tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87324509811224808022024-03-13T00:10:30.713+00:00Richard Walker's BlogRough-n-Ready Ruminations to Go.Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.comBlogger773125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-59462697248059722022021-08-29T11:30:00.094+01:002021-08-29T11:30:00.193+01:00Sermon Excerpt: The Face of Christ and the Life of the Soul<p>What is the soul? It’s the part of us which is eternal and enables us to know and experience God at the deepest and most permanent place of our being. </p><p>Growing up, I would hear phrases like “soul winning” or evangelistic outreach would often begin with lines like: “Do you know the state of your soul? If you died tonight, would you go to Heaven?” I can’t remember the last time I heard something like that. </p><p>Jesus said these things about the soul: </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. </i></li><li><i>Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. </i></li><li><i>What good will it be for slomeone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? </i></li><li><i>‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ </i></li></ul><p></p><p>The late, great A. W. Tozer said this about the soul: </p><p></p><blockquote><i>The human soul is not a hard baked vessel with a fixed size; it is a living thing capable of growth and expansion as it interacts with the gracious actions of the Holy Spirit. </i></blockquote><p></p><p>In other words, every human being is like the tardis from Dr Who. Much bigger on the inside than we are on the outside. </p><p>One day your body stops growing (upwards at least). One day, your mind is incapable of taking on any new information. But the soul has the capacity to grow forever into the joyful life of God.</p><p>It has to. Why? Because if it didn’t eternal life would get very boring very quickly. We’d get bored of God and of each other. </p><p>The Apostle Paul put it like this:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>2. Cor. 3:17-18: Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit... </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>4:18 So, we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. </i></blockquote><p></p><p>We are commanded to behold, fix our eyes upon the glory of God and as we fix our eyes upon God’s glory, we grow. The soul is like a plant. If a plant opens its leaves towards the sun, it grows, if it turns its leaves towards the darkness it weakens and shrivels. So too, we grow as we open and orientate our souls towards God and we shrivel and weaken when we don’t. </p><p>Have you ever met someone with a big soul? Someone who just seemed more solid and grounded in God. Pastors should be great examples but sometimes we are just as harassed and floating through life on autopilot as everyone else. </p><p>But here is a question. What is the glory of God? Is it some kind of divine light bulb in heaven? </p><p>Paul, again, gives us the answer, 2 Cor. 4:6: </p><p></p><blockquote><i>For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. </i></blockquote><p></p><p>Faces show us the soul of a person and move us at the deepest level of our being. Some faces fill us with great joy. Like those in our family (hopefully). Others fill us with great dread and fear. Tragically, as many abuse victims know, these faces can also be in our own families. If I see your arm or leg, I don’t really know that much about you, but if I see your face, I can start to get a sense of who you are. Every face, even those that are buried under a lot of beauty product, tells a story. </p><p>When a certain face captivates us, we will do anything for it. Helen of Sparta was said to have the face that set sail to 1000 ships as her husband King Menelaus of Sparta set out to rescue her from Prince of Troy in the as told in the ancient epic – the Trojan Horse. </p><p>Paul in this text says that the face of Christ is the Glory of God. Jesus isn’t some salvation slave who wins us an audience with God the Father and then disappears off into the shadows. He is the glorious eternal son and the father longs that we delight in him as much as he does. </p><p>When I say “The Face of Christ” what image comes to your mind? Jesus in the manger? Jesus speaking to crowds? Jesus with the marginalised? Jesus with the sick? Jesus confronting the religious bigots? Jesus on the cross? </p><p>All of those images are true and good, but that they aren’t true right now! Jesus isn’t doing any of those things now. </p><p>If I showed you a picture of me from 20 years ago. Is that picture me? Yes it is, but it isn’t me now. </p><p>Where is Jesus now? He is reigning in Heaven with his Father. It is this face from Revelation 1 that we are commanded to fix our eyes on and behold. It says: </p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote><i>...his eyes were like flames of fire. ... his voice thundered like mighty ocean waves. … and a sharp two-edged sword came from his mouth. And his face was like the sun in all its brilliance.</i></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">The face of Christ is: </p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Pure and Holy – there is no imperfection of any kind when you look at him, there is no darkness, no hidden sin lurking that is waiting to be exposed. </li><li>Eternally Good and true – Everything that he is, is and always has been, from eternity past to eternity future good and true. </li><li>Trustworthy and faithful – He will eternally stand by all that he has said. He has kept and will keep all his promises </li><li>Victorious and Joyful - he has defeated evil, sin and the devil by his death on the cross and he reigns as the champion of Heaven over all things both on earth and in heaven. There is no cubic millimetre of the created order which doesn’t sit under his gracious power and authority. </li><li>Kind and compassionate – he is not ignorant of our trials, miseries and sins and he longs to do good to all. </li><li>Humble and gentle – he is more interested in knowing how you are than telling you how great he is even though – being God - he has a lot to boast about. Peaceful and rested - He is not looking over his shoulder in case anyone might overpower him, he is not worried that he hasn’t considered all the angles. He isn’t acting out of fear or anxiety or any sense of lack. Total unity – there is no division, confusion or unresolved loose ends in him. </li><li>Satisfied and delighted – He is not bitter or grumpy about the price he had to pay to get us out of the mess we were in or worried that he might not have done enough or been enough. Rather, he eagerly desires to know us and a share the fullness of all he is and has with us. </li><li>Righteous and Wise – He knows all things he can’t be fooled or duped and he knows how to act in such a way as to get the best outcomes. </li><li>Patient and loving – He has time. He can wait. And whilst he won’t wait for ever, he can wait for now because he isn’t nervous that our sin or weakness is somehow going to show him up. </li><li>Life-giving and affirming – to see his face is life to turn away from it is death. We are like spiritual plants who need to turn towards the sun for life. </li></ul><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>No one has ever seen the Father. When you think of God, think of him through the lens of the face of Christ. Let this reality of Jesus in Heaven, once crucified, but now raised, ascended and crowned as the Lord of all creation ground you in who you really are. Let this reality begin to purify all the mixed motives of your hearts. </p><p>Let the face of Christ birth: </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Joy and adoration in us - as we see personally and together that the one who reigns in Heaven is to utterly and wonderfully good. </li><li>Praise in us - as we behold personally and together the beauty and majesty of God. </li><li>Gratitude in us as we see personally and together that God has graciously given himself to us. </li><li>Strength and patient endurance in us to believe for and work for the best outcomes in all the circumstances we find ourselves both personally and as a church community in that seem to have no solution and for all the expectations we have to manage </li><li>Wisdom and understanding in you so we know personally and together what paths to take </li><li>Courage and self-denial in us to be open with others and to walk the paths of obedience he reveals to us personally and together as a church community </li><li>Hope and faith - that though things may be difficult now God’s word of life to you will be vindicated and will bring you joy. </li></ul><p></p><p>Orientating our hearts to this face as often as we can day is our highest duty, our surest foundation and our greatest joy. </p><p> A couple of application comments: </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Reading the bible is the beginning, not the totality, of growth. In the Bible we behold the living God, but only through prayer, contemplation and obedience does the reality in those pages become our reality. Reading and commenting on your<a href="https://www.readingfamilychurch.org.uk/rfc3s" target="_blank"> RFC3 Whatsapp thread</a> is a great start, but if you really want to grow, don’t leave it there. It’s not easy – sitting with God with no agenda, but it is necessary. All our foibles and insecurities bubble up to the surface. We come face to face with the fact that whatever we have achieved in life, it pales into insignificance when beholding the divine presence of God. </li><li>Coming into the presence of God isn’t just a cerebral exercise; about body, mind and soul working together with the Holy Spirit. Each has an impact on the other. We can get overly stuck in our heads when thinking about being ‘spiritual.’ Consider getting out of your home, being outside, or making something with your hands. Jesus sometimes/often went out to pray, getting outside helps wake you up, tunes you into creation, not just sitting drowsily in bed feeling bad that you are half asleep and can’t focus on anything.</li><li><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="text-indent: -18pt;">Stop thinking that more experiences, greater competency, being in control, security or stability, finding yourself,</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="text-indent: -18pt;"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="text-indent: -18pt;">the affirmation of others or your pursuit of moral excellence will, in and of themselves, make you feel grounded in your notion of who you think God is or who you are. They aren’t wrong in themselves, but they won’t give you the fulfillment you hope they will. And if they do, you need to ask yourself if you really know the truth of who God is at all.</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="text-indent: -18pt;"> </span></li><li>Discipleship is about becoming before it’s about achieving. When all is said and done, all our earthly identities are done with, learning to be with and enjoy God without an agenda is the essence of eternal life. It’s not that there aren’t things to get done, like the great commission, but that they come second to being with God in joyful rest. If we are not learning to be joyfully rested in God, we will become a liability in his service causing as much harm as good as we go about our lives. </li><li>Prioritise space in your heart for the face of God. </li><ul><li>Try to spend at least as much time thinking about your soul health as you do your physical health. The good news is body mind and soul are all interrelated. </li><li>Turn off the screens. </li><li>Sing – the joy of the LORD is your strength </li><li>If you are one of the few genuinely busy people, you still need to learn boundary. When to say “this far and no further” to the expectations of others, including employers, and yourself! They may lay claim to your work time, but they may not lay claim to your soul, don’t let them. </li><li>A word to families with younger children – could we help each other to make space for this through reciprocal child care for retreat days? </li></ul></ul><p></p><p> </p><style class="WebKit-mso-list-quirks-style">
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</style>Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-57784997329408816272020-11-07T05:19:00.002+00:002020-11-07T05:19:39.239+00:00Week of Prayer Devotional 5: The Life Giving Nature of Routines<p>A cast supports and protects a broken joint/bone until it sufficiently healed and can operate independently.</p><p>In the spiritual life, routines and disciplines are like casts, they protect us and enable us to heal and until such time as we are strong enough to move on from them.</p><div>Have a look at the following slide and humbly ask the Spirit to show you see which routines you need to put in place in order to grow in him healthily</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-gFGypuiO4j8/X6YuYZRSBAI/AAAAAAAAE8k/ug8W4ybtEG4cqrTd4oq0gvl85b7xz9ZlQCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="687" height="225" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-gFGypuiO4j8/X6YuYZRSBAI/AAAAAAAAE8k/ug8W4ybtEG4cqrTd4oq0gvl85b7xz9ZlQCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h225/image.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /></div>Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-80144890172281976632020-11-05T07:00:00.001+00:002020-11-05T07:00:04.779+00:00Week of Prayer Devotional 4: Rooted<p>Learning to live in our lives where we are, accepting our limitations, coming to terms with our disillusionments and not live in our own heads somewhere else is probably one of the greatest challenges of our age, especially given all the media technology that can whisk our imagination off to somewhere else at the touch of a phone screen. </p><p>Staying rooted in Christ and engaged with the real world and people around us takes great effort in an age of distraction and disillusionment. Have a look at the table and verses below and ask the Spirit to show you which of the pink sections you live in and how you can move closer to the green.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fy7eD_uI_PM/X6Lor8SqkgI/AAAAAAAAE8Y/E62J5XFC-lYO8QclwcqgmYxt2dRUsELIgCLcBGAsYHQ/s650/Rooted.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="366" data-original-width="650" height="225" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fy7eD_uI_PM/X6Lor8SqkgI/AAAAAAAAE8Y/E62J5XFC-lYO8QclwcqgmYxt2dRUsELIgCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h225/Rooted.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-57198401996551704732020-11-04T17:06:00.003+00:002020-11-04T17:06:27.261+00:00Week of Prayer Devotional 3: Pilgrims<p>The Bible describes our life here as a journey to our eternal home. In traditional pilgrimages, the two most common threats were getting lost or falling into the hands of robbers / raiders. In the Christian life this is seen when we get beguiled by lies or we hide in fear of attackers. Look at the table and verses below and see what the Spirit nudges you on. </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HzGmqcQPgSQ/X6Lej39j3XI/AAAAAAAAE8M/eiwYgirv-l8oFGtr4Nmr6WK88WxrKPFbwCLcBGAsYHQ/s651/Pilgrimage.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="369" data-original-width="651" height="226" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HzGmqcQPgSQ/X6Lej39j3XI/AAAAAAAAE8M/eiwYgirv-l8oFGtr4Nmr6WK88WxrKPFbwCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h226/Pilgrimage.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-41121912615909939572020-11-03T07:00:00.033+00:002020-11-04T17:39:02.678+00:00Week of Prayer Devotional 2: Is Anybody Home?<p>Yesterday we looked at how Jesus is at home in our hearts. Today, we look at how we are at home in our hearts. Sounds counter intuitive, but actually its easy for us to be absent from where we are for all kinds of reasons. </p><p>Have a look at the table below. In the blue column our home paradox (that home is both here and out there) is described. In the green column is a definition of what it means to be at home in the Lord both here and out there (in Heaven). In each of the red columns are some of the dangers we face when we are captured by misplaced fear or love. Only Jesus perfectly dwelt in the green all the time. The rest of us start in the pink bits and learn to move increasingly to the green centre.</p><p>Which of the four pink areas do you most identify with at the moment? Why? What do you need to know about the goodness of God so as to bring change? </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VZ1utUz1m8E/X6BlxWfjrMI/AAAAAAAAE8A/SzENKZXIlnUd6lb2hMFtkioo8WWCrnrDgCLcBGAsYHQ/s682/home%2Bmatrix.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="386" data-original-width="682" height="226" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VZ1utUz1m8E/X6BlxWfjrMI/AAAAAAAAE8A/SzENKZXIlnUd6lb2hMFtkioo8WWCrnrDgCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h226/home%2Bmatrix.JPG" width="400" /></a></div></div>Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-14046413054254369042020-11-02T07:09:00.001+00:002020-11-02T07:09:20.107+00:00Week of Prayer Devotional 1: How does Jesus live in your heart?<p>We often say that Jesus lives in our heart and it makes us all warm and fuzzy, but have a look at the following slide and ask the Holy Spirit to show you what status he has in the home of your heart. Is there anything he is nudging you to change? Click on the image to enlarge the text.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-qnqrPSNcnT4/X5-wd9SWwxI/AAAAAAAAE7g/aWhnhNkI7b0Ukiq36DF4nMVUicjw-bi_gCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="684" height="226" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-qnqrPSNcnT4/X5-wd9SWwxI/AAAAAAAAE7g/aWhnhNkI7b0Ukiq36DF4nMVUicjw-bi_gCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h226/image.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-18845283022446571342020-04-14T08:26:00.001+01:002020-04-14T08:30:32.653+01:00Notes from Prayer Meeting 13 Apr 2020<b>Intro: Praise - 1 Peter 1</b><br />
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<i>All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is by his great mercy that we have been born again, because God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Now we live with great expectation, and we have a priceless inheritance—an inheritance that is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay. And through your faith, God is protecting you by his power until you receive this salvation, which is ready to be revealed on the last day for all to see.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honour on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls.</i><br />
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<b><br /></b>
<b>Pray for peace in uncertain times</b><br />
<ul>
<li>Give thanks that God is in control. Even when it seems like things don’t make sense. John Piper said: <i>“Know that the same sovereignty that could stop the coronavirus and doesn’t, is the very sovereignty that sustains the soul in it. Indeed, more than sustains, it sweetens the soul with hope that, for those who trust him, his purposes are kind, even in death.”</i></li>
<li>As our cultural idols of health and wealth are exposed by this virus, pray that many will find true hope in Jesus Christ</li>
<li>Pray for particular people you know who need to meet Jesu</li>
<li>Pray for those you know who are sick, especially those in our RFC family</li>
</ul>
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<b>Pray for all Churches and for their Leaders</b><br />
<ul>
<li>Wisdom in public declarations</li>
<li>Mobilisation of volunteers</li>
<li>Courage and wisdom</li>
<li>For RFC specifically that we would fulfil the request given to us by Reading Borough Council to meet the needs of vulnerable people in South Reading.</li>
</ul>
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<b>Pray for those in authority</b><br />
<ul>
<li>For national government and for your MP</li>
<li>For local government e.g. RBC (include any local counselors you know by name)</li>
<li>For the police service as they have the unenviable task of enforcing the law / guidance from above and have to deal with a general public who all have their own interpretation of what is acceptable or not.</li>
</ul>
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<b>Pray for those facing economic pressures and job losses</b><br />
<ul>
<li>The self-employed who have no work atm.</li>
<li>For the newly unemployed – signed onto the dole and experiencing the stress of wondering how their application will turn out.</li>
<li>For small and medium sized business owners who are losing sleep over the unenviable choices they have to make for their employees and the impacts those choices will have for the employees and their families.</li>
<li>For financial help from the government to be wisely and fairly distributed</li>
<li>For the wise distribution of the hardship fund set up by RFC</li>
</ul>
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<b>Pray for NHS and health care workers</b><br />
<ul>
<li>For the right equipment in the right quantity in the right place at the right time</li>
<li>For strength and resilience in the face of overwhelming need.</li>
<li>For gracious treatment from the families of the sick</li>
<li>For the NHS to learn well from this episode and be able to plan well for any future recurrence of a pandemic</li>
<li>For those in hospices and care homes looking after the elderly</li>
<li>For those who die alone and don’t get to say goodbye to their loved ones because of the need for distancing.</li>
<li>For the families of those who won’t get a proper funeral because of the need for mass burials</li>
</ul>
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<b>Pray for social services and other bodies who have to deal with the fallout of this lockdown.</b><br />
<ul>
<li>For schools who looking after the children of those who are looking after the sick and dying.</li>
<li>For social services who are trying to help families in crisis or trying to help mums and / or children who are suffering abuse at the hands of others more than usual due to lockdown.</li>
<li>For those working with youth that find themselves with little or nothing (they want) to do and who could get drawn into gangs / drug running.</li>
<li>For the charities who are either overwhelmed by the increased need or who are unable to reach out to those they normally care for due to social distancing requirements</li>
<li>For the prison service who in a period of overcrowding find themselves with few staff due to many self-isolating due to underlying health issues.</li>
<li>For those let out early due to the pressures on the system, not to reoffend when they get out, but to get good role models in their lives.</li>
</ul>
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<ul>
</ul>
Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-91246897157272972572019-04-19T20:01:00.000+01:002019-04-22T21:09:21.396+01:00The Window and the Mirror: A Good Friday MeditationWindows and mirrors have something in common, they both enable us to see things that ordinarily would remain hidden to us.<br />
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We can’t see through walls. Windows enable us to see beyond our field of view into a space which would otherwise have remained invisible to us. Imagine living in a house with no windows. Likewise, God’s heart is hidden from us, but the cross of Jesus Christ is a window onto God’s heart and mind. They are on full display for all to see.<br />
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Also, we can’t see what we really look like. Mirrors enable us to see things about ourselves that would otherwise remain invisible to us. Imagine if you had never seen your own face. What idea would you have about yourself? The cross of Jesus Christ holds up a mirror to humanity showing us what we’re really like.<br />
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Jesus says it another way in John 3:19-20 <i>“Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed."</i><br />
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Jesus is our window onto God’s life, but he is also a mirror held up to ours and whether it’s the passive faithlessness of the disciples deserting Jesus or the active faithlessness of the Jewish and Roman authorities sentencing him to death, all of us, by nature, are lovers of darkness. Isaiah said it well (53:6): <i>“We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.</i><br />
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Our readings from Mark’s gospel help us to see this window/mirror contrast up close. The trauma of the crucifixion reveals the simple, profound and beautiful truth of all Jesus was, and at the same time it revealed how deceived, dark and dysfunctional we are.<br />
<ul>
<li>Where we, like Peter, James and John, were disobedient and prayerless, Jesus wrestled in prayer on our behalf saying: “Not my will, but yours be done.”</li>
<li>Where we, like the disciples, refused to stand with Jesus, he stood with us, choosing out of love to bear our disgrace rather than leave us to face the wrath of God as the appropriate consequence of our actions.</li>
<li>Where we, like the guilty disciples, fled, because we didn’t want to die, the innocent Jesus offered himself up to die in our place.</li>
<li>Where we, like Peter, denied all knowledge of the truth before a low status servant girl, Jesus faithfully confessed the truth before the highest spiritual and political authorities in the world of that time.</li>
<li>Where we, like the rulers and authorities of this world, postured before Jesus challenging his seemingly ridiculous claim to be King and Messiah, Jesus silently rested in the confidence that who he was and what he had come to do had been given to him by God the Father and prophesied in the Old Testament scriptures.</li>
<li>Where we, like the common people, reviled Jesus because he didn’t do the miracles we hoped to see, Jesus performs the miracle of bearing all our sin and turning the other cheek to their mockery, saying <i>“Father forgive them, they don’t realise what they are doing."</i></li>
</ul>
Perhaps the place where this window/mirror contrast is most obvious is when Pilate presents Jesus and Barabbas before the people and asks them to vote for who should be released. Consider what it is he offers them at the Passover festival:<br />
<ul>
<li>Barabbas, is a zealot: a nationalistic, religious freedom-fighter. He will stop at nothing to see his homeland of Judah – the “Kingdom of God”, established in his the pattern of his revolutionary political and religious ideology, free from Roman occupation and with a fully Jewish king on the throne. He has tried to do this by violent force and as a result, he is on trial for murder.</li>
<li>Jesus is an itinerant preacher and miracle worker, also looking to establish the kingdom of God, but not by violently kicking out the Romans and re-establishing a pure-bred race, rather, by obedience to his Heavenly Father. It is for his obedience to his Father that he ends up on trial before the people.</li>
<li>Matthew tells us in his gospel (27:16-17) that Barabbas’ full name was Jesus Barabbas.</li>
<li>The name Jesus means “salvation.” The name Barabbas means “son of the father.”</li>
<li>So Pilate presents the people with two alternative “Salvations,” two “Sons of the Father.”</li>
<li>Jesus Barabbas is mirror to us of our own hearts. He is a treacherous and estranged rebel son made in the image of Adam his spiritual father. Adam, in Genesis 1, was the first “son of the Father.” Barabbas, like Adam, and like us wanted to seize God’s kingdom and establish it on his own terms. The consequence of that action was death for all.</li>
<li>Jesus Christ is the true and better Barabbas, the true and obedient son of the Father, who did not seize his Father’s kingdom or try to refashion it in his own image, but by faithful obedience he has established it according to his father’s will, meaning life can now be offered to all.</li>
</ul>
The crowd, stirred up by the religious authorities, chose to side with the one who is like them – the rebel son of the father, condemning the innocent son of the father to death.<br />
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Yet here is a simple but profound picture of the gospel. For as we look in this mirror we remember that we, like Barabbas, were the guilty ones who deserved death, but we go free. <br />
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We also look through this window and see how, in love for God and love for us, Jesus suffered on our behalf so that our declaration of acquittal and freedom might not come, like it did for Barabbas, through the false decree of a corrupt legal system, but by the true decree of the eternal, righteous God.<br />
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Praise God that when we were at our absolute worst: proud, arrogant, ignorant, self-deceived, mad, rebellious and wicked, to name but a few, God used all our evil actions to work something breathtakingly beautiful and enabling us to born again of the Spirit and to return to him as dearly beloved adopted sons and daughters.Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-57061862923235332142019-03-24T13:54:00.003+00:002019-03-25T16:07:48.122+00:00Some Historical Background to Isaiah 8The bit I didn't have time for from Sunday's Sermon...<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zhfWtX_Uim4/XJeL0idmmZI/AAAAAAAAEuc/npizdmUYHLIOYvpQX_vqTv7IGqvH-04SgCLcBGAs/s1600/Assyrian%2BEmpire.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="644" data-original-width="1023" height="251" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zhfWtX_Uim4/XJeL0idmmZI/AAAAAAAAEuc/npizdmUYHLIOYvpQX_vqTv7IGqvH-04SgCLcBGAs/s400/Assyrian%2BEmpire.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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The year is 732 B.C. God’s people (in the bottom left-hand corner of the map) have been divided for about 200 years into the northern kingdom of Israel (light green blob) and the southern kingdom of Judah (brown blob). During that time they have had a stormy relationship - sometimes getting on with each other and at other times brutalising each other.<br />
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At the point we join the story, relations are at an all-time low and tensions are running high. This is because Israel under King Pekah and Syria, under King Rezin have joined forces to invade Judah and mount a coup to depose Ahaz. They want to place a puppet king known to us only as the “son of Tabeel” on the throne. Understandably, Ahaz is irked by this threat to his kingdom.<br />
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Enter Isaiah, God’s prophet who comes to Ahaz and says do not fear, trust in the Lord and all will be well. Problem is, although he had a godly father and was brought up in a godly household, Ahaz has become a spiritually dark whirlwind of a man. He knows all the right Christian jargon to say, but he has no interest in actually following what God says. In fact, he is hell bent on doing the exact opposite. He ignores everything that Isaiah says.<br />
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But there’s more to the intrigue. The reason Israel and Syria are ganging up on Judah and trying to mount a coup is because they fear the rising power of Assyria (not the same as Syria) as represented by the large purple blob on the map. Warlord King Tiglath Pileser III is violently and mercilessly throwing his weight around and creating the largest empire in the world at that time. Israel and Syria want Ahaz on board as an ally so that they can have a chance of fighting off the advancing Assyrians. But Ahaz doesn’t want to join forces with them so they decide to take matters into their own hands, trying to force Judah to join them through a coup.<br />
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The reason Ahaz ignores Isaiah and doesn’t want to enter into an alliance with Pekah and Rezin is because, deep down he seems infatuated with Tiglath Pilezer III (Tig for short) and when Pekah and Rezin eventually invade, instead of calling on the Lord for help, he sends messages to godless King Tig begging for him to come and rescue him. That rescue comes, but of course, it comes at a price; unswerving allegiance and lots of money for Tig and his empire. This will mean Ahaz raiding God’s house, the temple in Jerusalem, rather than his own, to pay off Assyria and leading God’s people even further into idolatry, forsaking the Lord who loves them.<br />
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In short, everyone seems to be bewitched by the power of Assyria, either living in fear of it, like Pekah and Rezin, or wanting to be like it, like Ahaz. Note that the issue here is not politics. The issue is confidence. In the face of the Assyrian threat, Pekah is putting his confidence in a military alliance with Syria (and Judah if he can coerce them) and Ahaz is putting his confidence in being able to win Assyria over. None of these kings are putting their confidence in God.<br />
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And it’s not just the kings who are godless, the people too are hell-bent on pursuing their idols with them. They might follow the living God with lip-service, but no-one is actually interested in meaningfully loving and serving the Lord. All the mighty acts of God in the nation’s past have been forgotten. As they place their confidence in the worship of idols, they are about to embrace catastrophe. The very thing they hope will save them, will soon almost destroy them. That’s the problem with idols, you think they will save or prosper you, but they end up destroying you by giving you what you thought you wanted.<br />
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Isaiah and the few left with him in Judah who refuse to go along with this idolatry and sham worship are overwhelmed with fear. For they know that the nation’s spiritual treachery will bring down a mighty judgment from God upon everyone, and they will be caught up in the disaster, possibly losing everything they have along with everyone else. It doesn’t really matter whether Ahaz throws his lot in with Tiglath Pileser on the one hand or with Pekah and Rezin on the other, they see beyond the immediate surface things and see that through the pursuit of dark passion and desire God’s people and God’s nation is suicidally bent at every level on its own destruction.<br />
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Now there are many differences between this story and our own times, but here are three similarities worth highlighting:<br />
<ol>
<li>Our current political crisis of deadlock and division over Brexit is merely a symptom of a much deeper problem. Whether in the form of military might in Ahaz’s day or money in our day, everyone seems to be enthralled both individually and collectively to the false god of worldly power and prosperity and what the best way is to get it and keep it. Irrespective of the outcome over the next days, weeks or months - whether Brexit happens or not, pursuit of worldly power and prosperity will eventually bring catastrophe.</li>
<li>The voice of God coming through his faithful ones seems to have no traction in the public debates that are shaping our collective future. None of our leaders are publically seeking God. Whilst many will be praying in private, none are obviously praying. Though God is the reason they exist, people either don’t believe he exists or don’t believe he can help or they have been damaged by hypocrite Christians or they are just not interested in the kind of help he offers.</li>
<li>The few faithful people who are left like Isaiah and others may have lived following God as best they know how, but they and their families will not be sheltered from any turmoil or fallout that may come. What happens to the nation, for better or worse, will also happen to them.</li>
</ol>
Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-20436444594439254512018-06-10T17:18:00.003+01:002018-06-12T14:29:31.396+01:00Lifegroup Notes - Followers who Fast - Luke 5:33-35In the Bible, fasting is always tied to prayer. Just as a Christian understanding of sex is meaningless without marriage, so a Christian understanding of fasting is meaningless without prayer.<br />
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Yet, how many Christians do you know who regularly fast and pray? It has become the deserted discipline of our age. We have sleepwalked into depending on ourselves more than God and into the love of this life more than the eternal life and love of God. When we combine prayer with fasting we become aware of just how much we love the idols of consumption, convenience, comfort, control, conformity, compartmentalisation and compromise among others.<br />
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So what is fasting? It’s a mini death and resurrection. It's emptying ourselves of the temporary life this world offers so that we can be filled with the eternal life that God offers. It’s not abstention, but replacement, not a formula for twisting God’s arm but an orientation of humbling ourselves before God and saying “Your will be done.”<br />
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Whilst we might say that many things “give us life” and that we can fast from TV, social media etc. the bible focuses on the kind of fasting that literally gives us life (namely food and drink). Fasting from leisure pursuits so you can pray is good. Fasting from food and drink so you can pray is better.<br />
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In Luke 5:33-35, Jesus says the reason his people will fast is because they long for him. We have great joy in the Gospel, great power in the life of the Spirit, but there is also an unfulfilled longing. Christian fasting is not primarily about mission objectives, but about longing for Jesus. Even if this world was perfect, Christians would still fast because Jesus isn’t here, he hasn’t returned yet.<br />
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Whilst there are similarities in the Old and New Testaments, in the Old Testament fasting was shaped by the commands of the law and was for the preservation of the nation. So in most recorded examples, they would fast when they had to repent of their sin or when they were threatened with annihilation from their enemies. However, in the New Testament, (especially Acts) fasting is powered by the Holy Spirit and becomes more about expansion of the kingdom of God and preparing the earth for Christ’s return. Prayer and fasting stir up the Spirit in us. See Luke 4:1 and 4:14. What difference did prayer and fasting make to Jesus? See also 2 Tim. 1:6-7.<br />
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<b>Some pointers for getting going:</b><br />
<ul>
<li>Pursue the love of God, not your health goals.</li>
<li>Fasting feels pointless, because we like to be in control, but that's the point. Fasting is about giving control to God and waiting for him to come through.</li>
<li>The reason we fast is to make time to pray, so when you fast, change your routine to maximise prayer. But if you can’t change your routine, don’t worry, just pray when you can.</li>
<li>Don’t sweat the small stuff – if you feel the need to take a fruit juice to help combat dizziness or mental fog, then do it. Or if your child wants to feed you a bit of their dinner, that doesn’t invalidate your fast. One cornflake won’t kill your hunger and it won't invalidate your fast.</li>
<li>Where you can, fast with others so you can encourage each other.</li>
<li>Start small and grow in the discipline e.g. "Fast" the first half of your lunch break and go and pray. It may only be a 30min fast, but it's a start and you can grow from there.</li>
<li>Exemptions:</li>
<ul>
<li>Pregnancy and some medical conditions – seek medical advice.</li>
<li>Eating disorders, chronic anxiety, insomnia – if you suffer from these or have had a history of them – seek advice before fasting. The problem isn’t the fasting, but the mind games you can play around the fast can quickly become destructive, so be wise.</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<b>Some other resources:</b><br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.cru.org/us/en/train-and-grow/spiritual-growth/fasting/personal-guide-to-fasting.html">Bill Bright on getting going in fasting</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxX6s9-DzCU">John Piper on fasting and prayer</a></li>
</ul>
<b>Questions:</b><br />
<ol>
<li>What stops you from fasting in order to pray? Which idols above are you quietly / secretly bowing to?</li>
<li>Jesus says that his people will fast because they long for his return, what does that statement provoke in you?</li>
<li>How can you get going in fasting and prayer and what help/support do you need from others in order to do so?</li>
</ol>
Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-74122600981669038672018-02-04T16:42:00.003+00:002018-02-05T11:25:35.380+00:00Sermon Notes for Confident Adventure #4 :: "Remembering" :: Genesis 17:1-23 Because we can read Abraham’s story in about 25 minutes, it’s easy to miss the weight of the 25 year wait he had to see the promises of God fulfilled to him. Abraham’s faith was best expressed through patience. When you are waiting for something you need to remember why you are doing it otherwise you will lose heart and wander off.<br />
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In the Bible remembering isn’t merely the factual recall of trivia like sporting results, it has a moral quality, such as when parking your car on a hill, you must remember to apply the handbrake. Forgetting to do so could have disastrous consequences. If we don’t make it a priority to remember who God is and what he has asked of us, then we will not only harm ourselves, but spread chaos and destruction in his world as well.<br />
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The context of Genesis 17 is God restoring Abram after a “fall.” Similarly to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, God seemed not to be acting on his promise to give Abram and Sarai a son, so they took matters into their own hands and got a son (an heir) for Abram via Sarai’s slave woman.<br />
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By the time Genesis 17 happens, we’re 13 years on. Ishmael, the son born to Abram via the slave woman is hitting puberty, and therefore manhood and starting to take his place as Abram’s heir apparent. But God turns up and says NO! Abram will have a son via Sarai. Initially, Abram doesn’t want to accept this word from God (not least because it means having to have a really awkward conversation with Ishmael). He wants Ishmael to be accepted by God and doesn’t want to have to start all over again after waiting 24 years to get to this point!<br />
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God promises to bless Ishmael. In his mercy, he won’t let Ishmael take the hit for the mistakes of his father and his mother’s mistress, but neither will he let Abram and Sarai’s mistake dictate the course of salvation history – he will do things as he planned them.<br />
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To help remind them of his promise, he gives them new names – <i>Abraham and Sarah</i>, a new instruction: <i>Walk before me blamelessly</i> and a new initiation – <i>circumcision</i>. Circumcision was a “sign” which reminded them of God’s promise to Eve (that she would bring forth a son/a “seed”) and also pointed forward to the coming of that seed – the Christ. The cutting away of the foreskin was also symbolic of God’s refusal to allow the potency of man specifically, and the human race generally, to do God’s work for him. We cannot save ourselves, only a miracle of God can do it.<br />
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To his credit, Abraham doesn’t sulk under a tree when he realizes God is yanking him back onto the right track, rather he humbles himself, immediately obeying what God has said.<br />
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Today, we are not circumcised, because the promised coming of the “seed” (Gen 3:15) has been fulfilled in Christ. Our sign of being God’s covenant people is baptism. Just as what happened to Abraham (circumcision) had to happen to his household, so too, what happened to Christ has to happen to us otherwise we do not belong to him. If we believe in Christ we must be baptized in water and the Spirit like he was (Matt.3). Baptism is symbolic of a past “dying” to our old way of life in rebellion to God and being raised up to live for God by the power of the Spirit. It’s also a reminder that one day, when Christ comes again, he will raise us from the dead, the work of the Spirit will be perfected in us and we will live with God forever in the new creation.<br />
<br />
To that end, we must cultivate regular, routine remembrance of God, for this gives life our souls.<br />
<ul>
<li><b>Confession:</b> declaring to our hearts and to God who God is and who we are as a result of all his goodness to us. <b>Thanksgiving and praise:</b> the things that should flow from confession.</li>
<li><b>Bible reading:</b> this is the main and plain, bread and butter way God speaks to us. <b>Fasting: </b>humbling ourselves, emptying ourselves and recognizing that all our power to do what pleases God comes from him not us. <b>Prayer:</b> talking to God, reflecting on all that we are learning from him.</li>
<li><b>Simplicity: </b>renouncing the lie, that the joy of our life comes from the glitzy abundance of possessions, accolades and entertainment and embracing a kind of <b>Celebration</b> that takes the greatest joy from seeing God do amazing and deep things in the hearts of people – including us.</li>
<li><b>Solitude:</b> being one to one with God and shutting out the clamour of both the outside world and our anxious hearts so that we can wholly be with him and <b>Gathering</b> with the people of God so that they can help keep us on the straight and narrow path, as well as encourage us to keep going on it when times are tough.</li>
<li><b>Serving one another:</b> sharing the load of all that God has asked us to do so that no one person or group of people burn out and… <b>Being served.</b> We all love being served, when the service makes much of us, but we don't like being served if it means we must admit weakness. At times like these, it is hard for us to accept help, but don’t let pride rob you of an opportunity to receive God’s grace in this form.</li>
</ul>
As we do these things regularly, little by little, we will build a massive reservoir of testimony and legacy that will be remembered before the throne of God, with praise, forever.<br />
<br />
<b>Suggested questions:</b><br />
<ul>
<li><i>What is the thing you have had to wait longest on God for? Are you still waiting for it? Would you have the patience to wait 25 years for God to fulfil a promise to you like Abraham and Sarah did?</i></li>
<li><i>When we have invested much time, money and effort into something and God says no to it, it is a hard word to receive. Has this ever happened to you, what was it and how did you respond – with obedience or denial? Or are you going through it now? God is asking you to revoke a mistake you have invested in for years, and you are finding it hard to renounce. What help do you need to go God’s way?</i></li>
<li><i>Have you been baptized in water and the Spirit, if not what is stopping you from obeying God’s command on this and following in the footsteps of the Master?</i></li>
<li><i>Of the “routines of remembrance” that give life to the soul which ones do you find easy, which ones do you find hard? What’s the next step you need to take in order to allow God to breathe life into your soul? How can we help each other cultivate these?</i></li>
</ul>
Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-3311906798117509922018-01-02T09:33:00.000+00:002018-01-02T09:38:00.745+00:00The What and the Why of Biblical FastingA quick search on the internet will give you all kinds of ways and tips on how to fast. My aim is not to repeat all that good advice, rather it’s to give you a few biblical encouragements as to the what and why of fasting.<br />
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Firstly, fasting is not a uniquely Christian activity, nor does it have in and of itself of any spiritual value. It’s like money, its value comes in how you use it. When done well, fasting increases our appetite for God, brings our hearts in line with his, enables us to feel the kinds of deep longings that we know we should feel for him and makes us sensitive to the Spirit’s voice in our hearts. However, when it’s done badly, it makes us grumpy, self-obsessed, proud and entitled. Bad fasting makes God the servant of our agenda, rather than making us the servants of his.<br />
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Secondly, fasting without praying is like turning up to the cinema, but not going in to watch the film. There’s no point to it. That statement has to come with caveats, of course. We must avoid the fallacy of suggesting that a certain amount of prayer will obtain a certain amount of blessing. Nothing in the Bible makes such a crude formulaic connection. For example, a single person who can spend an extra hour a day praying when they fast, does not automatically, receive more blessing than the parent who can only spend an extra ten minutes praying in the day because they have to prepare meals for their kids and put them to bed etc. And there are always unforeseen things that call us away at certain times from the praying we set out to do. We don’t need to feel guilty about that. But all that said, fasting without making some conscious decision and effort to seek God in prayer either on our own or with others is pointless. God is our heavenly father, not our heavenly formula. He knows our hearts and the constraints on our time and energy. He sees the steps we make towards him (as well as the excuses) and is more than able to show us how to use what we have to honour him and bless the world. He is the multiplier of our efforts, not us.<br />
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Thirdly, by not eating, we remind ourselves that the body, as important as it is, is not the ultimate reality of our lives, our souls are. And when we use our time fast and seek God, we give a nourishing boost and “growth spurt” to our souls, (which by the way, will continue to grow in God forever when they get new bodies, after the death of these ones). Fasting is the deliberate humbling of these bodies of ours with all their desires, reminding them of their proper place in the order of the universe as servants of our souls, not masters of them, helping us to submit to God. It is the opportunity to remind our hearts of what is truly real and what will last forever, not just what will last for this lifetime.<br />
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Fourthly, fasting is not limited to food, you can fast from leisure activities too. But food and drink fasting and fasting from sleep are the only kinds done in the Bible and the benefit of fasting from food or sleep is that every time you have a rumble in your stomach or feel weary, it reminds you to lift your eyes to heaven and say “Jesus our eyes are upon you to do all that you have promised. Thank you for calling me into your amazing adventure. Help me to be obedient and effective in all that you desire!”<br />
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So why not fast? If you have fasted a meal before, why not fast a whole day? If you have fasted a whole day, why not fast a few days etc. What have you got to lose?<br />
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If you have never done it before, then try skipping a meal. For example, skip the evening meal and go to your bedroom, read the bible and then pray. Or skip lunch and go for a walk in a local park and pray as you walk. If you have a small child who is no longer breastfeeding, why not fast lunch and then pray when your child is napping? There are endless possibilities, we just need a little imagination and encouragement from others who have done it before.<br />
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Nothing truly great comes easy and yes, it is hard at times, but the benefits always outweigh the costs because, as we often say, you can never out give God. He will always give us more than we give to him.<br />
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Whatever you decide. be accountable to someone and remember, the main thing is to pray like Jesus prayed – that God’s kingdom becomes a reality on the earth like it already is in Heaven.Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-72309072446906377292017-11-05T22:28:00.000+00:002017-11-06T15:35:34.923+00:00Notes on Mark 10:35-52This week our text considers two requests made to Jesus. They made their requests face to face, but we make our requests to him through prayer, and prayer at its simplest form is talking with God.<br />
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Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem and he has told his disciples that the time has come for him to be crucified (10:32-34). The disciples are terrified by this for once they are done with Jesus, will the authorities not then turn on Jesus’ followers in an effort to “cleanse” the nation of his teaching? Along with this fear the disciples’ sense of self-importance is bubbling up to the surface as they argue about who of them is the greatest.<br />
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James and John figure that if they are to suffer with Jesus they want to be guaranteed some kind of reward in the next life so they “ask” if they can be enthroned next to him in eternity. They had spent three years with the greatest person who has ever walked the earth yet instead of imitating his example, they want to use their privileged position with him to secure honour for themselves.<br />
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Jesus, knowing the tumble of emotions going on within them, indirectly and lovingly rebukes them by showing them a better way. Heaven is a world of love, where there is no grabbing at status or compensation, instead all serve one another for that is what love does. Those who seek positions and honour have not yet truly understood or been perfected by love. Love serves all without finding fault.<br />
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Mark then shows us perfectly how Jesus is full of love and service and recounts the healing of blind man, Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus in Aramaic meant “son of impurity." Due to, amongst other things, a misinterpretation of Leviticus 21:16-23, the culture of Jesus’ day looked down on disabled people, not just as less useful, but as spiritually unworthy people. In healing this man, Jesus not only gives him the precious gift of sight, but symbolically makes him fit for worship and service to God.<br />
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The disciples are too busy wallowing in their sorrow, fear and sense of self-importance to hear this cry of faith and desperation. In calling Jesus the Son of David, Bartimaeus is expressing faith that Jesus is the Messiah and that he has power to restore all things – including his sight. And when his sight is restored, he beholds the saviour of the world. Imagine that moment.<br />
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Jesus asked the same question to both James and John and Bartimaeus, but he got very different responses. He asks, not because he doesn’t know the answer, but because he wants us to lay hearts bare before him and for us to realise what is in our hearts. What do you want Jesus to do for you today?<br />
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Let us learn to ask like Bartimaeus in faith and humility, recognising our true and desperate need and seeking mercy and grace. And as we ask like Bartimaeus, let us be like Jesus – laying down our lives in service to all, not dictating the terms like James and John, but obeying whatever it is that Jesus asks of us. Serving not just the people we like or who are like us or who we think will be useful to us at some point, but serving all without finding fault in them, without expecting anything in return and seeking their true flourishing as we lead some of them, one day, to Christ.<br />
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There is an abundance of grace, but there is not an abundance of choice, we either pick up our cross and follow Jesus in humble, joyful service or we don’t. There is an abundance of grace, but there is not an abundance of time. In eternity, time will be a abundant, but in this life it is a precious resource, don’t waste it – choose obedience and choose it quickly.<br />
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<b>Questions:</b><br />
<ul>
<li>What would have been going through your mind if you were one of the disciples following Jesus to his death in Jerusalem?</li>
<li>In what ways are you tempted to dictate to Jesus the terms of how you serve him?</li>
<li>What had James and John not yet understood about love and God's kingdom? Have you understood it yet?</li>
<li>Who are the Bartimaeuses in your life, can Jesus rely on you to bring them to him or are you too absorbed in your own world to notice?</li>
<li>What do you need the Holy Spirit’s help with as a result of thinking on these things?</li>
</ul>
Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-17542767027804045852017-08-20T16:00:00.001+01:002017-08-20T16:00:36.255+01:00A Prayer to Endure: Sermon Notes on 2 Thessalonians 3:5<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.</i></div>
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Summer is a better time to take stock than Christmas and New Year, because it’s busy and it is dark and cold.<br />
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This verse is a window on how Paul was praying for the Thessalonian Christians and no doubt all the Christians he knew.<br />
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One of the values that guides our prayers as a church is to endure in the faith ourselves like Jesus did and to build a community of Christians here that endures for as long as there is a town called Reading on the map of what is currently called the United Kingdom.<br />
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The Thessalonian Church was a church under fire. If you read Acts 17, you find that the mob was out for them. Paul writes two letters to them and in this second letter, one of the issues he is addressing is that some have given up working for their daily bread and for the Lord because the opposition was intense and somehow, maybe through grief and discouragement, they believed the “Day of the Lord” had already come and that they would be imminently carried off to Heaven or some such. Paul exhorts and admonishes them to persevere in their responsibilities to the Lord and to each other, to be busy both in work to provide for their bodily needs and in the work of the Lord because the end has not come just yet. What might seem like the end times to them in their bubble, is not the end times to the rest of the world and they need to be diligent in serving the Lord for some time yet.<br />
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Two thousand years later and we are all still here! Some of those Thessalonian Christians would have their tails between their legs if they knew! Whilst our context is not a context of violent pressure like theirs, pressures still exist. The call to persevere remains, even if it comes from a different angle and the power to endure still comes from the same place.<br />
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I want to ask three questions relating to this verse:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>What is the love of God?</li>
<li>Who is the Lord who directs our hearts?</li>
<li>How does the steadfastness of Christ help us to endure?</li>
</ol>
<br />
<b>What is the love of God? </b><br />
The true and living God is a community, a family of love: God the Father and God the Son delighting in each other through the fellowship of God the Holy Spirit. All three of them are fully distinct personalities, yet all three of them are fully God. And yet, they all dwell in each other so fully, that if you have met one of them, you come to know them all. <br />
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But here is a question. If the Father, Son and the Spirit enjoy true bliss and satisfaction in each other and have no need of anything else, then why are we here at all? Surely that means God lacks something, needs something – why otherwise would we be here.<br />
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The good news is that you and I exist not because God has some gaping hole in the soul, or because the trinity all got bored of each other, but because God is love.<br />
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You see true love shares and gives. When you truly love someone you want to share all that you have with them and you want to give all of yourself to them. <br />
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True love is self-effacing and self-sacrificing. True love does not say “look at me, I’m important.” True love forgets itself, it is too delighted with another. True love says I want to give everything I am and have to the one whom I love.<br />
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God the Father loves God the Son and desires to give him the greatest gift he possibly can. That gift was not the latest smartphone or even a stash of cash the size of the Himalayas, but people. More specifically a people who would love the son, and delight in him the way the Father delights in him. A people who would share his delight in his beloved son and be united to the Son in that love.<br />
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Think about that for a moment. As a human being you are, along with all other humans, the person sat next to you, your family and friends, and all the people who fill the earth are, in God the Father’s mind the greatest possible gift he could think of giving to his Son. Let that thought fill you with dignity that it should for a moment. Poke the person next to you and tell them they are the greatest gift the Father could think of to give his Son. You are not just a biological machine, you are not just the sum total of all your worldly titles. Whether you realise it or not, you as a human being, as the pinnacle of God’s creative genius are a gift – a gift from the father to the son.<br />
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And the Son is not passive in this gift giving process. He is not up in his bedroom in heaven playing computer games and shouting downstairs every half an hour when he wants a snack. When the father offers him this gift of a people to love and be loved by him, he doesn’t say Meh! Got anything else? He says Wow! That’s the greatest gift I could ever conceive of receiving. Father you are the greatest father there is and I desire that just as I have enjoyed your love eternally and honour you for that love, so too, I want to do everything I can so that this people you give to me, come to know that enjoyment of your love also.<br />
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And so together, through the power of the Holy Spirit, they created the universe we see around us. A place that is vast in size and yet intricate and balanced to the finest detail. A place full of beautiful variety and yet ordered and harmonious in that variety.<br />
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And at the centre of that creation they placed Adam and Eve, the babies of the human race. And in this world of love, beauty and perfection, all we, the human race had to do was give our yes and amen to God by loving and trusting them and doing all that they asked of us so that we could grow, flourish and mature into a beautiful people who filled the earth with the happiness of God and when all had been fulfilled – when we came of age, God would give us in marriage to his son forever.<br />
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The problem was, we didn’t say yes and amen to this plan, we said no, no way. We didn’t say “I do,” we said “I don’t.” And in that moment, we became spiritual orphans and adulterers. <br />
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We became orphans, not because God the father died, but because we refused to recognise his existence in our lives as the Father of our souls. We became adulterers because instead of giving ourselves in faithful love to God the Son we gave our hearts and our bodies in obedience to another voice – the voice of the serpent. We have all lived in the shame, guilt and slavery of that decision ever since, deaf and dead to the voice of the Holy Spirit. <br />
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At that point, the Father, the Son and the Spirit could have thrown in the towel outraged at our faithlessness and consigned us and the universe we live in to the dustbin of Heaven and got back to the drawing board saying “Let’s try that again.”<br />
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But the God of the Bible is love, and true love does not give up. True love pursues. The greater the love, the greater the pursuit. The greatest love gives birth to the greatest pursuit.<br />
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More than that, only tragedy can truly prove how great any love is and so the greatest tragedy – our rebellion against God, whilst far from being the plan and no one plans tragedy – is nevertheless the opportunity for the greatest love to show itself true.<br />
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Whilst it is absolutely outrageous that the God of the universe should be humiliated in such a way, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is nevertheless, the moment in history where the love of God and the glory of that love is most truly displayed. And where the Son of God proves that he is worthy to receive all our adoration and affection as our future bridegroom. <br />
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For it is there he said I love you. It is there that he became our representative and stood in our place. It is there that he said:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Let me take your shame so that you can receive my glory.</li>
<li>Let me take your guilt so that you can receive my perfection.</li>
<li>Let me take your punishment so that you can receive my peace.</li>
<li>Let me take your bondage so that you can receive my freedom.</li>
<li>Let me take your darkness so that you can receive my light.</li>
<li>Let me take your chaos so that you can receive my rest.</li>
<li>Let me take your weakness so that you can receive my power.</li>
<li>Let me take your spirit of lawlessness so that you can receive my Holy Spirit.</li>
<li>Let me take your death so that you can receive my life.</li>
<li>Let me take everything that you are so that you can receive everything that I am.</li>
<li>I love you, I love you, I love you and my father and I want you to be with me where we are!</li>
</ul>
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Paul sums it up like this in Ephesians 2: <i>As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.</i><br />
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Thanks to the kindness and mercy of God, at the end of history, there will still be a great marriage when God the Son, in the presence of his Father will be united in love to all those out of every nation on the earth who have believed and trusted in him. <br />
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The Apostle John puts it like this in 1 John 3: <i>Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.</i><br />
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The Apostle Paul puts it like this in 1 Corinthians 2: <i>No eye has ever seen, no ear has ever heard, nor has any mind conceived of the things that God has in store for those who love him. </i><br />
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David the Psalmist, puts it like this in Psalm 45: <i>Listen, my daughter, and pay careful attention: forget your people and your father’s house. Let the king be enthralled by your beauty; honor him, for he is your lord. All glorious is the princess in her chamber, with robes interwoven with gold. In many-colored robes she is led to the king, with her virgin companions following behind her. With joy and gladness they are led along as they enter the palace of the king.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Whoever you are, whatever you have done, whatever your history, whatever your trajectory, the Father and the Son desire that we all should join them forever in a renewed world unspoiled by our darkness and evil, and they have made provision such that no barrier can ever get in the way of us believing him. The only thing that can possibly stop us now coming to him is our refusal to receive his love. He will not force his love upon us, but neither will he wait forever, if you hear his voice today, don’t wait to receive his love and obey his voice.<br />
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Have you said yes to this call from him?<br />
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The Love of God is the Story of History<br />
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But what about the here and now, we have just looked at the beginning and end of human history, but where are we here and now in Reading in 2017 at whatever age and stage we are.<br />
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I have spoken much about the Father and the Son, not so much about the Spirit.<br />
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Which leads us to our second question...<br />
<br />
<b>Who is the Lord who directs our hearts?</b><br />
It is the Holy Spirit who the Father and the Son have given to us to guard us and to prepare us meet them and to help us prepare the world for it to be God’s future home.<br />
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In the Old Testament, the guardian of God’s people was the Law – the law guarded God’s people and helped them prepare for the coming of Christ. The Law was to be a seal upon their hearts reminding them who they belonged to and light to their eyes showing them how to live.<br />
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The Spirit of God is the true and better guardian of God’s people. He is the true and better Law. He is preparing us for the return of Christ. He is the true and better counsellor, he is our the true and better advocate. The Law brought people near to God, the Spirit unites our hearts to God.<br />
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Like the Law once was, now the Spirit is God’s seal upon our hearts reminding us who we belong to and so Paul writes in Ephesians 1:13-14: <i>When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession.</i> He is also light to our eyes showing us how to live. Again, Paul writes in Galatians 5:25: <i>Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. </i><br />
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So in his role as guardian, what is it that the Spirit is to do?<br />
<br />
His role is to take us from immature adulthood to mature adulthood.<br />
<br />
When you and I turned 18, our status in law changed from child to adult, but that did not mean that you and I were immediately allowed to do everything that every other adult is allowed to do. Yes, we could legally drink in a pub without supervision, but nobody immediately handed us the keys to a jumbo jet, or the tools of a brain surgeon and said “Off you go, have a go”. If they had, they would have been ridiculously negligent. There was still a huge amount of training and maturing we had to go through, both in our technical ability and in our relational wisdom so as to become mature in our adulthood. And if you’re like me, you are still learning and still maturing. At 18, my status changed overnight, but my maturity and competence level most definitely did not!<br />
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Maturity isn’t a mix you can buy from the supermarket: “Instant Maturity:” Just add the Spirit.”<br />
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Just like the picture behind me, the girl who has probably just turned 18, has a different status in her family, but if she has any sense and her parents are any good at parenting, she will be constantly returning to them for help, advice and money as she learns to take her place in an adult world. <br />
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When God poured out the Spirit upon his people, it was a sign that their status had changed! Now they were truly born of the Spirit and children of God, now they were truly the betrothed bride of Christ, now they truly would reign with Christ and be seated in heavenly realms with him, but they were / are immature in that new status, and it was and is the Spirit who was given to help us to grow up and mature into who God has made us to be. Paul says in Ephesians 4:13 that we are to <i>“grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.”</i> Paul is not just referring to individual Christians here, his scope is much broader, he is referring to the people of God down history, including you and me.<br />
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The giving the Spirit marks God’s intention to transition the world and his people from this old way of life in sin, death and hatred of God to a new way of life, a way of light, life and the love of God.<br />
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But this process of maturing that the Spirit wants to do in us doesn’t come easy! Like Josh said last week, nothing great is easy. The greatest tasks are often the hardest tasks, so if this stuff sounds hard or even impossible to you then you are thinking the right things and asking the right questions.<br />
So we come to our third question...<br />
<br />
<b>How does the steadfastness of Christ help us to endure?</b><br />
<br />
We can face opposition in the world around us, but even more than that, we find sometimes that our hearts are at war within us. The greatest battle in our lives is the battleground of the heart. Our old task master, Satan, that great serpent, doesn’t just role over when we give the allegiance of our lives to Christ. Moreover, our own hearts are so used to living a different way that they find it difficult do synchronise to this true and better vision of life.<br />
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In these moments of internal and external conflict the Spirit of God will point our eyes to Christ. The writer to the Hebrews puts it like this:<br />
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<i>Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.</i><br />
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The Spirit wants us to see Christ who is both our guarantee and our inspiration.<br />
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He is our guarantee in those moments when we are given to disappointment and frustration because we have let God down, that he will not forsake us. The blood of Jesus is always fully able to cover over and redeem all our failings and weaknesses. God will carry on to completion the good work he has begun in us.<br />
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He is also our inspiration for he has called us to finish the work he began and if we are facing difficulty in that work, we can look to him and his example so that we know how to proceed in the circumstances that we find ourselves.<br />
<br />
What stops us from allowing the Spirit to direct our hearts?<br />
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At the root of it, what causes us to stifle the voice of the Holy Spirit is that we elevate the voice of our hearts above his voice. <br />
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Our culture is constantly telling us to listen to our hearts, that this is the way to flourish. Proverbs 14:12 disagrees, it says <i>There is a way that seems right to us, but in the end it leads to death. </i> What truly brings life to us is listening to the voice of God.<br />
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The danger here is not that we can’t be honest to God, we can and must be honest with God and with each other, the danger here is pride. Considering our voices more important than God’s voice which when you think about how great God is and how puny we are, is nothing short of madness.<br />
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This process can be subtle. You and I can fall into the trap of assuming that because we believe the right stuff that we have somehow been vaccinated against falling away from God, but if we let our emotions and desires be the prism through which we understand God’s words, rather than asking God’s words to be the prism through which we learn to understand our desires and emotions, then we are already half-way to living in disobedience, stifling the Spirit and giving up. <br />
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We may carry on being Christian on the outside, but there will little energy and appetite for obeying Christ’s command to complete the great commission and a strong desire to stay on the path of least resistance, maintain the status quo and avoid change.<br />
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Here are some emotions and desires we can elevate above God’s word in our hearts. The list is not exhaustive.<br />
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<ul>
<li>Disobedience</li>
<li>Failure</li>
<li>Guilt</li>
<li>Grief</li>
<li>Disappointment</li>
<li>Unmet expectations</li>
<li>Victimhood</li>
<li>Cynicism</li>
<li>Self-pity</li>
<li>Bitterness</li>
<li>Opposition</li>
<li>Fear</li>
<li>Fatigue</li>
<li>Boredom</li>
<li>Comfort</li>
<li>Pleasure</li>
<li>Overfamiliarity</li>
<li>Complacency</li>
<li>Deception</li>
<li>Fruitlessness</li>
<li>Frustration</li>
<li>Discouragement.</li>
</ul>
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When these emotions and thoughts come we must speak the words of God to them and believe the Spirit as he reminds us of them and fix our hearts on the love of God and steadfastness of Christ.<br />
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Then, and only then, we will have the strength to endure to the end.Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-5292131700682931322017-07-02T22:02:00.001+01:002017-07-03T14:47:06.799+01:00Conclusion and Cliffhanger: Notes on 1 Cor. 16:15-24In this last section of the letter, Paul continues his closing appeals to his Corinthian brothers and sisters.<br />
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<b>V15-16 Submit to those who work hard in the Lord.</b><br />
Stephanas’ family were Paul’s first converts in Asia and the first evidence that God was with him blessing his endeavours . Their lives were turned upside down by God for joy and they turned their lives upside down devoting themselves to the service of God and his people. Paul tells the church to submit to people like this.<br />
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<b>V17-18 Face to face fellowship brings life</b><br />
Stephanas, Fortunatus and Achaicus have brought the “report” to Paul. It’s off the back of their visit to him in Ephesus that 1 Corinthians gets written. Paul genuinely longs for the Corinthians as a father for children. These men have given up their time and money to visit Paul. They have refreshed Paul by being personally with him. Don’t let technology fool you into thinking connecting over social media is a substitute for meeting and connecting face to face, person to person, heart to heart.<br />
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<b>V19-20 Family Greetings</b><br />
Paul always finishes off his letters with greetings. Prisca and Aquila are a top married couple who get a special mention as they are with Paul now and were with him in Corinth when he first arrived to preach the gospel. They partnered with him in earning money as tentmakers to support themselves and in planting the church and so would have been well known and loved by the church. They will have served God faithfully for decades and risk their lives to serve Paul (Rom. 16:3)<br />
What is a kiss? A small intake of air into the mouth. Symbolically, it’s the taking of someone into yourself. It’s evidence that they dwell in your heart and as they kiss you, it shows that you live in their heart. Healthy families show much affection to each other as well as looking out for each other. That is how the church should be.<br />
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<b>V21-24 Assurance and Warning</b><br />
Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus would have vouched for the authenticity of this letter having visited Paul, so Paul’s writing is, more than anything, a sign of affection.<br />
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In calling down a curse on those who do not love the Lord, Paul isn’t so much wishing harm to others, rather he is saying that if after all that God has done for you in Christ, you’re still not satisfied then God has nothing left He can give you. There’s nowhere else to go, except into the eternal night of walking away from the love and light of Christ. Loving Christ is defined by covenant faithfulness not emotional intensity. Jesus said “if you love me, you will obey my commands”<br />
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Paul utters a prayer “Our Lord, come!” A prayer asking for the Lord to return. A prayer for the second coming. When will the second coming happen? When the great commission is fulfilled. Matt.24:14. Do you want Christ to return sooner or later? If we love Christ, then why do we say in our hearts, don’t come back just yet, Lord? Many of us spend more time hoping that we will live long enough to meet our grandchildren before we die than we do hoping that we will see Christ return in our lifetime. 1 Peter 3:12 tells us that we should live the kind of lives that bring forward the return of Christ, not delay it. If you were engaged to be married and your fiancée kept putting back the date because they wanted to do other things first, what would you conclude about their love for you?<br />
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In closing his letter, Paul wants them to know he is for them, but that doesn’t mean he is blind to their faults or that their faults don’t matter. The Corinthian church is at a crossroads. There are many good things about the church, but there are also dynamics at play that could, if left unchecked, rip the church apart and destroy its witness. And so the letter ends with a cliffhanger. What will the Corinthians do, will they listen to Paul and repent, or will they ignore him and continue to let the cancers they have spread through their church body?<br />
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But more than that, God loves this Corinthian church and Paul loves the Corinthian Church too – all of them. Not just those who side with him, but all of them. He is a good apostolic father, he has no favourites. The rich and the poor, the married and the unmarried, the fervent and the backsliding, the more charismatically gifted and the less charismatically gifted, the presentable ones and the un-presentable ones, the strong and the weak... He longs for them ALL to know God better and to mature in the love of the God who has loved and called them to live with Him forever.Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-75845713695907044552017-05-07T14:33:00.000+01:002017-05-07T17:04:59.672+01:00Fix Your Eyes On Resurrection Glory - Notes on 1 Corinthians 15:1-11Paul has spent the bulk of this letter answering the questions the Corinthian Christians have asked him and correcting their dodgy practice after hearing what has been going on. Now he wants to take their eyes off all these secondary issues and onto what really matters.<br />
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See "Dead Come Alive" by "Full of Eyes," <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FHYI3kdK_g">here</a>.<br />
<b><br /></b> <b>Verses 1-2: An Appeal In Love.</b><br />
Whatever the rights and wrongs of their opinions were on the various issues, Paul wants to fix their eyes on the gospel he preached. He is nervous that their pursuit of all these secondary things, whilst good in themselves, is rendering their understanding of Jesus and their proclamation of him, <u>incoherent</u>. As when Jesus told the parable of the sower, (Matthew 13:22), he said: <i>As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.</i> When all is said and done, we must be absolutely clear that the Cross of Jesus is the foundation of our identity (who we are now) and the resurrection of Christ is the foundation of our hope (where we are going).<br />
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<b>Verses 3-4: The Big Picture</b><br />
The beginnings of the first Christian creed. Paul isn't giving them his own opinions, he is reminding them of the big picture of history, which is not only that the death and resurrection had happened, but that it was predicted and prophesied hundreds, even thousands of years before it happened. The good news of the gospel blesses us, but it does not serve us, we serve the gospel. Ask not how the gospel is relevant to your life and rather ask how you can make your life relevant to the gospel, for, in the end, it's all that matters.<br />
<b><br /></b> <b>Verses 5-8: Appearances Evoking Faith</b><br />
Paul cites a number of different occasions where Jesus appeared to people after his resurrection. The list is neither chronological nor exhaustive, so what is Paul's editing principle here? Probably the best clue is in 1 Cor 15:12. It would appear some in the church no longer believe the resurrection. So he cites a list of instances where those who did not believe were lovingly confronted and brought / restored to faith by Jesus himself:<br />
<ul>
<li>Peter (Cephas): Matthew 16:23, 26:69-75 John 21:15-19</li>
<li>The Disciples / Apostles: Mark 16:9-14</li>
<li>The 500+ crowd: Matthew 28:17</li>
<li>James, Jesus' brother - tradition say that did not believe his brother to be the Messiah until after the resurrection, but then became one of the pillars of the fledgling Jerusalem church: Acts 15:13, Galatians 2:9</li>
<li>Paul: Acts 9.</li>
</ul>
<b>Verses 9-11: Grace Slays Self Importance and Cultivates Obedience.</b><br />
Just as we did not choose the time and place of our physical birth, neither did we pick and choose the time of our spiritual birth. Paul was out to destroy God's beloved bride - the church, yet God not only had mercy on him but also turned him into (arguably) the most eloquent presenter of the gospel (after Jesus) the world has ever seen. That kind of mercy can only cultivate obedience. There is no room for complacency or triumphalism.<br />
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<b>Questions:</b><br />
<ul>
<li>Are you so busy pursuing the "good things of life" that your understanding of and witness to the gospel is becoming incoherent?</li>
<li>Do you really believe that Jesus rose from the dead? If so, why doesn't it shape your life priorities as much as it should? What are the excuses you are making?</li>
<li>Is your expectation in life that the gospel serves us, or that we serve the gospel as a response to grace?</li>
<li>If the grace of God is really that good, why do we get so puffed up, and why are we so sluggish to obey God's commands?</li>
</ul>
Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-40081683928375740332017-02-14T18:42:00.000+00:002017-02-14T18:42:23.619+00:00Some Notes and Questions from Sam Alberry’s Sermon 12 February 2017You can find Sam’s sermon along with some of the Q and A, <a href="https://soundcloud.com/readingfamilychurch/is-god-anti-gay">here</a>.<br />
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<b>Mark 1:15</b> <i>“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”</i><br />
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Jesus is the person in whom all of God’s promises to humanity are fulfilled. Repentance is a total turn around in direction – like a car going the wrong way down the motorway will eventually hit a wall of other vehicles unless it turns round, we must repent before we are hit by the juggernaut of God’s kingdom purpose.<br />
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<u>Question: What does repentance look like in a life? In your life?</u><br />
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<b>Matthew 15:19-20</b> <i>For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.”</i><br />
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Our culture tells us we are lost and that we need to look inside our hearts to find the real authentic us and that once found, we must celebrate and express that. Jesus says the opposite; that looking at our hearts will only confuse and delude us because our hearts are corrupted.<br />
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<u>Question: How much time do you spend listening to other voices (including your own) defining you? How much do you listen to what Jesus says about you? Is there anything that needs to change?</u><br />
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<b>Matthew 19:3-6 </b><i>And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”</i><br />
<b>19:10-12</b> <i>The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”</i><br />
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Jesus avoids being trapped by the Pharisees by not answering their question directly, but by looking at God’s original intention for marriage – that it be one man and one woman in an exclusive lifelong union. This is a high calling, one that leaves the disciples gobsmacked. All of us are skewed (not straight) in our sexuality, all of us are broken. No one has sexual desires that are 100% godly all the time. All of us need Christ’s love and power to reconcile and restore us. If we cannot embrace Christ’s teaching on marriage, then the only legitimate pathway is celibacy – which is also a high calling. There can be many and varied reasons why people might be eunuchs (live celibately). In marriage we see the shape of the gospel (Christ and his Church). In celibacy, we see the sufficiency of the gospel (Christ and his family of the church are enough for me).<br />
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<u>Question: What does this teaching provoke in you? Why is Jesus so black and white about this? What does he want us to see? What implications does it have for you and your relationships? How can we support each other in this?</u><br />
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<b>Mark 8:34-35</b> <i>And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.</i><br />
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The only time Jesus uses “self” before any word is in “self-denial.” The world says hold on to all you have for as long as you can. Jesus says lose your life to me – the one you were made for - and you will become more you than you ever realised you could be.<br />
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<u>Question: Why is self-denial so hard? Does it feel like God is “crucifying you” over anything in your life at the moment as you learn to follow him wholeheartedly? If not, why not? Are you really counting the cost of being a disciple? Do you believe that in losing yourself to Jesus, you become the real you?</u><br />
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<b>Mark 10:28-30</b> <i>Peter began to say to him, “See, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.</i><br />
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The hardest ties to leave behind are relational, but Jesus makes the a promise that he expects his people to deliver on his behalf, namely that those who renounce their old life and its relational ties to follow him will be richly rewarded on a relational level by being welcomed into a family that is so good, it far outweighs both the good you thought you had in your old life and the persecution you now get for following Jesus. Our culture confuses sex and intimacy. You can live without sex, but you cannot live without intimacy (deep friendship or kinship). If the church is not a place of deep intimacy / fellowship then it cannot be surprised when people fall into bad relationships of all kinds, but especially sexual ones.<br />
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<u>Question: Have you experienced the depth of relationship in church life that Jesus promises here since you became a Christian? If not, why not? (Be honest, not accusatory.) How can you be obedient to Jesus and fulfil his promise to others of deep, intimate friendship / kinship?</u><br />
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<b>John 6:35</b> <i>Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.</i><br />
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This is a weird metaphor in a culture that has lots of different staples – potato, rice etc, but Jesus wants to be our daily bread, our sustenance for the journey of life. In our culture of romantic love – we often put expectations on others to complete us in ways they were never meant to fulfil. That is idolatry – only Jesus can truly satisfy and sustain us.<br />
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<u>Question: Do you look to Jesus as your soul/sole source of strength, or do you unfairly put a burden of expectation on others they were never designed to fulfil?</u>Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-49164675996269471112017-02-05T15:19:00.000+00:002017-02-05T15:27:11.291+00:00Honour The Body of Christ: Notes on 1 Corinthians 11:17-34Disclaimer: These are the notes I wrote to help me preach, but they are not necessarily representative of the content that was heard, for that, you need to go <a href="http://www.readingfamilychurch.org.uk/media/">here</a>.<br />
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Remember way back in the summer when we looked at chapter 7? We learned that the Corinthian church had written to Paul about a number of matters asking for his wisdom on them. However, what we are looking at today is not that. Earlier in the letter we read that Paul had received a report from “Chloe’s Household” and shocked and appalled about how things have deteriorated, Paul writes back answering those original questions and also correcting them on the stuff that has gone a bit mad according to Chloe and friends!<br />
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Where we are now in Chapters 11-14, Paul is primarily addressing issues around their collective acts of worship – In his letter, he uses the phrase “when you come together…” to pass comment on what has usually gone awry when they meet as a church. This section isn’t primarily about personal lifestyle choices of individual Christians.<br />
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Because our modern educational formation leaves us a bit baffled when it comes to thinking about communion, I want to make two comments to help contextualise what we are about to read.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jSQJKAJgPmo/WJc-8T_9wvI/AAAAAAAAEkY/OWhYgo0E4VcqmHJgt3HOygE6yibRwVA4ACLcB/s1600/Slide2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jSQJKAJgPmo/WJc-8T_9wvI/AAAAAAAAEkY/OWhYgo0E4VcqmHJgt3HOygE6yibRwVA4ACLcB/s320/Slide2.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
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Firstly – that ritual meals are the stuff of life and you and I do them all the time: Birthdays, Weddings, Anniversaries, Christmas, Sunday Roasts, Farewell Celebrations, Office Parties, New Year celebrations, like the one on the screen behind me, are all examples of ritual meals. For example at a birthday people gather to celebrate the birthday boy or girl. As it is their celebration, they decide what food and drink is consumed and what entertainment is had, and in the midst of the celebration a special type of ritual food is brought out called birthday cake, the candles are lit, then we all sing the special ritual song “Happy Birthday to you…” the candles are blown out, wishes are made and in that moment we are celebrating all that our friendship with the birthday boy / girl means and reaffirming our friendship with them.<br />
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Ritual meals mark moments in our lives, they bring meaningful shape to the contours of our lives. They help us to make sense of and honour the stories of our lives as they mark the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. They remind us “what time it is.” In a ritual meal you come together, both to celebrate and reaffirm what you love. You probably don’t remember most of the meals you had in 2016, but I bet you can remember many, if not most of the ritual ones – the birthdays, weddings and leaving dos you attended. Ritual meals mark themselves on our memory, in a way the everyday meals do not.<br />
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Communion is not some weird hocus-pocus event, it is the ritual family meal where Christians gather together by the Spirit to be reminded “what time it is,” what season of history we are in and what, the stories of our lives have become. It is a celebration of all that God is for us in Jesus Christ and restating / reaffirmation to ourselves our love for and allegiance to that God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.<br />
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Secondly, to contextualise… God has always enjoyed meals with his people and in the Bible we see them take on a pattern, there is the gathering, the offering, the shared meal and the ritual remembrance.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9-2iAQyMa34/WJc-8Z22g6I/AAAAAAAAEkU/aXO6STSAeoUiPMh8SJZlSTg-7WPnq4KYwCLcB/s1600/Slide3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9-2iAQyMa34/WJc-8Z22g6I/AAAAAAAAEkU/aXO6STSAeoUiPMh8SJZlSTg-7WPnq4KYwCLcB/s320/Slide3.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
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In the Old Testament, the Israelites would gather to the Presence of God – the Shekinah Glory Cloud, which was over the temple in Jerusalem three times a year, they would take the tithe (a 10% share) of their harvest with them, give some to the Levites (the priests) in an offering. Then use the rest to throw the largest bring and share party meal the world of the time had ever seen, where all those who united their hearts to the Lord whether they were rich or poor, Jew or not, could come and be welcomed in and they would all rejoice together in awe as they feasted in the temple, in the Presence of the LORD. The hungry would be fed, the naked clothed, the orphans and wanderers found a home, the scriptures read, songs sung and in the midst of the feasting and celebration, ritual animal sacrifices were performed that reminded them who God is and who they were as his people. Those sacrifices reminded them of how God had rescued them from slavery in Egypt and carried them to a new life in a good land and pointed forwards to the coming of Messiah. This was not their own personally preferred past time, this was their duty and their joy as God’s chosen people, for in remembering what God had done for them, they were to be a global witness to the nations around them that God would one day send the Messiah who would offer rescue to the whole world, from the slavery of our rebellion against him and open up the way to friendship with God again.<br />
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Fast Forward to the New Testament, we see the same pattern as the Old Testament, but it is a new context. The Presence of God – the glory of God is no longer found above a stone temple, but in groups of people who have been made alive by the Spirit of God and when they gather together they also bring their offerings and lay them at the Apostles feet who would then, like the Levites, use the offering for the work of the church, the care of the poor, and for feasting and celebrating together before God. And in the midst of that celebration, as they ate together in their homes with glad and sincere hearts, they would perform the ritual remembrance of communion. They would remind themselves that they were once dead in sin, cut off from the goodness of God with no hope and no right to any share in any of it, but that God in his mercy, through the death and resurrection of Jesus had given them new life and new hope, and that this new life and hope was not just to be a waiting witness to the world, but was to bring about the transformation of the world, in order to ready it for Jesus’ return.<br />
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I say these things so that as we now read 1 Cor 11, you can understand and feel just how dysfunctional these Corinthian Christians had become.<br />
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The church hasn’t asked him any questions about communion. Paul doesn’t wait to be invited to comment, he just weighs in because Chloe’s report left him shocked and appalled. One wonders if his readers took offence at this, but that might be more of a reflection on my 21st century cultural conditioning that I see offense everywhere, rather than there being any actual offense.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mHBnp9-KfSc/WJc-8i1wZcI/AAAAAAAAEkc/ozHKaWTGyEgW4hAE1_MTDpzzo3x4d40jwCLcB/s1600/Slide4.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mHBnp9-KfSc/WJc-8i1wZcI/AAAAAAAAEkc/ozHKaWTGyEgW4hAE1_MTDpzzo3x4d40jwCLcB/s320/Slide4.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
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The divisions mentioned here are not the same as the ones mentioned back in the earlier part of the letter, we aren’t talking about them dividing over which apostle they preferred to align themselves. Nor are we now talking about meat offered to idols, although as we will see, I think that is in the background here. Rather we are talking about the strong dominating and humiliating the weak. <br />
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The Strong were those in the church who were rich, well connected to the corridors of power and influence. They were the charismatic (with a small c) ones in the church, the extraverts, the ones whom in that horrible battle known as the survival of the fittest had gained victory as they had all the characteristics that were best adapted to getting on top, locking themselves in there and enjoying all the prizes of this life to the exclusion of others.<br />
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The Weak were those in the church who were poor, uneducated, had no access to the corridors of power and influence. They often just struggled to hold life together.<br />
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In preaching the good news of Jesus to the Corinthians, Paul declared the breaking down of the kinds of social and physical walls that divided people like this into the strong and the weak, the privileged and the underprivileged, telling them they were all one together in Christ Jesus. <br />
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But with Paul now long gone, some of that old world division was creeping back into the church. The rich were now enjoying more privileges than the poor, barriers were starting to be re-erected and this heretical tendency was most evident at their communion meals. The very moment where their unity should have been most obviously on display had become a moment of disastrous disunity.<br />
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No doubt many of the rich resigned themselves to this regression. They may even have said to themselves that Jesus had told them that they would always have the poor with them, twisting a godly utterance in order to justify a deeply ungodly pattern of behaviour.<br />
Paul is deeply sarcastic about this “Of course, you must have divisions amongst you so that those who are truly spiritual, truly rich, truly favoured by God might be vindicated in that favour. How could I forget, (Paul might have gone on that sarcastic vein) that God favours the rich, that God is impressed by your prosperity and thinks that he can do more through you because of your money, rather than because of your obedience, because we all know that it’s their money that always makes rich people more obedient than the poor, how dumb am I?!<br />
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So what exactly was going on in their public worship, and more specifically their communion meals?<br />
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Before we all demonise the rich for reconstructing walls that enforced their own privileged status, we would do well to remember that they were probably just reverting to the standard cultural assumptions of their day. Much like the rich in modern democracies lock the poor out of running for power by making the process of getting elected so exorbitantly expensive that no poor person can afford to run for office. It’s one of those laws of a fallen world; the rich, when left to their own devices will always start to throw their weight around whether deliberately or unwittingly – disenfranchising the poor in the process.<br />
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Our best guess, based on what Paul wrote and what we know of the customs of the time, is that they began to mirror the standard cultural practice of the ritual meals of the day which was that someone rich would lay on a meal, gathering all their rich friends into the dining room known as the “triclinium.” There they would gorge themselves on the finest of the food and wines, do some religious ritual to some idol, and once they had had their fill, whatever was left would be taken out to the poor who were waiting in a small courtyard-like place known as the atrium. The rich “cared” for the poor by giving them their scraps and leftovers. This was how the poor were “cared” for in a society that had no benefits system. Left to fight over that which the rich were too sick or too drunk to finish.<br />
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Have this picture in your mind as we read on…<br />
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So picture the scene if you will. The rich who have servants to do all their hard work, the rich who can arrange their diaries as their desires allow, the rich who have no worries about where the next meal is coming from, the rich who probably aren’t all that hungry, arrive on time to the worship service, participate without a care and when the time comes to share the love feast of communion as it was known, they are called into a special room and given all the privileges of fine dining.<br />
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Not so for the poor, who are scraping a living, the poor who can’t arrange their diaries however they like and who have to work all the hours that their masters and mistresses desire because if they don’t they get beaten to within an inch of their life, having no right to plea for justice from the law courts for such abuse, the poor, who turn up to the worship of God as soon as they can, but sometimes that just isn’t soon enough, and when they get there, they haven’t eaten all day and they are told to wait in the courtyard until the rich brothers and sisters have finished their food.<br />
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When you add to this the fact that Paul was probably writing at a time of global food shortage which was sending the price of basic food sky rocketing and throwing many into starvation, you can quickly see why Paul is so outraged as he writes.<br />
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The rich are getting drunk and fat whilst the poor are going hungry and wasting away, right next to each other.<br />
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The rich had hijacked God’s family meal and turned it from something that was to focus on Christ and be a blessing to all his people, to being something that focussed on the pleasures of the rich and the strong and humiliated the weak.<br />
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Paul is relatively generous in his writing “Shall I commend you in this? No I will not!” I would imagine, he was fuming with righteous indignation as he was writing. Is this really what God’s family meal had sunk to?<br />
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Paul wasn’t present at the Last Supper with Jesus and his disciples, but he takes so seriously the traditions that were passed on to him by those first disciples who are now apostles, that it is as if the Lord himself had given the instructions to Paul personally. What Paul taught the Corinthian church about communion when he was with them was therefore not open to their improvised interpretations based on the cultural sensibilities, prejudices, conveniences and foibles of the society around them. They, like Paul were to be faithful to the traditions with which they had been entrusted by the Lord, through his faithful servants.<br />
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Communion is Jesus’ meal, not ours to reinterpret how we like. It is his invitation, his house, his entry criteria, his table, his settings, his food, his drink, his words, his ceremony, his remembrance and his resurrection power flowing through the heart of it all. The best of Roman Catholicism understands this so much better than us Protestant Charismatics. <br />
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Here is the paradox, Jesus is both the host of the meal and the food at the centre of it and Paul now restates the heart of the ritual remembrance that should have taken place in the midst of their eating together. <br />
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The night Jesus was betrayed, he took that famously termed “last supper” which was a Passover meal that God’s people had been celebrating now for nearly two thousand years as they had waited for their promised Messiah, and transformed them into something new. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, God was pulling human history into a whole new era: from night to day, from mourning to dancing, from law to spirit, from death to life and from creation to renewed creation in order to prepare everything for his return at the end of history.<br />
For at the cross, Jesus offered up his body in perfect obedience to death. His body, conceived inside Mary the virgin, by the power of the Holy Spirit, was one that knew no sin. He had never given his body over to doing anything other than the will of the Father in Heaven. He had not used his eyes and ears to behold and believe lies, no matter how delicious they first appeared. He had not used his hands, feet and mouth to grasp for things he had no right to take for himself. He had always fixed his mind, heart and soul, in love, on doing his Father’s will every second of every minute, every minute of every hour, every hour of every day, for every day of his life. <br />
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And as he offered his body up in righteous obedience on the cross, drawing into himself the curse of all our sin, shame and bondage to darkness and with it the punishment that we so rightly deserved; the life of God was broken open. Father, Son and Holy Spirit who had been united in love for all eternity, were separated from each other. The life of God was broken open so that now through the power of resurrection, we might be added in.<br />
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So when Jesus’ disciples took that bread into themselves, they were to remember him and his body offered up in righteous obedience, but not only that, for in eating the bread, they were reminded that his righteousness was now given to them, his obedience was credited to them and that his mission was now their mission. And as we take the bread, 2000 years later, nothing has changed. We remind our hearts that Christ’s righteousness is now our righteousness, that his obedience is now our obedience, his mission is now our mission. That his status before the Father is now our status before the Father and that we can come before God in love, free from condemnation.<br />
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And as bread gives strength to our physical bodies to labour in life’s work, so Christ’s righteousness given to us, strengthens our souls that we might more and more be conformed to the likeness of Jesus – to become what God has already declared over us in hope: beloved and obedient children. <br />
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Movement is life and because blood moves all over your body, it’s the stuff of life. Humans cannot live without blood running through the body. <br />
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Blood provides the energy that all our body parts need to live and if we lose it, we die.<br />
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In the Bible, blood poured out signifies life lost and judgment rendered. If you spilled the blood of another in murder, then the law required that your guilty life had to be taken and your blood spilled to atone for your crime and restore the peace of the community and the fruitfulness of the land. Righteous judgements restore peace, prosperity and flourishing. Unrighteous judgements provoke instability and chaos and render the land barren.<br />
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Christ had no guilt, he was perfect, but he had the guilt of the whole world, including ours, laid upon him and then the righteous wrath and judgement of God; Father, Son and Spirit, was poured out on the Son for our rebellion against them. As the wrath came down, the blood poured out. It dripped out as he was flogged and beaten, and gushed out when his side was pierced. And because of his eternal, immortal perfection, he was able to absorb and soak up that wrath completely. The righteous judgements of God for sin were completely satisfied.<br />
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This is massive, for it means that when Christ rose from the dead, not only could we be acquitted of our guilt, but by the power of the spirit, the lifeblood of Christ now flows to us by the Spirit, his life is now our life, his power is now our power, his victory is now our victory. <br />
Just as wine is a victory drink that we drink when the work is done and it brings joy and laughter to our bodies, so too, the blood of Christ, the life of Christ given to us is our reminder that Jesus’s work is done, judgement for sin is over, all the wrath of God for our rebellion is spent. Satan is powerless, death is powerless, sin is powerless, this present world is powerless, for God’s victory in Christ over them is total and incontestable. In the bread we receive the righteousness of God; in the wine we receive the pleasure and life of God as through the Spirit he now courses through our souls leading us to cry Abba! Father!<br />
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By regularly taking bread and wine in communion, we remind ourselves and the watching world that the central fact of history is not the fake, or for that matter true, news that sloshes around on social media but the death and resurrection of Christ and we participate in that fact, becoming united to it. We remind ourselves and the world that the only thing that matters, for all of us, is what happened on a small mountain outside Jerusalem 2000 years ago and that this event and our response to it, is what determines the destiny of all people everywhere who have ever lived and will ever live until Jesus returns to wrap up history. <br />
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But this meal is not a free for all. It is a life or death meal because it is a meal centred on love and allegiance to Christ.<br />
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The main point of this section is not so much about counting up and confessing our sins. That is important, but it comes second to us examining our allegiances. You may not have committed any “big sins” this week, but your heart, like the Pharisees, could be a million miles away from God. Equally, you could have had an awful week of slipping up into old ways, but if you confess and renounce those things from the heart then you are in the right place to come and eat and drink with Jesus. Christ’s invitation to the communion table is not based on our performance, but his. Our duty is to examine our allegiances confess our need of Christ and give our hearts to him again in love. <br />
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My guess from reading around is that some of the rich Christians at Corinth were participating in idol feasts either, because they wanted to hedge their bets and cover all their bases in the spiritual realms, or because they wanted to foster their business interests and friendships with those who worshiped those idols and so participating in the odd idol feast day here and there kept the friendships warm, the money rolling in. The problem was that it led to a compromised allegiance that was ripping the church apart.<br />
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Now, I am pretty confident that most of us here are not sneaking off to other religious temples around the area to make offerings to other gods or curry favour there for the sake of our business interests, but as my wife reminded me when she proof read this, religious interest is on the rise like never before, I should not assume anything. Are you visiting idol temples? There are more and more of them around. And even if you aren’t, are you getting involved with practices that at a very surface level are innocuous enough, but behind them have a power that is not rooted in the Spirit of God? Yoga, meditation, mindfulness, superstitions like not walking under ladders, Freemasonary, Ouija boards, alternative medicine, acupuncture etc. These things can have very legitimate applications in life, but if we are not discerning and careful they can lead us down roads to idolatry down which we never intended to travel. <br />
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And just because most of us don’t really do any of that stuff, doesn’t mean that we can let ourselves off the hook. Our culture idolises the fantasy called the free, self-defined individual. We can so easily give our souls and bodies to those things that bolster the delusions we want to believe about ourselves and about our circle of family and friends. We give our time, energy and thought to getting, amongst other things, money, sex, status, technology, knowledge and power because in our collective consciousness, we think that it is our right to have those things and to have them serve our sense of destiny yet we end up in bondage to them and we forget that our primary energy, time and thought is to be devoted to the duty and service of Christ.<br />
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Paul called out the Corinthians, and I am calling us out today, not so much to an assessment of our performance although that is important, but to an assessment of our allegiance. Who is your primary allegiance in life to? When you eat bread and drink wine, are you hedging you bets or are you giving yourself heart and soul to the one who gave his heart and soul, his body and his blood for you. <br />
Christ wants his love reciprocated, not scorned. He wants us present at his table, not just in body but in heart also, just as he is present in body and heart.<br />
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This is not a take it or leave it kind of thing, the consequences of doing this flippantly are dire, lets read on… <br />
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Judgement is not the root of all evil, as many in our culture would have it. It is neither good nor bad. However, good judgement is a source of life. If we are to reign with Christ, then we are to grow in maturity. We grow in maturity when we grow in the exercise of good judgment - discerning good and evil. If we want to live a life that makes no judgments about anything, then we will remain infantile in our thinking and ironically, it won’t be long before we see our world collapse in tornado of paranoia and neurosis as we end up judging everyone and feeling judged by everyone. We can’t help but pass judgement. We must ensure our judgements are good and true.<br />
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If we have a compromised allegiance to the Lord, if we are spiritual adulterers, claiming allegiance to the Lord, but going off and seeking out other things to take his place in our affections, then the bread and wine which should work life and health in us, will instead work death in us, for the Lord is a jealous God, eager to protect and guard those who are united to him. His love will burn up those parts of our hearts that are given to others rather than to him. That is why many at Corinth were weak and sick and some had died. Like the Israelites who gave themselves to the golden calf in the wilderness, met with their death. So now the Corinthians who played fast and loose with their allegiance to Christ, popping off on the sly to feast at the tables of other gods, were reaping terrible consequences at communion, and becoming unfruitful in their unfaithfulness.<br />
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These people don’t lose their salvation necessarily, Paul says that those who are unfaithful get “disciplined” not dammed. Nevertheless, they pay a high price for what is at best a lack of good judgement or at worst a gross arrogance before God.<br />
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But if we have already confessed and renounced our sin, if we have already bound ourselves to the Lord in love, then the bread and wine work as they do in any normal situation to give life and vitality to us in body and soul, they work for our fruitfulness in the service of God and for our victory in the mission of God.<br />
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The success of our mission statement as a church and the legacy of our lives as a whole are not founded in our technique and performance for God, but on our allegiance and obedience to God.<br />
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So, in summary, remember whose meal this is, who is the host and who is the guest, remember the entry criteria and how we should come, if we do this communion will be a source of life and joy to us not misery, sickness and death.<br />
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Come, let us eat, drink and offer ourselves up in devotion to the Lord as living sacrifices. Christ offered himself up in sacrifice to God for us that he might unite us to God making us holy and beautiful like he is holy and beautiful, now calls us to do the same. We must be clear about this. Jesus suffered the wrath of God so that we didn’t have to, but he didn’t die that we don’t have to, he died so that we might follow him to death and through death out to resurrection on the other side.<br />
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Christ offered up his perfect, righteous and holy life in sacrifice for the world, so that we who have now been made perfect and righteous in Christ might now leave our self-absorbed, sin laden lives behind, follow Christ’s lead and offer ourselves up as living sacrifices for the life of the world, as he did. (Romans 12:1-3) Christ’s laying his life down in obedient sacrifice opened the way for us to live with God. Our sacrifices, obediently laying ourselves down for God, for one another and for the world, fill the new creation with souls for God and prepare the world for his return. What he alone by sacrifice could begin, Christ has commanded his Spirit filled church, by sacrifice to complete (Matt. 28:19-20).<br />
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So will you come now to Christ’s table? He calls us to unite and reunite our heart to his in love. <br />
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He calls us to be honest about our allegiances, to confess and turn away from those things, people or situations, which are either tempting us or causing us to commit spiritual adultery.<br />
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He calls us to remember, to honour and to take great joy in his once-for-all sacrifice on the cross made in love to God the father for us.<br />
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He reminds us that this is his meal table, not ours. We don’t approach it how we like in our introspective little bubble. We come as God’s gathered people to remember and celebrate Christ together and to remember that by his mercy we are one body together in him born anew into a living hope that begins now and lasts for ever. We wait for one another, ensuring as far as we can that we help each other to all be ready spiritually and physically to eat and drink with Jesus. <br />
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So prepare your hearts, prepare each others’ hearts. Let us eat and drink with our eyes open. Take things in, these are the people, along with many millions across the world and down history to whom you are united in God for eternity.Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-86021351193142078402016-11-27T14:33:00.000+00:002016-11-27T14:36:54.354+00:00Sermon Notes: Making Room for God... by ObedienceDue to time, I haven't prepared the usual script, hopefully the bullet points make enough sense..<br />
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<b>A Modern Parable</b><br />
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<li>Tommy the world famous tight rope walker. He did amazing stunts.</li>
<li>Tommy had fallen off in practices and in performances years ago, but not recently.</li>
<li>One day, the unthinkable happened… but the curious thing was that he enjoyed it.</li>
<li>He started to do it for the paying crowds</li>
<li>But the crowds weren’t fools, word got out and they stopped coming to see the show, they didn’t want to pay to see for something they could do.</li>
<li>Tommy’s act became financially unviable, and folded</li>
<li>He signed on the dole.</li>
<li>When Tommy was different, it got the world’s attention, when he was just like them, they lost interest.</li>
<li>How many of us are like Tommy in our Christian lives? Never tried to live differently, or used to try, but don’t any more.</li>
<li>Titus 2:11-14 <i>For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.</i> </li>
</ul>
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<li>Today, I felt compelled to speak about <i><b>making room for God by obedience</b></i></li>
<li>What does the title provoke in you? Excitement? Cynicism? Resentment? Fear? Apathy? Guilt?</li>
<li>Paul, at the beginning of his letter to the Romans says that his whole life mission is to bring the Gentiles into the <i>“obedience of faith for the sake of his name”</i></li>
<li>At the end of the same letter, he says:<i> “For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed”</i></li>
<li>In the Great Commission, (Matt 28), Jesus told his followers to teach not just for understanding, but for obedience.</li>
<li>As I speak, my aim is not just to help you understand, but obey</li>
<li>As you listen, your aim should not just be understanding, but obedience.</li>
<li>Anything less and we are fooling around and there’s nothing for the world to see.</li>
<li>People don’t need to see their banal little lives reflected back at them when they look at Christians, they want to see something worth living and dying for.</li>
<li>If you have a bible in any kind of format, please turn to John 14:23 </li>
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<li>Making room for God is not like making room for your dog on the sofa, it’s making room for a King of the universe.</li>
<li>Of course we never mean it like that, but how often does our making room for God feel like giving him the leftovers of our time or our emotional energy if we have any rather than finding out what the king requires of us?</li>
<li>This verse is stunning because God is willing to stoop to our level.</li>
<li>One of Jesus’ disciples asks a question.</li>
<li>With a verse like this you would expect a question like: what are the benefits of being a Christian? What are the terms and conditions of discipleship?</li>
<li>Previous verse says: Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “<i>Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?”</i></li>
<li>Judas is a bit confused Jesus is going and they can’t follow, but then he says he is coming back but when he comes back, he will not be seen by the world but will be seen by them so is he coming back wearing a hoodie or an invisibility cloak?</li>
<li>Jesus is talking about returning not in bodily form, but through the Holy Spirit who is God and who dwells in the hearts of all those who humble themselves to receive him.</li>
<li>In a mystery that only God will truly understand heart to heart, soul to soul, life to life.</li>
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<li>Much has been penned by many about love languages in recent years. Learning how to give and receive love is key to harmonious relationships.</li>
<li>Fundamentally, we show love to God by obedience, everything we do should flow from that motivation as a response to his great kindness to us.</li>
<li>The call to all. If <i>anyone</i>…</li>
<li>Loves me “agape” is used here - deep sacrificial love.</li>
<li>The love God shows to us is the love he desires to see us show to him… He wants his love to be reciprocated – like for like. Tension and difficulty comes when love is not reciprocated to the same level in the other.</li>
<li>High school crush analogy - unrequited love.</li>
<li>Jesus has loved the world to death, through death and out the other side to new and eternal life and by the Spirit, he wants to cultivate that same kind of love in his people where we say I die to myself, my agenda, my dreams and plans and move by the power of God into a new kind of life – God’s eternal life where God’s ambitions, dreams and plans become my own.</li>
<li>Hebrew 5:7-8: <i>During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. Christ, by his obedience</i></li>
<li>No disciple is greater than his master, if Jesus had to do it, then those who call themselves Christians must follow in his footsteps.</li>
<li>Christ’s obedience to the Father opened up the gates of Heaven for all to enter in. No one but he could do that.</li>
<li>But God in his wisdom has decreed that it is by our obedience to Christ and the power of the Spirit that brings people through those open gates.</li>
<li>You are here today, because someone was obedient to Jesus on your behalf, before you realised it.</li>
<li>Those who love Jesus sacrificially will obey his commands, because they have a new nature, appetite and power for obedience put in there by the Holy Spirit.</li>
<li>They will walk the tightrope. They won’t do it perfectly, that’s why God’s mercy and patience is so great, but they will do it increasingly through the seasons of life.</li>
</ul>
What does it mean to keep Jesus’ words?<br />
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<li>Words are living things, that my sound strange, but they have the power to multiply themselves.</li>
<li>Words both good and bad get passed from one person to another, if the messages they bring take root, then eventually, they will get passed on to another. Words become scripts that get passed from generation to generation in families and societies for better or worse.</li>
<li>We enact the words and the scripts that are passed on to us by our family and by our culture</li>
<li>When Jesus told his disciples to keep his word, he didn’t mean in a jar in a cupboard, he meant out in the open. His words are living and active</li>
<li>We can treat God’s words like a vacuum cleaner: most of the time it is hidden away under the stairs, but is brought out when we’ve made a mess of things.</li>
<li>Jesus didn’t only mean for his words to be used as part of our crisis management, he meant for them to change the world.</li>
<li>It’s so easy to fall into negative and passive modes of obedience. Judging our spiritual progress by the sins we are not committing</li>
<li>No good human relationship functions like this, but we seem to think that God will be ok with it.</li>
<li>Jesus seeks an active and positive obedience the kind that says “Master, what do you want from me today”</li>
<li>Like the way that not going to the gym for six months leaves us sluggish and self-loathing, we often lack spiritual vitality, not because life is hard, but because have given up doing the things that give us spiritual life – namely obedience to what God says.</li>
<li>In another story Jesus told, he talked about how the cares of this life and the deceitfulness of riches can be like weeds that choke the life out of the words God plants in us.</li>
<li>The cares of this life are all the good things of life that we need, but which we come to obsess over. We take our eyes off Jesus and put them on these things</li>
<li>The deceitfulness of wealth is not just rampant materialism, it’s the belief that money can give you the life that you need.</li>
<li>Most of us in here aren’t rampant materialists, but we can be taken captive by thinking that good money management is the key to a successful life. Money management is important, but faithfulness to Jesus is more-so.</li>
<li>Jesus says seek first to do as I say and I will ensure you have everything you need.</li>
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<li>Jesus isn’t Lord Sugar. He’s not standing there with arms folded waiting to be impressed and cajoled into liking us.</li>
<li>This isn’t a job interview it is an invitation</li>
<li>At the cross, Jesus has invited us into his life and he desires that we invite him into ours.</li>
<li>He doesn’t care if our lives are worthy or perfect enough.</li>
<li>He has all the resources we have none,</li>
<li>Jesus didn't die so we could live like Christians on Sunday and atheists on Monday</li>
<li>He isn't worried about what is out of your control, only what is in it.</li>
<li>He’s isn’t bothered by our perfection or lack of it.</li>
<li>Some of us need to stop whinging about what Church isn’t or Christians aren’t and get on with what God has asked of us.</li>
<li>Stop using other people’s faults as an excuse for our own laziness / apathy / disobedience.</li>
<li>Some of us need to move from negative and passive forms of obedience to positive and active ones.</li>
<li>Some of us need to make room for God in more than just the nooks and crannies of our lives, but give him access to the master bedroom as it were.</li>
<li>Some of us haven’t felt alive in God for a while, for the simple reason that we haven’t pursued the vitality of obedience.</li>
</ul>
Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-28811634291006186732016-09-04T10:00:00.000+01:002016-09-04T14:18:17.396+01:00Sermon Notes: Praying is ReigningI want to begin this sermon by asking you two questions.<br />
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What is the good life? And how do we get it? What, in your opinion, is the good life, and how are you going about getting it?<br />
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The reason we need to answer these first is that our answers to these questions fundamentally shape and fill our attitude to life and therefore to prayer. <br />
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Whether we realise it or not, we are orientating our hearts, our energy, our time, our daily routines, our talents, our money and even our prayers around getting whatever we think the good life is.<br />
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If we think that the good life is thrills, like the guy behind me or a nice house, good job, a photogenic family, good schools for our kids, plenty of leisure time, and no stress, illness or tragedy, then we will pray for and put our energies into those things. <br />
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We have often said, if you want to know what a person really believes and is living for, don’t listen to what they say they believe, look at their bank statement. <br />
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The same is true of prayer – if you want to know what someone thinks the good life is don’t listen to what they say – look at their prayer life. <br />
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Think about your praying or perhaps your lack of prayer over the last couple of months, what does it tell you about your priorities?<br />
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Christians often say that Jesus came to give us <i>life and life in all its fullness</i> and yes, Jesus did say that in John 10:10, but he meant something very different to what we think he is saying. <br />
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In bringing us the full life, he turned all our assumptions about the good life on their heads. <br />
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You see, the context of that passage is Jesus talking about how he is the good shepherd and how we are his sheep. Now, think about that for a moment, what is the destiny of a sheep? It’s to be prepared for the dinner table. The destiny of sheep is not to live for themselves, but to serve the agenda of the shepherd.<br />
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Our natural instinct is that the good life is get, get, get for ourselves and our loved ones and especially in liberal democracies like ours, we all feel, myself included, especially entitled to have everyone serve our ambitions.<br />
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But Jesus says, the good life is give, give, give. He said in Matthew 16 that <i>anyone who wants to keep his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake will gain it and more back. </i><br />
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Paul picks up the same theme in 2 Corinthians 5 when he said that Jesus: <i>died for all, so that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. </i><br />
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How could we ever, possibly have this attitude? The only way a self-giving life like that becomes desirable, let alone possible, is because Jesus has already given us everything he could possibly give us. The shepherd has already laid his life down for the sheep.<br />
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Romans 12:1 says that in view of this incredible kindness from God, that we are to be living sacrifices, not grabbing and getting, but offering ourselves up to God for whatever it is he would wish from us. <br />
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The relief in al that is that Jesus is not a God who is looking for minions, he is a God who is looking for those who will become like him, filled to the brim by the Spirit like he is, and overflowing with love for the Father and for the world. <br />
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A love that expresses itself most clearly in self-sacrifice. <br />
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If we are prayerless in our daily lives, or we only call on God when we want something for ourselves, our family or our friends, then what evidence is there, that we have been raised to a whole new kind of life in Christ. <br />
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At best, we haven’t experienced very deeply what Christ died to give us, at worst our confession of Christ is a lie and we are deluding ourselves.<br />
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It’s when our definition of the good life starts transforming into the same as Jesus’ that prayers, and our spirits, start to come alive. <br />
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So what is prayer? At its simplest definition, it’s talking to God. <br />
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The thing about simple definitions is that they are at the same time, both helpful and misleading. It’s helpful because it’s true, when we pray, we talk to God, and he talks to us, supremely and authoritatively through the Bible, but not exclusively so. <br />
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However, the definition is misleading because we talk in different ways to different people depending on our relationship to them. I talk one way to Elli my wife. I will talk a very different way to Evie my 7 month old daughter. I will talk a different way again to my father, to my colleagues or to strangers. <br />
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This doesn’t make me a hypocrite, it just means that the different relationships in my life take different forms of conversation and routine. Elli will not thank me if I start talking to her as I talk to Evie.<br />
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Jesus is not my wife, my child or my mate, so I don’t talk to him in any of those ways. I address him as the Lord of the universe with worship, awe, reverence, gratitude and honour for who he is and what he has done, but also with simplicity and confidence because whilst he is the ruler of all things, he is also my older brother in family of God and has given me access to the heart of God the Father.<br />
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Secondly, the Bible speaks of Christians reigning with Christ, but what does that mean? It doesn’t mean sitting on a throne perched in the clouds and staring into the middle distance.<br />
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Reigning with Christ looks like the picture behind me – the Council of Elrond from the Lord of the Rings. (See here, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhHvj3_si_o">part 1</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrJJ6ncp1fc">part 2</a>.)<br />
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Just like Elrond in the Lord of the Rings, God has his council. In Psalm 82 we read: <i>God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment. </i><br />
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In Psalm 89, we read: <i>who in the skies can be compared to the Lord? Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord, a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him?</i><br />
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God ruled over the world of the Old Testament through angels and supremely through an enigmatic figure known as the Angel of the LORD. It was angels who would go to and fro across the earth and then come to council and talk to the Lord about what they had seen and he would give them missions to fulfil. For examples of this, see Job chapter 1 or Micaiah’s vision in 1 Kings 22.<br />
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But when Christ ascended into Heaven and sat down at the right hand of his Father, the work of the angels was over and in Revelation 4 we see them laying down their crowns of authority, symbolic of the great hand over, when the church would, as it were, pick up the baton and carry on where they left off. <br />
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For angelic rule was only ever a temporary measure.<br />
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God’s intention was always that men and women would be the ones who sat on his council. In Genesis 1 we read that God made humanity to rule creation with him, but when we rebelled against God, we disqualified ourselves not only from fellowship with God but also from our place on his council, ruling creation with him and were placed in spiritual quarantine until Christ came. <br />
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But through Christ and his cross, God has not only restored our fellowship with God, but he has restored us to our position of reigning with him on his heavenly council. That is why we read in Revelation 5:9-10: <i>And they sang a new song, saying, “Worthy are you [Lord Jesus Christ] to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.”</i><br />
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The church is a new people, the children of God gathered increasingly out of every nation as the gospel goes forth. Through Christ, we have been gathered into not only into the family of God, but also the heavenly ruling council of God to talk with him, to know his mind, to bring to his attention the things that are going on in his world and asking what he will do about it and what he wants us to do about it. <br />
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It’s by this process, spending time in the council of God, in prayer, and the obedience that flows from it, that we grow in maturity and live lives that are useful and pleasing to the master and see the world filled with the transforming love of God.<br />
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Jesus talks about this participation in the divine council another way, he says in John 15: <i>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.</i><br />
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Through Christ, God has brought us into every aspect of his heart and his life and he wants us to join him in making the plans he has for the world a reality.<br />
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Our reigning with Christ is made meaningful through prayer.<br />
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Prayer is the process by which we reign with Christ and grow in Christ.<br />
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At this point a clarification is helpful. If you have been around Christians long enough, you may have heard some of us say that we are sons and daughters of the king. But what does it mean to be a prince or princess in this heavenly dynasty? <br />
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To be a son or daughter in our culture tends to mean that we sit around whilst our parents run ragged trying to find ways of keeping us entertained and out of trouble or danger, but that is not the way the Bible ever views children of royalty. <br />
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Privilege is never the justification for indulgence or passivity. It is always the opportunity for gratitude and service.<br />
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In the bible, being a child of a king, means not only taking our place on the heavenly family sofa, but also taking our place on the heavenly council.<br />
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And on that council, we have three distinct roles which are inseparably woven together. We are all at the same time, sons (and daughters), subjects and soldiers. If we over or under-emphasise any one of these three roles, we won’t be like Jesus in our praying.<br />
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Firstly, princes and princesses are sons and daughters. We have the incredible privilege of being able to draw near to God in prayer. <br />
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Being made in his likeness means we can understand and enjoy him in a way that no other creature can. <br />
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Being close to him means we can talk to him as our loving father sharing with him all our hopes and fears, our disappointments and successes, and everything that our lives consist of. Jesus said to his disciples in John 20 : <i>“I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”</i><br />
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But princes and princesses are also subjects in the king's court and servants in his service. They carry the king’s authority and are expected to serve the king and the kingdom in whatever is needed. <br />
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So we also come as subjects to be given jobs to do, realms to oversee and responsibilities to discharge, whether that be in the church or in our family lives, our workplaces or whatever and we are to be as faithful and obedient as we can in those places we serve him. <br />
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This is why Jesus said to his disciples in Luke 17:10: <i>“when you have done everything you were told to do, you should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.”</i> Sons and daughters are also subjects and servants, and we do well to remember that, lest a dark spirit of entitlement starts to overtake us.<br />
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Finally, less so historically for princesses than princes, we are called to be soldiers. In days of old, battles were not fought by a professional military who were paid, trained and deployed by the government, but by common people, like you and me and they were led into battle by the king and his sons.<br />
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The bible says that our battle is not one fought by physical force with guns and planes or with political manipulation and trade agreements, it is a spiritual battle waged with the spiritual weapons of the bible, prayer, faith and obedience. <br />
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Through this spiritual warfare, the children of the king, defend this spiritual kingdom from attack and dismemberment by forces that would love to see it destroyed for ever, and they also enlarge the borders of this kingdom transforming places of darkness, ignorance and evil into places of light, wisdom and purity. <br />
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When the disciples returned from what was the first ever mission trip, rejoicing at all that God had done through them – Jesus summed it up saying in Luke 10: <i>“I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”</i><br />
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With great power comes great responsibility. Through Christ, we have a privileged place in the palace as princes and princesses of the king, but that goes hand in hand with having a place of duty on his council as subjects or servants and as soldiers.<br />
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Here at Reading Family Church we have a mission statement that says we want to bring the kingdom of God to Reading and beyond. As princes and princesses of the king of Heaven, that mission statement only becomes a reality through the joy and the hard graft of our prayer.<br />
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To reign with Christ is to pray.<br />
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Now, all that said, here are some practical pointers.<br />
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Firstly, whatever else you take away from today remember to be yourself with God. He knows you and me better than we know ourselves, that is supposed to be a liberating truth to help us open up to God, not a scary one to shut us down. <br />
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God loves us dearly, and wants to hear what we have to say, so we don’t need pretend with him or think that we have to put on a special voice for him when we pray. We can just talk to him. <br />
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Of course, being yourself looks different at different times. Me talking and being myself at the age of 10 looked very different to me talking and being myself now at the age of 38. <br />
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At the tender age of 10, I was terrified about the possibility of nuclear war and the hole in the ozone layer, so my prayers included these things. <br />
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Being ourselves will change over time, but the principle of honesty, openness and simplicity in praying should never become absent.<br />
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Secondly, talk and listen to God, conversations are a two way process so listen to God as he speaks to you from the pages of the Bible. Listen to him for inspiration as you think about the words he has spoken, he may drop a thought into your head or an image. In all my 32 years as a Christian, I have never audibly heard the voice of God, I would imagine there are a few in this room who have down the years. Talk to him about what you think he is saying to you. <br />
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Thirdly, seek first the Kingdom. This is taken from something Jesus said in Matthew 6. What Jesus was saying was make the focus of your prayers mission of God. When we put God’s mission first we are honouring God.<br />
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The amazing thing about that is that as we make God’s concerns our main concern, he makes our concerns his concern. <br />
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As we look out for God’s priorities in prayer, he covers our back providing all we need, although not necessarily all we want.<br />
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What is God asking you to do, and encouraging you to trust him for?<br />
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Fourthly, faithfulness first, feelings second. If we are honest, sometimes, the reason we don’t pray is that we can’t be bothered or we don’t feel like it. <br />
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But feelings are never to be the basis for our deciding whether do anything, let alone whether we pray or not. <br />
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If I rang up my boss and said I don’t feel like working today. I’m not coming in. Then my boss would rightly say, well I don’t feel like paying you either, in fact whilst we’re at it, I’m, not sure I feel like employing you either. <br />
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Yet, somehow, we often fob our Heavenly Father off with excuses that we would never dare use to the people in our everyday lives. <br />
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Of course feelings do matter, but they come in second place to faithfulness. When we put faithfulness above feelings, we are not being hypocrites. We are doing the right thing and honouring the God who loves us and serving the world he loves.<br />
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As we exercise faithfulness in prayer, there are some things we pray about because we care about them, other things we pray about because God tells us to, but the curious thing about that is that with time, I have found as I have prayed, is that I start to care about the things I pray about. <br />
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The reason we pray is not just because it changes situations, it’s because it changes us.<br />
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Fifthly, quantity, quality and content do matter. There is a tension here. We are to be ourselves with God and come to him honestly and openly, but God wants to grow us in the practice of prayer, he uses prayer to grow us to maturity. So as we grow in our relationship to God our prayer and our praying will change over time. <br />
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Content does matter, if it didn’t, Jesus would never have taught his disciples to pray and given us what we now call the “Lord’s Prayer.” <br />
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Quality matters too, we can’t come to God any old sloppy how. We can only come to God because of and through his Son, Jesus, that is why you so often here Christians say the phrase <i>"in the name of Jesus" </i> when they pray. Moreover, in Psalm 66 David says that if he had cherished sin in his heart, then God would not have listened to his prayer.<br />
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That’s not because God is grumpy, but because he wants to sort out our hearts before we can move on. It isn’t that we have to get everything right before we talk to God, but just think sensibly and respectfully about who we are talking too and what he has asked of us.<br />
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And quantity matters, one example is in 2 Corinthians 2 where Paul says that he was delivered from death due to the prayers of many people. <br />
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Now of course we cannot go applying a formula to prayer that says if you pray "this much", then you get "this much" answer from God. Prayer is not a business transaction.<br />
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But it is by our persistence and our volume of prayer that we demonstrate to God and to ourselves that we really want something and it is in that process that God matures our hearts to the point that we are ready receive what we are asking for. <br />
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Sixth, model your prayers on Bible prayers. The Bible is full of prayers, use these to guide your own praying for yourself and for others. For example, one of my favourites is Eph. 3:16-19 why not turn to it now.<br />
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When I pray for you by name, this is the kind of thing that I am praying for you. If I know of an outward circumstance in your life, a job situation or something I may remember to pray for that, but my main desire is to pray the solid gold of prayers of the Bible like this over you so for example:<br />
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<i>I pray for ______that out of your glorious riches you would strengthen him/her with power through the Spirit in his/her inner being, so that Christ may dwell his/her your heart through faith. And that , being rooted and established in love, he/she may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that he/she may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. </i><br />
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Try it now like I did above, pray those verses over someone!!<br />
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Isn’t it good, don’t you feel like you’re doing something meaningful. God is not ignorant of our external circumstances, but when you pray, try to avoid spending too much time praying for external circumstances of people and pray for the growth and maturing of their hearts in God, then whatever the external circumstances, they will be secure in the love of God and able to overcome whatever trial they are facing.<br />
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The other benefit about praying Bible prayers over people is that they help you to get the right balance between worship, thanksgiving, confession, and asking God for stuff. Left to our own devices we often spend too much time waffling on in one area. Modelling our prayers on the bible help us to avoid these imbalances. As I pray that Ephesians 3 prayer over people, I often find myself worshipping God for how awesome he is. I can’t help it.<br />
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Seventh, praying with God by yourself commands a blessing from him. Jesus says in Matthew 6 that when we prioritise quality time with God in prayer on our own we are rewarded. Praying by ourselves to God is the proof to our hearts and to his that we aren’t just going through the motions with everyone else, it means that we want to be there with him and for him alone. <br />
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Now, as you leave the meeting this morning, the host team will drop into your hand a little handout I have created so that depending on how much time you have available you can make some time to pray. <br />
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If we have time to pee, we have time to pray. If we have time to watch TV, we have time to pray. If we have time for Facebook, we have time to pray. If we don’t have time to pray, it’s because we don’t think it’s important enough. <br />
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I say that not to heap up condemnation on us, but simply to bring a reality check because, we always make time for the things that are important to us.<br />
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No one has ever told me I am a legalist if I eat three meals a day or try to sleep 7 hours per night. No one. Yet, if I say I try to pray every day, some Christians look at me all funny! <br />
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Regular praying is not legalism, it is like eating and sleeping, it’s a healthy routine that brings life. We know how to feed our bodies, do we know how to feed our souls?<br />
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In 1 Thessalonians 3, Paul said he prayed night and day for the churches, This doesn’t mean that he was constantly praying, it means he would have begun and ended the day in prayer. <br />
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All down history, Christians across the world have made it a priority and given themselves to starting and finishing the day in prayer. <br />
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How much time we spend in prayer will depend on how much time we have, how tired we are etc, but committing our days to God before we walk out the door and committing them again to him before we flop into bed are so helpful to in keeping our hearts soft and responsive to God and the handout you will get on your way out will give you more on how to do this.<br />
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Over the course of the week, my rule of thumb is to try and do the morning and evening times of reading the Bible and praying, if I am pressed then it will just be a prayer before I run out of the door. <br />
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Saturday is a day for review of the week thanking God for what he has done and praying for what is yet undone. Sunday is a day of rest as I gather with the people of God to worship and celebrate together.<br />
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The other thing to say is that if we have lifegroup during the week, then that meeting becomes my evening time with God, I wouldn’t then expect to spend more time with him after that. <br />
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Pray with others. My morning times are by myself with God, unless Evie has awoken early, then I have to have one eye on her as I pray and read the Bible whilst she plays and eats things. But in the evening, Elli and I have started doing this together and our aim is that as Evie grows, she will participate increasingly in this with us. If you are single, why not pray with your housemates or find someone who doesn’t live too far from you who you can pray with – men with men, women with women. <br />
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Elli and I also meet up once a week to pray with Simon and Kat Starling who live down the road from us. We pray together for this community of Whitley. <br />
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Then of course there are our church wide prayer meetings and this week we have our week of prayer to kick of the new term, more about that in a minute.<br />
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Use technology – that could be as simple as a pen and journal where you write down what you think God is saying and what you pray to him as a result. You can then look back and see answered prayers. <br />
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I also use the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2UCcjs1kV8">Prayermate app</a> which sounds fancier than it is. It’s just the equivalent of an old card index system by which you can organise the things you pray for. I have about 20 lists each of which vary in length and I pray for one thing off each list each day. That might sound like a lot, but it isn’t. I probably spend a maximum of about 30 seconds on each item which means it takes about 10 minutes. I’m not waiting to be caught up into a third heaven vision before I start praying, I am just getting on with the task of trying to faithfully do what the master has asked me to do.<br />
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I then review and update those lists once or twice a year to keep them up to date which takes about an hour or so.<br />
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Think about the physical position of your praying. If I lie down on the bed or sit on a chair, I find mind wanders or I nod off. I tend to get passive. So instead, I try to stand, kneel or pace up and down. That way, I find I stay more focussed and when I am moving, it helps me to feel more engaged.<br />
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Finally, fasting. Fasting in the eyes of the world is a ridiculous thing. How on earth do you achieve anything by depriving yourself? But in the Bible, fasting is a way of emptying yourself, on one level quite literally, so you can be filled with what only God can give – the Spirit of life. When God sees that we want what he wants to the point of denying yourself, again, his heart is moved to hear you. Again, it’s not a formula, it’s not this much fasting for such and such an answer, fasting is an attitude of heart.<br />
<br />
If you have never fasted before, why not try skipping a meal one day in the week and giving yourself to prayer. You may feel like you are dying but you aren’t. If 12 year old Muslim boys and girls can go without food from sunrise to sunset during July as part of Ramadan, then surely I can skip a meal to pray. Muslims do Ramadan for the sake of pursuing an idol, who cannot save. How much more should we seek the face of God and his eternal Son, Jesus Christ, knowing that he will hear and answer us.<br />
<br />
Move to Communion...Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-87816880685549064982016-07-31T10:30:00.000+01:002016-07-31T16:32:13.369+01:00Sermon Notes on 1 Corinthians 9:1-12 Sacrificing Personal Rights for the Good of All.For those of you who aren’t regulars here, we are working our way through the Bible book called 1 Corinthians. <br />
<br />
1 Corinthians is not actually a book but a letter, written by a disciple of Jesus called Paul to a prosperous and successful, but also very dysfunctional church based in the sea port of Corinth. Corinth was to Athens, what New York and Las Vegas are to Washington DC. Athens, like Washington DC, was where all the boring politics and bureaucracy happened, Corinth, like New York and Las Vegas was where all the great action was, where the money was being made and where all the fun was being had.<br />
<br />
Paul’s letter is long, at 6830 words it is probably longer than any letter that you or I will ever write. Today we are looking at a small section just over half way through the middle of the letter, which, thanks to the sixteenth century French publisher and geek known as Robert Estienne, we now call chapter 9 verses 1-12.<br />
<br />
Before we look at this bit of the letter, we must be clear about the context and I will spend a decent amount of time setting the scene here so that when we read it later it should all be much clearer.<br />
The great thing about verses and subheadings in the Bible, is that they help us find our way around quicker, the problem is that because it has been divided up in that way for our ease of navigation, we stop seeing the Bible and the writings in it as organic wholes that together make one complete story. <br />
<br />
How many of you have ever sat down and just read 1 Corinthians from start to finish? You should. It will take you about an hour or by the wonder that is the internet you can listen to it read to you for free if you prefer. <br />
<br />
It’s a letter, and that’s what you do with letters, you read them in their entirety usually in one sitting. Have you ever had a letter, or an email from a friend which you read a paragraph at a time once a week? No one would think that you were normal, especially not your boss at work, if you read their emails or letters at the speed of one paragraph once a week, you could well find yourself being made redundant for a lack of productivity. Yet somehow, when it comes to the Bible, we think it’s normal to read them bit by bit in sections, rather than as a whole.<br />
<br />
Now, there are a number of themes that run through this letter, which will help us understand, why Paul says what he does in this bit here.<br />
<br />
If you were here when we were looking at the earlier parts of the letter, you will hopefully remember that Paul spent time stressing to the church that he is a genuine apostle and worthy to be considered a leader, better still, a father figure amongst them. And so, again, today, we will see Paul defend his legitimacy as an apostle (spiritual father) to the Corinthian church.<br />
<br />
But this time that defence has a different slant on it. Last time, Mike, by looking at the issue of food offered to idols, introduced us to the theme of the strong and the weak in the church at Corinth. To use a wrestling metaphor, in the blue corner, we had strong who felt it was perfectly ok to eat meat offered to idols because idols are nothing compared to God and in the red corner, we had the weak who didn’t want to eat that same meat because it represented giving honour to those idols and compromising their allegiance to God. These two groups were in the wrestling ring over the issue, but the strong were throwing their weight around and destroying the weak who they should have been viewing; not as people who should bow to the supremacy of their arguments, but as their dear brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. <br />
<br />
Paul rebukes the strong and tells them that irrespective of their rights on the matter, they should if needed, lay their right to eat meat down for the sake of the greater good of the whole Church family.<br />
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This section addressing the question about meat offered to idols actually spans three chapters, finishing at the end of chapter 10 so what we are about to read is not Paul going off on a tangent about another subject, rather, having told the strong that they should lay down their rights to eat meat for the good of all he continues that theme by giving an personal example of how this laying down of rights works in his life. <br />
<br />
Before we go there, we need to explore these themes of the strong and the weak and Paul’s authenticity a little more. <br />
<br />
You see, the strong weren’t just causing trouble in the realms of juicy steaks and bacon sandwiches, there was more going on. The strong were those who held all the power and influence in church life. They were rich, they were the ones with university degrees, the ones who had friends in influential places from whom they could call in favours, they were those with leadership responsibility and influence in shaping the life and culture of the church, and for all those reasons, they considered themselves to be spiritually mature and strong. <br />
<br />
The weak were poor, living just above the bread line, they had little or no formal education, they had no friends in high places other than Jesus himself, they were the rank and file of the church who generally did what was asked of them and if they raised a question about how things were done, it would appear that they were just brushed off as being uneducated, immature or naïve.<br />
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We have already seen that it was the strong who, with their “so called” superior knowledge, were destroying the consciences of others by encouraging them to eat meat. It was the strong who were encouraging factions, getting everyone to pick the apostle they liked best, be it Paul, Apollos, Cephas or someone else. It was the strong with all their money and social connections who were trying to use the Corinthian law courts in chapter 6 to get their own way in the church. <br />
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We will see later in the letter that it was the strong rich who were humiliating the weak and poor at communion meals and it was the strong who were boasting about their amazing spiritual gifts and how they could speak in tongues all the time.<br />
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This should be no surprise to us. There is nothing new about the strong manipulating everything for their own advantage, and the weak little people having to fight over what is left. For most of history, most people have lived in poverty, whilst a few wealthy people at the top lorded it over them. For all our talk about equality these days, the one equality that really isn’t getting addressed is the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. Those who challenge that gap are brushed off as naïve and idealistic. Whilst the crash of 2008 made many poorer, the super-rich continued to increase their share of the wealth and there is no sign that this trend will change any time soon.<br />
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The tragedy was that the Church in Corinth was more and more reflecting this kind of dark worldly thinking, where the preferences of the strong, irrespective of whether they were right or wrong were bulldozing over everyone else.<br />
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But not only are the strong throwing their weight around in Corinthian church life more and more, they are spreading toxic rumours about Paul, casting doubt on his authenticity and integrity as an apostle.<br />
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We saw earlier in the series that Paul has never asked them for any money to support him. When with them, he laboured during the day as a tent maker, then in his free time, planted and nurtured the church. But instead of saying “Wow, what a man filled with incredible love and self-sacrifice, he has freely given us everything he has to give.” they start saying things like. “Well he can’t be a very good apostle then, if he is not earning any money from it.” Or maybe they were offended by his refusal to receive any money from them. “That Paul thinks he’s better than all the other apostles, he’s so super-spiritual, he doesn’t need our money, who does he think he is?!”<br />
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We do that too don’t we? We assume that if something costs more, it must be better. Whilst that may be true some of the time, it is not universally true. The rest of the time it just proves what suckers we are – duped by clever advertisers.<br />
<br />
Do you think that Reading Family Church is a better church than other churches because it has a salaried staff team? <br />
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We are definitely better off from a management and administration point of view and in other ways too, but if we start to think that we are automatically more spiritually mature than the church down the road where all the leaders are unsalaried volunteers, then we are on dangerous ground.<br />
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Secondly, Paul isn’t married, but instead of saying “Wow what an incredible sacrifice he has made for the benefit of the church!” The strong are saying: “he’s a bit weird isn’t he? Can’t get himself a wife, what’s wrong with him? How on earth will he be able to speak with any authenticity to the women in our church, or to the dads with kids?”<br />
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Thirdly, Paul hasn’t been trained in the art of Greek public speaking, nor is he interested in merely entertaining his listeners with a good story, but instead of saying “Wow, Paul has understood the gospel of Jesus Christ really well, let’s glean as much as we can from him so we can grow and mature too!” They say, “He’s not a very engaging speaker, he goes on for hours and hours all in a boring monotone voice, he can’t have anything worth hearing.<br />
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Do you do the same? Do you think that if a preacher has held your interest and you have enjoyed listening to what has been said that they must be more faithful to God than someone who is boring? When you check your phone during the sermon or start daydreaming about what you’re doing later; is it because those who speak aren’t declaring to you the words of God or is it because they aren’t entertaining enough for you? Or maybe they aren’t saying it the way you think it should be said?<br />
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So as we read through this passage, and hear how Paul defends the way he lives out his apostleship, keep in mind that whilst he is addressing the whole church, he is particularly addressing the strong who are selfishly throwing their weight around and also casting doubt amongst everyone about Paul’s authenticity as an apostle.<br />
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He opens this bit with four rhetorical questions, to which the answers are all an emphatic YES! And as I read I will insert some comments to help make things a bit clearer.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Verses 1-2</b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Am I not free? [Of course I am, Jesus has made me free!] Am I not an apostle? [Of course I am! The Holy Spirit set me and Silas apart many years ago now during a time of prayer and fasting for this work.] Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? [Of course I did, he appeared to me on the road to Damascus as I was on my way to arrest Christians and destroy the church!] Are not you my workmanship in the Lord? [Of course you are!] If to others I am not an apostle, at least I am to you, for you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord.</i></blockquote>
Paul effectively tells those who doubt his authenticity as an apostle to wake up, open their eyes and look around them. The believers and the church at Corinth are the evidence that Paul is an apostle, that he did meet the risen Lord Jesus and that that same Jesus commissioned him to preach the good news of the Kingdom of God to the world. <br />
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Have a look around you now. All of us gathered in this venue are witnesses to the fact that one day many years ago, God laid it on the heart of Sean Green, the lead pastor here at RFC who is currently on sabbatical, to plant a church. If he had not been obedient to that call, we would not be here, not like this. Not that all of us became Christians through Sean, most of us didn’t and would have ended up at other churches in Reading if RFC wasn’t here, but RFC is here and that is due to the obedience of Sean and Liz, leaving Bracknell with a bunch of others and setting up here.<br />
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In the same way, the Corinthian church would not be there if it had not been for Paul’s obedience and whilst he did not personally convert everyone or baptise them, all of the Corinthian Christians, whether they have met Paul or not owe a debt of gratitude in God to Paul. Not that they should idolise Paul, or that we should idolise Sean. Far from it!! We are to worship Christ alone, but we should recognise and be grateful for the obedience of all the people God put in our lives, without whom, we would still be destined for judgment and damnation. <br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Verses 3-12a</b><br />
He has another fist full of rhetorical questions.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>This is my defence to those [esp the strong] who would [cross-]examine me. Do we not have the right to eat and drink? [Of course we do!] Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? [Of course we do!] Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living? [Of course it’s not! Of course we have the right to be funded by you like all of the other apostles are! For] Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? [No one does, that’s mad!] Who plants a vineyard without eating any of its fruit? [No one does, that’s bonkers!] Or who tends a flock without getting some of the milk? [No one does!]</i> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i></i><i>Do I say these things on human authority? [trying cleverly to manipulate you to get money out of you? Of course I don’t!] Does not the Law say the same? For it is written in the Law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.” Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Does he not certainly speak for our sake? It was written for our sake, because the plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of sharing in the crop. If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you? If others share this rightful claim on you, do not we even more? Nevertheless, we have not made use of this right, </i></blockquote>
Paul lays out that what is a normal principle in everyday life is also a perfectly legitimate principle to have in the church, which is that labour done should be rewarded appropriately. If you turned up at work one day and your boss or line manager said to you that your pay check had been cancelled because the management felt everyone should work for the moral satisfaction alone that hard work is good for the soul, you’d check your phone and see if it’s April the first or, if you found out they were actually serious, you’d realise that your company had gone bonkers and you’d hand in your resignation and go looking for another job because you have real bills to pay. <br />
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Or maybe do it yourself, why not try telling your bank or credit card company that the money you owe them isn’t real, it’s just typed in numbers on a spreadsheet, just a bit of ink on paper or just some pixels on a screen. They would laugh you all the way to the courthouse and afterwards, drop you off at the asylum.<br />
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Paul says it this way, that no soldier signs up to the army to risk their life in battle for the sake of the cause expecting to have to take their own packed lunch and box of Elastoplasts along with them to the front line. No farmer spends hours cultivating food only to watch it be taken away at the end. No cattle herder spends hours in the winter snow rescuing cows from snowdrifts only to see their delicious milk get poured out on to the ground. No one works day in, day out hours on end for the joy of work alone. <br />
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Not only is financial reward a principle in life, it is in the Bible too. Paul quotes the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 25:4 to be exact. What’s weird is that if you look up that chapter, you find a whole bunch of verses about people and then suddenly this one that seems to be about animal rights – not muzzling oxen. That’s a bit left field. <br />
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But it is symbolic of a wider point in that section, that those who have power over others should not abuse that position of power, and therefore degrade their fellow human beings. If someone amongst you takes the place of a servant either by choice or because they have too, do not abuse the power you have over them lest they become discouraged. If God didn’t allow the Israelites to discourage an ox by disallowing it from eating anything as they drove it around the threshing floor, how much more concerned is he that human beings treat each other with dignity and honour? As Jesus said, you are worth more than many sparrows.<br />
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Paul has made himself a servant to the Corinthian church, and both the world and the word of God say that he has a right like anyone else to receive financial and material support from that church. For no one, should have to work hard without the hope of some kind of reward, whether that reward be financial or the receiving of some kind of recognition from others or indeed a commendation from Christ himself. Meaningless work is corrosive to the soul and destructive to society.<br />
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Nevertheless, Paul has not taken up the right to financial support for the work that he does. Not because he has no right to it or is not worthy of it, but because there are other issues in play. Paul isn’t against receiving money, he happily receives gifts especially when he is in need and we see that in Philippians 4. But does not receive gifts as a normal practice in his life for three reasons:<br />
<ol>
<li>Because those gifts come with the loaded expectation that he will now give preferential treatment to the people who gave them to him.</li>
<li>Because those gifts could give the impression that he is in it for the money. And finally, and this is the big one…</li>
<li>Because he wants nothing to block people – especially the poor, from hearing the good news of Jesus.</li>
</ol>
<b><br /></b>
<b>Verse 12b</b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>but we endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ.</i></blockquote>
Paul wants nothing to stop people from hearing the gospel and coming to Jesus, and if there is anything that does stop them, it should only be the message itself, nothing else.<br />
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Why does Paul have this attitude of laying down a perfectly legitimate right to the benefits of financial support? On a purely practical level, he wants the everyone, especially the poor – those who just manage to scrape a living from day to day, to hear the gospel. He doesn’t want them to disqualify themselves from hearing the good news, because they think that at some point Paul will ask them for money like all the other travelling gurus of the day.<br />
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But more than that, because that is the attitude of the master himself – Jesus - and Paul wants to be like him. John 13 says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Jesus knew that the Father had given him authority over everything and that he had come from God and would return to God. So he got up from the table, took off his robe, wrapped a towel around his waist, and poured water into a basin. Then he began to wash the disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel he had around him…<br />I have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you.</i></blockquote>
Do you think you have rights? <br />
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Jesus has more, he is the eternal Son of God, he has always existed, he created the universe by his power in all its intricate detail and beauty. He is pure in all his ways – never has a dark thought, word or action been committed by him. He is always doing the right, good and beautiful thing. He alone has the right to rule the world and expect things to be done the way that he wants, and that way is best for all. He alone is worthy of worship and adoration along with his Father and the Spirit.<br />
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Yet he gave up all those rights of strength, honour and glory to come and serve weak, foolish and corrupted little human beings like us so that he might make us beautiful like he is beautiful.<br />
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Supremely, we see that at the cross, where:<br />
<ul>
<li>Instead of demanding his rights that people worship him and give him an easy life, he willingly, receives all the insults that they hurl at him. </li>
<li>Instead of receiving the gifts rightly due him as a king, he allows himself to be treated as a common criminal. </li>
<li>The one who has the right to all blessing, was, on the cross, cursed for our sake, taking the place where we should have been.</li>
</ul>
We see the same in John 13, it is hours before Jesus goes to the Cross, Jesus knows that the universe and everything in it belongs to him, he knows that he has all authority over it, but instead of expecting worship from his disciples, he gets down from the table and takes the lowliest place of all, washing their cheesy, dirty feet.<br />
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He who was the strongest amongst them, used his strength to serve those he loved. He who had every right amongst them, gave all those rights up so that he might beautify those who had no rights, giving them the right to become children of God.<br />
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Jesus told his followers that they should do the same. For it is by this that the world will know that we are his people. If the world sees a church where the strong are throwing their weight around and having everything their own way marginalizing the poor and weak, they will see that we are no different to any other human community.<br />
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But, if when they look at the church, they see the strong laying down their rights for the benefit of all, just like Jesus, the mighty Son of God laid down his rights for the benefit of all then they will know that we are truly disciples of the risen Lord Jesus Christ.<br />
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Jesus said, that the world would know that we are his disciples by the way that we love each other, not just in words but in actions, not just loving people like us, but in loving those who are not like us for Jesus sake, not by the assertion of our rights, but by the giving up of our rights. Not because Christians should be doormats for everyone to walk over, but so that everybody wins, not just the powerful few.<br />
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So, what right is God asking you to give up for the benefit of all?<br />
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Do you think you have the right to the last word in everything? Might you not, for the good of all keep your mouth shut.<br />
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Do you think that because you and your friends are the kinds of people who represent the majority of people at RFC that you should have the loudest say in what goes on in church life? Might you not, for the good of all honour the requests of those who are not like you?<br />
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Do you think that because you have been here at RFC longer than other people, that your opinion should be heard more strongly than others? Might you not, for the good of all help those who are newer around here to get embedded in like you have, rather than leaving them to figure it out by themselves?<br />
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Do you spend most of your time thinking about how make the best of the rights you have for you and your family rather than for your community? It’s important to look out for your family. But do you do that at the expense of the wider community, whether that is the church family, the place where you live or the place where you work? Why not change your definition of the greater good to include those who are beyond your family and friendship circle?<br />
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Do you think that because God loves you so much you have the right to become everything you think you should become? Do you expect everyone else in your life to serve you and God’s call on your life? Don’t be so blinkered, stop staring in the mirror and start looking out for and serving others.<br />
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Do you think that Jesus died for you so that you could have the right to a comfortable life? Loads of us think that. Me included. Jesus died, so that I don’t have to. Well yes, that is true. But he who died in your place, also said “Pick up your cross and follow me.” The inference of that phrase is follow me to death – to death for the sake of love.<br />
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You see when we kneel at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ, or indeed before the throne of the risen Lord Jesus, all talk of our rights goes out the window and we repent of such stupid thinking.<br />
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A church that is most interested in asserting its rights, will see minimal real breakthrough in the things of God, but a church that is full of people who have given up their personal rights to comfort and the good life for the glory of Jesus and benefit of all, both those inside and those outside the church are a people who will truly see God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven.Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-4281161512598726382016-07-03T13:20:00.001+01:002016-07-05T14:15:10.479+01:00Sermon Notes on 1 Corinthians 7:25-40 "Wisdom for Living Between Worlds"Today we are looking at 1 Corinthians 7:25-40, but I won’t get to that text until later, the reason being is that to really make sense of what we read, we need to understand the context both in the world at large and in the church, so I’ll spend about half my allotted time talking about that. The benefit being that is that if we understand the context well, Paul’s words will be less confusing and how we are to live as a result will make so much more sense. We won’t make the mistake of either badly applying or misapplying what he says to our own lives or worse to the lives of others.<br />
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So let’s get going on the context. Paul is not speaking into a prosperous peacetime context, but one of great upheaval. In this passage he says in verse 29 that “the time is short” and in verse 26 he talks of a “present crisis.” What did he mean by these things?<br />
<b><br /></b>
First, there was a famine that had been prophesied by Agabus over the whole (Roman Empire) World in Acts 11:28 and that came to pass in AD51 during the reign of Claudius. Whilst we don’t know when exactly this letter was written, many people with cool combinations of letters after their names seem to think it was between 53-57AD, that the “present crisis” Paul is referring to is this famine and that they are living in the traumatic aftershocks of that deadly period. Poor people are always hit harder by these kinds of events and in 1 Cor 1:26, Paul suggests that most in the church were poor and therefore most in the church would have gone through a severe time of testing. Whilst I don’t think this is the primary reason for the advice that Paul gives in this section, the famine obviously contributed to an understanding of the fragility of life; of not taking the gift of life for granted.<br />
<br />
Secondly, the world at this time was in a phase of massive turbulence and transition both spiritually and politically. <br />
<ul>
<li>On a political level, the emperor Nero was fermenting trouble for the sake of boosting his own self-esteem. Less than a decade after this letter was written, in AD64, he set fire to the city of Rome so that he could rebuild its public spaces as a monument to his own enormous ego and when he found out that his people didn’t really like him for burning down much of the city, he blamed the Christians, thus unleashing both the power of the vigilante lynch mob and the state on the church, arresting, torturing and killing many. Moreover, after Nero’s death (soon after the fire) Rome would go through a massive civil war as various factions sought to gain supremacy. </li>
<li>But at the time of writing, pressure building from Rome was not as great as the pressure being applied by the Jews, many of whom were now actively persecuting the church, either from the outside, by getting people arrested, or from the inside, by leading people away with false teaching; telling them they have to follow all the Old Testament law and that the men have to be circumcised. Even more significant than that, the world was in a 40 year cross over between the end of the Old Testament Age and the beginning of the New Testament Age. Jesus said that The Old world, centred around Jerusalem: the temple, the sacrifices and festivals was about to come to a dramatic end (Matt 23:37-24:51) and that his generation of people would see it. And that is exactly what they did see, when the Romans razed Jerusalem and its temple to the ground in AD70 and whilst the nation of Israel was resuscitated back in 1947, the Temple has never yet been. Emerging from the wake of that collapse was a new world centred on Christ and his Spirit filled church which was to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. There are parallels here with the 40yr period in the wilderness (transition) which Israel experienced between the “old world” of slavery in Egypt and the “new world” of conquering the promised land. All this makes Brexit look like a walk in the park.</li>
</ul>
Finally, the end of the old world had begun. When the Cross of Christ was lifted high and dropped into the ground, it was, as it were, like a stake through the heart of the old creation. Ever since that moment, that old world ruled by the devil and full of sin and suffering has been passing away and the new world of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, the new world of Christ and his bride the church, has been advancing growing and maturing. And it will one day culminate with the return of Christ. Those of us old enough to remember the Matrix trilogy of films will remember the final moment when Neo defeats Agent Smith, causing the whole dark system of the matrix crash. The Cross of Christ, caused the crash of the old world and out of the ashes of that defeat, God is not only resurrecting and transforming people, but He will also resurrect and transform the whole universe.<br /><br />
So whilst Corinth was a relatively prosperous, liberal and multicultural place, there was nevertheless a large amount of uncertainty and upheaval in the background of everyday life:<br />
<ul>
<li>On the level of physical existence getting enough food,</li>
<li>On the level of politics and society – with the earthly powers vying for supremacy and</li>
<li>On the level of the unseen, spiritual world, with the old order passing away – but not going without a fight with Satan trying to take down as many with him as he goes to destruction.</li>
</ul>
But there was an added complication. Into all this external upheaval, competing voices were vying for supremacy within the church. You will know from history lessons and from our own recent EU referendum that in times of tension and upheaval, extremist views find it easier to get heard in the public square. The church at Corinth was no different. But they weren’t just dividing over which leader they liked and thought they should follow, but also over the best way live out the Christian life. There were those who said “No worries! It’s all about grace.” Versus those who said “No Compromise! It’s all about righteousness.”<br />
<br />
Have a look at the slide behind me? Which column do you more naturally gravitate towards? “No worries!” or “No compromise?” One of the problems of living in an advertisement saturated culture is that we begin to live life by well-meant but misleading slogans and clichés. All of the words on the slide behind me (“No Worries,” freedom, desire, spontaneity, hectic-ness, informality, “No Compromise,” rules, discipline, routines, order, formality.) have elements of truth in them, but if left unquestioned, or if we don’t allow the Bible to define how we understand those words, they will become infused with our own confused definitions and then they become dangerous to us. <br />
<br />
Christian freedom is not the freedom to do what we want, it’s the freedom to do what is right. <br />
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Christian discipline is not the opportunity for us to show God how faithful we can be to him, but the opportunity for God to show how faithful he has been and will be to us! We read our Bibles not because we are trying to prove how faithful we are, but because when we read our Bibles we see how utterly faithful God is!<br />
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Some in Corinth were all about freedom and license – sleeping around at the temple, getting drunk during communion, eating food that had been offered to idols in pagan temples, (more on that in the coming weeks) and they thought nothing of it – No worries. God loves us – the Cross of Jesus covers all our sin! And yet over time, they start to make God look like a weak and overindulgent parent, spoiling their child. <br />
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But others in Corinth were all about legalism – they were no longer making love to their spouses, they were withdrawing from public spaces and they were spending all their time in church meetings speaking in tongues, because they seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that normal everyday things like grocery shopping, making love to your spouse and talking intelligibly to other people were far too worldly and not spiritual enough for “real Christians” (whatever they are). Yet they were in danger of portraying God as a harsh task master and looking down their noses at all those who didn’t share their view. <br />
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Paul will not be drawn into either of these two camps because, whilst having elements of truth in them, they are both ungodly at their root. They both are human-centred. The “no worries” people put their own desires for pleasure at the centre and the “no compromise” people put their own desire for glory and vindication at the centre. Neither of them have Christ at the centre. Paul seeks a different way, which explains why he might at times seem to contradict himself. He is neither totally for nor totally against either group, he wants to show them a yet more excellent way – the way of love – love for God and love for others. (More on that when we get to chapter 13 of the letter.)<br />
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Paul seeks wisdom which is founded on Christ and his goodness, full of the Word and Spirit of God. This kind of godliness does not seize what it thinks it should have now, but waits upon the Lord for his timing. This kind of godliness is full of praise, thanksgiving and hope, it’s wise, pure, peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy, impartial, sincere, it honours God and blesses others, it is willingly self-sacrificial and it shows to the world a vision of life as good, the next life as even better and of God as a loving father, with us in Christ, as his joyfully obedient children.<br />
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Paul has waited on God, meditated and reflected on the context of the world at large, the economic uncertainty, the political struggles going on in Rome on the one hand and Jerusalem on the other and how the new life of the gospel of Jesus is transforming everything. He has meditated on the basis of his own first-hand experience of planting the Church in Corinth and now on the basis of the report that Chloe’s house has brought to him and in the midst of all that, he has meditated on the truth of God’s timeless word. And now, whilst he has had no direct heavenly revelation, he gives them trustworthy Holy Spirit inspired answers regarding the unmarried in their church.<br />
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<b>V25-28: Singles? Stay as you were.</b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Now concerning the betrothed, I have no command from the Lord, but I give my judgment as one who by the Lord's mercy is trustworthy. I think that in view of the present distress it is good for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you do marry, you have not sinned, and if a betrothed woman marries, she has not sinned. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that. </i></blockquote>
Paul’s advice to singles in the church given the times that they are living in is the same as it was to the slaves and the married people from earlier in the chapter who have become Christians – stay as you were. Don't worry about the situation you find yourself in, do not rush to change it. Singles who are engaged to be married and on the road to being married do not now need to call off the engagement and if they get married, they have done no wrong – contrary to what the super-spiritual bunch in the church at Corinth might have been telling them. The only word of caution Paul has for them is that because of the times they are living in, they may have their hearts broken as they try to hold their family life together in the midst of a world that is falling apart. Paul, being the loving pastor, seeking their best interest wants to spare them this sorrow.<br />
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This week, as a nation we have been celebrating the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. In terms of loss of life it was the worst ever battle in British military history. The first day alone saw nearly 60000 men killed or wounded.<br />
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Now, imagine you were living in that time. You were a young man called up to serve your country in that battle, or a young woman called to serve the war effort at home. Imagine that you had just got engaged, as WWI kicked off over Europe. At best your marriage plans would postponed until the war was over, at worst your fiancée might not come back alive, or if he did come back alive, he might have come back with a body and mind so mangled by the trauma of war that your expectations for marriage and family life would have been completely overturned.<br />
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Times must have been hard, because Paul tells singles who are not in a relationship currently, not to pursue one. He doesn’t say that they should never seek a spouse, just that in the current circumstances, you may do better to hold off at least for now.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>V29-31: Have a “camping” mind-set.</b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.</i></blockquote>
I remember a conversation many years ago with a guy who was very worked up about whether he should marry or not. The reason being that he thought that marriage continued for ever, not just in this life but in the next one i.e. for eternity. He was scared he would make the wrong choice and have to live with the consequences for ever. When I told him that marriage is for this life only, the joy and relief on his face was incredible.<br />
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In this section, Paul isn’t actually telling his married listeners to live as if they weren’t married, if he was then he would be going totally against what he had just said earlier in the chapter – for more on that you can listen to Sean’s sermon from two weeks ago.<br />
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What he is saying; is don’t get overly attached to this world or the things in it. Don’t live your life as if the 70 or so years you hope to have down here were the only time you have. Have a camping mind-set in life. When you go camping, you know it’s for a short time, that your real life is elsewhere. If the camping is hard, it’s pouring down with rain, everything is sodden and you are cold, then knowing that the experience will not last long is a great comfort. If however, sun is shining and you are having a great time, you still live with the knowledge that one day you will have to pack up the tent and go home, back to real life.<br />
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That’s what Paul is getting at here. Live here in this life, fully in the knowledge that one day you will pack up your bags and go home.<br />
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Now if you’re a Christian living in North Korea or Iraq right now, that is probably a great comfort to you. However, if you are a Christian living in the prosperous and relatively comfortable West, then that might feel like an interruption to your fun you are having. <br />
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Irrespective of where you think you think you are, remember you are camping, this is season you are in, this life you are living right now is temporary. A day will come when we all have to pack our bags and go to our permanent home.<br />
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<b>V32-35: Count the cost, honour your word.</b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband. I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord.</i></blockquote>
In saying that we should have a camping mind-set, Paul is trying to help anxious Christians calm down and take the heat out of some of their decision making. That being said, he is in no way saying that we should be casual in our decision making. Living in this world as though we are passing through is meant to help us have peace in our hearts; it is not at all an excuse for being flippant in our life choices. The paths we choose to walk, assuming that we have a choice in the matter, deeply affect not only our own lives but the lives of those around us too. They also affect not only our own eternal destiny, but the eternal destinies of those around us too. We should be prayerful and careful in the decisions we make and then resolute and steadfast in following them through to the end.<br />
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Paul doesn’t lay down an exhaustive list of the benefits of singleness or marriage here so we should be wary of taking what he says here in isolation. Marriage and singleness both have their joys and their struggles, their pros and their cons. <br />
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Paul says that marriage comes with responsibility. Good responsibility. Those who are married have to fulfil obligations to one another and to their family. Single people also have obligations, it’s just that singles have fewer of them and they are not all legally binding. If, as a single man I got a lodger who I ended up not getting on with very well, then I could easily say to them that they needed to find alternative accommodation. However, if I get into serious relational difficulty with Elli or Evie, I am still bound both legally and in the sight of God to continue looking after them, I cannot cut my losses and leave.<br />
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When Paul says unmarried people can be more concerned with being holy, it doesn’t mean that single people are more concerned with purity or being “zen,” it just means that they can be more overtly devoted to the work of God. They can serve people in the name of Jesus, rather than spend hours and hours poring over the decision of which primary school to send their children.<br />
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Moreover, married people cannot embrace risk and danger for the sake of the gospel in the same way as single people can because they have others who are dependent on them. <br />
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This doesn’t mean that single people in the church should be viewed as cannon fodder for the mission field or that single people make better martyrs, nor does it mean that married people are let off the hook from living radically and sacrificially for Jesus - sometimes becoming martyrs. It’s just that at times the risks, needs and costs of missionary work are better suited to singles i.e. people with fewer ties.<br />
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In 2 Corinthians 11 Paul will say that he has led a life that has gotten him imprisonments, countless beatings, often to within an inch of his life. He has been stoned, shipwrecked not once, but three times left adrift on the open sea, he has been in danger from robbers, from his own people, from the Gentiles, he has regularly been hungry, thirsty, cold and exposed. Now imagine if Paul had been a family man, what his letters home would have been like and the nervous wrecks he would have reduced his wife and children into as they wondered if he would ever make it home alive.<br />
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<b>V36-38: Marriage is good and right, but singleness for Christ is “even better.”</b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes: let them marry—it is no sin. But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well. So then he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do even better.</i></blockquote>
The main question in this section is what does Paul mean when he says that he who marries does well and he who does not marry does better.<br />
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You don’t become an extra super Christian if you get married, and you don’t become an extra super Christian if you remain single. But equality of status, is not the same as equality of action and we should not confuse the two. God has no favourite children – the gift of Christ’s righteousness is the scandalous claim that all Christians, irrespective of track record stand as not only forgiven, but dearly beloved in the sight of God. But that does not mean that all our life choices are equally good.<br />
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Paul says here that marriage is good – very good, but that singleness is better. Why? Because it is a sacrifice. But marriage is a sacrifice, I hear you marrieds say. True, husbands are told to lay down their lives for their wives. But no one gets married expecting their life to get worse. No-one. When those who are married, met at the altar or the registry office, they did so in the hope of stepping into a better life together. It’s true marriage is not always easy and it can be a place of exquisite pain and sorrow. But it is still, at least at the outset, an enterprise of hope, help, joy and companionship.<br />
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Those who embrace singleness for the gospel whether in the short term a year at a time or for a life time, are making a sacrifice that others have not made, that is why Paul says they do even better. Because they embrace a loneliness that others do not, they embrace a sense of rootlessness in this life, that others, with their responsibilities to family do not. Their motives can be misunderstood; they can feel socially awkward – like black sheep, because they haven’t embraced the same behaviour as the rest of their peers. They are more vulnerable because, if they invest themselves in gospel and mission work, and it all goes up in smoke one day because of the moral failure of others or themselves, to whom do they go to grieve and find their sense of identity again if they cannot retreat back to their family?<br />
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A few months ago, Sean spoke on what happens when we die. On judgment day, I truly believe that those who have embraced singleness for the sake of the gospel, will receive a greater reward in tat area than those of us who married, because the cost they willingly paid in this life for the service of God was greater. And when that reward is given we will all say, Amen and give praise to God for the incredible things that he did through that single person.<br />
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Those of you who are single now should consider these things, and like Jesus said in Matthew 19:14 – if you can receive it, then receive it. But if you can’t you are not sinning, marriage for God is good, but singleness for God is better.<br />
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<b>V39-40: Freedom with limits</b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord. Yet in my judgment she is happier if she remains as she is. And I think that I too have the Spirit of God.</i></blockquote>
Finally Paul instructs that if a woman becomes a widow and decides to remarry, the man should belong to the Lord – i.e. be a Christian.<br />
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From this verse and others in the Bible, we have the teaching that if you are a Christian, you should marry another Christian.<br />
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This is not because Christians automatically have better marriages, there are some really toxic “Christian” marriages out there. Nor are we saying that when a Christian marries a non-Christian it is automatically worse. Those kinds of statement are demonstrably false. <br />
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Moreover, just because someone says they are a Christian, that doesn’t mean you should go out with them, nor does it mean that you will have no problems in your married life. Conversely, just because someone isn’t a Christian, that does not mean they won’t make for an excellent husband or wife. I know many spouses who aren’t Christians, who love their spouses in ways that demonstrate the relationship between Christ and the church.<br />
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What it means is this, that if you really love Jesus and want to live all out for him, then marrying someone who is at best, not invested in that same enterprise or worse, actively working against it, will be a source of sorrow or even outright conflict later in married life. <br />
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When it’s all dinner dates and romantic walks, and having lots of me time in between, it’s easy to think that later disagreements about how to spend your money, your time, how to raise your kids, where to live will all just somehow easily resolve themselves. They often don’t and the pain of that can be excruciating.<br />
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That said, like Scott said last week about divorce last week, it’s not the unforgivable sin. The issue is this, and I would address it to both the Christian and the non-Christian who are dating: why would you both knowingly embrace that potential conflict? Don’t do it. Just don’t. <br />
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I realise that I have touched on many issues this morning, and I may have left you with more questions than answers. I’m ok with that – my point this morning is to provoke you to godliness, not answer every possible interpretation or speak into every circumstance. But if there are now questions for you that need resolving then do come and speak to me or one of the other elders. The prayer ministry team will be at the back should you wish to talk / pray some of this stuff through with them.<br />
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But for now, let's eat and drink with Jesus in communion...Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-50664930675041238672016-05-08T09:30:00.000+01:002016-05-08T16:08:43.723+01:00Sermon Notes on 1 Corinthians 5: Drive Out the Unrepentant ChristianTo frame this sermon… Let me tell you a story from the beginning of the book of Joshua in the Old Testament. Are you sitting comfortably….? Then I’ll begin.<br />
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Israel after 40 years of wandering is on the edge of the “Promised Land”<br />
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Jericho is the first city they are to take and it is to be given to the Lord – everyone killed, all the buildings razed to the ground and all the plunder brought into the Lord’s treasury.<br />
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After the battle everyone is bringing the Jericho booty to tabernacle – the place where the God of Israel was worshiped.<br />
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But a man called Achan holds some or all of it back for himself – a ceremonial robe, 200 silver coins and a bar of gold. <br />
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His family is (forced to be?) complicit with him this – they should dob him in, but they don’t. They honour their family and friendship ties above obedience to God’s command.<br />
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As a result of this disobedience, God refuses to go with Israel into the next battle and they become sitting ducks for the surrounding nations to come in and annihilate them, 36 men die, men who are sons, brothers, husbands and fathers to many. 36 men who had been obedient in the battle of Jericho, fell to their deaths in the battle of Ai because of Achan and his family’s disobedience. <br />
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Achan’s sin weakened the whole nation of Israel so that together they could not stand against or push back the enemy.<br />
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Achan and his family are found out, and stoned to death for in their selfish disregard for others, they had put their personal family enrichment and pleasure before the safety and prosperity of the wider community of the nation and before obedience and love to God. <br />
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You might choose your actions, but you can never choose the consequences for those actions.<br />
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Had he known what the outcome would be, would Achan have done that? Probably not, but by then it was too late.<br />
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We find stories like this hard to stomach in 21st Century Britain because:<br />
<ol>
<li>There is a lot of seemingly gratuitous death,</li>
<li>We more often think of God being like an indulgent parent than we do a righteous king and</li>
<li>We are so individualist in our outlook, we just don’t see how our personal choices could ever be anyone else’s business and we often have a very poor appreciation of how our personal choices affect our lives as well as wider community life together.</li>
</ol>
But this story from Joshua is so important and helpful in shedding light on our text for today and helps us to understand why Paul gets so exercised about the situation in view because:<br />
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<ol>
<li>Joshua under God, was leading Israel in conquering the promised land, Paul under God was leading the church in the new phase of Jesus command to conquer the world by making disciples.</li>
<li>Israel’s battle was physical with swords and fighting. The church’s battle is spiritual with the words of God and prayer.</li>
</ol>
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But the secret to success in Jericho, in Corinth and now is the same – active, obedient faith and trust in all that God has spoken. And the consequences of ignoring that are the same – divisiveness, disarray, disappointment and if left unchecked, destruction.<br />
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Without obedience, our mission statement of bringing the kingdom of God to Reading and beyond will remain a statement and never become a reality. And the devil loves mission statements, what he hates is when those statements become reality in real people’s lives so he will do everything he can to fool you into thinking that that obedience is either unnecessary or impossible.<br />
<blockquote>
Verses 1-5: <i>It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.<br />
For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgement on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.</i></blockquote>
Back in Ch.1:11 we read that Chloe’s household has brought a report to Paul about the church in Corinth, and that report is the provocation for him writing this letter.<br />
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Having talked about how the old so-called wisdom of the world rooted in disobedience to God has made its way back into the church and caused divisions in it, now we see how that same so-called wisdom is causing trouble in other areas too. Namely, in the moral backbone and public integrity of the whole church.<br />
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A man in the church has entered into sexual relationship with his stepmother. We aren’t given any more details than that, we don’t know if the woman is divorced or widowed or how long this relationship has been going on for.<br />
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The Bible forbade this kind of behaviour – both Genesis 2:24 and Jesus in Matthew 19:5 said that a man should LEAVE his father’s house and be united to his wife and the two should become one flesh. No ifs, no buts, this man has done an outrageous thing. <br />
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That should have been enough, but then Paul reminds them that even the laws of Corinth, sexually liberal Corinth, where all kinds of perversions are not just tolerated but openly encouraged and glorified, also still ruled this to be an unlawful thing.<br />
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Now, no doubt there are a good number in the church that think he should have been reprimanded for this action, but somehow, so far, nothing has been done. The church as a whole has been at the very least tolerating this, if not actively shielding him from any consequences of it. Why?<br />
<ul>
<li>Is he a big financial backer of the church who no one wants to upset?</li>
<li>Is he part of a family which had a big influence in the church and had started to throw its weight around expecting special treatment and intimidating those who disagreed?</li>
<li>Are they, as a church, so soaked in a particular misunderstanding of grace that they think the normal everyday rules of the bible and of life don’t apply to them anymore?</li>
<li>Or do they know they’re in the wrong, but are furiously trying to save face and pretend that they are a church which has everything sorted because publically admitting this man’s lifestyle choice would bring them more shame and cries of hypocrisy than they could handle?</li>
</ul>
We don’t know, but my guess is that, like the slide behind me, that their priorities when it came to how to live the Christian life had gotten totally back to front. And they had become so arrogant in it that they hadn’t noticed just how corrupted they had become. This counterfeit wisdom that had infected the church had gotten all their priorities the wrong way round. They were fussing about small things and ignoring the big things. Trying to remove the specks from each other’s eyes rather than removing the great big trees.<br />
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You see chapter 7 of this letter begins with the phrase “<i>now for the matters you wrote about…</i>” they are clearly very interested in knowing Paul’s opinion on certain moral issues like:<br />
<ul>
<li>Whether they should eat meat offered to idols</li>
<li>Whether they should get married or stay single for the Gospel</li>
<li>Whether a Christian, once converted should remain married to an unbeliever</li>
<li>Whether slaves should seek their freedom</li>
<li>How to handle spiritual gifts in meetings and which gifts should be given more prominence.</li>
<li>And on it goes</li>
</ul>
But they don’t seem to care one bit about issues of integrity that God seems to think are of great importance, they never thought to ask him about this guy who is sleeping with his step mum. They were so ok with it, it never crossed their minds to ask him.<br />
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Those other moral and theological questions, which they do want ask have their place. But they are nothing compared to the big black and white teachings about sexual conduct and the reason Paul gets so exercised here is that when we sin sexually, we tell lies to ourselves and to the world with our whole being – body, mind and soul about the God in whose likeness we were all made. God created sex and marriage to be a beautiful parable to the world of what God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are like and what the mission of the church is. When we sin sexually we deny the nature of God and God's mission in the world.<br />
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Paul will say in chapter 11 that their communion meals do more harm than good, and one of the reasons for that is that some are grossly sinning against God and then walking into church and taking communion as if nothing has happened and nothing is wrong, he says: <i>Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine themselves, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself </i>[and on the rest of the body for we are all connected inseparably together]. <i>That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, </i>[if our priorities were right]<i> we would not be judged.</i><br />
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Just as Achan’s disobedience brought disaster on the nation of Israel, the willful disobedience of this man in sleeping with his stepmother is one of the factors contributing to the disarray and impotence and potential destruction of this church.<br />
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Paul pulls no punches as a spiritual father to the church – he tells them that they must eject the man from the family of the church. The reason is simple, this man is claiming to be a Christian, but is living like the devil, and so to bring him to his senses, Paul tells the church to hand this man over the one who appears to be his heart’s desire - to the devil. <br />
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This is a restorative action not a vindictive one. The aim is to restore the man, it is a gift of grace to him. The hope is that this man will come to his senses, repent and then be welcomed back into the church family. Paul is echoing Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18. If the man doesn’t repent, he proves that his profession of faith in Christ, however impressive or seemingly heartfelt, is meaningless and he should therefore be treated like an unbeliever - that is with great love and compassion, but not as a brother or sister in the faith and he must be denied access to the communion meal.<br />
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Paul isn’t advocating this practice for all sins and all unrepentance. If I squash a fly because I get impatient with it buzzing around the room, I may well have anger management issues and you may well want to challenge me on it, we may end up agreeing to disagree, about whether I was in the wrong, but no one would think we would need to go to the elders about it and kick me out of the church. So what is the rule of thumb here?<br />
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It would seem that what gets a person excommunicated from the church, that is kicked out of the church family, is the same kind of thing that would have received the death penalty in Old Testament Israel. Hence we have the list later on in the chapter, if you were convicted in the Old Testament of idolatry, sexual immorality, greed, drunkenness, lying and cheating – in some or all of those cases, you would be handed the ultimate sentence. You would lose your life.<br />
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The good news here is that the death penalty is no longer in view, that is for the state authorities to decide and in this country, at least, that is no longer in play, but spiritually speaking this is no less serious, to be put out of the church is to be put out of Christ. In Matthew 16 Jesus said, whatever you (the church) bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven, that simply means that Jesus will back up his church when his church is obedient to what he has told her to do, so if, in obedience to God’s word, the church has to kick someone out of the family for gross disobedience and unrepentence, then Jesus will give it his AMEN to them and back them up.<br />
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Of course there have been abuses of that authority all down church history, and Jesus will judge those who have misused his authority for their own ends, but the principle still stands and we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If, in obedience to God’s word, the church has to kick someone out of the family for gross disobedience and unrepentence, then Jesus has said he will back them up.<br />
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The difference between the Old Testament and the New is that in the Old Testament, there was no way back. Once you were dead, you were dead. But here, in the new life of the church, there is every possibility that a person who has had to be put out can come back in and be restored.<br />
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And indeed that is exactly what we see in a later letter Paul wrote cleverly titled 2 Corinthians. This man has finally been disciplined by the church, has repented and is being restored. Paul writes in chapter 2 of 2 Corinthians: <i>Now if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but in some measure—not to put it too severely—to all of you. For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough, so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. 8 So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him. For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything.</i><br />
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The good news is that whilst this man may have had to endure consequences to his actions in the everyday of life, he was nevertheless restored to full participation in the family of the church and welcomed back to the communion table.<br />
<blockquote>
Verses 6-8: <i>Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.</i></blockquote>
Paul draws in these middle few verses on an analogy from the Old Testament festival of Passover.<br />
<br />
In cultures where everyone made bread at home, the practice was that you would make the bread rise by creating what was known as a sourdough starter, but that took time and effort and wasn’t something that could be done every day, so they did something ingenious; once their bread had risen and before they put it in the oven, they would remove a piece of the dough, put it in a jar and keep it for the next day. The next day, when it came to making bread again, they wouldn’t need to ferment another starter, they would just make their dough and then add the lump from yesterday’s mixture into the new batch and the unseen yeast already present in that little lump inside that lump would multiply through the whole new batch. Once that batch had risen again they would take out another lump and put it aside for the next day and so on and so on. <br />
<br />
A brief look on the internet told me yesterday that the oldest leaven lump known to be in existence is to be found in Newcastle, Wyoming in the USA and it was first created in 1889 – the same year the construction of the Eiffel Tower was completed. It is a lump that has been passed down the generations and continues to rise the family breads and pancakes to this day.<br />
<br />
At Passover, the nation of Israel was supposed to get rid of all the leaven lumps in their houses and only eat unleavened bread. It was symbolic of a new beginning, a new start, a new creation.<br />
<br />
Christ our Passover Lamb was sacrificed, not so that we could carry on the old destructive ways of life, but that so we could enter into a new kind of life – not ruled by the hidden desires of sin and the flesh, but ruled by the hidden eternal, holy Spirit of God.<br />
<blockquote>
Verses 9-13: <i>I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people - not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”</i></blockquote>
A couple of practical pointers then from these verses as we come to a close.<br />
<br />
To reiterate from earlier, Paul is not at all advocating that the church cuts itself off from sinners or unbelievers, for those are exactly the kinds of people Jesus came to save and be amongst – the kinds of people you and I were, at least in our hearts, before we received the truth about Christ. In chapter 14, Paul seems to take it as given that there can be unbelievers in church meetings. If the church cuts itself off from the world, it will end up having no mission purpose in the world and therefore self-destruct.<br />
<br />
The issue is that we should not call someone a brother or sister in the faith or be treating them like one if there is a gross unrepentant disobedience going on in their life. You can associate with them in all manner of other ways, indeed you have to if they are a member of your family, or a work colleague or someone with whom you do a hobby. The point isn’t that you shun them completely, that would be totally unworkable in some cases. You can love them in a thousand different and creative ways, just not as a brother or sister in Christ – until they repent. And until that time, you will have to live with some degree of awkwardness, sadness and tension.<br />
<br />
Finally, when Paul says that he has nothing to do with judging those outside the church, he is not saying that the church should not be interested or involved with wider social or national issues, he is saying two things:<br />
<ul>
<li>Firstly, that the church must get its own house in order before it starts getting involved in anything else. In a letter to Timothy, Paul tells Timothy that he should not appoint any man as an elder of a church if he cannot keep his own household in good order. For if he cannot manage his own household, how can he oversee the church family with any credibility. Similarly, if the church with all the power of God at its disposal cannot govern its own family life with any integrity or diligence, she will not in any way be God’s means of saving the world, but rather she will become a total laughing stock.</li>
<li>Secondly, that the church’s mission in the world is not to get people to behave like Christians, without receiving Christ. The church’s mission is to introduce people to Jesus and all that he is and says – once a person has received him into their life, then we can have the conversation about what it means to live like God requires, but if you just try and get people to behave Christianly without receiving Christ, all you do is turn them into hypocrites. And the church has enough of them already without making any more.</li>
</ul>
<i>Purge the evil doer from among you.</i> Drive out the unrepentant Christian, so that they may come to their senses and be restored and the church strengthened for her mission to the world.<br />
<br />
The Bible says that God’s love is to lead us to repentance not complacency and pride. Sin has consequences that go beyond you and me into the body of the church. I don’t say that so that anyone can start a witch hunt on others, I say it so that we can all come before God in humility and ask him if there is any offensive way in us that he might lead us in the path that leads not just us to life but others too. Where sin has abounded, grace abounds all the more. In Christ, we are all connected together in deep and eternal ways, many of which we don’t understand, but we can trust God that as we walk in obedience to him, quickly repenting when we fall short to him and others, he will ensure that we have everything we need and will be successful in the calling he has made upon our lives.Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-70631326937100265932016-04-10T10:15:00.000+01:002016-04-30T15:34:18.352+01:00Notes on Death and JudgmentTo complement <a href="http://readingfamilychurch.org.uk/media/index.php?sermon=177" target="_blank">Sean's sermon</a>, (which will go up on Tuesday afternoon) here are the notes I wrote, for our elders' meeting, that represent the historic Reformed Protestant Christian confession, on the weighty subject of death and judgment. All of this turns on the assumption that through Jesus, God offers us not just a cleaned up heart, but a new one; not just a cleaned up life, but a new one.<br />
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<br />
Death is the defining chrysalis moment where our true spiritual identity as belonging to Jesus or belonging to the Devil is finally revealed.<br />
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The fact that physical death has not been removed by the Cross, should spur a Christian on to honest reflection, maturity and holiness not denial, dissipation and depravity.<br />
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Christians follow Christ through death to resurrection life and the new World. If the Master underwent it, so must we, for we are no greater than he.<br />
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Our attitude to death reveals to our hearts - where we really think our source of life is located. If we think it is in ourselves, our love and obedience to God will stall, if we know it is from God we will freely give ourselves up to him in love, even to death as he has already done for us in his Son at the Cross.<br />
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Below is the handout we distributed: (click on it to enlarge)<br />
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<br />
The apostle Paul in Acts seemed happy declaring the “brute fact” of Final Judgment to all people, believers and unbelievers alike, whether they were familiar with the Bible or not. What imperative does that press on us for our preaching, our personal lifestyle and our church culture?<br />
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The Final Judgement is the great unveiling. Things that were hidden from view will finally be fully understood. This judgment is not our opportunity to plead our case with God – that outcome is already known by whether we received Christ or not – the point of the Final judgement is the public vindication of God’s reputation in condemning sin (rebellion against him) forever in individuals who refused his offer or in Christ at the cross for those who have received him. <br />
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Thus, final judgment is for declaring the severity of the sentence for the unbeliever and the greatness of the reward for the believer.<br />
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If God does reveal the sins of believers at the Judgment (and it would appear that he does) it will only be in the context of vindicating his grace, and showing that no one receives eternal life on the basis of their own efforts, but only as a gift of Christ’s righteousness. It is therefore not a reason to fear, but it <br />
should provoke a Christian to godliness and to the renunciation of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is probably the biggest sin in the church, causing the enemies of God to mock him – 2 Sam 12:14 (See NASB translation)<br />
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<strong>The Nature of Judgment</strong><br />
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Christ will be the judge – unbelievers will never see the Father only the righteous will see him. (Matt 5:8)<br />
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Unbelievers will be judged and the judgement will be brutally holistic and nothing will be left in the dark, no questions left unanswered, no loose ends left unravelled – and there will be degrees of punishment. The punishments will be greatest for those heretics of the faith who whilst claiming to bring people to God led them instead to greater destruction by their false teaching - using Christianity as a means of getting riches and glory in this life only. <br />
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We assume that Hell is a place where people will lament and wish they had repented, but it is not. Only those who hate God are sent to Hell. The torments of fire and worm come as each time those who hate God declare how much they loathe him. Were it true that people were crying out to God from Hell to be saved, God would immediately save them, his compassion is so great. But the chilling truth is that like a madman floating on driftwood at sea, refusing to get in the lifeboat when it arrives, so too, gripped by the madness of sin, the wicked would rather be the kings and queens on the throne of their own sinful hearts and go to Hell, arrogant and defiant before God, than humbly bow the knee and lovingly submit to him. However moral and good they may have looked in this life, at the judgment, their nature as children of their “father” the devil - John 8:44 is fully revealed.<br />
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Believers will be judged equally holistically and rewards given, (remember their rebellion against God has been paid for by Christ) based on how they have lived. Whilst not everyone’s reward will be the same, for not all have worked equally hard and God is not a communist state, nevertheless everyone’s joy will be complete for God has no favourite children and Christians will have no favourites amongst their brothers and sisters. There will be no pride in those who have received more, only humble loving service to those under them in the New World. Equally, there will be no envy in those who have received less, but loving, humble submission to those over them in the New World. Love will perfect all things. Rewards will be greatest not for those who converted the most souls (that is often the immediate conclusion after looking at a subject like this), but for those who have loved God and then their neighbour most wholeheartedly, laying down their lives for both to the uttermost.<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>The Moral Application of Final Judgment</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
On a personal level, the final judgment satisfies our need for justice and lets us freely forgive, confident that God will repay rightly. (But remember, its God's standard of justice, not our flawed ones.) It also admonishes us to live righteously now in the present moment. and spurs us to compassion and evangelism.<br />
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On one level, this can all seem rather cold and clinical, but the Apostle Paul writes of the joy and sorrow he feels here, almost all at the same time. It is a tension to be held, in trust of God, not a problem to be solved. The joy:<br />
<blockquote>
<em>What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,</em><br />
<em></em><br />
<em>“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;</em><br />
<em>we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”</em><br />
<em></em><br />
<em>No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.</em></blockquote>
And in the very next verse, the sorrow...<br />
<blockquote>
<em>I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit— that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.</em></blockquote>
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At this point, one might legitimately ask:<br />
<ul>
<li><em>What about those in unreached parts of the world who have never heard the Gospel?</em></li>
<li><em>What about those who never really heard the gospel clearly because all the Christians in their lives were too flaky to say anything? </em></li>
<li><em>What about all those tiny aborted lives or the lives those who died so young? </em></li>
<li><em>What about the mentally disabled / enfeebled? </em></li>
<li><em>What about those who have turned away from God because of a dreadful hypocritical witness from those who claimed to be Christians acting in the name of God? </em></li>
<li><em>Will God really condemn these people?</em> </li>
</ul>
These are good questions. And along with the <em>Why does God allow suffering?</em> question, they are probably the biggest arguments that lead many to reject the Faith or give it up if they began in it. They cannot reconcile a loving God with these kinds of black and white, in or out pronouncements on eternal destiny.<br />
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Many have given defences of God by coming up with reasons why God would grant all of those people eternal life. Others have come down the other way and said, there is no salvation without an explicit profession of faith. And there is every shade in between too.<br />
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Personally I would not want to declare either way. I know you think that is a cop out, but on balance, this is a tension to hold, not a problem to solve. There are some things that are for God alone to know. On the one hand, our confidence is that God is loving and merciful, gracious and compassionate, but on the other, he has not given us any confidence in the Bible that there is any way to be saved other than through faith in Jesus Christ, so neither should we.<br />
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We might in our arrogance demand, or in our grief plead, that God give an account of his actions, but the truth is that if we as a race had never rebelled against God in the first place, we wouldn't be in this predicament, so the blame is finally with us, not God. God has offered in his love and mercy a way out through his Son, but instead of taking it we try and frame God as the criminal in this, to get ourselves off the hook and vindicate ourselves.<br />
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Moreover, in our Western cultural narrative of "rights and equality," we tend to assume that we are entitled to God's kindness, that it's God's job to save us because that's what a loving God should do give us everything we want - like some kind of overindulging parent. Interestingly, in other cultures the question is framed differently, namely, how can God allow himself to draw near to such dark and lowly creatures as we are and still remain pure and just? If we have an entitlement to anything, it is justice, not generosity, wrath not grace.<br />
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So when it comes up in conversation, I would be inclined to say: <em>“Don’t worry about other people, God will take care of them rightly, the question is what are you going to do with Jesus’ offer of life to you today? </em>Or if they are Christian – <em>What does this knowledge of Judgment mean for you? What has God asked of you when it comes to being his witness to the world around you?</em> <br />
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One interesting example of this is <a href="https://vimeo.com/9333908" target="_blank">how the Mouk people received the Gospel</a>. (See from 27:23, but the whole video is worth a watch. It's the second of a two part film series. Chapter 1 is <a href="https://vimeo.com/9329683" target="_blank">here</a>.) The Mouk people could have gotten really angry with God that their relatives and ancestors had entered a Christless eternity, and they do mourn for them, but they don’t allow that sorrow to overshadow the great joy they have at receiving Christ as their Lord and Saviour, or stop it from sharing what they have received with others.<br />
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For more on what we believe at RFC, <a href="http://readingfamilychurch.org.uk/about/what-we-believe.php" target="_blank">click here</a>.Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732450981122480802.post-8634863439826875172016-04-03T16:00:00.000+01:002016-04-03T16:00:04.902+01:00Sermon Notes: 1 Corinthians 3:16-23Paul continues in this first section of his letter addressing the issue of true wisdom and how it leads to true unity and false wisdom and how it leads to division. <br />
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<strong>Vv16-17</strong> <br />
<em>Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy and you are that temple.</em><br />
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Each individual Christian has the fullness of the Holy Spirit living in them (Paul: 1 Cor 6:19 and Jesus: John 14:23), but the “you” of this passage is plural. Don’t you know that you all – the gathered church is also the expression of the fullness of God’s Spirit. Each individual Christian has the fullness of the Holy Spirit dwelling in them, yet when 200 Christians gather together to worship God, there aren’t 200 Holy Spirits in the room, there is one Holy Spirit. The same Spirit who lives in you is the Spirit who lives in the gathered Church.<br />
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But in Corinth, factionalism was destroying unity and therefore destroying the church. In this case, it wasn’t the fault of leaders, it was the fault of the led. That’s why he is addressing the church with this letter rather than just the elders in private. Paul, Peter and Apollos hadn’t set themselves up as superstars, the people were dividing themselves over them and maybe some others who aren’t mentioned. And the bad news was that it wouldn’t get any better. If you fast forward to the end of 2 Corinthians, it got worse. So called “super-apostles” are seeking to gain an (financial?) advantage for themselves by driving even deeper wedges of division into the church. <br />
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Before I continue, let me reiterate that there is nothing wrong with having great love for leaders in the church. In chapter four Paul talks of himself as a father to the Corinthian church, meaning that like any good father, he has loved her, watched over her and nourished her with the word of truth, but it also means that as a good father according to that culture, he is preparing her for the day when he will give her away to another. She is not his property and never has been, he is preparing her to be fully united to Christ her Saviour and Lord on the day of Judgment as a pure and spotless bride. <br />
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The problem comes when we make the idolatrous switch, when instead of thanking God for the service of leaders in the church, we come to view them as mini-messiahs, which is what the Corinthians had done. They had somehow come to believe that they would be more blessed, more victorious, more favoured by God, more favoured by society, look more cool in front of their non-Christian friends, be more proficient in spiritual gifts, see more supernatural activity or have a greater understanding of scripture if they aligned themselves with a particular person and they therefore put that person, or that ministry up on a pedestal and made them something of an idol in their hearts.<br />
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When we pursue personalities, we are pursuing idolatry for we are more interested in hearing what a particular personality has to say than we are in what the Holy Spirit has to say. And when we start pursuing personalities, or church brands or online ministries, more than Christ himself, we start to tear down God’s house, the church, which means we destroy God’s testimony in the world and ourselves in the process. It is spiritual suicide and madness. Like the man ripping his head open in the picture.<br />
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Why is this utter folly and foolishness? Because God has already given us everything we need. Everything! EVERYTHING! At the Cross, he has given us himself at Pentecost, he poured out his Spirit upon us. What more do we need? Why do so often sit in the dumps thinking we can never be a great Christian because we don’t have access to this or that person, this or that ministry? We have everything we need for life and godliness, we are told that in 2 Peter 1, we just need to believe God and activate it. Fan it into flame. The Bible says that if anyone lacks wisdom, they should ask God who richly provides it. Paul told the Corinthians back in chapter one that they have already been enriched in EVERY WAY, so there was no need to align themselves with someone who they think would get them so to speak a “better deal.” Money pile analogy.<br />
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Now that already have everything doesn’t mean we become individual lone ranger Christians, for God has called us to be a people together – the church. For what we can achieve together in God is greater than the sum of our individual parts. It’s not because we lack anything.<br />
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God’s temple, the church is holy – set apart for him – it’s not ours to do with as we please – it’s not a place to experiment with our cool ideas. The Church is Christ’s property – when people messed with him (crucifixion) he turned the other cheek, but if we mess with and divide his church with our factions and divisions and do not repent, this text says he will destroy us. Let the weight of that sit not because we want to engender fear, but rather spur us on to godliness.<br />
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Now indulge me a moment. The honest truth is that we don’t see any factionalism in RFC – I can see preferences, which are understandable and human, we all have those, and as long as those preferences are kept in their place, and we are 80% happy with what goes on then that is ok, but think for a moment –the fact that you are here is testimony to the fact that you like church to be a certain way. We already agree on so much here, otherwise we would never have walked through the door. <br />
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But imagine there is only one church in Reading, like there was in Corinth. Imagine all the Catholics, Baptists, Charismatics, Anglicans, Orthodox, Brethren etc all had to meet together in one building and in one meeting what would that look like, because that is probably closer to seed of disunity we have here in Corinth? These days, in the consumer atmosphere of the UK when we become a member of any church we are automatically making a whole host of value assumptions choosing one church over another. Are you at RFC because you think God will give you more by being here as opposed to another church? Maybe not, but be wary of that kind of thinking and that you don’t unconsciously make the idolatrous switch because we already have everything we need in God in Christ.<br />
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Having said that, I realise the issues around churches and denominations are complex and I don’t have the catch all solution to church unity, but Jesus prayed for the unity of his church in John 17 that we would be one across all boundaries, so therefore should we, not just guarding the unity we have here at RFC, but praying for the unity of the whole church. For Christ does not have many churches, but one church, he does not have many bodies, but one body, he does not have many brides, he as one bride and he is returning to take that one body, one church, one bride to be with him forever.<br />
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<strong>Vv18-20</strong><br />
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<em>Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.”</em> <br />
<br />
The Corinthians were not the first bunch of people to pursue this kind of idolatry and personality cult believing that they needed more than they already had. Where is the first personality cult in the Bible? Put another way, which is the first creature in the Bible to be called crafty? It’s the serpent in the garden of Eden and for me the most helpful way of understanding this middle section v18-20 and the human wisdom vs. God’s wisdom argument more generally is through the lens of Genesis 3:1-6.<br />
<br />
<em>Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. </em><br />
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Adam and Eve were the babies of the human race to whom God had given everything – everything they could possibly want. And through childlike love and obedience to the God who loved them they would learn to rule the world in righteousness through a right knowledge of good and evil, but that meant being patient and humble, it meant maturing and growing up in God and so when the serpent entered the garden and told them that God didn’t really want them to get wise, that God didn’t really love them and wanted to keep them as servile creatures, he tempted them to get wise and rule the world through disobedience to God’s command, seizing the fruit of the tree and defining good and evil for themselves. And as they bit into the fruit, they spurned God’s love, and were deceived into following the serpent’s lead. <br />
<br />
And so much of human history has flowed from that simple moment of mistrust and disobedience. Whatever we say about the great civilisations of history, the great religions of history, that on the surface have had many things in common – similar moral codes when it comes to how to treat your neighbour etc. The fundamental truth underneath the surface is that the history of fallen humanity has been hallmarked but by disobedience to the word of Christ and a desire to gain the blessings of God (life, wisdom, health, wealth and prosperity) without any loving relationship to God or obedience of him. We want God’s blessings, but we don’t want him. <br />
<br />
Interestingly, Sisyphus, the king who founded Corinth was the embodiment of this ungodly craftiness and cunning (so called wisdom) and the myths surrounding his escapades with the gods no doubt permeated the culture and the “spirit” of the city as a whole. I won’t say any more on that, but he is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus" target="_blank">worth a glance on Wikipedia</a>, if you get a moment.<br />
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But that so called wisdom, the “wisdom of this age” is passing away. God has given his eternal NO! to that counterfeit wisdom, birthed in disobedience. For the only kingdom or civilisation that can stand forever is one that is founded on love and obedience to God’s command – love and obedience to Christ. That is the Kingdom of God and when we talk in our vision statement about bringing the kingdom of God to Reading and beyond, the foundation of that Kingdom is Christ and obedience to Christ. God the Father has given the reign of all things over to his Son Jesus Christ because Jesus was obedient – he was truly wise and he gained authority over everything not by trickery, impatience, violence or mistrust, but through obedience, love and sacrifice even to death.<br />
<br />
Whatever the cool influencers Corinth were saying, chapter 4 suggests it was probably a variation on this theme of Adam and Eve – “Have it NOW don’t wait”. Have great bible knowledge, have a supernatural ministry, have amazing worship bands, have all kinds of social action projects, have a vision fund for a new building, or when it comes to general life - get a spouse, get a pay rise, get babies, get your health, get a good qualification, get good friends, get in shape, but obedience? Nah, don’t sweat about that. Who needs the long plod of obedience when there are miracles to be had worship songs to sung and great teaching to be listened to, loving partners to be found, bills to pay etc, etc etc?<br />
<br />
Don’t be deceived like Adam and Eve who fell for the serpent’s craftiness, don’t think that you can gain fullness of life or eternal life by craftiness, or disobedience, rather receive the love of God and become foolish in the eyes of a watching world by learning the long plod of obedience that comes by faith in Christ who loves you and called you to be his own. Synchronise you heart with the deep truth that true reigning in life comes through obedience to Christ. God’s people are those who by patience and faith in Christ inherit promises.<br />
<br />
One of the big things I have experienced becoming a parent is that you are forced to change your rhythm of life. There are some things we can’t do anymore. There are no shortcuts, nappy change by nappy change, cry by cry, gurgle by gurgle, feed by feed we are preparing her for life in the world. There are no shortcuts to that process. I remember feeling deeply frustrated at the age of 12 that I had to wait 5 years before I could get behind the wheel of a car, but there was no way of legitimately shortcutting that process. I just had to wait. And it did me no harm whatsoever. And there are no shortcuts to our spiritual growth either. Jesus said, whoever wants to enter the kingdom must become like a little child, trusting and obeying the Heavenly Father. <br />
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Don’t despise the change in rhythm that comes with learning or relearning the basics of obedient faith for they are life to you and they will make you truly wise.<br />
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Paul’s quotes, from Job 5:13 and Psalm 94:11 respectively ram home the point that this issue of whether we receive God’s wisdom or the world’s is not a morally neutral one. It is the difference between life and death, blessing and curse, salvation and judgment. Pride and arrogance before Christ are the hallmarks of this wicked wisdom and humble obedience to Christ is the hallmark of the righteous. Adam, Eve and the Serpent, came under God’s judgment pretty swiftly, but judgment may not always be instantaneous, in every case, but it will finally come on all those who refuse to hear God’s call and turn aside to pursue the vanity of their own imagination. – Wanting the blessings of God’s world without God himself.<br />
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Christ was the obedient one and he gives us the gift of his righteousness, not so that you and I can continue in disobedience but now that by the Spirit we have been given the kind of heart he has we can follow him in the same kind of obedience he had. <br />
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<strong>Vv21-23</strong><br />
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<em>So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.</em><br />
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What can help us to stop grabbing? What can help us to stop boasting in our worldly connections?<br />
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Who owns everything? You do, Jesus said that the meek shall inherit the earth, not by earning it but by receiving it as a gift. What Adam sought to take by force - God has given to us as a gift in Christ. All things are yours, you have all authority just as Christ had for the old world is passing away and the new world is dawning – a new world, in which, thanks to great kindness and love of God, you have a place. Paul reels off a short list of what it means that God has given everything to the church.<br />
<ul>
<li>Church leaders yours, they are God’s servants whom God has given to you not for you to bully into your way of thinking, but for your joy, maturity and service. </li>
<li>The world is yours – every square metre of it belongs to you for God has given it to you as an inheritance for you to reign over not by violence and warfare, but by prayer – waging spiritual warfare and better still you will reign over it in peace when it is renewed at the end of the age after the judgment of all the living and the dead.</li>
<li>Life and death are yours for death is no longer source of fear, but a motivator for life, spurring you to greater godliness, preparing for the day when you will be rewarded by Jesus Christ for your faithful service to him. Life is to be lived in daily talking to the Lord –for this is the privilege of the children of God, we can talk to him at any time – asking him for help in the circumstances we find ourselves in and asking him what he would have us do for him as obedient sons and daughters. </li>
<li>The present and the future are all yours for God is right now, in the present, working all things, ALL THINGS for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Even horrible circumstances can be redeemed for whilst God is not the author of evil, as we look to him and stand on his word, trusting him, God can make all things, not just the good things work for our good in the end.</li>
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It would be easy to get proud and passive here and think that we are amazing because God has lavished so much upon us, but Paul then reminds us, in view of all that God has lavished upon us, not to forget that we are not independent actors, but that we belong to Christ and our first allegiance and obedience is to him and we only inherit everything if we remain in him. And Christ, though in every way equal with the God, belongs to the Father. <br />
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In summary:<br />
<ul>
<li>Are you putting certain personalities or people in your life in a place where they are more important to you than Jesus? If yes, repent of your idolatry and return these people to their proper place in your thinking. Christ is all you need, stop hamstringing the church by an over-allegiance / reliance on human teachers.</li>
<li>Are you seeking the good things of life through impatient shortcuts and disobedience or patient trust and obedience?</li>
<li>If Heaven was a place where you could have all the health, friends, food, gadgets and entertainments you could wish for, but Christ was not there, would you be happy with that? Would that be enough for you? Because that isn’t true Heaven.</li>
<li>You stand to inherit the whole world, in good time. How should that affect the way you live now, how you share that life with others and God’s creation? </li>
<li>If you are not a Christian, God calls you in love to the obedience of faith that means trusting in all that Jesus is and all that he has done. It will cost you everything you have, but you will truly gain everything that is valuable in the exchange.</li>
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Richard Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01992452050525845190noreply@blogger.com0