Passionate about Strictly?

Recently, it seems to have been impossible to turn on the TV or the radio or to look at a newspaper without some reference to Strictly Come Dancing and specifically about the voting fiasco for the semi finals and the implications for the final.

I am not a fan of Strictly Come Dancing (that is putting it mildly) and so I have been rather bemused at all the fuss. It has amazed me that so many people are ready and willing to talk so passionately about the show’s voting rules. I am reading a book on the Trinity at the moment and I began to wonder whether the average person in the pew would be as ready to talk passionately about the doctrine of the Trinity as the average man in the street is to talk about the voting rules on “Strictly.”

Then, dangerously, I began to wonder whether the average person in the pew would be more ready to talk about the voting rules for “Strictly” than they would about the doctrine of the Trinity.

Of course, I am being unfair to Christian “Strictly” fans – I could wonder the same about Christians who are fans of birdwatching, of American football, of steam engines etc, etc. We all have the potential to know and understand more about our hobbies and pastimes than we do about the doctrines of our faith.

Last night I videoed the highlights of Arsenal v Liverpool and I am ready to watch it again just to see Robbie Keane’s fantastic goal – but I need to ask myself: “How long will I spend watching footie and how long will I spend in prayer and how long will I spend reading my Bible – or even how long will I spend reading my book on the Trinity?”

It is all a question of what I’m passionate about.

Kissing Retirement Goodbye

I have just read this inspiring article on www.desiringgod.org

Kissing Retirement Goodbye

By John Ensor December 3, 2008

John Ensor is the Executive Director of Urban Initiatives for Heartbeat International and author of The Great Work of the Gospel.
* * *
I kissed retirement goodbye—at least the kind traditionally planned for in America. My mother has finally persuaded me that there are better things to do when I reach her age.
In August, I wrote about caring for family with end-of-life challenges. My mother, at 78, started to go blind while on a mission trip to Mongolia. Her sight was saved through high-dose steroids, which tripped other health concerns which were compounded by the discovery of breast cancer.
The subsequent surgery left her fragile. She fell and added injury to sickness and disease. We gathered with her in August to discuss how to care for her as she enters what I call “the frowning years.”
Ecclesiastes calls them plainly “the evil days” when
the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut—when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low—they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets. (12:1-5)
The point of this description is to “remember your creator in the days of your youth” (12:1). I take this to mean:
Taste and see the goodness of God while all your senses are in full function, and your strength is still intact.
Savor him while you can—before your teeth fall out (the grinders cease) and your eyes fail (the windows are dimmed) and your bones ache with every move (the grasshopper drags itself along); before the fears of dying assail you and sap your strength and try your faith one last time before they are swallowed up in victory.
Evidently, at 78, my mother is still in the days of her youth. Since August, she has prayed and fought for her health.
Last week she left for Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. She joined a team of trainers for a Leadership Development Conference in which 90 teachers from around the country took their school vacation week to learn to study and teach the Bible through an inductive-study method. Seven more teachers planned on being there.
But my mother writes, “They did not get here because their charter bus was ambushed by robbers and the driver was killed.”
In spite of such things, she writes of the thrill of watching teachers learn to read out of the Bible its unsearchable riches rather than read into it preconceived notions.
She concludes, “I have been so blessed to be here that at times I think I will burst!” Evidently, she intends to die with her mission boots on as she faces down those “frowning years.”

Good news to the poor

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after

orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself

from being polluted by the world. James 1:27

On TV over the past few days, there have been a few vox pops around the country where people have been saying that the reduction in VAT will have little impact on them this Christmas. That may be true, but what a difference it would make to children across the world if those same people donated £2.50 for every £100 they spent this Christmas.

Two charities close to my heart:

http://www.childcareinternational.net/

Child Care International provides safe shelter, food, basic health care, education and training
which enables children to develop their potential and play a positive role in their communities.
Without help, many children, whose families can barely etch out a living, would never step foot
into a classroom. Without care, homeless and abused children often turn to crime, drug abuse and prostitution

http://www.handsatwork.org/

On a bare patch of dirt in the bush outskirts of the community I met Jaos (9) and Luisa (7): a brother and sister that lived under a tarp tied to a tree. Their mother died last year and their father was in an accident and can't use his arm or earn income. In April the family’s few clothes, blankets and cooking pots were stolen from beneath the open tarp, and church volunteers found the kids shivering in the cold winter evening.
Jaos and Luisa pass entire days without a meal. The only food they get is by begging from other already poor neighbors or by offering to pound (by hand) a neighbor’s corn kernels into flour for a fee of a handful of the flour. Neither of them is in school. They can’t afford exercise books or pens. But without food, they couldn’t concentrate enough to learn anyway.

Outnumbered

I have recently discovered ‘Outnumbered’ (BBC1 Saturday 9.00pm ish). It brought back memories of life in our family and friends’ families when our (now grown up) sons were young. The programme shows the unpredictability of family life and how things easily go wrong. It is a lesson in how messy family life can be. The BBC says “it captures the daily rollercoaster of family life in a way not seen before, at its most deliciously chaotic. It is a very recognisable celebration of parental incompetence, as a beleaguered Mum and Dad attempt to raise their kids (a regal six-year-old with a talent for interrogation, an eight-year-old boy with a penchant for lying, and a lovelorn 12-year-old), with the minimum of emotional damage for all concerned.”

It seems that most families like to pretend that their life isn’t messy. Christian families are especially prone to this. They feel they have an image to present to the world and to present to one another at church. No-one must know what is going wrong. No-one must suspect the areas in which individual family members (or the family as a whole) are falling short of the standard that everyone else is obviously reaching. (Except everyone else isn’t!)

At a conference recently, I heard Rob Parsons say that the organisation “Care for the Family” was built on vulnerability. Rob and the others who share and promote good advice on family issues have to be ready to acknowledge their own shortcomings. To be honest and say where they have messed up. He went on to give personal testimony to a time when he and Diane were going through a difficult time and in their church they established a “strugglers group.” This was for people who were not really coping with life, who were falling short of biblical standards, who found their faith was weak and God was distant, who were cold spiritually, who were experiencing break-up in their family. He told how they were inundated with people.

Once someone had the guts to say: “I need help” others too said they needed help. I guess there are churches up and down the land where there is a need for a “Strugglers Group” except no-one wants to be the first to put their hand up. So in our churches we carry on presenting a façade to each other instead of being vulnerable and confessing to one another (James 5:16). In our churches we are letting each other down and we fail to carry one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2) and we continue to be messed up and failing and because we don’t have people alongside us who know our needs, to encourage us, pray for us, support us. We carry on pretending and the church becomes a shadow of what it is meant to be.

The church’s face to the world is often one which proclaims “we have got it all sorted.” We pretend to non-Christians that we have all the answers. They must find this terribly off-putting. They must feel they need to get their life sorted before ever setting their foot in our church. If we were honest about our shortcomings and the fact that we are still a “work in progress” that the Holy Spirit is still doing his work of continuing sanctification in our lives, maybe we would be more winsome, more approachable to someone outside of Christ who is ready to acknowledge that their life is messed up.

Tim Chester's blog

www.timchester.wordpress.com/

I hope that any readers of this blog are also reading Tim Chester’s blog – it is much more worthwhile!

If nothing else, read his posts on his contributions to the Evangelists Conference and the new Statement of Faith for The Crowded house.

Change has come.

Barack Obama has won the race for White house. In his campaign he has consistently promised change and in his victory speech, he proclaimed “Change has come to America.” Of course, the test for him will now begin in earnest to deliver this promised change – to make things better for the USA and in the world.

But he is also proclaiming the fact that change has already happened. The USA has changed a lot in the last 40yrs. In the crowd listening to Barack was a man with tears in his eyes: Jesse Jackson. It was obviously an emotional moment for him to see a black president. Perhaps in the 1960’s he would not have believed it possible, even in his wildest dreams. Jackson was a Baptist minister and a civil rights activist who was with Martin Luther King when he was assassinated in 1968 and was one of thousands of people who were stirred by Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963. The civil rights movement worked to get equal rights for black people in America where segregation of black people and white people was practiced and rigidly enforced.

America has changed. The world has changed. Change continues to happen at an incredible rate and as Christ-followers, we need to be engaged in this change. Generally speaking, churches are not good at this. Unfortunately, we can get locked into doing things that may have worked half a century ago, but do so no longer. Many Christians like their traditions and their religion and their rituals. We have churches looking to their own wisdom and understanding of what works instead of stepping out in faith and trusting God and doing something less comfortable.

We need to be ready to meet the new challenges that arise. We need to be involved in “change we can believe in.” Not slavishly following what is happening in the world – but to see what God is doing and follow his lead. We need to hold to gospel truths, but we need to proclaim them in a way which is relevant to the times in which we live. We need to be salt and light and live out our Christian lives amongst our family, our friends, our neighbours, our work colleagues and in our community in a way which evidently demonstrates the love of Christ.

The other day, my wife read to me some verses in Isaiah 43. They included these: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.”

We worship a God who does new things!

The glory of Christ in everyday life.

We have seen his glory. John makes this bold claim at the beginning of his gospel. Yet there were many people who saw Jesus, talked with Jesus, spent time with Jesus, who did not see his glory! Their experience of rubbing shoulders with the Son of God, the “Word become flesh,” had no impact on them. Even the disciples took a while to get to this point of recognition.

How often do we miss the presence of Jesus and fail to see his glory?

Do we experience him and see his glory in the ordinary stuff of life: the school run, washing up, working on a production line, sitting in a meeting, caring for an elderly incontinent parent? He is there with us – dwelling with us. So how do we not see him? How do we fail to see the glory of his presence?

In Mark 6, we read that the disciples didn’t recognise Jesus when he walked towards them on the water, they didn’t understand the implications of the feeding of the 5000, they were amazed because they did not recognise that this man, this ‘carpenter turned teacher’ was in fact the “Word become flesh dwelling among them.” They did not see his glory! Mark tells us why: their hearts were hardened.

Here is why we do not see Jesus in our everyday life. When we do not even experience him and see his glory when we read his word, when we pray, when we meet with other Christians, even when we share communion. We need to have our hearts softened. We need to have the Spirit cut through the calloused exterior of our hearts and pour God’s love in.

We need to think again of Calvary. This is the place where for many people, Jesus’ glory was the most obscured and yet it is the place where his glory is the most evident. John 12 and John 17 show how Jesus links together his death and his glory.

Tom Lockley’s song captures it well:

See his love nailed to a cross,
perfect and blameless life given as sacrifice.
See him there all in the name of love,
broken yet glorious, all for the sake of us.

This is Jesus in his glory,
King of Heaven, dying for me.
It is finished, he has done it.
Death is beaten, heaven beckons me.

From where does the term “shekinah glory” originate?

I have been asked this question a couple of times and had to confess that I didn’t know the answer. I was familiar with the term. I used to hear it a lot when I was growing up. Preachers used to talk about the shekinah glory filling the tabernacle (Exodus 40:34,35). It was the glory of God’s presence, but why “shekinah?”

In his book, “Christ plays in ten thousand places” Eugene Peterson comes up with an answer. (This is an excellent book that I am reading at a slow pace).

He says that many years after the Hebrew Bible was completed, the Hebrew verb shakan meaning “dwell” or “tabernacle” was given a noun form shekinah that was widely used in the Hebrew religious community to mark God’s presence, God dwelling among his people accompanied by a visible display of bright glory.

So if you didn’t know before….now you do!

Of course, the impact of this spectacular extravagant light is amazing – even when it is veiled in a cloud - Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting, the priests could not perform their service in Solomon’s temple, Ezekiel fell face down at the temple entrance.

Ponder then:

Hebrews 1:3a “The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being,”

John 1:14 “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Over the wall I will jump

I have been inspired to start a blog by my son (who has two) and by friends who have been blogging for a while. I have kept putting it off and then the final inspiration came when another friend (and soon to be colleague) started a blog just a couple of weeks ago.

I have used the line ‘Over the wall I will jump’ from a Godfrey Birtill song “The die has been cast” to describe how I feel about starting a blog, but this song really tells a story about the Christian life.

If we are serious about following Jesus, we do need to be decisive, to be committed, to ‘jump over the wall.’ From which there is no turning back.

When we shrink back from this radical step, we continue in our joyless Christianity, we short-change Jesus and we short-change ourselves. It is a weak, ineffective kind of Christianity which is at odds with the Christian life we are intended to live and enjoy and which gives a real, vital witness to the grace, power and love of our Saviour.

My experience is that this is not a once for all decision – Jesus said “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23).

It is a continuing decision. Hence this blog.

I need to keep reminding myself that I must deny myself, I must take up my cross, I must follow Jesus. And I want other people with me in this great enterprise!

I want to encourage others to follow Jesus….and I want them to encourage me!
I hope this blog will help in that.