Here are a few funny articles from the spoof ‘Christian news’ site Lark News:

Woman stitches ‘prayer cloth’ wardrobe – I like the ‘walking in the anointing’ gag;

Outsourced prayer lines confuse callers – satire both on TV evangelists and call centres.

‘Orthodox lite’ services draw ritual-hungry evangelicals – the comment by the ‘pastor’, “I don’t mind changing the packaging for people. It freshens it up for them and for me”, is a little too close for comfort with many practices.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: LarkNews, humour

I’m starting a sermon series on healing tomorrow morning. Largely I’m editing an old sermon series, which any readers of my old website might recognise from three or four years ago. I’m preaching on this to prepare one of my churches for the introduction of ‘services of prayer for healing.’ Here’s the first one.

Healing 1: A Biblical Basis

Introduction
Here’s a howler from a student sitting an RE exam:

‘Everyone was pleased when Jesus healed the paralytic man, except Simon who had to pay to have the roof mended.’
[Murray Watts, ‘Bats In The Belfry’, p68 #95.]

Healing is disruptive, even when there is good news!

Seriously, though, the subject is fraught with difficulties. We long for healing: some of us have witnessed it; some have cried out for it, but not received it. Then there are the controversial practitioners. Beware some of the TV evangelists like Benny Hinn, who give a bad name to the good ones.

Some Christians even denounce all expectations of direct divine healing. I once heard a preacher denounce every Christian who believed in healing as people who demanded that God perform to their orders. This is a terrible misrepresentation.

The subject needs careful handling. Can any of us be completely objective about the question of healing in response to prayer? I can’t. I have known loved ones healed, I have also had my own share of disappointments, where I still don’t understand the reasons why.

So I shall take several sermons to explore this theme. Even then, I cannot cover everything. However, I hope I can give a rounded treatment of the subject as far as I can go.

We begin with a biblical basis for Christian approaches to healing. We shall journey with the story of God’s involvement with his creation, from the Great Beginning to the Great End. I shall do this in four stages.

1. Creation
Do you remember learning multiplication tables, chanting them until you knew them? If I wanted to know what eight times eight was, I could chant my eight times table until I came to that sum.

We see this learning by repetition in Genesis 1’s account of the creation. The words, ‘And God saw that it was good’ keep recurring, until you have received the message loud and clear that God took pleasure in his creation, declaring it good. Indeed, at the end, we read, ‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.’ (Genesis 1:31)

God’s action in creation is good, even very good. There is no hint in the account of any imperfection, imbalance, anything displeasing, any distortion, disharmony, suffering or evil. The child who asked her mother if God created lions and when told yes then asked a supplementary question, “But isn’t he frightened to?” missed the goodness of God in creation.

In terms of healing, we are to deduce that ill health is not central to God’s plan. Whatever God may allow and even use for good, it is not his best for creation. The intention of God’s creation is that everything is good and working well in harmony.

The doctrine of creation shows us the divine purpose in healing. It is to restore things to how he intended them to be. To care about healing the sick is to care about God’s creation and to share his perspective on how this world is meant to be.

But reality is more complicated, so we have to look at other elements of the biblical story.

2. Fallenness
A man dies and finds himself standing at the pearly gates. St Peter comes out to greet him, but looks puzzled. “We weren’t expecting anyone just now,” he says, “just wait here a minute while I look up your records on the computer.”

While the man waits, he notices a wild party going on down among the clouds. There’s music and laughter, food and dancing, and the people are having a good time. “I wonder where that is?” he thinks to himself. “It’s obviously not heaven, but it looks far too much fun to be hell.”

Then the gate opens again, and St Peter comes out scratching his head. “I’m really sorry to keep you,” he says, “but we can’t find your records at all. If you wouldn’t mind waiting a bit longer, I’ll go and have another look.”

So the man stands twiddling his thumbs, and every so often looking down at the cloud where the party’s still in full swing. He eventually makes up his mind, and jumps down to join the party.

But he falls straight through the cloud and lands in front of the devil. It’s boiling hot, the flames are shooting up around him, and the devil grins at him and says, “Welcome to hell!”

“But I didn’t want to come here,” the man stammers, “I just wanted to join the party.” “Ah,” the devil replies, “I see you’ve come across our marketing department.”
[Simon Coupland, ‘Spicing Up Your Speaking’, p116 #101.]

Sin is good at marketing, and that is what we find in the Garden of Eden: “You will not surely die,” says the serpent (Genesis 3:4).

Christians realise through this story and others – as well as our own experience – that sin cuts us off from God. But fallenness has many more consequences. Whatever God’s goodness in creation, sin means that we live in an off-kilter universe. In the story – and in life – humans are alienated from God: Adam and Eve hide from God and can no longer be naked before him. They are alienated from each other, as they blame each other, and the husband ends up ruling over the wife. Sharing in God’s act of creating by bringing new life into the world is affected too, as childbirth becomes painful. The relationship with the rest of creation is disrupted, as Adam’s tilling of the land becomes a burden. Worst of all is the association of sin with decay and death.

This sin is not just isolated individual acts. This is what we call fallenness, or original sin. It is the state we are in. Think of it like being born in enemy territory, in a land opposed to God and his goodness. You are not responsible for having been born there, but you are responsible for your actions if you stay there.

This fallenness produces disruption, decay, and death that permeate creation. Every part of existence is affected. If we were born with certain predispositions, it does not mean that these were all what God intended for us. We cannot use the excuse, “I was born that way; God made me like this.”

Thus, we recognise the need for healing, because all are affected by decay and death through the universe being out of harmony with God. It is not to say that every illness is caused by a sin. it would be cruel to say, “You are ill, because you did something wicked.” But we accept that at times our sinful behaviour is bad for our bodies and may make us ill. However, generally the truth is that creation’s disrupted relationship with God leaves everything subject to decay.

Therefore, the healing ministry is one sign of the battle against sin and all that opposes God. Sickness is a sign that all is not as God intended it to be, and the healing ministry is a sign that God will not take that lying down.

3. Redemption
The promise of redemption comes as God curses the serpent in the Garden:

‘And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head
    and you will strike his heel.’
(Genesis 3:15)

Christians have traditionally seen this as a prophecy of Jesus and his cross. He is the offspring of woman who crushes the serpent, the tempter, but who is wounded in the heel, that is, where he touches the earth. The New Testament presents the Cross of Jesus not only as Jesus being a substitute for our personal sin but also as the victory over all the powers of darkness.

Not only that, the prophecy in Isaiah 53 of a suffering servant that the New Testament sees as being fulfilled in the sacrificial ministry of Jesus is applied in Matthew’s Gospel to the healing ministry:

‘When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. This was to fulfil what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah:

    “He took up our infirmities,
        and carried our diseases.”‘
(Matthew 8:16-17)

Some people push this text too far, saying that healing is just as much the birthright of the Christian through the Cross of Christ as forgiveness is. I think it is better to see it more generally: if in the Cross Jesus conquers the powers of darkness, then when healing happens in his name, it is because he has disarmed evil spiritual forces in his death for the sins of the world.

Therefore healing in the name of Jesus is part of the victory of the Cross. In terms of sin, God forgives us, but we must then – with the power of the Holy Spirit – live in holiness. In terms of sickness, God invites us to pray for healing as the Holy Spirit joins the war against all that denies the goodness of God.

That ‘war’ against evil is still on, even if the decisive battle was won at the Cross, rather like the D-Day landings showed which way World War Two would end, but it took another year to make the Allies’ victory certain, final, and complete. The war of God in the cosmos against sin is on a much larger scale, but it is in the context of that war, where Jesus has won the decisive battle that we pray for healing.

4. Kingdom
God’s kingdom has begun in the ministry of Jesus: in Jesus, God acts in kingly power. But we anticipate the time when the kingdom has fully come, when the war is finally over, and peace and justice reigns.

Come to Revelation 21, where a new heaven and a new earth appear, and the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, descends, representing the redeemed people of God. We then read that the old order of things has passed away. Death, mourning, crying and pain are abolished. All that has corrupted creation and caused dislocation and disharmony is vanquished. This is the fulfilment of the Christian hope.

In terms of healing, we look to the day when illness will no longer afflict our bodies, and they will not decay to the point of death.

What is the basis for this hope? It is in the resurrection of Jesus. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 verse 20, the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits of the harvest from the dead. The rest of the harvest will surely follow. As he goes on to say in verse 26,

‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’

Now we can assess where we are in general terms with regard to the healing ministry. We live between what has been called the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’. The ‘now’ is that since the coming of Jesus the kingdom of God is here and continues to come.

Because we live in the ‘now’ of the kingdom we may expect to see God act in kingly power when we pray with the authority of Jesus, and this includes healing, in which we follow the example of Jesus himself.

But we also live in the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom: the kingdom of God is not yet fully present, where even death has been destroyed. The D-Day landings may have happened, but we haven’t reached VE Day or VJ Day. Resistance remains; the war continues.

Therefore, not everything we long to see that is in line with God’s kingdom happens yet. Even if healing happens, people still at a later date die, because death will be the last enemy to be conquered.

We must hold this ‘now’ and ‘not yet’ of the kingdom in tension. To major on just one or the other is to distort the picture. If we only concentrate on the ‘now’ of the kingdom we shall expect everybody we pray for to find healing, and we shall have a crisis of faith when not everyone is. If we only concentrate on the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom we shall fail to pray for people to be healed when they could have been, and great blessing will be missed.

Conclusion
Let’s sum up: the doctrine of creation shows what God does and how he intends things to be. But fallenness introduces a corruption into the universe that taints everything in creation.

However in Christ and his Cross God conquers the powers of darkness; even if the final victory over death is yet to happen, the outcome is certain.

Thus we live in the tension between the ‘now’ of God’s kingdom, in which we expect to see him do great things in response to our prayers, and the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom, meaning that we do not see all that we long for in answer to our prayers. We may not know why such prayers are not always answered: that may be hidden.

Where does this leave us with healing? We need to listen for what God is saying and doing. Just praying a quick prayer and adding, “If it be your will” on the end can be the prayer of the lazy Christian who will not have the compassion for the person in need to spend time listening to God.

It is quite a different matter if either circumstances mean a prayer must be offered there and then, or if time has been spent trying to listen to God but try as you may you feel you have not discerned what God is saying. How should you pray then?

In those cases, surely the best thing to pray for is for God’s best for the person – which in the case of illness is usually healing. Perhaps God will say ‘no’, but at least give him the chance to say ‘yes’. Let us not deny the sick person the opportunity to receive blessing from God.

Technorati Tags: healing, MurrayWatts, BennyHinn, creation, fallenness, SimonCoupland, redemption, atonement, kingdomofGod

I’m starting a sermon series on healing tomorrow morning. Largely I’m editing an old sermon series, which any readers of my old website might recognise from three or four years ago. I’m preaching on this to prepare one of my churches for the introduction of ‘services of prayer for healing.’ Here’s the first one.

Healing 1: A Biblical Basis

Introduction
Here’s a howler from a student sitting an RE exam:

‘Everyone was pleased when Jesus healed the paralytic man, except Simon who had to pay to have the roof mended.’
[Murray Watts, ‘Bats In The Belfry’, p68 #95.]

Healing is disruptive, even when there is good news!

Seriously, though, the subject is fraught with difficulties. We long for healing: some of us have witnessed it; some have cried out for it, but not received it. Then there are the controversial practitioners. Beware some of the TV evangelists like Benny Hinn, who give a bad name to the good ones.

Some Christians even denounce all expectations of direct divine healing. I once heard a preacher denounce every Christian who believed in healing as people who demanded that God perform to their orders. This is a terrible misrepresentation.

The subject needs careful handling. Can any of us be completely objective about the question of healing in response to prayer? I can’t. I have known loved ones healed, I have also had my own share of disappointments, where I still don’t understand the reasons why.

So I shall take several sermons to explore this theme. Even then, I cannot cover everything. However, I hope I can give a rounded treatment of the subject as far as I can go.

We begin with a biblical basis for Christian approaches to healing. We shall journey with the story of God’s involvement with his creation, from the Great Beginning to the Great End. I shall do this in four stages.

1. Creation
Do you remember learning multiplication tables, chanting them until you knew them? If I wanted to know what eight times eight was, I could chant my eight times table until I came to that sum.

We see this learning by repetition in Genesis 1’s account of the creation. The words, ‘And God saw that it was good’ keep recurring, until you have received the message loud and clear that God took pleasure in his creation, declaring it good. Indeed, at the end, we read, ‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.’ (Genesis 1:31)

God’s action in creation is good, even very good. There is no hint in the account of any imperfection, imbalance, anything displeasing, any distortion, disharmony, suffering or evil. The child who asked her mother if God created lions and when told yes then asked a supplementary question, “But isn’t he frightened to?” missed the goodness of God in creation.

In terms of healing, we are to deduce that ill health is not central to God’s plan. Whatever God may allow and even use for good, it is not his best for creation. The intention of God’s creation is that everything is good and working well in harmony.

The doctrine of creation shows us the divine purpose in healing. It is to restore things to how he intended them to be. To care about healing the sick is to care about God’s creation and to share his perspective on how this world is meant to be.

But reality is more complicated, so we have to look at other elements of the biblical story.

2. Fallenness
A man dies and finds himself standing at the pearly gates. St Peter comes out to greet him, but looks puzzled. “We weren’t expecting anyone just now,” he says, “just wait here a minute while I look up your records on the computer.”

While the man waits, he notices a wild party going on down among the clouds. There’s music and laughter, food and dancing, and the people are having a good time. “I wonder where that is?” he thinks to himself. “It’s obviously not heaven, but it looks far too much fun to be hell.”

Then the gate opens again, and St Peter comes out scratching his head. “I’m really sorry to keep you,” he says, “but we can’t find your records at all. If you wouldn’t mind waiting a bit longer, I’ll go and have another look.”

So the man stands twiddling his thumbs, and every so often looking down at the cloud where the party’s still in full swing. He eventually makes up his mind, and jumps down to join the party.

But he falls straight through the cloud and lands in front of the devil. It’s boiling hot, the flames are shooting up around him, and the devil grins at him and says, “Welcome to hell!”

“But I didn’t want to come here,” the man stammers, “I just wanted to join the party.” “Ah,” the devil replies, “I see you’ve come across our marketing department.”
[Simon Coupland, ‘Spicing Up Your Speaking’, p116 #101.]

Sin is good at marketing, and that is what we find in the Garden of Eden: “You will not surely die,” says the serpent (Genesis 3:4).

Christians realise through this story and others – as well as our own experience – that sin cuts us off from God. But fallenness has many more consequences. Whatever God’s goodness in creation, sin means that we live in an off-kilter universe. In the story – and in life – humans are alienated from God: Adam and Eve hide from God and can no longer be naked before him. They are alienated from each other, as they blame each other, and the husband ends up ruling over the wife. Sharing in God’s act of creating by bringing new life into the world is affected too, as childbirth becomes painful. The relationship with the rest of creation is disrupted, as Adam’s tilling of the land becomes a burden. Worst of all is the association of sin with decay and death.

This sin is not just isolated individual acts. This is what we call fallenness, or original sin. It is the state we are in. Think of it like being born in enemy territory, in a land opposed to God and his goodness. You are not responsible for having been born there, but you are responsible for your actions if you stay there.

This fallenness produces disruption, decay, and death that permeate creation. Every part of existence is affected. If we were born with certain predispositions, it does not mean that these were all what God intended for us. We cannot use the excuse, “I was born that way; God made me like this.”

Thus, we recognise the need for healing, because all are affected by decay and death through the universe being out of harmony with God. It is not to say that every illness is caused by a sin. it would be cruel to say, “You are ill, because you did something wicked.” But we accept that at times our sinful behaviour is bad for our bodies and may make us ill. However, generally the truth is that creation’s disrupted relationship with God leaves everything subject to decay.

Therefore, the healing ministry is one sign of the battle against sin and all that opposes God. Sickness is a sign that all is not as God intended it to be, and the healing ministry is a sign that God will not take that lying down.

3. Redemption
The promise of redemption comes as God curses the serpent in the Garden:

‘And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head
    and you will strike his heel.’
(Genesis 3:15)

Christians have traditionally seen this as a prophecy of Jesus and his cross. He is the offspring of woman who crushes the serpent, the tempter, but who is wounded in the heel, that is, where he touches the earth. The New Testament presents the Cross of Jesus not only as Jesus being a substitute for our personal sin but also as the victory over all the powers of darkness.

Not only that, the prophecy in Isaiah 53 of a suffering servant that the New Testament sees as being fulfilled in the sacrificial ministry of Jesus is applied in Matthew’s Gospel to the healing ministry:

‘When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. This was to fulfil what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah:

    “He took up our infirmities,
        and carried our diseases.”‘
(Matthew 8:16-17)

Some people push this text too far, saying that healing is just as much the birthright of the Christian through the Cross of Christ as forgiveness is. I think it is better to see it more generally: if in the Cross Jesus conquers the powers of darkness, then when healing happens in his name, it is because he has disarmed evil spiritual forces in his death for the sins of the world.

Therefore healing in the name of Jesus is part of the victory of the Cross. In terms of sin, God forgives us, but we must then – with the power of the Holy Spirit – live in holiness. In terms of sickness, God invites us to pray for healing as the Holy Spirit joins the war against all that denies the goodness of God.

That ‘war’ against evil is still on, even if the decisive battle was won at the Cross, rather like the D-Day landings showed which way World War Two would end, but it took another year to make the Allies’ victory certain, final, and complete. The war of God in the cosmos against sin is on a much larger scale, but it is in the context of that war, where Jesus has won the decisive battle that we pray for healing.

4. Kingdom
God’s kingdom has begun in the ministry of Jesus: in Jesus, God acts in kingly power. But we anticipate the time when the kingdom has fully come, when the war is finally over, and peace and justice reigns.

Come to Revelation 21, where a new heaven and a new earth appear, and the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, descends, representing the redeemed people of God. We then read that the old order of things has passed away. Death, mourning, crying and pain are abolished. All that has corrupted creation and caused dislocation and disharmony is vanquished. This is the fulfilment of the Christian hope.

In terms of healing, we look to the day when illness will no longer afflict our bodies, and they will not decay to the point of death.

What is the basis for this hope? It is in the resurrection of Jesus. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 verse 20, the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits of the harvest from the dead. The rest of the harvest will surely follow. As he goes on to say in verse 26,

‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’

Now we can assess where we are in general terms with regard to the healing ministry. We live between what has been called the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’. The ‘now’ is that since the coming of Jesus the kingdom of God is here and continues to come.

Because we live in the ‘now’ of the kingdom we may expect to see God act in kingly power when we pray with the authority of Jesus, and this includes healing, in which we follow the example of Jesus himself.

But we also live in the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom: the kingdom of God is not yet fully present, where even death has been destroyed. The D-Day landings may have happened, but we haven’t reached VE Day or VJ Day. Resistance remains; the war continues.

Therefore, not everything we long to see that is in line with God’s kingdom happens yet. Even if healing happens, people still at a later date die, because death will be the last enemy to be conquered.

We must hold this ‘now’ and ‘not yet’ of the kingdom in tension. To major on just one or the other is to distort the picture. If we only concentrate on the ‘now’ of the kingdom we shall expect everybody we pray for to find healing, and we shall have a crisis of faith when not everyone is. If we only concentrate on the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom we shall fail to pray for people to be healed when they could have been, and great blessing will be missed.

Conclusion
Let’s sum up: the doctrine of creation shows what God does and how he intends things to be. But fallenness introduces a corruption into the universe that taints everything in creation.

However in Christ and his Cross God conquers the powers of darkness; even if the final victory over death is yet to happen, the outcome is certain.

Thus we live in the tension between the ‘now’ of God’s kingdom, in which we expect to see him do great things in response to our prayers, and the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom, meaning that we do not see all that we long for in answer to our prayers. We may not know why such prayers are not always answered: that may be hidden.

Where does this leave us with healing? We need to listen for what God is saying and doing. Just praying a quick prayer and adding, “If it be your will” on the end can be the prayer of the lazy Christian who will not have the compassion for the person in need to spend time listening to God.

It is quite a different matter if either circumstances mean a prayer must be offered there and then, or if time has been spent trying to listen to God but try as you may you feel you have not discerned what God is saying. How should you pray then?

In those cases, surely the best thing to pray for is for God’s best for the person – which in the case of illness is usually healing. Perhaps God will say ‘no’, but at least give him the chance to say ‘yes’. Let us not deny the sick person the opportunity to receive blessing from God.

Technorati Tags: healing, MurrayWatts, BennyHinn, creation, fallenness, SimonCoupland, redemption, atonement, kingdomofGod

I’m starting a sermon series on healing tomorrow morning. Largely I’m editing an old sermon series, which any readers of my old website might recognise from three or four years ago. I’m preaching on this to prepare one of my churches for the introduction of ‘services of prayer for healing.’ Here’s the first one.

Healing 1: A Biblical Basis

Introduction
Here’s a howler from a student sitting an RE exam:

‘Everyone was pleased when Jesus healed the paralytic man, except Simon who had to pay to have the roof mended.’
[Murray Watts, ‘Bats In The Belfry’, p68 #95.]

Healing is disruptive, even when there is good news!

Seriously, though, the subject is fraught with difficulties. We long for healing: some of us have witnessed it; some have cried out for it, but not received it. Then there are the controversial practitioners. Beware some of the TV evangelists like Benny Hinn, who give a bad name to the good ones.

Some Christians even denounce all expectations of direct divine healing. I once heard a preacher denounce every Christian who believed in healing as people who demanded that God perform to their orders. This is a terrible misrepresentation.

The subject needs careful handling. Can any of us be completely objective about the question of healing in response to prayer? I can’t. I have known loved ones healed, I have also had my own share of disappointments, where I still don’t understand the reasons why.

So I shall take several sermons to explore this theme. Even then, I cannot cover everything. However, I hope I can give a rounded treatment of the subject as far as I can go.

We begin with a biblical basis for Christian approaches to healing. We shall journey with the story of God’s involvement with his creation, from the Great Beginning to the Great End. I shall do this in four stages.

1. Creation
Do you remember learning multiplication tables, chanting them until you knew them? If I wanted to know what eight times eight was, I could chant my eight times table until I came to that sum.

We see this learning by repetition in Genesis 1’s account of the creation. The words, ‘And God saw that it was good’ keep recurring, until you have received the message loud and clear that God took pleasure in his creation, declaring it good. Indeed, at the end, we read, ‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.’ (Genesis 1:31)

God’s action in creation is good, even very good. There is no hint in the account of any imperfection, imbalance, anything displeasing, any distortion, disharmony, suffering or evil. The child who asked her mother if God created lions and when told yes then asked a supplementary question, “But isn’t he frightened to?” missed the goodness of God in creation.

In terms of healing, we are to deduce that ill health is not central to God’s plan. Whatever God may allow and even use for good, it is not his best for creation. The intention of God’s creation is that everything is good and working well in harmony.

The doctrine of creation shows us the divine purpose in healing. It is to restore things to how he intended them to be. To care about healing the sick is to care about God’s creation and to share his perspective on how this world is meant to be.

But reality is more complicated, so we have to look at other elements of the biblical story.

2. Fallenness
A man dies and finds himself standing at the pearly gates. St Peter comes out to greet him, but looks puzzled. “We weren’t expecting anyone just now,” he says, “just wait here a minute while I look up your records on the computer.”

While the man waits, he notices a wild party going on down among the clouds. There’s music and laughter, food and dancing, and the people are having a good time. “I wonder where that is?” he thinks to himself. “It’s obviously not heaven, but it looks far too much fun to be hell.”

Then the gate opens again, and St Peter comes out scratching his head. “I’m really sorry to keep you,” he says, “but we can’t find your records at all. If you wouldn’t mind waiting a bit longer, I’ll go and have another look.”

So the man stands twiddling his thumbs, and every so often looking down at the cloud where the party’s still in full swing. He eventually makes up his mind, and jumps down to join the party.

But he falls straight through the cloud and lands in front of the devil. It’s boiling hot, the flames are shooting up around him, and the devil grins at him and says, “Welcome to hell!”

“But I didn’t want to come here,” the man stammers, “I just wanted to join the party.” “Ah,” the devil replies, “I see you’ve come across our marketing department.”
[Simon Coupland, ‘Spicing Up Your Speaking’, p116 #101.]

Sin is good at marketing, and that is what we find in the Garden of Eden: “You will not surely die,” says the serpent (Genesis 3:4).

Christians realise through this story and others – as well as our own experience – that sin cuts us off from God. But fallenness has many more consequences. Whatever God’s goodness in creation, sin means that we live in an off-kilter universe. In the story – and in life – humans are alienated from God: Adam and Eve hide from God and can no longer be naked before him. They are alienated from each other, as they blame each other, and the husband ends up ruling over the wife. Sharing in God’s act of creating by bringing new life into the world is affected too, as childbirth becomes painful. The relationship with the rest of creation is disrupted, as Adam’s tilling of the land becomes a burden. Worst of all is the association of sin with decay and death.

This sin is not just isolated individual acts. This is what we call fallenness, or original sin. It is the state we are in. Think of it like being born in enemy territory, in a land opposed to God and his goodness. You are not responsible for having been born there, but you are responsible for your actions if you stay there.

This fallenness produces disruption, decay, and death that permeate creation. Every part of existence is affected. If we were born with certain predispositions, it does not mean that these were all what God intended for us. We cannot use the excuse, “I was born that way; God made me like this.”

Thus, we recognise the need for healing, because all are affected by decay and death through the universe being out of harmony with God. It is not to say that every illness is caused by a sin. it would be cruel to say, “You are ill, because you did something wicked.” But we accept that at times our sinful behaviour is bad for our bodies and may make us ill. However, generally the truth is that creation’s disrupted relationship with God leaves everything subject to decay.

Therefore, the healing ministry is one sign of the battle against sin and all that opposes God. Sickness is a sign that all is not as God intended it to be, and the healing ministry is a sign that God will not take that lying down.

3. Redemption
The promise of redemption comes as God curses the serpent in the Garden:

‘And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head
    and you will strike his heel.’
(Genesis 3:15)

Christians have traditionally seen this as a prophecy of Jesus and his cross. He is the offspring of woman who crushes the serpent, the tempter, but who is wounded in the heel, that is, where he touches the earth. The New Testament presents the Cross of Jesus not only as Jesus being a substitute for our personal sin but also as the victory over all the powers of darkness.

Not only that, the prophecy in Isaiah 53 of a suffering servant that the New Testament sees as being fulfilled in the sacrificial ministry of Jesus is applied in Matthew’s Gospel to the healing ministry:

‘When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. This was to fulfil what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah:

    “He took up our infirmities,
        and carried our diseases.”‘
(Matthew 8:16-17)

Some people push this text too far, saying that healing is just as much the birthright of the Christian through the Cross of Christ as forgiveness is. I think it is better to see it more generally: if in the Cross Jesus conquers the powers of darkness, then when healing happens in his name, it is because he has disarmed evil spiritual forces in his death for the sins of the world.

Therefore healing in the name of Jesus is part of the victory of the Cross. In terms of sin, God forgives us, but we must then – with the power of the Holy Spirit – live in holiness. In terms of sickness, God invites us to pray for healing as the Holy Spirit joins the war against all that denies the goodness of God.

That ‘war’ against evil is still on, even if the decisive battle was won at the Cross, rather like the D-Day landings showed which way World War Two would end, but it took another year to make the Allies’ victory certain, final, and complete. The war of God in the cosmos against sin is on a much larger scale, but it is in the context of that war, where Jesus has won the decisive battle that we pray for healing.

4. Kingdom
God’s kingdom has begun in the ministry of Jesus: in Jesus, God acts in kingly power. But we anticipate the time when the kingdom has fully come, when the war is finally over, and peace and justice reigns.

Come to Revelation 21, where a new heaven and a new earth appear, and the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, descends, representing the redeemed people of God. We then read that the old order of things has passed away. Death, mourning, crying and pain are abolished. All that has corrupted creation and caused dislocation and disharmony is vanquished. This is the fulfilment of the Christian hope.

In terms of healing, we look to the day when illness will no longer afflict our bodies, and they will not decay to the point of death.

What is the basis for this hope? It is in the resurrection of Jesus. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 verse 20, the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits of the harvest from the dead. The rest of the harvest will surely follow. As he goes on to say in verse 26,

‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’

Now we can assess where we are in general terms with regard to the healing ministry. We live between what has been called the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’. The ‘now’ is that since the coming of Jesus the kingdom of God is here and continues to come.

Because we live in the ‘now’ of the kingdom we may expect to see God act in kingly power when we pray with the authority of Jesus, and this includes healing, in which we follow the example of Jesus himself.

But we also live in the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom: the kingdom of God is not yet fully present, where even death has been destroyed. The D-Day landings may have happened, but we haven’t reached VE Day or VJ Day. Resistance remains; the war continues.

Therefore, not everything we long to see that is in line with God’s kingdom happens yet. Even if healing happens, people still at a later date die, because death will be the last enemy to be conquered.

We must hold this ‘now’ and ‘not yet’ of the kingdom in tension. To major on just one or the other is to distort the picture. If we only concentrate on the ‘now’ of the kingdom we shall expect everybody we pray for to find healing, and we shall have a crisis of faith when not everyone is. If we only concentrate on the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom we shall fail to pray for people to be healed when they could have been, and great blessing will be missed.

Conclusion
Let’s sum up: the doctrine of creation shows what God does and how he intends things to be. But fallenness introduces a corruption into the universe that taints everything in creation.

However in Christ and his Cross God conquers the powers of darkness; even if the final victory over death is yet to happen, the outcome is certain.

Thus we live in the tension between the ‘now’ of God’s kingdom, in which we expect to see him do great things in response to our prayers, and the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom, meaning that we do not see all that we long for in answer to our prayers. We may not know why such prayers are not always answered: that may be hidden.

Where does this leave us with healing? We need to listen for what God is saying and doing. Just praying a quick prayer and adding, “If it be your will” on the end can be the prayer of the lazy Christian who will not have the compassion for the person in need to spend time listening to God.

It is quite a different matter if either circumstances mean a prayer must be offered there and then, or if time has been spent trying to listen to God but try as you may you feel you have not discerned what God is saying. How should you pray then?

In those cases, surely the best thing to pray for is for God’s best for the person – which in the case of illness is usually healing. Perhaps God will say ‘no’, but at least give him the chance to say ‘yes’. Let us not deny the sick person the opportunity to receive blessing from God.

Technorati Tags: healing, MurrayWatts, BennyHinn, creation, fallenness, SimonCoupland, redemption, atonement, kingdomofGod

The sermon below will be preached tomorrow night at a circuit service to mark the beginning of the new Methodist year (strangely, we think the year starts on 1st September – is that why you find so many teachers in Methodism?).

Matthew
16:13-20

Introduction
At the beginning of a new Methodist year we think of hope. But hope can be
short supply, like a precious metal. Signs of hopelessness surround us,
especially numerical church decline, with the time bomb of our particular
failures with younger generations. So many Christians are desperate for hope.
Where might we find it?

By way of introduction, I want to say that we sometimes look
for hope in the wrong places. It can be the hope we invest in a new minister or
a Christian ‘personality’. That’s why – at my welcome service two years ago – I
quoted the line from Monty
Python’s Life Of Brian where Brian’s mother tells the adoring crowds, ‘He’s
not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.’ Invest your hopes in Christian
leaders and you will be disappointed. Whatever gifts we bring, we are all
sinners.

Or we look for hope in the ‘latest thing.’ We hear that
something ‘works’ somewhere else, and we adopt it in the hope it will turn
things around for us. That has happened in recent years with the Alpha Course, where churches start to run Alpha
without absorbing its values. Even more recently, it has happened with Fresh Expressions. People don’t
cotton onto the radically different values from traditional church, and start
claiming that anything out of the ordinary is a ‘Fresh Expression’, when it
isn’t.

In all this lusting after the latest thing, we forget that
it is not techniques that save us, but Christ. In fact, both the fevered
adoption of trendy success stories and the false hopes placed on church leaders
amount to idolatry. They are a worship of something or someone other than our
God.

And not only that, the goals of our hopes can be wrong. Martyn Atkins,
this year’s President of the Conference, tells this story in his new book, Resourcing
Renewal about an incident in his first appointment:

 ‘What’s the purpose of
our church, why are we here?’ asked the leader [of the lay witness weekend].

‘To invite people to join us’, it was readily agreed.

‘Yes, but why?’ persisted the leader.

‘Well,’ said one of my stewards earnestly, ‘we’re all getting
older and someone’s got to do all the jobs – we can’t go on forever.’[1]

Do you see the problem? It was all about prolonging the
institution. There was nothing about wanting people to find Christ. They
construed church as a religious club to be maintained, rather than God’s
primary agent of his mission.

Idolatrous hopes and wrong goals for our hopes: we need a
corrective. Let me recommend this passage from Matthew 16 as one that will help
us do so. What constitutes hope for the Church?

1. A Church Where Christ Transforms People
Simon Peter makes the confession: ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the
living God’ (verse 16). It is this confession of faith that is entry to the
church, and its foundation. We are not dealing with a religious club, where –
as Martyn Atkins discovered – we need to invite more people to join us to do
the jobs and preserve the institution. We are a group of people centred on
living faith in Christ.

And Christ transforms the people who confess their belief
and trust in him. So Jesus replies, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For
flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I
tell you, you are Peter …’ (verses 17-18a). He renames him. No longer is he
Simon (the reed) but Peter (the rock). Yet this is the man who will soon
misunderstand him, who will deny him, and who will not always maintain the full
inclusion of the Gentiles in the early church.

But Jesus says, not Simon but Peter. He prophetically
renames him. He sees him as different. He knows he will fail within minutes. He
knows that will not be the final failure. But the renaming from Simon to Peter
is sign of hope. Jesus announces his project for Simon who is now Peter.
Confession of faith is not where discipleship ends, but where it begins. Jesus
loves us as we are, but loves us too much to leave us as we are. He is committed
to our transformation.

In the meantime, he doesn’t wait for our perfection. But – neither
does that mean Christ is content for us to stay as we are. So he gives us the
Holy Spirit to be partners in his mission, and to work transformation in us.

That isn’t to say ‘let go and let God’. God gives the Holy
Spirit to Christ-followers, but we have a responsibility to co-operate with the
Spirit in order for transformation to happen. What is our part in that? The
classic answer – and Broomfield friends have heard me say this several times –
is participation in spiritual disciplines. We make ourselves available for
Christ’s transforming work by his Spirit by practising spiritual disciplines.
Just as an athlete won’t win an Olympic medal without training, so we won’t
show the signs of spiritual
fitness and transformation without participating in the disciplines God
appoints for us.

So there are no shortcuts. A new Methodist year may well be
the time when we say we’ll commit to new patterns of prayer (alone or
together), Bible meditation, fasting, solitude, silence, giving, simplicity and
many of the other tried and tested disciplines. It’s time to renounce the ‘I
want it all and I want it now’ attitude of a microwave-cooked,
broadband-enabled society, in favour of what one writer called the ‘three
mile an hour God.’ He transforms us not only with an instant zap but also
in the slowness of discipline. Let us embrace that.

2. A Church Where Christ Is Lord
‘I will build my church,’ says Jesus
(verse 18). Would it be too shocking to suggest that there are occasions when
we think Jesus is not looking and we try to make off with his church, and make
it our own possession, our plaything, our hobby?

I have mixed feelings when I hear a church member say, ‘This
is my church.’ It can be positive: it can indicate that here is where I am
working out my discipleship. It can mean that here is where I have found a
welcoming community and the love of Christ. But it can mean, ‘I want things my
way.’ The idea that I can have worship how I like, and other things to my
taste, is one of the most damaging things in church life. If we take this
attitude, then when we don’t like something we become like the small child who
throws a tantrum, picks up the football and says, ‘It’s my ball, and I’m taking
it home.’

But Church is not something we buy at Toys R Us: it is
Christ’s body. It is the community of his Father’s kingdom. It is the people
living under the reign of God. It is Christ’s primary agent in mission. To
reduce it to a consumer choice is to insult Christ. It’s like the true story of
a lad who asked his father, ‘Which brand of church do we belong to?’, as if you
could reduce church to the status of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s or Tesco. Some of us
have chosen church on the grounds of ‘brand’, and then we think we own it. This
has to stop.

So I sense an old message being renewed for us: Jesus wants
his church back. It’s not that we offer the church to him as a present; it’s
that we return to him what is rightfully his. So if my first point about
spiritual transformation is a call to discipline, this second point is a call
to repentance. Let Jesus have the first and final words about his church. In his
words, not ours, we find hope.

3. A Church Built By Christ
As I said in my introduction, we might wrongly hope in the latest spiritual
fashions and success stories. And we want more people to join us – although sometimes
our motives are questionable. The New Testament paints a picture of a growing
church. In this passage, Jesus promises, ‘I will build my church’ (verse 18).

Jesus wants a growing church, but he builds it, not us. One trap
of a technological society is that we think we can deploy certain techniques
and then results are guaranteed. That has its place. But it is dangerous
nonsense when transferred to the church. In the church, we do not deal with
processes, engines and computer chips: we deal with people. Church growth is
not technique. It is the work of Christ. Our hope for growth is not in finding
the latest programme or adopting a new fad: our hope is in him.

What is our response, then? Is it to sit back and do
nothing? Is it to blame Jesus for numerical decline? No. We still have a
responsibility. It just isn’t for the growth. We are responsible for the health
of the church. Those who research church growth today say that Christ grows the
church, but our part is to create a healthy
church. Researchers such as the Anglican Robert Warren suggest
several qualities:

energised by faith; outward-looking focus; seeks to find what
God wants; faces the cost of change and growth; operates as a community; makes
room for all; and does a few things and does them well

At this point, let me simply call for a health
check, a spiritual ‘medical’ for our churches. The ministers of this District
have a medical every two years: maybe a medical for our churches wouldn’t be so
bad, either! When I had one of these medicals in January, they highlighted one
or two things I needed to change in order to be healthier. More exercise and
less chocolate would be the summary! What might a spiritual medical of our
churches ask us to change? Here are a few suggestions:

·        
Stop treating
the church as if it were for us and not the world

·        
Remember to forgive
one another

·        
Stop using
power in the church to hurt others.

That will do for starters! Can you spot what’s
unhealthy in the church you serve? Will you address it?

4. A Church Focussed On Christ’s Future
‘I will build my church, and the
gates of Hades will not prevail against it,’ promised Jesus (verse 18).

How
easily we adopt a siege mentality. One evangelist I used to know said that
everywhere he travelled, the local Christians told him their town was the
hardest place for the Gospel. They couldn’t all be! But we may be prone to
think that the forces of evil are overwhelming us.

Jesus
will have none of it: ‘the gates of Hades will not prevail against’ his church.
Gates are not a form of attack, but a form of defence! When did an aggressive
pair of gates last clobber you? No. The gates of death – Hades being the place
of the dead – cannot cope with the forward movement of Christ’s church. We are
resurrection people, and death cannot stand in our way.

But
you may feel death is getting in the way of the Christian church. Members die,
and we don’t seem to be replacing them with younger Christians. We’re growing
the Church Triumphant, but not the Church Militant.

Yet
– death is ‘the last enemy.’ If death cannot cope with Christ and his Gospel,
then it means that everything the enemy and the forces of evil have at their
disposal is too weak to withstand the God of creation, his servant Son who
stoops to conquer from a Cross and leave a cold tomb empty.

How
might we respond? Well, we love all that resurrection talk. We thrill that
death will finally be defeated. But resurrection requires a death first. To experience
the all-conquering resurrection power of Christ in our churches is going to
require some death first. Are there aspects of church life that are no longer
suitable for today’s challenges? The methods of the nineteenth century or the
1950s need to die.

Yes,
we need to stay rooted in the Gospel that is Jesus. But where we have elevated
other things as if they, too, were non-negotiable, then a death is called for. That
can mean the style and content of worship, the ways of doing church, and so on.
Even good things may need to die. All God calls us to keep is faith in Christ
crucified and risen, and the Spirit-empowered life of the kingdom community. Everything
else is relative. There will be funerals before we live the resurrection hope
of Christ. But those communities willing to live the adventure of following
Jesus will find indestructible resurrection hope.

Conclusion
Do we want hope? It’s found in Christ. He transforms people; he is Lord of the
church; he builds the church; and he gives it resurrection hope.

But
each of these Gospel promises comes with a challenge: to spiritual discipline;
giving the church back to him; looking after the health of the church; and
seeing what needs to die.

Who
will embrace this adventure of hope?

Technorati Tags: hope, Methodist, MontyPython, LifeOfBrian, AlphaCourse, FreshExpressions, MartynAtkins, spiritualdisciplines, churchgrowth, churchhealth, RobertWarren, resurrection

The sermon below will be preached tomorrow night at a circuit service to mark the beginning of the new Methodist year (strangely, we think the year starts on 1st September – is that why you find so many teachers in Methodism?).

Matthew
16:13-20

Introduction
At the beginning of a new Methodist year we think of hope. But hope can be
short supply, like a precious metal. Signs of hopelessness surround us,
especially numerical church decline, with the time bomb of our particular
failures with younger generations. So many Christians are desperate for hope.
Where might we find it?

By way of introduction, I want to say that we sometimes look
for hope in the wrong places. It can be the hope we invest in a new minister or
a Christian ‘personality’. That’s why – at my welcome service two years ago – I
quoted the line from Monty
Python’s Life Of Brian where Brian’s mother tells the adoring crowds, ‘He’s
not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.’ Invest your hopes in Christian
leaders and you will be disappointed. Whatever gifts we bring, we are all
sinners.

Or we look for hope in the ‘latest thing.’ We hear that
something ‘works’ somewhere else, and we adopt it in the hope it will turn
things around for us. That has happened in recent years with the Alpha Course, where churches start to run Alpha
without absorbing its values. Even more recently, it has happened with Fresh Expressions. People don’t
cotton onto the radically different values from traditional church, and start
claiming that anything out of the ordinary is a ‘Fresh Expression’, when it
isn’t.

In all this lusting after the latest thing, we forget that
it is not techniques that save us, but Christ. In fact, both the fevered
adoption of trendy success stories and the false hopes placed on church leaders
amount to idolatry. They are a worship of something or someone other than our
God.

And not only that, the goals of our hopes can be wrong. Martyn Atkins,
this year’s President of the Conference, tells this story in his new book, Resourcing
Renewal about an incident in his first appointment:

 ‘What’s the purpose of
our church, why are we here?’ asked the leader [of the lay witness weekend].

‘To invite people to join us’, it was readily agreed.

‘Yes, but why?’ persisted the leader.

‘Well,’ said one of my stewards earnestly, ‘we’re all getting
older and someone’s got to do all the jobs – we can’t go on forever.’[1]

Do you see the problem? It was all about prolonging the
institution. There was nothing about wanting people to find Christ. They
construed church as a religious club to be maintained, rather than God’s
primary agent of his mission.

Idolatrous hopes and wrong goals for our hopes: we need a
corrective. Let me recommend this passage from Matthew 16 as one that will help
us do so. What constitutes hope for the Church?

1. A Church Where Christ Transforms People
Simon Peter makes the confession: ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the
living God’ (verse 16). It is this confession of faith that is entry to the
church, and its foundation. We are not dealing with a religious club, where –
as Martyn Atkins discovered – we need to invite more people to join us to do
the jobs and preserve the institution. We are a group of people centred on
living faith in Christ.

And Christ transforms the people who confess their belief
and trust in him. So Jesus replies, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For
flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I
tell you, you are Peter …’ (verses 17-18a). He renames him. No longer is he
Simon (the reed) but Peter (the rock). Yet this is the man who will soon
misunderstand him, who will deny him, and who will not always maintain the full
inclusion of the Gentiles in the early church.

But Jesus says, not Simon but Peter. He prophetically
renames him. He sees him as different. He knows he will fail within minutes. He
knows that will not be the final failure. But the renaming from Simon to Peter
is sign of hope. Jesus announces his project for Simon who is now Peter.
Confession of faith is not where discipleship ends, but where it begins. Jesus
loves us as we are, but loves us too much to leave us as we are. He is committed
to our transformation.

In the meantime, he doesn’t wait for our perfection. But – neither
does that mean Christ is content for us to stay as we are. So he gives us the
Holy Spirit to be partners in his mission, and to work transformation in us.

That isn’t to say ‘let go and let God’. God gives the Holy
Spirit to Christ-followers, but we have a responsibility to co-operate with the
Spirit in order for transformation to happen. What is our part in that? The
classic answer – and Broomfield friends have heard me say this several times –
is participation in spiritual disciplines. We make ourselves available for
Christ’s transforming work by his Spirit by practising spiritual disciplines.
Just as an athlete won’t win an Olympic medal without training, so we won’t
show the signs of spiritual
fitness and transformation without participating in the disciplines God
appoints for us.

So there are no shortcuts. A new Methodist year may well be
the time when we say we’ll commit to new patterns of prayer (alone or
together), Bible meditation, fasting, solitude, silence, giving, simplicity and
many of the other tried and tested disciplines. It’s time to renounce the ‘I
want it all and I want it now’ attitude of a microwave-cooked,
broadband-enabled society, in favour of what one writer called the ‘three
mile an hour God.’ He transforms us not only with an instant zap but also
in the slowness of discipline. Let us embrace that.

2. A Church Where Christ Is Lord
‘I will build my church,’ says Jesus
(verse 18). Would it be too shocking to suggest that there are occasions when
we think Jesus is not looking and we try to make off with his church, and make
it our own possession, our plaything, our hobby?

I have mixed feelings when I hear a church member say, ‘This
is my church.’ It can be positive: it can indicate that here is where I am
working out my discipleship. It can mean that here is where I have found a
welcoming community and the love of Christ. But it can mean, ‘I want things my
way.’ The idea that I can have worship how I like, and other things to my
taste, is one of the most damaging things in church life. If we take this
attitude, then when we don’t like something we become like the small child who
throws a tantrum, picks up the football and says, ‘It’s my ball, and I’m taking
it home.’

But Church is not something we buy at Toys R Us: it is
Christ’s body. It is the community of his Father’s kingdom. It is the people
living under the reign of God. It is Christ’s primary agent in mission. To
reduce it to a consumer choice is to insult Christ. It’s like the true story of
a lad who asked his father, ‘Which brand of church do we belong to?’, as if you
could reduce church to the status of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s or Tesco. Some of us
have chosen church on the grounds of ‘brand’, and then we think we own it. This
has to stop.

So I sense an old message being renewed for us: Jesus wants
his church back. It’s not that we offer the church to him as a present; it’s
that we return to him what is rightfully his. So if my first point about
spiritual transformation is a call to discipline, this second point is a call
to repentance. Let Jesus have the first and final words about his church. In his
words, not ours, we find hope.

3. A Church Built By Christ
As I said in my introduction, we might wrongly hope in the latest spiritual
fashions and success stories. And we want more people to join us – although sometimes
our motives are questionable. The New Testament paints a picture of a growing
church. In this passage, Jesus promises, ‘I will build my church’ (verse 18).

Jesus wants a growing church, but he builds it, not us. One trap
of a technological society is that we think we can deploy certain techniques
and then results are guaranteed. That has its place. But it is dangerous
nonsense when transferred to the church. In the church, we do not deal with
processes, engines and computer chips: we deal with people. Church growth is
not technique. It is the work of Christ. Our hope for growth is not in finding
the latest programme or adopting a new fad: our hope is in him.

What is our response, then? Is it to sit back and do
nothing? Is it to blame Jesus for numerical decline? No. We still have a
responsibility. It just isn’t for the growth. We are responsible for the health
of the church. Those who research church growth today say that Christ grows the
church, but our part is to create a healthy
church. Researchers such as the Anglican Robert Warren suggest
several qualities:

energised by faith; outward-looking focus; seeks to find what
God wants; faces the cost of change and growth; operates as a community; makes
room for all; and does a few things and does them well

At this point, let me simply call for a health
check, a spiritual ‘medical’ for our churches. The ministers of this District
have a medical every two years: maybe a medical for our churches wouldn’t be so
bad, either! When I had one of these medicals in January, they highlighted one
or two things I needed to change in order to be healthier. More exercise and
less chocolate would be the summary! What might a spiritual medical of our
churches ask us to change? Here are a few suggestions:

·        
Stop treating
the church as if it were for us and not the world

·        
Remember to forgive
one another

·        
Stop using
power in the church to hurt others.

That will do for starters! Can you spot what’s
unhealthy in the church you serve? Will you address it?

4. A Church Focussed On Christ’s Future
‘I will build my church, and the
gates of Hades will not prevail against it,’ promised Jesus (verse 18).

How
easily we adopt a siege mentality. One evangelist I used to know said that
everywhere he travelled, the local Christians told him their town was the
hardest place for the Gospel. They couldn’t all be! But we may be prone to
think that the forces of evil are overwhelming us.

Jesus
will have none of it: ‘the gates of Hades will not prevail against’ his church.
Gates are not a form of attack, but a form of defence! When did an aggressive
pair of gates last clobber you? No. The gates of death – Hades being the place
of the dead – cannot cope with the forward movement of Christ’s church. We are
resurrection people, and death cannot stand in our way.

But
you may feel death is getting in the way of the Christian church. Members die,
and we don’t seem to be replacing them with younger Christians. We’re growing
the Church Triumphant, but not the Church Militant.

Yet
– death is ‘the last enemy.’ If death cannot cope with Christ and his Gospel,
then it means that everything the enemy and the forces of evil have at their
disposal is too weak to withstand the God of creation, his servant Son who
stoops to conquer from a Cross and leave a cold tomb empty.

How
might we respond? Well, we love all that resurrection talk. We thrill that
death will finally be defeated. But resurrection requires a death first. To experience
the all-conquering resurrection power of Christ in our churches is going to
require some death first. Are there aspects of church life that are no longer
suitable for today’s challenges? The methods of the nineteenth century or the
1950s need to die.

Yes,
we need to stay rooted in the Gospel that is Jesus. But where we have elevated
other things as if they, too, were non-negotiable, then a death is called for. That
can mean the style and content of worship, the ways of doing church, and so on.
Even good things may need to die. All God calls us to keep is faith in Christ
crucified and risen, and the Spirit-empowered life of the kingdom community. Everything
else is relative. There will be funerals before we live the resurrection hope
of Christ. But those communities willing to live the adventure of following
Jesus will find indestructible resurrection hope.

Conclusion
Do we want hope? It’s found in Christ. He transforms people; he is Lord of the
church; he builds the church; and he gives it resurrection hope.

But
each of these Gospel promises comes with a challenge: to spiritual discipline;
giving the church back to him; looking after the health of the church; and
seeing what needs to die.

Who
will embrace this adventure of hope?

Technorati Tags: hope, Methodist, MontyPython, LifeOfBrian, AlphaCourse, FreshExpressions, MartynAtkins, spiritualdisciplines, churchgrowth, churchhealth, RobertWarren, resurrection

The sermon below will be preached tomorrow night at a circuit service to mark the beginning of the new Methodist year (strangely, we think the year starts on 1st September – is that why you find so many teachers in Methodism?).

Matthew
16:13-20

Introduction
At the beginning of a new Methodist year we think of hope. But hope can be
short supply, like a precious metal. Signs of hopelessness surround us,
especially numerical church decline, with the time bomb of our particular
failures with younger generations. So many Christians are desperate for hope.
Where might we find it?

By way of introduction, I want to say that we sometimes look
for hope in the wrong places. It can be the hope we invest in a new minister or
a Christian ‘personality’. That’s why – at my welcome service two years ago – I
quoted the line from Monty
Python’s Life Of Brian where Brian’s mother tells the adoring crowds, ‘He’s
not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.’ Invest your hopes in Christian
leaders and you will be disappointed. Whatever gifts we bring, we are all
sinners.

Or we look for hope in the ‘latest thing.’ We hear that
something ‘works’ somewhere else, and we adopt it in the hope it will turn
things around for us. That has happened in recent years with the Alpha Course, where churches start to run Alpha
without absorbing its values. Even more recently, it has happened with Fresh Expressions. People don’t
cotton onto the radically different values from traditional church, and start
claiming that anything out of the ordinary is a ‘Fresh Expression’, when it
isn’t.

In all this lusting after the latest thing, we forget that
it is not techniques that save us, but Christ. In fact, both the fevered
adoption of trendy success stories and the false hopes placed on church leaders
amount to idolatry. They are a worship of something or someone other than our
God.

And not only that, the goals of our hopes can be wrong. Martyn Atkins,
this year’s President of the Conference, tells this story in his new book, Resourcing
Renewal about an incident in his first appointment:

 ‘What’s the purpose of
our church, why are we here?’ asked the leader [of the lay witness weekend].

‘To invite people to join us’, it was readily agreed.

‘Yes, but why?’ persisted the leader.

‘Well,’ said one of my stewards earnestly, ‘we’re all getting
older and someone’s got to do all the jobs – we can’t go on forever.’[1]

Do you see the problem? It was all about prolonging the
institution. There was nothing about wanting people to find Christ. They
construed church as a religious club to be maintained, rather than God’s
primary agent of his mission.

Idolatrous hopes and wrong goals for our hopes: we need a
corrective. Let me recommend this passage from Matthew 16 as one that will help
us do so. What constitutes hope for the Church?

1. A Church Where Christ Transforms People
Simon Peter makes the confession: ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the
living God’ (verse 16). It is this confession of faith that is entry to the
church, and its foundation. We are not dealing with a religious club, where –
as Martyn Atkins discovered – we need to invite more people to join us to do
the jobs and preserve the institution. We are a group of people centred on
living faith in Christ.

And Christ transforms the people who confess their belief
and trust in him. So Jesus replies, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For
flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I
tell you, you are Peter …’ (verses 17-18a). He renames him. No longer is he
Simon (the reed) but Peter (the rock). Yet this is the man who will soon
misunderstand him, who will deny him, and who will not always maintain the full
inclusion of the Gentiles in the early church.

But Jesus says, not Simon but Peter. He prophetically
renames him. He sees him as different. He knows he will fail within minutes. He
knows that will not be the final failure. But the renaming from Simon to Peter
is sign of hope. Jesus announces his project for Simon who is now Peter.
Confession of faith is not where discipleship ends, but where it begins. Jesus
loves us as we are, but loves us too much to leave us as we are. He is committed
to our transformation.

In the meantime, he doesn’t wait for our perfection. But – neither
does that mean Christ is content for us to stay as we are. So he gives us the
Holy Spirit to be partners in his mission, and to work transformation in us.

That isn’t to say ‘let go and let God’. God gives the Holy
Spirit to Christ-followers, but we have a responsibility to co-operate with the
Spirit in order for transformation to happen. What is our part in that? The
classic answer – and Broomfield friends have heard me say this several times –
is participation in spiritual disciplines. We make ourselves available for
Christ’s transforming work by his Spirit by practising spiritual disciplines.
Just as an athlete won’t win an Olympic medal without training, so we won’t
show the signs of spiritual
fitness and transformation without participating in the disciplines God
appoints for us.

So there are no shortcuts. A new Methodist year may well be
the time when we say we’ll commit to new patterns of prayer (alone or
together), Bible meditation, fasting, solitude, silence, giving, simplicity and
many of the other tried and tested disciplines. It’s time to renounce the ‘I
want it all and I want it now’ attitude of a microwave-cooked,
broadband-enabled society, in favour of what one writer called the ‘three
mile an hour God.’ He transforms us not only with an instant zap but also
in the slowness of discipline. Let us embrace that.

2. A Church Where Christ Is Lord
‘I will build my church,’ says Jesus
(verse 18). Would it be too shocking to suggest that there are occasions when
we think Jesus is not looking and we try to make off with his church, and make
it our own possession, our plaything, our hobby?

I have mixed feelings when I hear a church member say, ‘This
is my church.’ It can be positive: it can indicate that here is where I am
working out my discipleship. It can mean that here is where I have found a
welcoming community and the love of Christ. But it can mean, ‘I want things my
way.’ The idea that I can have worship how I like, and other things to my
taste, is one of the most damaging things in church life. If we take this
attitude, then when we don’t like something we become like the small child who
throws a tantrum, picks up the football and says, ‘It’s my ball, and I’m taking
it home.’

But Church is not something we buy at Toys R Us: it is
Christ’s body. It is the community of his Father’s kingdom. It is the people
living under the reign of God. It is Christ’s primary agent in mission. To
reduce it to a consumer choice is to insult Christ. It’s like the true story of
a lad who asked his father, ‘Which brand of church do we belong to?’, as if you
could reduce church to the status of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s or Tesco. Some of us
have chosen church on the grounds of ‘brand’, and then we think we own it. This
has to stop.

So I sense an old message being renewed for us: Jesus wants
his church back. It’s not that we offer the church to him as a present; it’s
that we return to him what is rightfully his. So if my first point about
spiritual transformation is a call to discipline, this second point is a call
to repentance. Let Jesus have the first and final words about his church. In his
words, not ours, we find hope.

3. A Church Built By Christ
As I said in my introduction, we might wrongly hope in the latest spiritual
fashions and success stories. And we want more people to join us – although sometimes
our motives are questionable. The New Testament paints a picture of a growing
church. In this passage, Jesus promises, ‘I will build my church’ (verse 18).

Jesus wants a growing church, but he builds it, not us. One trap
of a technological society is that we think we can deploy certain techniques
and then results are guaranteed. That has its place. But it is dangerous
nonsense when transferred to the church. In the church, we do not deal with
processes, engines and computer chips: we deal with people. Church growth is
not technique. It is the work of Christ. Our hope for growth is not in finding
the latest programme or adopting a new fad: our hope is in him.

What is our response, then? Is it to sit back and do
nothing? Is it to blame Jesus for numerical decline? No. We still have a
responsibility. It just isn’t for the growth. We are responsible for the health
of the church. Those who research church growth today say that Christ grows the
church, but our part is to create a healthy
church. Researchers such as the Anglican Robert Warren suggest
several qualities:

energised by faith; outward-looking focus; seeks to find what
God wants; faces the cost of change and growth; operates as a community; makes
room for all; and does a few things and does them well

At this point, let me simply call for a health
check, a spiritual ‘medical’ for our churches. The ministers of this District
have a medical every two years: maybe a medical for our churches wouldn’t be so
bad, either! When I had one of these medicals in January, they highlighted one
or two things I needed to change in order to be healthier. More exercise and
less chocolate would be the summary! What might a spiritual medical of our
churches ask us to change? Here are a few suggestions:

·        
Stop treating
the church as if it were for us and not the world

·        
Remember to forgive
one another

·        
Stop using
power in the church to hurt others.

That will do for starters! Can you spot what’s
unhealthy in the church you serve? Will you address it?

4. A Church Focussed On Christ’s Future
‘I will build my church, and the
gates of Hades will not prevail against it,’ promised Jesus (verse 18).

How
easily we adopt a siege mentality. One evangelist I used to know said that
everywhere he travelled, the local Christians told him their town was the
hardest place for the Gospel. They couldn’t all be! But we may be prone to
think that the forces of evil are overwhelming us.

Jesus
will have none of it: ‘the gates of Hades will not prevail against’ his church.
Gates are not a form of attack, but a form of defence! When did an aggressive
pair of gates last clobber you? No. The gates of death – Hades being the place
of the dead – cannot cope with the forward movement of Christ’s church. We are
resurrection people, and death cannot stand in our way.

But
you may feel death is getting in the way of the Christian church. Members die,
and we don’t seem to be replacing them with younger Christians. We’re growing
the Church Triumphant, but not the Church Militant.

Yet
– death is ‘the last enemy.’ If death cannot cope with Christ and his Gospel,
then it means that everything the enemy and the forces of evil have at their
disposal is too weak to withstand the God of creation, his servant Son who
stoops to conquer from a Cross and leave a cold tomb empty.

How
might we respond? Well, we love all that resurrection talk. We thrill that
death will finally be defeated. But resurrection requires a death first. To experience
the all-conquering resurrection power of Christ in our churches is going to
require some death first. Are there aspects of church life that are no longer
suitable for today’s challenges? The methods of the nineteenth century or the
1950s need to die.

Yes,
we need to stay rooted in the Gospel that is Jesus. But where we have elevated
other things as if they, too, were non-negotiable, then a death is called for. That
can mean the style and content of worship, the ways of doing church, and so on.
Even good things may need to die. All God calls us to keep is faith in Christ
crucified and risen, and the Spirit-empowered life of the kingdom community. Everything
else is relative. There will be funerals before we live the resurrection hope
of Christ. But those communities willing to live the adventure of following
Jesus will find indestructible resurrection hope.

Conclusion
Do we want hope? It’s found in Christ. He transforms people; he is Lord of the
church; he builds the church; and he gives it resurrection hope.

But
each of these Gospel promises comes with a challenge: to spiritual discipline;
giving the church back to him; looking after the health of the church; and
seeing what needs to die.

Who
will embrace this adventure of hope?

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