Author: Dave Faulkner

I'm a British Methodist minister, married with two adult children. I blog from a moderate evangelical-missional-charismatic perspective. My interests include digital photography (currently using a Nikon Z8), contemporary music, and watching football (Tottenham Hotspur) and cricket. For my photography, please visit www.flickr.com/photos/davefaulkner

Covenant Sermon

This Sunday, my church at Broomfield is experimenting with bringing its annual Covenant Service forward to the beginning of the ‘Methodist year’ rather than the calendar year. Hence what follows is a sermon for a Covenant Service, rather than on one of the regular weekly Lectionary readings.

Romans 12:1-2

Introduction
At my office, I worked with a Muslim guy. Javed (or ‘Suave Jave’ as we called him, for his attitude to the ladies) was more Muslim by upbringing than practice. But one day, he brought in to show us his mother’s copy of the Qur’an. It was edged and blocked in gold leaf. It came in a special tissue-like wrapper. One thing neither Javed nor his mother would have done with that book was write in it. Even touching it seemed risky, in case of damage.

But I don’t treat my copies of the Bible that way. In particular, I was taught as a young Christian to underline words in my Bible. Not only verses that struck me, but also some key words. ‘But’ was a good word to underline. It indicated an important change in Paul’s arguments.

And Romans 12 starts with another key word: ‘therefore’.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:1-2)

‘I appeal to you therefore’: therefore indicates all that has preceded Romans 12. It indicates the first eleven chapters of Romans, summarised here as ‘the mercies of God’. We make and renew our covenant because of ‘the mercies of God’. All we offer today is in response to the mercies of God. Not just one-off mercy in initial forgiveness, but mercies. Over and over again, God is merciful to us. Our sins, our mistakes, our foolishness and weakness: for all these things God is merciful to us in Christ through the Cross. And because he is relentlessly merciful – his mercies are ‘new every morning, [so] great is [his] faithfulness’ (Lamentations 3:23) – we offer ourselves to him.

How does Paul ask his readers to respond to the mercies of God? In these two verses are two ways:

1. Sacrifice
Paul urges Christians to ‘to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship’ (verse 1).

‘Spiritual worship’ here implies that it is reasonable, rational and true. This is the right and proper thing to do in light of God’s enduring mercies to us. The mercies of God come to us through the sacrifice of Christ: is it not appropriate, urges Paul, for us to make sacrifices as a grateful response?

But what are these sacrifices? ‘Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God’, he says. It’s not just something we do ‘spiritually’: we present our bodies. And if I might just re-order the words to reflect what many commentators think is the sense of the Greek, we make ‘sacrifices, living, holy and acceptable to God’. Those adjectives ‘living’, ‘holy’ and ‘acceptable to God’ illustrate the kinds of sacrifices we might make with our bodies.

‘Living’ – we freely offer our bodies to God, because of what he has done for us in Christ. It may cost us something. The author Robert J Morgan tells how one Sunday, the late Corrie ten Boom was preaching in Copenhagen on these very verses. She was eighty years old at the time. Two young nurses at the church invited her to lunch afterwards, but they lived in a tenth floor flat and there was no lift. Not what you want at eighty.

She struggled up the stairs as far as the fifth floor, but her heart was pounding and her legs buckled. Collapsing into a chair, she complained to the Lord. But she sensed God whispering to her that it was important she carried on.

When she finally made it to the tenth floor, she met the parents of one of the nurses. Neither was a Christian, but they were both interested in the Gospel. Corrie ten Boom led them to faith in Christ. All because she reluctantly followed her own sermon and made her life – her very body – a sacrifice in climbing ten flights. She was willing to go where God led her, despite the cost.

‘Holy’ – our dedication to God may also sometimes come at a price. The Covenant Service promises balances the way some parts of our discipleship are attractive and others are costly:

Christ has many services to be done: some are easy, others are difficult; some bring honour, others bring reproach; some are suitable to our natural inclinations and material interests, others are contrary to both; in some we may please Christ and please ourseleves, in others we cannot please Christ except by denying ourselves. Yet the power to do all these things is given to us in Christ, who strengthens us.’ (Methodist Worship Book, p288.)

Holy sacrifices are about being willing to pay the price of unpopularity and difficulty for the sake of dedication to the right thing. It is also a matter of doing so graciously, rather than with complaint, self-righteousness or attention-seeking.

‘Acceptable’ – this probes our motives. Other translations say, ‘well-pleasing to God’. It’s about a desire to please God. In marriage and other human relationships, we make it our first goal not to please ourselves but our spouse, or whoever it is we love. So too with God. When we know how merciful he has been to us and how regularly he has been merciful, the fitting response is to set our minds and hearts on doing the things that bring him joy.

There is a story told in the Old Testament that gives a small illustration of what I am talking about King David wanted to buy some land from a subject and use it for worship. The owner says he can have it free of charge, but David says, no: he insists on paying. Why? ‘I will not give to the Lord that which has cost me nothing,’ he says. Discipleship and giving need to cost us something to be genuine. It may be financial, material, emotional, psychological, even social. If we realise just how merciful God continually is to us, then out of joy we shall be willing to show love in return, even if it comes at a price.

2. Transformation
Verse 2:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

‘Do not be conformed to this world’ – or, as J B Phillips famously translated this passage, ‘Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould’. Do not be conformed, be transformed, says Paul. Don’t be squeezed by the world, ‘let God re-mould your minds from within’ (Phillips).

Yet how easy it is to conform to the world, to let it squeeze us into its mould. Often we don’t notice. The late Lesslie Newbigin once observed that just as a goldfish is not consciously aware of the water in which it swims, so we are often unconscious of the culture we live in and its values.

In our society’s case, think about how we easily use popular words such as ‘tolerance’. It is presented as a quality that everybody must have. Woe betide the intolerant! But the word ‘tolerance’ carries with it overtones of a benign attitude to things that are wrong, enduring wrong things or having no deep convictions oneself. It’s a slippery slope towards tolerating sin. All these shades of meaning are therefore anathema to the Christian, but we refer to tolerance as much as anyone! The world is squeezing us into its mould, if we are not careful. I could give examples from other apparently innocent or positive words such as ‘inclusiveness’ and ‘community cohesion’.

So how do we resist social pressures to adopt ways of thinking that are inimical to the Gospel? Paul exhorts us to ‘be transformed by the renewing of [our] minds’, or to let God re-mould us from within, as Phillips puts it. Spiritual transformation involves a battle for the mind, because what we think affects our attitudes and our actions.

This doesn’t mean we all have to be intellectuals. Any Jesus-follower can develop Gospel thinking, Gospel attitudes and Gospel actions. That is Paul’s vision. Where do we begin?

We start with reading and reflecting on the Bible and its great story from the Garden to the New Jerusalem. It is Scripture above all that will help us to be Gospel thinkers. However, we don’t do so alone. Private Bible reading is good and worthy, but most of the books in the Bible itself were written or dictated to be heard less by individuals than by groups of disciples. It’s important, therefore, to get to grips with the Gospel together. If you’re not part of a small group that does that, you’re missing out! For starters, join the Living Faith course! It will help us get to grips with the big picture of our faith together.

But it’s not enough just to read the biblical message and discuss it. There are many people in churches who know their Bibles well, but who are harsh, unloving and judgmental. (Not that any of us is perfect – least of all, me.) So just reading the Bible and talking about it isn’t enough.

In other words, the biblical authors didn’t write their books just to be read or heard. They wrote them to generate action. The Bible isn’t just to be read, it’s to be done.

In my final year as a student minister, I spent half my time on placement in a circuit. At one of the two churches where I worked, I led a Bible study every week. However, the minister who supervised that group had been very frustrated with it. ‘When are they going to stop talking about the Bible and start doing something?’ he said to me once. ‘They’re more interested in the maps on the inside covers of their Bibles than in putting the teaching into practice.’

And that’s what I’m on about. Spiritual formation in Christ – the transformation of our minds to which Paul calls us – involves Bible reading, reflecting on it together where we support and challenge each other, and then getting on with what we’ve learned. It’s when the thinking leads to action that we truly learn. If I were a betting man, I would wager that Katie learned more about God’s love for the poor through her trip to Kenya with Hand In Hand than I would have done simply by reading about the poor.

One famous preacher said, ‘Never finish your sermon without telling your congregation what you want them to do about it.’ I suggest you might almost say, ‘Never finish your Bible reading without deciding what you are going to do about it.’

Conclusion
If God has been so persistently merciful to us, then what might we give him as a present? It would be appropriate if our offering involved sacrifice, when we recall all that he has done for us in Christ.

Transformation is also appropriate: Christ did not die on the Cross only for our forgiveness: he died that we might be saved from sin in every way. Not only the penalty of sin, but the practice of sin (which involves us co-operating with the Holy Spirit in being transformed) but also the presence of sin (as we anticipate God’s New Creation by being colonies of God’s Kingdom).

This Covenant Service, let us pledge ourselves again – in promise and in action – to the God of abundant mercy.

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links for 2008-09-04

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Names

Have you seen the World Names Profiler? It’s had a lot of publicity recently. It’s taken several days for me to get a result searching for ‘Faulkner’, due to massive demand on the site. Having finally done so, I now find there are more FPM (Frequency Per Million) in Australia than anywhere else. Cue ‘convict’ jokes from my wife …

Clicking on the UK results, the surname is most popular in Northern Ireland, followed by most parts of England. Then you get the rest of England (including East Anglia, where we currently live) and Wales. Bottom comes Scotland, which is where the surname originates.

It’s different if you profile the putative original spelling (insofar as you can assume anything of the like, given massive illiteracy affecting birth registrations in previous centuries). ‘Falconer’ is far and away most popular in Scotland in terms of UK density. (Worldwide, it’s found most commonly in New Zealand.)

All of which brings me to a story: when I was born, I was given the middle name ‘Duncan’ to mark the Scottish heritage of the family. Studies suggest that ‘Falconer’ originated in Aberdeenshire around the 1200s, and the Falconers were a sept of the Keith clan. There is a town in Aberdeenshire called Keith. Falconers were plebs who looked after the falcons on the laird’s estate, and of course ‘falconer’ is still used as the name of the associated profession.

When my father and aunt were growing up, they both clearly remember their grandfather telling them that he had been born in Scotland, but had come south of the border with his family as a boy. In those days, the name was still spelt ‘Falconer’. When he went to school in England, the teacher said to him, ‘Now you’re in England, you’ll spell your name the English way.’ And so, according to Dad’s grandfather, that is when our surname changed to ‘Faulkner’.

As a result, Dad has always supported Scotland at football and rugby. I was named David Duncan, as I said.

In recent years, however, a problem has arisen. After he retired, Dad began investigating the family tree. He discovered the part of ‘Scotland’ we come from. It’s called Lincolnshire. He got as far as the early eighteenth century, and our family was always living in Lincolnshire hamlets, where some of our ancestors were shepherds – a nice antecedent for what I do now.

I’ve never had the heart to tell Dad that I’d discovered ‘Duncan’ was originally Irish.

Still, at least they were OK with calling me ‘David’. They chose that, because they knew it meant ‘beloved’.

So what’s in a name? What’s in yours? I like to use these stories at Christmas when preaching about the naming of Jesus. You might think of other applications. Do tell.

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Google Chrome

The blogosphere is awash with comments on Google Chrome, the new web browser. This is just a quick note to confirm that in my opinion it’s far and away the fastest browser I’ve ever used. The latest beta can be downloaded here. It’s only 474kb in size – quite remarkable. It probably won’t have the customisation possible with Firefox through add-ons, but one thing I am uninstalling is one of my other backup browsers, Apple Safari, which is based on the same Webkit open source engine. I retain Internet Explorer because I have to, and Opera because I like it. But I think Chrome will be my main alternative to Firefox now.

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Todd Bentley

I wrote several posts a few months ago about Todd Bentley. We arrived home from holiday to discover he was leaving the Lakeland ‘Revival’ and separating from his wife. Three days later his ministry admitted he was in an unhealthy relationship with another woman. Many bloggers have waded in. Dan Edelen has a lot of wisdom borne of pain in several posts. Bill Kinnon is more fiery, especially on the backtracking by C Peter Wagner. There are numerous others.

Whatever my criticisms of Bentley, I take no pleasure in these events. Here are some thoughts.

Losers According to Bill Kinnon, C Peter Wagner has described Todd Bentley as a loser. Crudely, that seems to mean Wagner didn’t back a winner, so he inflicts this description on Bentley. Whatever I think of Bentley’s ministry, especially the violence, if you write people off as losers you dismiss the Gospel. In the words of an old Steve Taylor song, ‘Jesus is for losers’. Watch the video for the song here:

No, if Wagner talks like this, what Gospel does he believe and preach? Where does the Cross fit in? Dan Edelen talks much about charismatics needing to recover the Cross: here is a prime reason why.

This isn’t a time for casting stones, it’s a time for prayer and grace as well as church discipline (which after all according to Jesus was meant to be restorative).

Accountability Bill Kinnon links to Phoenix Preacher, who said on August 26th,

Scott and I knew about Bentley’s immorality two months ago, but couldn’t find anyone willing to go on the record.

It’s in the nature of wrongly relating to someone other than yourself that there will be deceit, but this implies that appropriate accountability structures were abused. Yes, it’s good that Bentley stepped down, but that seems to have been for the sin of having been found out. Why were others culpable in the cover-up? Was it conspiracy or fear? We may never know.

But there is not only the accountability to his organisation Fresh Fire and the wider church, there is also the question of accountability in marriage. In what I am about to write I am aware that ‘there but for the grace of God go I’, but – it seems one of the problems seemed to be Bentley’s protracted absence in Lakeland. Like many ministry marriages, Debbie and I have it built into our relationship that if a question arises of my being absent overnight or longer, we discuss it before agreeing. We have done so with respect to my forthcoming sabbatical early next year.

It must have been very tempting (and yes, I probably do mean ‘tempting’) for Bentley to stay in Florida rather than Canada, given what was happening. It must have been exciting for him. The emotional pressure on Shonnah to agree must have been huge. But the fatal flaw in the logic is the idea that the revival depended on him. I suspect that when I take my sabbatical next year, my churches (which have never had a minister on study leave before) will discover just how unnecessary I am! It is a salutary lesson.

Prophecy Clearly, Wagner’s ‘prophecy’ in June that Bentley would increase in this, that and everything looks pretty sorry now. While I am not one of those who believes modern-day prophecies have to be 100% accurate (as per Old Testament standards) because they’re not adding to Scripture, it does strike me that the prophecy concerned is just altogether too typical of the prophetic drivel that sometimes infects charismatic Christianity. It is the sort once characterised by a friend of mine as ‘Thus says the Lord, I love you O my children’. It’s all about how wonderful the recipient is. While I’m neither for the sort of word that reduces everyone to worm status, I thought the only person we were meant to big up like this was Christ. This stuff needs serious questioning. It’s linked to my next observation.

Personality Whatever happened to all those prophecies around the 1990s that ‘the coming revival’ would be ‘a nameless, faceless’ one? Rather than that, we still promote our personalities, and then (like the secular press) exclaim with horror when they fall. The personality cult is one of the most insidiously worldly aspects of evangelical and charismatic Christianity. Bentley often said on the stage at Lakeland that it wasn’t about him but Jesus. Nevertheless, others promoted him and he allowed it. He could have stepped out of the way more for his associates or others. He rarely did. This may have been a tactical error rather than malicious, but any of us called to a public rôle in Christianity need to learn and accept the hard lesson that it’s not about us, it’s about Christ, and our actions need to match up. That’s not easy, and it requires some holy ruthlessness on our part. Often we’re not willing. The attention or acclaim is too attractive.

So may God have mercy on Todd and Shonnah Bentley and the anonymous female staff member. May God have mercy on C Peter Wagner. May God have mercy on us all. We who are without exception sinners need grace – the kindness of God that leads us to repentance.

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Back

We arrived home at the weekend from a fortnight on the Isle of Wight. I thought I’d type up a few highlights. No, please keep reading: this is meant to be more than those boring ‘let me show you my holiday pics’ conversations. I’ve tried to offer some reflections in what follows. If any of my stories or observations are helpful, feel free to pinch them. You might also smile or laugh – I hope.

Friday 15th August A wild fox entered the garden of the bungalow we were renting. The children (and we) were full of wonder. We are used to direct encounters with tame animals. Meetings with wild animals are usually managed or mediated, such as at the zoo. A direct encounter with the wild is not encouraged in our society – nor in our church. Was it Brennan Manning who called Jesus ‘wild’?

Saturday 16th We’re doing our little bit to make our break as eco-friendly as possible. Although we had to drive here and take the ferry, Southern Vectis Buses do a great ‘freedom ticket‘: £40 for two adults and up to three children for a week. I know friends would advise cycling, but I have a poor sense of balance and can’t ride a bike.

Sunday 17th A return trip from last year to one of the most family-friendly churches we’ve ever come across: Shanklin URC.

Meanwhile (not during the service!) I’m finally reading Tom Wright‘s ‘Surprised By Hope‘. Great quote on page 87, recounting part of Oscar Wilde‘s play ‘Salome‘. Herod the tyrant wants to forbid Jesus from raising the dead. He asks his courtier, ‘Where is this man?’ The courtier replies, ‘He is in every place, my lord, but it is hard to find him.’ Jesus is elusive in so many ways – not just the sense of his absence since the ascension but yet present by his Spirit, also the way that we no more than Herod can control him.

Monday 18th Two newspaper articles over the weekend bring out the dark side of the Olympics. Matthew Syed in The Times points out that the modern Olympics were founded with an elitist bias and they remain so, especially in favour of western sports and the privately educated. Ian Gallagher in the Mail On Sunday tells an awful story of how one Chinese pistol shooter managed his best ever score. He won bronze, only to be humiliated on national TV for not winning gold. And before we get too snooty about the Chinese (who clearly used the Games rather like Soviet Russia and the USA before the Berlin Wall fell), let’s remember the ritual humiliation the British press has handed out to sports stars like Tim Henman in the past.

Tuesday 19th We’re waiting at Ryde bus station to catch either the number 2 or 3 back to Shanklin. Rebekah and Mark have been frustrated that only Mum and Dad have had a bus timetable. They find a box of them on the ground. A customer assistant walks over to take one for a passenger who has made an enquiry. Beautifully, she asks our children if she may take one from the box. ‘Yes,’ replies Mark, ‘but you must put it back!’

Wednesday 20th A trip to Amazon World: not only a chance to see some animals, but the opportunity (if the kids let us read the displays, ha ha) to learn more about conservation projects and the plight of the world’s rain forests. In the gift shop, Rebekah’s eye is taken – as always – by bright and sparkly things. In this case, they are small chunks of rocks and minerals. Since they are only £1.50, I agree she can choose one. She selects Pyrite, a.k.a. ‘Fool’s Gold’. She spends the rest of the holiday desperate to take her Fool’s Gold everywhere. I’m sure you can find your own parallels …

Thursday 21st Fired Art Ceramics Café in Ryde is our venue to decorate a bowl ready for my parents’ golden wedding anniversary in October. We didn’t notice the café bit, but the proprietor was warm and welcoming. She struck the right balance between needing to protect delicate and hot items, yet children feeling safe and happy. Now there’s a challenge for our churches.

Friday 22nd If you’re ever in Shanklin Old Village, you have to buy an ice cream at Pearly Boise. An unbelievable huge range of home made flavours. It’s three months to the next dental check-up. More on ice cream in the next few days’ entries: you’ll see why.

In the afternoon, we take the children for their (and my!) first ever experience of live circus. Jay Miller’s Circus does not use animals, so we are happy. It’s not the biggest one you’ll ever see, but there were some astonishing acrobats, and we were ringside – which meant that Debbie and Rebekah got covered in spaghetti and custard pie from Peppi the clown. They weren’t distressed: Mark was.

Saturday 23rd Rebekah has an invitation next month to a ten-pin bowling birthday party, so we thought we’d better introduce her to its delights. At least it proves to be a delight to her when she wins, but not when she is second or lower. It turns out that on Ryde Esplanade there is a branch of LA Bowl ten-pin. Finding details before we went to the Isle of Wight had been frustrating. Tourist information sites listed the bowling alley, and it’s mentioned on LA Bowl’s home page, but not when you click ‘locations‘! They have a visibility and communication problem – not unlike the church.

Sunday 24th My sister and her boys come over from Hampshire for the day and meet us at Dinosaur Isle. (I’m a theistic evolutionist, not a creationist or Intelligent Design guy.) The Isle of Wight is rich in fossil history. It was over the heads of our kids, who still haven’t grasped that dinos are extinct, unlike my ten-year-old nephew, who fancies a career as a paleantologist. One section of the exhibition invites you to put your hand inside slots in a box and guess what you are feeling. Unfortunately, the first thing Mark feels is dino poo! We hear for the rest of the holiday about how it should have been flushed away.

Later, watching the BBC Ten O’Clock News, James Reynolds reports on the closing ceremony of the Olympics. He opens by saying, ‘In a state which has no god, the Olympics have been a religion.’ He closes with the words, ‘Now these people will have to find something else to believe in.’ Perhaps G K Chesterton was right all those decades ago when he said that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Or as Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody.

Monday 25th Rain makes us reverse our plans. An afternoon visit to The Old Smithy at Godshill becomes a morning visit. Instead of gorging ourselves on the finest cakes we’ve ever found in four holidays on the island, we settle for morning scones. Still stunning.

Then we make a return visit to Robin Hill. We’d been the previous Monday, and if you return within seven days, you get in free. Bad news: no longer do they sell New Forest Ice Cream, they’ve gone over to Minghella’s. The latter has apparently won forty-four awards, and was described in the Sunday Times as the best tasting ice cream ever. Could have fooled us. It melts in seconds, is indistinguishable in taste from ordinary stuff, and costs £1.70 per cone instead of £1.40 for New Forest. The biggest taste in Minghella’s is the hype.

Tuesday 26th We’re in Newport when Debbie suddenly sees a bus for Alum Bay. Now I’ve wanted to go there all holiday, I just can’t take her sudden and impulsive plan-changing approach to life. We won’t have time for everything there in a couple of hours. But we do get to the spectacular chairlift. Debbie and Rebekah, the family daredevils, love it. I have to restrain my intermittent vertigo to be safe person for little Mark, who is frightened at first. Sometimes that’s what I’m called to do in other ways as a minister. Churches don’t like looking down at the drop sometimes, but rather than staying on terra firma, I have to encourage them to get out on the chairlift, even if I too am frightened at the thought of looking down.

Wednesday 27th The Isle Of Wight Zoo And Tiger Sanctuary (‘Home Of ITV’s Tiger Island‘, we are repeatedly told) is much smaller than our much-loved Colchester Zoo. Enclosures are overgrown, with some plants even growing up the sides, making it difficult to see some animals. We have overgrowth in the church, making it hard for people to see Jesus.

More light-heartedly, we were watching some lemurs when one spontaneously urinated in front of everyone. Rebekah launched into an instant chant or rap: ‘Do some wee! Do some wee! We want you to do some wee!’ Thank goodness they didn’t know I was a ‘vicar’.

Thursday 28th On an X40 Island Coaster, returning to Alum Bay. The bus is crammed with people most of the journey. We stop en route at Ventnor. The bus driver calls out, ‘Anyone for Ventnor?’ Not thinking everyone has heard he even climbs out of his cockpit and comes upstairs where we are. He repeats, ‘Anyone for Ventnor?’ ‘No!’ cries back Rebekah, obviously thinking she has the right to speak for everyone. Do you know people like that.

Well, I think that will have to do. Hopefully this has raised a few smiles and given the odd pause for thought.

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Leave

Well, having set up the new blog here on WordPress, I now have two weeks without a computer, so updating may not happen for a little while. I’ll be back soon.

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Sermon For 31st August: Spiritual Health

I won’t be preaching for the next three Sundays, so here is one I’ve prepared for the end of the month.

Matthew 16:21-28

Introduction
Doctors told an American named Craig Boyden, who was just thirty-two, that he was suffering from Crohn’s disease and had three months to live. Perhaps understandably, he decided that if he only had three months, he’d better make the most of them. He went back to his job as a credit manager at a carpet company in Elliott City in Maryland, and embezzled $30,000. He the used the money to live it up – dining in the best restaurants, throwing parties for his friends, buying drinks for everyone in every bar he went into.

But the funny thing was that as the weeks went by, instead of feeling worse and worse he just felt fine, if anything, even better than he had done. So he went to a different doctor for a second opinion. There he discovered that he wasn’t suffering from Crohn’s disease at all, but just a hernia. He’d suffered an allergic reaction to the gloves that the surgeon was wearing during exploratory surgery, and that had led to the misdiagnosis.

But that left him with another problem: the firm had found out that $30,000 was missing. Fortunately for Boyden, when he explained everything, the court was understanding, and gave him a suspended sentence, on condition that he paid the money back at the rate of $5,000 a year.[1]

With sickness, it’s important to recognise and interpret the symptoms, make a diagnosis and from that basis prescribe the appropriate treatment. In our reading today, I want to suggest that Peter is suffering from a sickness of the spirit, even if he doesn’t realise it (at least at first). It’s a spiritual sickness that leads him to misunderstand the will of God. We need a healthy approach to discerning the will of God. Today’s sermon attempts to explore what a healthy approach to finding and following God’s will might look like, based on Peter’s symptoms, Jesus’ diagnosis and his prescription.

1. Symptoms
We find the symptoms of Peter’s sickness in his rebuke to Jesus:

‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ (Verse 22)

We can examine the symptoms by looking at the language Peter uses here.

‘God forbid it, Lord’ is an abbreviated version of a Jewish expression: ‘May God be gracious to you.’ It means, ‘May God mercifully spare you this,’ hence why Peter says, ‘This must never happen to you.’ It’s very emphatic, containing a double negative.

It sounds like Peter thinks he’s being kind to Jesus. In the previous few verses, Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah. Now he seems to say, ‘We can’t let this happen to the Messiah! That isn’t what’s supposed to happen to the Messiah! He’s meant to triumph over the enemies of God’s people, not suffer!’

On this reading, Peter is kind and well-intentioned. He is sincere. We like sincerity. The alternative is hypocrisy, and who wants that? It is common to say in our society, ‘It doesn’t matter what you believe, so long as you are sincere.’ I once talked to the son of a deceased church member who said he was sure his mum had gone to heaven, because that was what she sincerely believed would happen after death. If you believed something else, then that was what would happen to you. He didn’t pause to consider how illogical this was.

But in any case, sincerity is not enough. Many years ago, there was an inquest held when a person died in a hospital operating theatre after the wrong anaesthetic was administered. The coroner told the anaesthetist, ‘ I believe you sincerely thought you were giving the correct anaesthetic. But you were sincerely wrong, and it cost a life.’

We can be sincerely wrong. Peter was. He had a faulty concept of the Messiah’s mission. Sincerity on its own made him sick. He missed God’s will for Jesus.

And he missed God’s will for himself. Because he could not or would not see that the true destiny of the Messiah would shape his own. If Jesus were to go to the Cross, then the cross shapes the destiny of all disciples.

Now if that’s the case, then Peter’s symptoms may be more than sincerity detached from truth; they may also be about letting personal ambition get in the way of hearing God’s voice. He wouldn’t have been alone among the disciples: in just four chapters’ time, James and John will want preferential seating at the Messiah’s banquet in the kingdom of God. How easy it is for us, too, to baptise our own preferences and ambitions as the will of God.

Our son will keep asking for something, even when we say ‘no.’ When we get to the point of saying to him, ‘It doesn’t matter how many times you ask, the answer will always be no,’ he often replies, ‘But I want you to say yes.’ That can be like our ambitions trying to distort the will of God. We are desperate for the answer that suits us. But God won’t give it – unless he chooses to give us up to our desires, and that’s a worrying development.

Peter, then, displays possibly two dangerous symptoms of spiritual sickness. One is sincerity divorced from truth, the other is the baptism of personal ambition. Do either of these ring bells for us?

2. Diagnosis
When I was a child, we once had a family doctor who was writing the prescription on his pad almost within seconds of a patient entering his surgery. You wouldn’t really say he had a bedside manner.

And neither did Jesus. Peter might have expected affirmation or encouragement in the wake of his statement, but what happens next is this:

But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ (Verse 23)

So much for ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’! Let’s take a moment to think through this devastating diagnosis, that will have crushed Peter by asserting so aggressively that he is against the will of God.

We start with ‘Satan’. It couldn’t be worse, could it? The very least this means is ‘adversary’. Peter, you are not my supporter, you are my opponent, my enemy.

If by ‘Satan’ Jesus doesn’t simply mean ‘adversary’ but the Devil, then we link back to chapter four of Matthew’s Gospel, where the Devil tempts Jesus in the wilderness in order to sidetrack him from the Father’s will. This is what Peter is doing. Rather than correcting Jesus, he is sidetracking him.

And he is a ‘stumbling block’: Peter, the ‘rock’, becomes a ‘rock of stumbling’. It’s the same word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 1:23 to describe general Jewish offence at the idea of preaching Christ crucified. The Cross is a stumbling block to people finding faith, and Peter is a stumbling block in the way of Jesus going there for the salvation of the world.

Summing Peter up, then, Jesus diagnoses him not as a friend and disciple but as an opponent who wants to sidetrack him from the will of God. He is a serious obstacle to Jesus’ progress in bringing salvation.

Do we ever become the opponents of Christ? Do we get in the way of him fulfilling his purposes? I do. There are times when I don’t like his will. It might be something general from Scripture, like his insistence that the way to glory is through suffering and rejection. I’d rather it came through ease and popularity.

Or it might be that he wants me to do something in particular that isn’t congenial to me. I have been dragged kicking and screaming into his will on some occasions. I have heard him say ‘Yes’ and I have tried to persuade him that he really meant ‘No’. It is by his grace and mercy that he has faced me down as he did Peter, in order to put me in places where I might be fruitful for him.

Being healthy in the life of the Spirit entails saying ‘yes’ to Jesus.

3. Prescription
So how does Jesus set about making a sick Peter healthy? His prescription starts with the words, ‘Get behind me.’ The first thing Peter has to do is clear away the obstacles. Rather than standing in front of Jesus as a rock of stumbling, he should get behind him. How is he to remove the obstacle? By dropping his objection to the Cross. We have to stop seeing the Cross as an offence and embrace it. The path to spiritual health is like the words of the hymn, ‘In the cross of Christ I glory’. Yes, the Cross may lead us to weep for our sins that put Christ there, but we cannot stop with such emotions. Healthy spirituality rejoices in what Christ has done for us.

But ‘Get behind me’ may mean something else, too. ‘Behind’ is the proper place for a disciple. Disciples followed teachers: logically, that meant standing behind them. Jesus is telling Peter that the key to spiritual health and participating in the will of God is in following him – not in debating his words, but in doing them. John’s Gospel records Jesus saying something that sheds light on this:

‘Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.’ (John 7:17)

It’s no good treating the words of Jesus as theory, or just praising them as the greatest wisdom ever given to the human race. We can’t be bystanders. We need to be what James in his epistle called ‘doers of the word’ (James 1:22). We shall only have spiritual health when we commit ourselves to walking in the footsteps of Jesus.

We see another part of the prescription implied when Jesus tells Peter, ‘you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’ (verse 23). Surely the implication is that we need to set our minds on the things of God. It’s similar to what Paul tells the Colossians:

‘Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.’ (Colossians 3:2-3)

If we want spiritual health, we focus on God’s ways and God’s agenda. When we set our minds on human things or ‘things that are on earth’, we lower our vision and we tend to become self-centred. That is the way of the world, and it is the way of death. It is the approach that says your well-being is defined by your money and possessions.

Jesus is quite explicit in what follows about what constitutes setting our minds on divine things: it means denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following him (verses 24-28). We let the Cross shape our minds, hearts and actions.

When we set our minds on divine things, we are committed to spiritually healthy minds. But it cannot remain theoretical: if the brain doesn’t send signals to the rest of the body, there is something wrong with us. So too in the spiritual life: setting our minds on divine things is accompanied by the signals travelling to our hands and feet so that our cross-shaped thinking is complemented by cross-shaped acting.

Jesus’ prescription for spiritually healthy people who embrace the will of God, then, is to glory in the Cross and put his teaching into practice. This means letting our thoughts and deeds be shaped by a discipleship that is willing to suffer for following Jesus.

Just one last thing to say: I am on two repeat prescriptions from my doctor. We fall into a trap if we think that Jesus’ prescription is a one-off. It’s a repeat prescription. Spiritual health means we keep taking the tablets.

[1] Simon Coupland, Spicing Up Your Speaking, p 221 # 213, adapting Bill Bryson, Bizarre World, p 13f.

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Self-Centred Nerds

In February, I said I would be writing an article for Ministry Today under the title, ‘Is Blogging For Self-Centred Nerds?’ Finally, over the last two evenings, I’ve written it. I’ve taken responses from the original article, plus those given when Richard Hall broadcast my appeal. I’ve also quoted from a recent Tall Skinny Kiwi post and taken extensive material from a United Methodist Reporter article written two years ago.

I know, two years ago. So long in webland, and longer in the blogosphere.

I don’t know when the article will be published in hard copy or appear on the Ministry Today website. I’ll let you know.

Thanks to everyone who contributed, either here, at Richard’s blog, or in the other articles without knowing. I’ve linked to just about every blogger I’ve quoted, so if you commented, you’re almost certainly in the piece and hopefully you’ll receive a bit more traffic.

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