²² Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart. ²³ For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. ²⁴ For,

Peter didn’t just write, ‘knowing the truth’, he wrote, ‘obeying the truth’.  The true things Jesus taught us are not just supposed to sound beautiful. It’s always practical with God.

Tonight heading out to a meeting I passed a car that slowed to a stop next to me. The driver leaned over and asked me if she could ask me something. She pointed out that a man at the end of the road maybe wasn’t well, and asked if I could just stick around while she checked the situation out.  I crossed over and headed towards her reversing car. It turned out a man was walking home with heavy bags in this freezing weather, and was near home but struggling to catch his breath. I offered to help him carry them a few yards to his home, an easy thing to do, and smiled at the driver and she left. He turned out to be a lovely, courteous gentleman who really needs to take things easier. I’m going to invite him to our next lunch.

It was lovely to feel that our community can work together and trust each other.  If we all show each other sincere love – ‘love that looks like something’, as Heidi Baker says, the world will be a better place. We each experience ‘the world’ one person at a time.

Let’s treat each other well this week. There are too many people hating others and fearing what other people can do. Some people have a lot of influence, but the things that you or I can do today may have a tremendous impact on one person, more impact for them than whatever headlines they have been reading . Person to person, sincere love.

What is fuelling us?

^“18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, ¹⁹ and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength ²⁰ he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, ²¹ far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. ²² And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, ²³ which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.” (Paul’s letter to the Epheisans 1:18-23, NIV)

Determination works for a while. Gritting one’s teeth and pushing through; making a go of it; as English users we clearly get creative when it comes to describing the act of making an effort despite challenge.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is that there is a difference between doing something with determination and doing something fuelled by excitement and God’s divine energy.  Determination isn’t necessarily wrong, but God’s power is a bullet train.

In New Testament Greek this is dynamis – the same root gives us dynamic and dynamism. There’s altogether a lot more energy in my actions when they are powered by God.

I think back to when I first contemplated joining my first mission trip, which was to Uganda in November 2014, to assist with a SOMA teaching mission requested by a bishop in a beautiful part of SW Uganda. One day I was thinking about the announcement that there would be a mission trip, the next minute in my curiosity I was avidly reading everything I could about the place. From that moment on I was hooked, and agreements that might have been difficult fell into place very quickly. God had set up dominoes and was just waiting for me to push the first one and show an interest. His will was not hard to discern. I just had to jump on board. It had a powerful engine all its own.

The challenge in all this, I’m finding, is to discern what is of man and what is of God. Am I excited about a particular ministry because it’s God’s direction for my life, or because the grass seems greener on the other side? Are excited conversations with people about travel, or worship, or a hundred other things, an indication of a new direction in life, or am I idolising people with skills I covet and losing sight of God who is the source of the energy?

In church last night there was a powerful sense of the presence of God. As we sang together and fixed our thoughts on who God is, the focus became God, and the sense of his mighty strength and great love was real. In those moments, no fears can grip our hearts. We can sing words that speak of great trust, our hearts full of hope.

I want to live like that when the music stops too. After the head-spinning wonder of feeling so in tune with him yesterday, I want to keep singing even when the dreams have to be put into practice, and the challenge of living a day well come into sharp focus.

God knows this. It’s no surprise to him. I am encouraging myself today that he knows what I need, so I will remember that his reality comes first.

 

 

 

 

Whenever I come across these words from psalm 34, they are not silently spoken. They are sung, in a high, rich voice in my head. It is impossible not to hear this music. The melody provided the emotional connection when I was a teenager in the church choir. Now that I have lived a little and seen some ups and downs of life, and seen how God dealt with me through them, it is the power of the words and their truth that arrests me.

Those words would have perhaps seemed pious to my teenage self, but they are not the words of a teenager. They are the words of someone who has experienced God’s graciousness, the long view of his steadfast kindness over time.

Nowadays I am more familiar with the Bible in modern language, and the NIV puts it like this:

“Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.”

As I look back over what has endured and what is reliable and the source of life in my life, it is the connection to the living God, to Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit, renewed and tested and renewed again, that has proved to determine how good life has been.

Today ‘taking refuge’ took the form of time with a friend who reminded me who am I, who helped me stop obsessing over my weaknesses, reminded me of my strengths and why God created me that way, with purpose in mind.

Yesterday, ‘taking refuge’ meant worshipping God with my colleagues, and allowing God’s thoughts to bubble up in us as we meditated together on the truths we had been singing about.

These days the music is more likely to have been written by United Pursuit than Ralph Vaughan Williams, but it still means stepping into a very special place where I get to be emotional about who God is, and about the journey we’ve been on together. As the music forces us to reflect on what has been, I know that God has been faithful.

“He is the Maker of heaven and earth,
    the sea, and everything in them—
    he remains faithful forever.
⁷ He upholds the cause of the oppressed
    and gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets prisoners free,
⁸     the Lord gives sight to the blind,
the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down,
    the Lord loves the righteous.” Psalm 146:6-8

I’ve been watching the moving story of Jane Seymour’s family history on the BBC’s new series of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’

**Plot Spoiler alert!**

She follows two great aunts on the Polish, Jewish side of her family tree. One great aunt, Jadwiga, stays in Warsaw and loses her husband, her son, her daughter, her society and her city, as the Nazis systematically destroy the Jews and the Slavs in an effort to create purity.

The other great aunt, Jadwiga’s sister, flees with her family to Paris, then to Marseilles and finally to Switzerland, staying behind at times sacrificially to work towards the welfare of fellow refugees. Finally in Switzerland this life’s work is seen as a contribution towards the rebuilding of nations, and it is what enables the family to live in freedom and stability.

It’s impossible to watch the show without another wave of disgust at the ghastliness of the Nazis treatment of human beings.

It was also impossible not to think of the heartbreaking flows of people out of the Middle East in this month, reaching Europe’s borders and receiving a very mixed reception in 2015. It was shocking to hear reports on Radio 4 this week of Bulgarian police abusing refugees by beating them, stealing their phones (and thus their only means of contact, and legal evidence of their status as people who have entered Europe at all). And that is just one news report in a seemingly endless escalation of grotesque treatments that people have visited on each other in the past few months in our world.

Remember when Assad’s treatment of his own Syrian people was shocking, when it was the worst thing on the news? Those headlines seem to have been trumped now so many times, that we can lose sensitivity to the increasing need.

What can we possibly make of this?

I do know that this is not an ‘act of God’ (a hideous phrase even when applied to earthquakes). It is people who have done this, who have chosen to treat others with rejection and hatred. And what am I doing?

From the sweet boy serving in our local coffee shop greeting customers with cheery words, to the PPI insurance salesman who left another message on my answerphone today, every single encounter we have with another human being leaves a legacy, however small. At best, and at worst, the legacy of individual choices can change nations. Free will is not to be taken lightly.

God does not hide away the principles by which he wants us to live in peace and security. In the days of the Israelites he set out rules and it was clear to all that they could not keep them in their own strength. Jesus showed us that a person can live in a divine way, but that God knows we are not pure and righteous by our own actions. Whereas the Nazis made other people die in order to let their nation be supposedly ‘pure’; Jesus showed true power and life by loving us so much to treat us lovingly even while we, mankind, killed him.

In these last few days, at David’s Tent festival, I have enjoyed glimpses of the great love that God has for us; as we have sung his praises, we have been able to realise that the best things we can say about him don’t even reflect his wonder. How extraordinary that he would care enough to  lead us patiently in growing in stature as moral, loving, powerful human beings. How patient he is with us.

While singing to God about how good he is, and dwelling on his character, might seem like an incidental thing to do, it has had a profound effect on me. To soak in that atmosphere for a few days has shifted something. I am willing to accept that he is the one who is perfect, not me. The amazing Sean Feucht talked about the wonderful truth that however much we praise God, when we meet him face to face we will discover that really is that lovely, and more; we will look back and think, not that we wasted that time worshipping, but that yes, we really got it, and he was worthy of it all.

How to reconcile these two worlds? How can we spend four days in an English field, singing songs of praise to God, while people at the borders of Europe are desperately trying to escape the horrors of war?

John MacArthur has written that “worship is all that we are, reacting rightly to all that He is” (The Ultimate Priority, Moody Press). It’s no wonder that as we worship we see him more clearly, but we also see ourselves with new clarity. As we focus for example on how he rescues us daily, we may lose some of our innate arrogance at how we have so cleverly set up our comfortable lives. As we expose ourselves to the reality of how deeply flawed humans are, we can marvel that God not only loves us at all, but patiently trains us in the art of loving each other.

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last” – Jesus, quoted in gospel of John 15:13-16

These words of Jesus blew me away today. They floated down on a piece of paper out of a Bible in our prayer chapel; a few lines printed on a slip of paper that someone had tucked inside one of the Bibles.

They were so relevant to what was running through my mind. Purpose and calling; sacrifice and pleasure. It’s all there.

There’s no denying what a hard invitation this is: lay down your life. But then the rest of the context hits you: Jesus, God, considers himself your friend, and you are his.

And I love this: “EVERYTHING I learned from the Father I have made known to you.” Reading that again tonight, it’s as if i never noticed that was in the Bible before. What an extraordinary thing for us to know, that of all the mysteries of Jesus’s interactions with his Father, all that he gleaned he taught his followers (and commanded them to make disciples and teach them).

Whatever vocation we might feel in life, whatever calling, we cannot outgive God.

If it seems like God demands a lot, it’s only because he knows what he can do with laid-down lives like that – he can bring incredible fruit, that isn’t going to rot on the tree but will be eternal. What a legacy!

Jesus doesn’t sugar-coat it. When he asks for people to join his team, he doesn’t minimise the investment. It’s the investment the pig makes to the ham sandwich, not the investment of the cow to the cheese sandwich. (Credit: Pope Francis!)

This is the offer: if we want to be in, let’s go all in; and in return Jesus is promising this: a life lived with God, full of revelation, lived in emotionally close partnership with him, and a guaranteed return on the investment.
It strikes me that is a picture of two parties fully invested in a cause; but God will always be the bigger shareholder; because how could he not be? He is the author and perfector of our faith; our creator and redeemer; the one who knows the end from the beginning. If we fear giving our all, we can remember that God is not just matching our donation, but exceeding it in every way.

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‘Freely you have received, freely give.’ (Matthew 10:8)

Sorry if you’ve been missing my posts. I was enjoying two weeks of rest at two Christian summer festivals with a chance to retreat, worship, enjoy and serve. Turned out it was in that order. One week with a lot of resting and some serving: the next week with a little resting and a lot of serving. But the gaps where I was able to receive were like surgical strikes from God – just what I needed and no opportunity wasted.

I got a chance to really experience serving out of rest. The challenge is to do the same back home with my normal responsibilities. The knowledge of it in my head – the theory –  seems very secure, but putting it into action is what matters.