A TIME TO DIE

Today I was at the Newfrontiers Sussex regional leaders meeting, giving a paper about euthanasia.

There was some serendipity in the timing of this paper as in the news this morning were two features of immediate relevance to the euthanasia debate. The first was a report from the Healthcare Commission, “Caring for Dignity,” detailing how the elderly are routinely mistreated in hospital. The second was about research in the Journal of Medical Ethics suggesting that the legalizing of “physician assisted suicide” in Holland and Oregon has not created a “slippery-slope” leading to people being coerced into ending their lives.

An excellent response to this report can be found here.

ARE YOU JUST?

One of the things I laboured last Sunday was our tendency to seek self-justification rather than justification from God, and that this is legalism. It was Tim Keller who helped me to recognise the tendency of preachers to declare a gospel of grace but to live in a way that indicates they don’t actually believe it. While we can have an intellectual assent to the truth that, “it is by grace you are saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no-one can boast” our hearts often tell us something else. When I leave a service feeling condemned because it didn’t go well, or feeling justified because it was a success, I am in danger of slipping into legalism – making my performance the basis of salvation rather than the completed work of Christ on the cross.

Legalism is our default setting. Churches fall into legalism whenever some criteria other than the objective truth of “Jesus Christ and him crucified” is used to define success. If a church is growing numerically it is dangerously easy to fall into the trap of feeling justified as a result of that growth, just as it is dangerously easy to feel condemned if the church is not growing. The problem with self-justification is that it is never complete. When do I know that my church has grown large enough or fast enough for me to be justified? So I get caught in a performance trap with my sense of security entirely tied up with the growth of my church.

Every new fad and emphasis in church life runs the risk of falling into legalism. Often these are excellent things that the church should pursue – such as numerical growth, or strong family values, or an effective small groups ministry, or diversity, or the Alpha Course – but if they become the measure by which we try to save ourselves we are lost. Always, front and centre, must be “Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Only this way can I experience grace and know that – truly – I am justified.

TIME TO STOP

So that’s it then. My 176th and last Sunday morning preach at New Community Church. I would have liked to have got to a round 200, but that was not to be. Preparation was a nightmare, but in the end I felt God really helped me in the delivery. I wasn’t able to get any notes together and so just had a post-it with a few pointers to refer to. This was quite liberating actually. I have often thought it would be fun to preach without the safety net of notes but have never previously had the courage to do so.

Looking back over those 176 sermons, some have been – at best – mediocre. Others have been pretty good. Maybe the ones I had most fun with was a short series on the Psalms a few years back. I have also really enjoyed some of the more recent stuff. I thought the series on the Supremacy of Christ and on Jude from April-July this year packed some punch. Before that, the series on Ecclesiastes was massively challenging, but I personally got a lot out of the intense application it took to pull together (recordings of sermons from these series are still available here ).

The truth is that it is probably always the preacher who benefits most from preaching. Everyone else just gets the sermon, while the preacher gets the hours of study and prayer it takes to make the sermon happen. And preaching is always born out of the preachers own experience and need – or at least it should be. It is time to stop preaching when you are no longer preaching to your own soul.

So those 176 sermons have been highly significant for me. And I trust that the word of the Lord will not return void.

LEMON JUICE & BURGERS

Of the many “Christian” magazines that find their way to our church office, the only two I now consistently read are Modern Reformation and Leadership. These two are rather different from one another. Modern Reformation is Reformed theology at its sharpest, and sometimes feels like drinking lemon juice. Leadership is thoroughly pragmatic, and sometimes feels like eating a Big Mac. But most of the time I find most of both to be pretty nourishing, and very helpful both theologically and pragmatically.

As the two magazines do represent very different expressions of evangelicalism I was interested to spot both of them quoting a sociologist called Christian Smith, who spent five years researching the spiritual lives of American teens. At the end of this research Smith concluded (and here I am quoting the Leadership version) “that the faith of most teenagers, including those who attend evangelical churches, is MTD: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Smith explains:

“’By ‘moralistic’ I mean being good and nice… By ‘therapeutic’ I mean being primarily concerned with one’s own happiness in contrast to focusing on glorifying God, learning obedience, or serving others. Finally, by ‘deism’ I mean a view of God as normally distant and not involved in one’s life, except if one has a problem one needs to solve. In other words, God functions as a combination divine butler and cosmic therapist.’”

In the Modern Reformation article Smith is quoted as saying that there is “no difference between the churched and unchurched or even between the unchurched and young people raised in evangelical churches today.”

I’m sure its not just American teenagers who have MTD.

Unless we get our understanding of God right, of just what he has achieved by justifying sinners through the death of his Son on the cross, then we’re not going to get much else right.

MTD might be popular, but it won't save us.

LOSING & WINNING

Not a great weekend to be an Englishman in Johannesburg. As I feared, the Springboks demolished England in the rugby on Friday and the English cricket team collapsed against South Africa in the World Twenty20 competition on Sunday. The humiliation!

GodFirst church was great though. PJ Smyth and team are building a pumping church that crosses the ethnic divides in the city. Sunday morning we were at GodFirst Bryanstone, which has doubled in size since I was last there two years ago, and in the afternoon I preached at GodFirst Braamfontein, which didn’t exist two years ago! There were about 90 people at Braamfontein, mostly students, and representing something like twenty African nations. Dynamic!

Jo’burg is a city of high walls and electric fences. Some of the ideas about community that have been appearing on this blog would be hard to implement there. But at GodFirst I got a sense that genuine community was being built – something that really would be a witness to (and against) the city.

This Sunday is likely to be my last preach at New Community. I’m still wrestling with what to preach, but will probably go with 1 Corinthians 2:2 “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” A professional sportsman is only as good as his most recent performance. How different for followers of Jesus who are justified freely and fully by him, because of the cross. Our performance isn’t what makes us right with God. The gift of God is salvation by grace, through faith. Having received this gift we can never be removed from the team, and that feels good!

ITS ALL PERSPECTIVE

Being an internationally minded lot, we have always had a map of the world on the office wall at New Community Church. For the past few years the map on display has been a Peters projection. When I stood down as lead elder in July one of the first changes in the office was the removal of the Peters projection map and its replacement with a conventional Mercator. The new dispensation felt that Peters makes the world look odd.

Personally, I can’t look at a Mercator without something of a shudder. I dislike its Northern arrogance as it makes the North look twice as large as the South when in reality it is the other way round. I like the way Peters shows the position of one country to another much more accurately than Mercator. I especially dislike the way Mercator makes North America (7.4 million square miles) look much larger than Africa (11.6 million square miles). Even worse is the way Greenland looks as large as Africa on Mercator, when in reality it has an area of only 0.8 million square miles.

So, I am happy to forgo the “shapeliness” of Mercator for the accuracy of Peters.

Of course, both projections are a fiction.

The earth is round, not flat, and it is impossible to represent it absolutely accurately in two dimensions. There must always be compromise – either of accuracy of scale and position as with Mercator, or of shape as with Peters.

The best solution in our office would have been to buy a globe rather than a map! But I’m sure you will be relieved to know that I managed to recover my Peters from the bin and it will accompany me to wherever it is I go next.

Map preference is a good example of how perspective shapes everything. From the perspective of Mercator, Africa can be largely ignored. From the perspective of Peters, Africa dominates. I have been thinking about this as this weekend I will be in Johannesburg with my friends from Godfirst church. Its not a great weekend to be in South Africa though, as England meet the Springboks in the Rugby World Cup on Friday and it looks as though we will take a hammering; I’ve never known South Africans to be gracious in victory when it comes to beating England at rugby. Somehow it just doesn’t seem to fit in with their perspective…

COMMUNITY: MYSTICAL OR RATIONAL?

If you want something really meaty to chew on, try this: http://theresurgence.com/john_armstrong_2006_the_mystical_elements_in_truth_faith

Thanks to Doulos, whose blog led me to this link.

BTW, if anyone knows how I can add hyperlinks in blogspot I would be grateful! On a PC it is straightforward, but I am working on a Mac and for some reason can't make it happen...

THE COMMUNITY ULTIMATUM

Let me try and spin all this talk of community in a slightly different direction. Here is an extract from some lecture notes I use when teaching on the Trinity at our Newfrontiers leadership training:

Union with God is the goal of our salvation.

We were made in the image of God. Christ, the second Adam has made it possible for us to again attain that image. We tend to focus on the past aspects of salvation – regeneration, justification – and on the current implications – how we live – but neglect the goal of salvation – resurrection and union with God. These other things apply here and now, but glorification (or deification) lasts for eternity.

Theologically, we see a number of unions:
The incarnate Word – God and man
The union of Christ with his church
The reuniting of Christ and his church in the Eucharist

Our union with Christ is indivisible, since Christ is indivisibly united to the Father.

This is why union is so important to God. It is why covenants are unbreakable. It is why God hates divorce.

2 Peter 1:3-4 "His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature"

1 John 3:1-2 "How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."

The definition of human personhood is that a human is one who can in principle be in communion with God.

In the incarnation the Son united with a single human nature, at Pentecost the Spirit indwelled countless human persons.

The Spirit establishes our humanity. He makes us what we are meant to be.

Calvin: “the purpose of the gospel is to make us sooner or later like God.”

The Lord’s Supper anticipates the great eschatological feast, the marriage supper of the Lamb.

How do we know we are Christians? By being like God.
What does that mean? Love!

Love is the acid test of Christianity. If we lack love, we are not his. “Attributes like grace, mercy, justice, and even holiness are all relative to creatures. His wrath is relative to sinners, as the expression of his holiness in response to human sin. Love, however, belongs to who he is in himself in the undivided communion of the three persons.” (Letham, “The Holy Trinity”)

CYBRIDS

This week the lamentable Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority gave the go-ahead for the creation of human-animal embryos.

I have asked my friend James Haslam to post some comments here about this development. James took a brilliant session on the genetic revolution in the seminar track I led at the TOAM conference this year (which should be up on the Newfrontiers website but doesn't yet appear to be).

James is a busy man so it may take him some time to respond, but I'd be very interested in his comments.

SHRINK WRAPPED COMMUNITY?

To keep the discussion about community rolling, here is another Dallas Willard quote:

"A contemporary wording of Jesus’s comparison of God’s kind of love, agape, and what normally passes for love might be “What’s so great if you love those who love you? Terrorists do that! If that’s all your ‘love’ amounts to, God certainly is not involved. Or suppose you are friendly to ‘our kind of people.’ So is the Mafia!” (Matthew 5:46-47).

Now reflect: Has your heart gone out in generous blessing to someone who has insulted or humiliated you? Can you work without thought of gain for the well-being of someone who openly despises you, maybe has told you to drop dead? Are you enthusiastically pulling for the success of someone competing with you for favor, position, or financial gain? That is what those possessed and permeated by God’s kind of love find themselves doing.

A much-used doormat says, “Welcome, friends!” Could yours also genuinely welcome enemies? When you lend a dress, a stereo, a car, or some tools or books, are you able to release them with no hope of seeing them again, as Luke 6:35 suggests we should?"

LOOKING FOR TROUBLE

"If my Jesus has very little to do with real life, then my Christian faith will have very little to do with real life. And the rest of my life will carry on pretty much as it did before, with its petty failures, shady compromises and broken promises. Being a Christian will make hardly any discernible difference to the things that occupy my mind most of the time. And this is one of the main reasons why the churches of the West are struggling today. It is not because they haven’t taken on the latest management techniques, or understood postmodernism, or are technologically behind the times. It is because many of us Christians in the West today live lives that are virtually indistinguishable from those of our non-Christian friends, neighbours and work colleagues. I don’t mention this to blame anyone in particular. It just seems to be true. As one young man once told me: ‘The reason I cannot become a Christian is because I see no difference between the way Christians behave and the way non-Christians behave.’"

Graham Tomlin, "The Provocative Church"

COMMUNITY

One afternoon last week I visited Pilsdon, a community in West Malling, Kent.

Pilsdon operates on a Benedictine type model: prayer four times a day; an attempt to be as self-sufficient as possible; hospitality to strangers – a daily rhythm of worship and work and friendship. The community consists of more-or-less permanent members, guests who pass through for a few weeks or months at a time, and “wayfarers” who might stay for a night or two.

While it would be easy to take issue with some of the theological basis of Pilsdon, I felt deeply challenged by the open hospitality of the community. I arrived unannounced, with all my family in tow. We were welcomed in, shown around, given a drink, invited to return. In contrast, our atomised, insulated, suburban lives allow very little of this spontaneous hospitality. It would be unusual for any of us to drop in on a church friend without having first booked a date. It is unusual for us to share possessions, instead finding it easier to each buy a lawnmower, a jet-washer, an electric drill… We don’t like to intrude or be intruded upon, unless within the strict limits of the boxes we construct around our lives.

Pilsdon felt more human, more prophetic – more biblical.

It felt more like Acts: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.”

I’d like to be part of a church like that.

GROWING

Having blogged about spiritual discipline yesterday, I came across this online survey that assesses whether you are too busy to allow for spiritual growth. I’m not sure how meaningful it is, but its quite fun.

http://www.assess-yourself.org/og/og_online.cfm