China Alight

I am about to preach to the OMF China Alight conference. I'm very excited about this opportunity to encourage, bless and strengthen believers from that mighty country.

But I am also excited because it was at a similar missions conference at this conference centre 23 years ago that God used a sermon by Terry Virgo to call me into preaching. I was 18, I attended because friends of mine were going to Nepal and Pakistan with Interserve, and I had zero expectations of God doing anything with me. I went to the second Bible message with no expectations and was met so powerfully by the Lord that I walked out literally weak at the knees. I knew what God would use me to do for teh rest of my life, I just had no idea what that would look like, how to start, who to talk to, or how to advance it in any way. Talk about a weak vessel.

I've never spoken here before but am on my face praying hard for any 18 year olds here. I know how God can touch in power and change whole lives in the space of minutes. O God, please do your mighty work. 

My title is "The Joy of the Lord in Missions" about which I am thrilled. The joy of the Lord is our strength for world evangelisation. Therefore the questions of what it is, how we get it and how we are sustained in it are matters of absolutely primary importance. We cannot call people to come and praise him unless we are a praising people, nor to be glad in Him unless we are abundantly glad. 

I feel (and am!) a tiny, insignificant bit player in God's global purposes. Nevertheless God uses the things of this world that are not to shame the things that are, and the foolish to shame the wise. So I can pray with confidence for him to use ripples from here to accomplish whatever he wants. I may never see any results and probably won't. But that doesn't mean He isn't working. He wants to produce faith and worship among His people, and missions to the uttermost parts of the earth that arise from hearts that are abundantly glad in the Lord and take pleasure in worshipping Him.

Incandescent at the TV

TV last night made me very cross indeed. It was on in the background as Ros was marking schoolwork and I was reading. All of a sudden I mentally tuned in to something that made me stomp and fume around the living room. Picture me stomping and fuming. Grrrr.

The programme was about life on the Scilly Isles. A large segment was given over to how the "church" had finally fulfilled its great ambition to get a large peal of bells. The bells arrived to great excitement and the "blessing ceremony" was covered at length. The vicar sprinkled them with holy water blessed by the bishop, saying lovely things about how people had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to achieve this highpoint in the life of the church. 

Holy water? Bell-blessing? At the cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds?? Horror... 

Cutting the vicar in question the most slack I suppose it might have been the editing that made this look so vacuous. But vacuous it was. Anyone watching who already thinks that Christianity is about arcane, incomprehensible, ritualistic mumbo-jumbo, and that churches are buildings where the only aim is to spend lots of money on the premises will have had the opinion strongly reinforced. All the while the presented wittered on about how this was a high point for the church on the island.

There was nothing at all on the programme about biblical church, or the biblical God or his Christ. This was church-as-social-entity, church-as-religion, church-as-ancient-and-utterly-irrelevant-ritual. 

But it did just make me pause for one moment. You see I know a good number of churches who have got so suckered into pouring all their energy into their premises and their building plans that whatever their equivalent is of having a new peal of bells has become their aim. At the cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

And I am currently preparing a church service for Sunday. There will be people who like older worship material (as do I), which to a fresh generation - or those who have never met the Lord - is no less arcane and incomprehensible than the vicar flicking "holy water" with a twig of rosemary. Everything about that programme screamed that whenever that congregation has decided to contextualise itself it isn't now. It was a monument or a museum. The question for me is: will what I do on Sunday fall in any way into the same trap? I can give all my good reasons for using a whole range of worship material old and new (and some of the reasons are good ones), but the point at which anyone doesn't understand what's going on, then I have signed up for the bell-blessing brigade. 

How are you doing in your church? Is your aim impacting the world with the gospel of the glory of God in Christ? Or are you spending kingdom money achieving some other aims? And are your meetings really biblical church - full of adoration, contemporary, clear, passionate about the Lord and the scriptures, compassionate, reaching out, accessible?

Or are you with the strange bell-blessing people?

Joy in Jesus; Philippians 3

Here is my Sunday morning message on Finding Joy in Jesus, preached at Rock Baptist Church Cambridge

Joy in Jesus; Philippians 3

REST! Heb 3&4

In my quiet time blogging through Hebrews it seems a little appropriate to pause over the idea of rest. In Hebrews 3 and 4 rest is THE big blessing of God that we ought to want to enter into. But what is it? Even with the added detail of 4:9 that it is God's "sabbath rest" for his people it still sounds a bit nebulous and less defined a blessing than, say, forgiveness or adoption.

Here are a few Bible explanations that add some detail and texture:

• The first idea of rest for God's people was the Promised Land. If they had obeyed they would have inherited a land where there was peace from their enemies. But they didn't because of disobedience.
• The Canaan rest was also meant to be the place of inheritance from God as well as the place of safety, in Deut 12:9 (NB by the time the Israelites get to Canaan it is NOT the promised land for them any more - no relief from enemies, no edenesque flowing with milk and honey. They did not enter the rest)
• There are Bible hints that rest is linked to loving marriage in which security is provided for the wife. (Ruth 3:1)  

Most importantly it is God's rest (cf they shall never enter my rest). This means the rest God himself enjoys, as well as the rest he gives. That is why it is called sabbath rest. The sense is of eternal home with God. Our home of everlasting goodness. Hebrews will say a lot more about looking for an eternal city which is our real home. God is saying "come to my place. You can live where I live, you can experience the everlasting joy of the most joyful place, where I make myself known in glory and goodness to you."

Rest is nothing trivial. It is far more than a pleasant day off. It is the promise of security, relief, beauty, joy, marriage, inheritance and abundant goodness in intimate fellowship with God. It is surpassingly attractive. It ought to elicit a great big sigh of contentment at the very thought. No wonder that the writer is horrified that anyone at the Exodus would have turned up the opportunity, and no wonder he pleads with us to keep on in persistent faith in order to receive it.

Lord, help me turn my sights to it today and make me dissatisfied with attractions in the world that might seduce me away from this amazing treasure

Disobedience Equals Unbelief; Heb 4:1-5

About to set out to Cambridge to preach there this morning. In the few minutes before I am starting to wrestle with Hebrews 4. What a packed and challenging chapter!

Here are a two initial questions that it provokes for me:

• It says that "good news came to us just as to them" - ie to the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt. What does it mean that good news came to them? It means that they had promises from God - backed up with mighty acts like the Red Sea and signs like the tabernacle and pillar of cloud and fire - that he would lead them to the place of his rest
• It says that the people back then didn't enter because they were disobedient and urges contemporary readers to make sure they aren't disobedient and therefore miss God's rest also. The question is whether the writer makes Christians entering God's rest dependent on our obedience rather than on God's grace. Can we fall away by disobedience? He seems to suggest that we can: v1 let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it

Clearly if that were the whole story then everyone would be condemned because everyone disobeys God. 

The further question is why did the people not reach the promised rest because of disobedience. The answer is that every act of disobedience is rooted in unbelief in God. ch3:8-9 describes Exodus rebellion as testing God, seeing his works but still not trusting him, and therefore going their own way. Hence having an evil and disobedience heart towards God equals having an unbelieving heart:

Take care brothers lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God (3:12)

To whom did God swear that they would not enter his rest but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief (3:18-19)

...the message they heard did not benefit them because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest... (4:2-3)

Every time I disobey God, what it reveals is that I don't believe as I should. There is something faulty in my believing. In the case of the people in the desert that continued to grow and grow until it resulted in full-blown rejection of God and utter disbelief and lack of trust in him. The challenge in Hebrews 4 is to fear that slippery slope. Every time I sin it should be leading me to throw myself on God, fearing that I might fall into obdurate unbelief. 

Of course the very act of flinging myself on him for mercy, forgiveness and future hope is one of the main things that prevents me from slipping any further into unbelief, which is why the warning is here. 

For real believers the warning is to throw yourself on God, not down the slippery slope. For unbelievers who have some connection with the people of God the warning is to not assume you are OK because you sit in church. If you don't believe then you are no better off than the people in the wilderness who claimed a connection to God but who nevertheless hardened their hearts against him.

Praying that God makes me fear unbelief today, thereby driving me to him.