Sacred Normality

Earlier this month, six of us met on Sunday morning, we sang one hymn, prayed one prayer, read one passage of scripture and shared a little about if for a few minutes. We all stood round in a circle for the whole time trying to keep warm and bumbled our way through our gathering. We had a number of questions and comments about the passage, not all of them really relevant to the topic as raised in Acts1. Our prayer at the end was whilst we held hands in a circle and asked God to reveal himself to us and help us share with others. We prayed that God would surprise us this year with his blessing

The gathering was not polished, we were not conscious of any great presence, we would not have impressed any visitors, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Except six people gathered in the name of Jesus and he was in our midst. Holy ordinariness, every day incarnation, sacred normality. And I loved it!

The Harvest is Plentiful

Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

Matthew 9:35-38

Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness... These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.

Matthew 10:1, 5-7

The verse 'The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field' is sandwiched in between Jesus seeing the crowd in need and him sending out the disciples. The sending out the twelve (followed later by the seventy-two in Luke 10) seems to be in direct response to Jesus seeing the crowds, harrased and helpless, without a shepherd. He responded by not meeting the need himself but calling his disciples to pray for workers, a prayer that they themselves would prove to be the answer. 

Jesus had a mission and his disciples were going to be the means by which it would be fulfilled. Why did Jesus send others when he was so good at preaching himself? Why did Jesus encourage others to go and heal, teach, proclaim the Kingdom of God when he embodied perfectly all the required attributes? Who else would be able to act as he could act? How could his followers hope to compare with his anointing, zeal, compassion and ability? 

To try to answer these questions actually misses the point. The mission of God, the missio dei, was always going to be initiated by Christ and then implemented by a bunch of ordinary believers in every nation and across every age. The sending of the twelve and then the seventy-two would be the forerunner to the great commission; 'Therefore go and make disciples of all nations.' (Matthew 28:19) The early church, both men and women, responded to this command by proclaiming and demonstrating the gospel and large numbers of people were harvested for the kingdom.

When we look at the fields on the Gower Peninsula it is easy to fail to see the harvest as Jesus sees it. It is easy to presume that almost no-one is interested in Christ, hardly anyone wants to hear the gospel, that we will never see a harvest of lives coming to know Christ as Lord and Saviour. 

However instead of depression and inactivity, can we find the faith to pray that Jesus will send workers into the harvest field, that the Lord of the harvest would provide people who are willing and available to do the work.  Perhaps we can also find in ourselves the faith to respond as Isaiah did: 

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!” (Isaiah 6:8)

Learning from the past

There is Biblical support for the principle of learning from former generations. The Book of Job expresses it clearly when it says; 'Ask the former generations and find out what their fathers learned, for we were born only yesterday and know nothing.'1. Jeremiah speaks about the same issue. ‘This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.’2. 

There can be a tendency, that in wanting to be culturally relevant for our own time, we ignore what has happened in the past. There are many easy pitfalls into which one can fall when looking into history to learn lessons for the present day. One of the most obvious is ‘when we talk about the past…we inevitably project our perspectives into the past.’3. This tendency can be exaggerated to the point where ‘we are more interested in the retrospective significance of a given episode than its meaning for the agent at the time.’4.

However, Scripture also teaches us 'Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!' 5. How do we reconcile the seemingly contradictory commands to both remember and forget? Perhaps we need to realise that the past is a great place to visit but not a very good place to live. The past is meant to be a place from which we can learn but not one that we should attempt to copy or replicate. 

1. Job 8:8-9

2.Jeremiah 6:16

3. Bradley, J.B. and Muller, R.A., Church History: An Introduction to Research, Reference Works and Methods, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1995, p.33

4. Skinner, Q., Regarding Method (Visions of Politics Volume 1), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p.73

5. Isaiah 43:18,19

Go...

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Matthew 28:16

1. Then Jesus came to them and said, INITIATOR OF MISSION
2. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. POWER OF MISSION
3. Therefore go DIRECTION OF MISSION
4. and make disciples - OBJECTIVE OF MISSION
5. of all nations, EXTENT OF MISSION
6. baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, INITIATION OF MISSION
7. and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. OBEDIENCE OF MISSION
8. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” PROMISE OF MISSION

I have spent some time recently looking at this statement of Jesus and considering the implications for us in the 21st century. Various questions and thoughts have arisen, which include the following:

• I must presume that I need also to 'obey everything Jesus has commanded'
• Obedience requires teaching 
• Teaching is by disciples who have gone
• The command is made to disciples not to a disciple
• How many of the commands of Jesus are to do with what to believe compared to how to act?
• Is it possible to be a disciple of Jesus if we are not going and making disciples?
• Was this command meant for just the apostles or to all disciples of Jesus? 
• Is it reasonable to understand the verse in this way? Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, BY baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you
• What are the 'everything' commands of Jesus?
• Don't try to teach others until I am doing this myself
• Surely the early disciples would have understood that this very command of Jesus was one of the commands that should be taught to the nations. This would therefore mean that all disciples should: go, make disciples, baptise, teach
  
  
  Challenging thoughts and huge possible implications
  
  
  
  
  
  

What kind of boat are we?

We are not a battleship, we are unable to go to war

We are not a cruiseship, we are not there for the enjoyment of the passengers

We are not a tugboat , we are unable to spend our time trying to turn a much larger vessel

We are not a fishing boat, we cannot do large scale fishing

We are a lifeboat, focused on saving individuals that we come across by being trained ourselves

Persecution - The Seed of Blessing

The centenary of the start of the First World War has just taken place and I alongside many others have been deeply moved by the stories of the sacrifice of so many for the benefit of others. Laying your life down is the ultimate withdrawal of your own desires, wants and needs for the benefit of others. Recognising that your own hopes, dreams, plans and ambitions have to become subservient to a larger, wider requirement of a more important mission

 

Jesus said it perfectly when he said that 'Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.'(John 15:13) Many of our Christian brothers and sisters in different parts of the world are not so much laying down their lives but having their lives snatched from them in the most grotesque and barbaric way. People that Jesus loves and died for, have somehow come to the point where they think that killing Christians is God's will. I wonder if any of them realise that they are inadvertently copying probably the greatest Christian missionary of all time -the Apostle Paul. 

 

It is not The Islamic State who invented Christian persecution, all they are doing is pathetically copying many others who have gone before. Paul, before his conversion, set the bar very low in his hate-filled opposition to the followers of Jesus. 'Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples.' (Acts 9:1) Fulfilling the words of him whose followers he was seeking to destroy, he failed to see that all he was doing was planting the seeds of his own salvation. The very seeds of persecution would drop into the ground and bear fruit leading to the greatest Christian expansion of all time. 

 

'I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. ²⁵ The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12:24) Jesus was of course talking about his own death and the beautiful impact that it would have on the rest of history. The devil, the Jewish religious hierarchy and the might of the Roman Empire thought that killing Jesus would end his subversive activities. In reality, like today, the death of God's people is the very seed that will ensure that the Kingdom of God will keep growing and one day will fill the whole earth, in fact the whole creation

None of this of course means that we should not oppose Christian persecution, that we should not do all we can to stand alongside our brothers and sisters in Christ and pray for their protection. However, what is happening is not a sign that God's plan is being thwarted but rather is an indication that the world is ready for a new proclamation and demonstration of the beauty and wonder of the gospel of Christ. 

And how am I going to respond to this changing opportunity, am I going to be quiet and act as if the message of Christ is an out of date, irrelevant, un-scientific load of clap-trap. Or am I going to renew my love for Christ, my love for His word, my love for his people and my belief that Jesus is the hope of all nations including the Islamic State, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Palestine etc. 

 

The Gospels

I was looking through some old notes recently and found this from last year. The challenge for me remains, all other issues in my Christian life are secondary to this one.

I have to confess, although it is not easy, that I have never been that keen on the Gospels! I love the Bible and try to read it from cover to cover each year, but I have always preferred other bits to the story about Jesus. I find it hard to admit and even harder to understand why this is the case, but I have come to realise that it is definitely true

However three things have happened over the past few months that have started to change this situation. 

Firstly I have stopped my regular practice of reading from Genesis to Revelation each year to concentrate on just reading the Gospels. As I have done this over and over again, the wonder and beauty and stunning greatness of His life have started to impact me again. My faith is utterly meaningless if not rooted in a historic figure who lived in first century Israel. His teaching is awesome, but good instruction without the instructor is not going to cut it. Christianity is about Christ, about His life-changing life, about His death-defeating death, about His resurecting resurrection. Everything about my faith can look right, but if Christ is not central then everything else is wrong. 

Secondly, I have realised in a fresh way that Jesus is the lens through which we understand every other truth in the Bible. Jesus is the truth of God, the word of God, the revelation of God. All Scripture leads to Him, is empowered by Him and written for Him. Any deepening of understanding of Scripture will lead to a corresponding deepening of understanding of Christ

Thirdly, I have been impacted by Paul's words in Philippians:

[3:8] What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ  [9] and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. [10] I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, [11] and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

I am slowly learning how to say the words 'I want to know Christ' for myself