Category: Sermons

Sermon: Testing Truth And Error

I’m back tomorrow from a week off, and return with another sermon in our series on 1 John, which follows below. Then in the evening we have our annual All Souls service for bereaved people, and I’ll be posting my brief sermon for that service here on the blog tomorrow.

1 John 4:1-6
During the 1960s and 1970s, denominations such as the Methodist Church and the Church of England tried various experimental forms of worship. From that period comes the story of an Anglican bishop who visited a parish. He went to begin the service with the new form of words he had become used to. He said: “The Lord is here,” expecting the response, “His Spirit is with us.” But when he cried out, “The Lord is here,” nobody responded.

He said it a second time, slightly louder, in case people hadn’t quite heard him properly. “The Lord is here!” But again, there was no response.

A third time he said, “The Lord is here,” but again no-one said anything in reply. Finally, in desperation, he found himself saying, “The Lord is here, isn’t he?” To which the vicar replied, “Not in our service, he isn’t.”

How do we tell when the Holy Spirit is present? It’s an issue we have to deal with in the church. How do we assess people’s claims when they say that the Holy Spirit led them to say or do certain things?

Here is one occasion when perhaps I should have thought a little more discerningly about that question. We were sitting in the living room of an Anglican rector friend’s rectory. Several of us from an ecumenical group in our area were present, along with two other pastors from elsewhere in the county. One was a prominent vicar of a huge church ten miles away that attracted a huge congregation from all over London and the South East. The other was the pastor of a large independent church from down on the coast.

We were gathered along with the representative of an Argentinean evangelist to consider inviting him to lead a conference for the whole county. In the middle of the prayer time, the independent pastor started making huge claims about how he could feel the Holy Spirit very close to him, telling him what we should call the conference.

As it happens, the conference wasn’t bad – a few exaggerated spiritual claims from one or two people, but nothing sinister. Except the time when the aforesaid independent pastor made the appeal for the offering. He dished out twenty minutes of emotional manipulation about giving, some of it connected to the idea that the more you gave, the more likely it was that God would make you rich, and all to a background of stirring music. If I hadn’t been on the team organising the conference and if I hadn’t had a rôle to play that night organising the team that prayed with and counselled people afterwards, I would have walked out. In retrospect, I think I should have seen the warning signs when he started making his grand claims a few months earlier about how close he claimed the Holy Spirit was to him.

You may not find yourself in that situation, but we all hear claims from time to time that the Holy Spirit has led someone to say something contentious or do something controversial. We have to weigh these claims carefully. Just because something is out of the ordinary doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong – but nor does it automatically mean it’s right.

John faced a similar situation in the community to which he was writing. People were making bids for leadership in the community, and claimed the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but clearly John himself was dubious about some of these people. He had to give counsel to the church about how to discern the godly from the fake. There are two tests he offers in this passage, and we’ll explore them for how they help us to separate the work of the Holy Spirit from that which is merely of the human spirit, or even of another kind of spirit.

The two tests are a test of belief and a test of behaviour. Let us consider, firstly, John’s test of belief.

This is how you can recognise the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. (Verses 1-2)

John’s opponents are teaching that Jesus only appeared to be human – a denial of the doctrine of the Incarnation. A word from the Holy Spirit will glorify Jesus, the true Jesus. It will not undermine Jesus as fully divine and fully human. It will not deny the Cross and the Resurrection, the Ascension and his Return. In fact, a word from the Holy Spirit will bring praise to the name of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.
So take, for example, the question of how you might respond to someone who tells you they have had a particular spiritual experience that seems strange or unsettling to you. Depending on your own Christian life and what you have become used to, that could be any one of a number of things. If, for example, you’re not used to the idea of people speaking in tongues and someone says to you they have received the gift of tongues, the question to ask is not, do I find this spooky and unsettling? Instead, the question to ask is, does this person praise Jesus more as a result of their experience?
Similarly, suppose someone tells you that they received prayer at a meeting and they claim that the Holy Spirit came powerfully upon them – so powerfully, indeed, that they couldn’t remain on their feet and they fell to the floor. The question to ask is not so much about the falling down as about the standing up afterwards. Did they acknowledge Jesus, the Jesus of the New Testament, as a result of their dramatic experience?

If the answer is yes, then you have a decent sign that the Holy Spirit was at work, because Jesus told his disciples (as recorded in John’s Gospel) that the work of the Spirit was to point to him. On the other hand, if someone’s conversation afterwards is all ‘me, me, me’ then you have reasonable grounds to doubt whether they had an authentic experience of the Holy Spirit.

Equally, if the spiritual experience is allied to a viewpoint that denies essential truths about Jesus, you can also be properly sceptical about its authenticity. So if someone claims something remarkable but it is in the name of, say, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, then you have every right to doubt not the reality but the validity of that experience. After all, Jehovah’s Witnesses dilute the full biblical revelation about Jesus into making him just a demi-god, rather than fully divine. The Holy Spirit bears no witness to claims like that.

It’s with things like that in mind that John talks about ‘the spirit of the antichrist’ – you have to delete from your memories the ideas you have had about some end times spiritual terrorist that you might have gained from horror films or tawdry Christian paperbacks. Instead, you have to see ‘the antichrist’ as all that opposes Jesus Christ in all his truth and majesty. Such opponents will not be drawing you into a legitimate experience of the Holy Spirit.

Secondly, let us consider John’s other test, the test of behaviour. Listen again to how this section ends:

We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognise the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood. (Verse 6)

The point John is making as a founding apostle of the Church is this: look for how people react to the teaching of the Church. John and his fellow apostles were witnesses to the Resurrection and many had spent time directly with Jesus, as John himself had. They were best qualified, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to say what was authentic faith in Jesus. Therefore it was reasonable to expect that anyone claiming true spiritual experience would listen to them and respond positively to their teaching. (It still is.)

If we want to know whether someone is being led by the Holy Spirit, we have a right to ask whether they are walking in ‘the faith once delivered to the saints’, as received, interpreted and transmitted by the Church over the centuries. We shall always be open to new insights into the Scriptures, and it is also true that following ‘what the Bible says’ is by no means always a simple and clear matter. However, we can still discern whether there is a desire to be faithful to the apostolic testimony.

It is therefore often a sign of someone living under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that she or he finds the Scriptures coming alive, and that this experience is accompanied by a desire to live out the teaching found there. If a person who is living like that speaks about experiences of the Holy Spirit, it is worth taking them seriously. That doesn’t mean being uncritical, but it does mean being warmly disposed towards them.

I can look back on the experience I had in my first circuit when we had an ecumenical project that put youth worship in the local night club. Some people thought that the loud and exuberant worship of the teenagers was spiritual froth. But I recall how some of those youngsters took part-time jobs in local care homes, where they washed and cleaned incontinent elderly people out of their love for Christ, and I say they passed John’s test of behaviour.

I look back too at what has happened to several of those teenagers and young adults in the intervening years. I see some who entered church leadership. I see a scientist who works on pioneer treatments for people with HIV/AIDS. And so I say yes, the test of behaviour was met by many of them.

On the other hand, we should seriously question those who make great claims to spiritual experience but who are not prepared to match it with a desire for holy living. The person who claims remarkable insights into the ways of God yet is also rather too acquainted with the emptying of alcohol bottles is not to be trusted, as is the person who shows dangerous signs of greed and acquisitiveness, or the Christian who treats the opposite sex with less than complete respect.

Likewise, too, we should be suspicious of those who take the apostles’ teaching and twist it to their own ends, in order to justify their own behaviour. Be wary, for example, of the Mormons, who claim all sorts of spiritual experiences, but who also teach the highly dubious notion of ‘celestial marriage’, despite Jesus’ clear teaching that ‘there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage in heaven’. And in promoting ‘celestial marriage’ they end up privileging married people and demeaning the single, the divorced and the widowed. They don’t seem to notice Jesus’ own marital status. In fact, they fail both the behaviour and the belief tests.

But although I’ve used examples of sub-Christian groups such as the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, let’s remember that John was specifically addressing a problem of people who infiltrated the church herself with their dilution of who Jesus was and is, and their rejection of apostolic teaching. They tried to claim a following, but the whole problem with them was that their whole approach to life and faith was captive to the world’s way of thinking and living, not Christ’s:

They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. (Verse 5)

Being sucked into the vain values of a world opposed to Christ is a danger we all live with. It is something each of us needs to guard against. To give into the world’s ways and seek approval there is one of the surest recipes for cutting ourselves off from true, Christlike spirituality. So as well as exercising discernment over the claims of others by examining their belief in Christ and their behaviour in response to apostolic teaching, we do just as well to guard our own hearts and minds. Let us devote ourselves to the full, biblical Jesus and to the teaching of the apostles, that in doing so we may be more open to the work of the Holy Spirit.

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Sermon: Children Of God

1 John 2:28-3:10

In between accepting the invitation to serve in this appointment and actually moving here, we made a few preliminary visits to the area. One of those occasions was an opportunity to have another tour of the school that our children were going to attend.
On the day, we arrived in good time and waited near the school office for the Deputy Head to meet us and conduct us around the premises. While we were waiting for her, we looked at a display on one of the walls. The school supports a charity that enables people in a Ugandan village to support themselves by growing and selling chillis. They also have a connection with the nearest school, in order to understand how different life is for rural Ugandan children, in comparison to Surrey children.

This fascinated our two, and provoked some questions. We explained to them that in other parts of the world, people don’t have anything like as much money as us, and that also they often don’t have much to eat.

We had our tour of the school and drove home, as it was then, to Chelmsford. That evening, at the meal table, Mark said he had something to share.

“I’ve changed my mind about what I’m going to be when I grow up,” he announced. “I’m not going to be an author after all. I’m going to save Africa.”

He wasn’t even six at the time.

We quizzed him about how he was going to save Africa. “I’m going to build supermarkets everywhere so that everyone can get the food they need,” he explained.

“But,” I said, “many of these people won’t have the money they need to be able to afford the food in your supermarkets.”

“That’s OK,” he replied, “I’m going to build money shops as well.”

It’s all so easy when you’re five years old, isn’t it? But eighteen months later, he still talks about this. He is still going to save Africa. Will it last? Time will tell.

However, what I do know is that from his tender age, Mark has this clear dream for his life. It’s not something I ever had. When people asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I never knew. I thought it would be to do with Maths, since that was my best subject at school, but exactly how I would use that I never knew. Apart from the fact that I definitely didn’t want to be an accountant.

Today we have two infants who have been welcomed into the family of the church, and it’s natural to wonder what they will want to do with their lives.

And our theme today is not simply ‘children’, it’s ‘children of God’. John doesn’t call every human being a child of God, he reserves that description for those who have committed their lives to Jesus Christ, and who have, in Paul’s language, been adopted into the family of God.

So when we talk about children of God, we mean the family of God. I want to share two things from this passage about what it means to be a child of God. And the first is what I have hinted at with my story of Mark wanting to save Africa: children of God have a dream for their lives. Hear again chapter 3 verse 2:

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

We don’t know what we will be like one day, but we shall end up being like Jesus. What better dream for our lives than being like Jesus, and doing Jesus-like things?

Let us dream with God about what we might do with our lives! We do not know what we might do, but the controlling factor for our dreams is ‘that when he appears, we shall be like him’. The goal of our dream is Christlikeness in character and behaviour.
So that means one thing, which the secular management book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ by Stephen Covey puts well: begin with the end in mind. The end for us as Christians is seeing Jesus and being like him in the kingdom of God when he appears. That is where we are heading. Let’s take that end and then imagine what we can do with our gifts, our talents, the things we feel passionately about, and all combined with the power of the Holy Spirit.

Can you imagine what the kingdom of God will feel like, full of peace, justice, love and healing, inhabited by unselfish, gracious people who use their every ability to bring praise to God and love to one another? Can you imagine your existing skills perfected and used in the service of Christ?

Why, then, do we settle for the mundane? Why do we just plod along? Why do we merely react to life, rather than taking life by the horns and saying, “I am a child of God. I have a destiny in the kingdom of God where everything will be Christlike, and I intend to start making more of life like that right now”?

This isn’t some plea for us to indulge our gifts and our interests. Because this is about working for the kingdom of God, this is about putting those talents and passions to work with a particular attitude, the heart of a servant.

Contrast, if you will, the child with the ambition to be a firefighter, a policeman or some similar profession with the disturbing modern trend, where children are asked what they want to be and they simply say, “I want to be famous”, or “I want to be rich.” That latter attitude, with its empty, self-centred approach, is the very opposite of what I am advocating. I am saying, let us be people who deploy all that we have and are in the power of the Spirit, not to make ourselves famous but to spread the fame of Jesus Christ. That’s the kind of ambition worthy of God’s children.

The second sign of being a child of God in this passage is that of developing the family likeness.

The headline statement is chapter 3 verse 3,

Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure

and is followed by all the comments regarding not sinning. This leads to verses 9 and 10 at the end, which link this life of doing right and not sinning specifically with our status as children of God:

No-one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.

I expect that when Max and Ben were born, your families and friends started to offer observations about who they looked like. “He’s got his father’s nose.” “He’s got his mother’s eyes.” You know the drill. I shall never forget when our Mark was born, a man in our church at the time said to me, “Never take a paternity case to court, because the judge will take one look at Mark, one look at you and laugh you out of court.” There is no mistaking that he is my son, just as Rebekah is clearly Debbie’s daughter – beautiful, blonde … and feisty.

It is similar with children of God. We show the family likeness, and as we grow, while we shall clearly be individuals and not clones, we also increasingly display a family likeness. In this case, it’s not physical appearance, it’s characteristics.

We get this in John’s expectation that those filled with the hope of God will purify themselves, ‘just as he is pure’ (3:3), and that ‘No-one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him’ (3:9). The language is very black and white, but John cannot mean that the only true children of God are instantly perfect, because he has made provision earlier in the letter for confession and forgiveness. It may be that the changes take place over a period of time. I think that’s what Paul envisages when he talks about ‘the fruit of the Spirit’: no gardener plants a seed and expects the fruit to sprout up the next day. Similarly, the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in us is a matter of time and growth.

Nevertheless, John clearly expects a fundamental change in those who become children of God. The family likeness should be visible. The church should be different, and we should make no excuses when we are not.

In particular, John gives one specific example of how the family likeness should be seen: he says a difference should be seen within the family of God. ‘Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother’ (3:10). In other words, within God’s family we are to love our brothers and sisters.

So what we can specifically do without in the Christian church is bitching, gossiping, a critical spirit and similar attitudes. When these go on in a church, the blessing of God lifts and goes away.

We might say, “But I wish I could choose the members of my church family, because the other members of the family here are not the kind of people I naturally like.” Yet that is no excuse. We don’t get to choose the members of our physical families, either, with the exception of the person we choose to marry.

Some of you have heard how in my first appointment I was involved in a youth worship event that took place in the local night club. Our band of young adults and teenagers became quite proficient and were asked to offer their experience to some other churches. When I moved on from there, I invited them down to run a day conference on worship. I hoped that the seminars they led would help other singers and musicians involved in leading worship to become more proficient.

But the main outcome of the day wasn’t increased proficiency. It came during the evening celebration service, and wasn’t demonstrated by people who had learned new chords or new harmonies. It was a different kind of harmony. Many people sought out others in order to find reconciliation. The dominant tone that night was not of singing, but of speaking. People were saying to one another, “I’m so sorry for the way I’ve treated you. Will you forgive me?” We heard not guitars, keyboards and drums, but weeping and sobbing.

Actually, we did hear some music that night. I swear it was the angels singing in heaven.

‘See how these Christians love one another,’ said critics of the early church. It made sense. That’s what children of God look like. Little colonies of the kingdom where love reigns, because God is love and we are his family. Children who have a dream of that kingdom, too, and put all their energies and abilities at the disposal of the Holy Spirit to see that kingdom come in greater fullness.

Knaphill Methodist Church – do we look like children of God?

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Sermon: A Missional Wedding Banquet

I’m not preaching in my own churches or even circuit tomorrow. We have a visiting minister at Knaphill, taking a missions Sunday, and I am filling one of his pulpits. Hence you may recognise the odd little bit of content here that you’ve seen previously from me.

Matthew 22:1-14
Legend tells of Ian Paisley preaching ferociously about the ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’ that we hear about in this and a couple of other parables in Matthew’s Gospel. As he described the torments awaiting the ungodly in Hell, one elderly woman spoke up:

“What about me? I’ve only got dentures!”

“Teeth,” replied Dr Paisley, “will be provided!”

For those of us who have a cosy image of Jesus and his parables, the ending to this one is a shock. We shall come to think about that shock in the final part of the sermon, but for now let me just say that we have become so used to the parables that we miss their shocking nature. The Good Samaritan is a shocking story. A Samaritan helps a Jew? Whatever next? A terrorist helping a wounded person in New York?
And the Prodigal Son? There’s nothing fluffy in that story. Jesus’ listeners would have been appalled when they heard that the father looked out for his errant son and then ran to meet him. Culturally, the father should have been waiting inside the house for the younger son to return crawling on his hands and knees, grovelling for all he was worth – which wasn’t much.

I would say it is a key to understanding many of the parables: look for the shock. With today’s parable, I venture to suggest that the ending is not the only scandalous part. And I think that in this parable of mission, Jesus needs to shock us into recognising key aspects of God’s mission, in which we share.

Consider, firstly, the initial invitation. This should be routine, shouldn’t it? The servants go out ‘to those who had been invited’ (verse 3). These people are expected to come. We might think with some justification that these are the people who would fall into the natural orbits of the two families about to be joined together. While social conventions are different today, we know that there are certain groups of people from whom we naturally draw the bulk of the numbers when we are issuing wedding invitations. Family – starting with the closest; friends – from school or university, from church or work or social circles related to our hobbies and pastimes. And so on. Most wedding couples don’t spring massive surprises with their guest lists, other than the usual difficulty of deciding where the cut-off point is.

And similarly, perhaps, with our strategies for mission. There are certain people whom it seems right to connect with first, if we hope to touch people with the love of God in Christ with our words and deeds. There are particular groups of people who we shall naturally invite to join us at church. There are those who once used to come, but then dropped out. They may be relatives of existing church members. There will be people associated with groups that hire our premises. Perhaps this list might include uniformed organisations. We might think of people who show a certain affinity with us, even if they do not yet share our commitment to Christ. If you have come across Back To Church Sunday in recent years, that is a strategy directly aimed at those who used to go to church, but who retain more of a sympathy for the church than we might commonly imagine.

Indeed, for a long time now, our mission strategy has been based on an appeal to ‘come’, and in generations when churchgoing was much more natural than it is today, that approach had certain degrees of success.

But there are a couple of dangers.

One is that the religiously sympathetic are not always the most likely to commit themselves to the radical step of following Jesus. Just as the natural invitees to the wedding banquet in the parable ignored, mistreated or killed the second wave of servants that was sent to summon them, so religious people can be those most inoculated against the Gospel. And could it be, given the way the king in the parable sends his army against those people who reject his invitation (verse 7), that God is less impressed with the religious and the respectable than we are?

The other danger is that the natural constituency for this approach is shrinking fast. If we do step out in mission, we want to be as comfortable as possible about it, so we only reach out to people we feel safe with, and furthermore we only do it in locations where we feel at ease – such as our own church buildings.

Secondly, let’s consider the second group that the king invites. The king sends his servants to invite ‘anyone [they can] find’ (verse 9), and this leads them ‘into the streets’ where they [gather] all the people they could find, both good and bad’ (verse 10).

What might this mean for us in terms of the call to Christian mission? Clearly in Jesus’ own day he is indicating a message that will ultimately go beyond the Jewish community to the unconscionable Gentiles. When those we might humanly expect to respond to God’s redeeming love do not do so, God has a way of pushing us out to the least and the last, to those least likely – at least in our eyes.
Before I studied Theology and candidated for the Methodist ministry, my prior work was as a civil servant, working in Social Security. As some people said, that was certainly one way of seeing life. During my first year in the civil service, I had my final family holiday with my parents. We went on a Methodist Guild Holiday[1]. One devout Methodist we met on the holiday asked me what my work was. I explained that I worked in Social Security. Back came a response I have never forgotten: “At least you are on the right side of the counter.”

Obviously, I have never forgotten those words for all the wrong reasons. Apart from the fact that in my work I knew full well that the great majority of those claiming benefits were honest people who didn’t want to be in the situations they had found themselves in, there is also the fact that this parable shows us how the Gospel is for those who are ‘on the wrong side’.

Could we not do with a challenge in the church sometimes to this effect? Who are the people whom we would not naturally consider, but who are loved with an everlasting love by God through Jesus Christ? Are there those he is calling us to reach in word and deed with his love?

Might it be that we just have a problem in the church with being that little bit too comfortable that we need reminding God sends to ‘anyone [we can] find’? Might this be to do with the same fear we hinted at in the first point that leads us just to operate our mission in places where we feel at home? We base our concepts of mission on attracting people to where we are already. However, while we want to bring people into the Christian community, could it be that in a day when – as I said – the number of people for whom it is natural to come onto church premises is shrinking so fast – that we might need to change our primary verb from ‘come’ to ‘go’?
Indeed, might Jesus be saying to us, look at how I embraced the Father’s mission? I am the Word who was made flesh and dwelt among you. I did not wait for you to come to me, I took the initiative and brought the Father’s love to you. And since at my Resurrection I said I sent you as the Father sent me, then do you not hear? Your call in mission is not to say, “Come to us”, but to go to the world, to anyone you can find.

Thirdly and finally, let us consider the intruder at the wedding.
Our own royal family knows all about intruders. Whether it’s Michael Fagan getting into the Queen’s bedroom, a comedian dressing up as Osama bin Laden or protestors from Fathers For Justice landing inside Buckingham Palace, they tend to suffer spectacular intrusions every few years.

I’m not sure whether the word ‘intruder’ is the right one here, but it will have to do. What I’m concerned with is the shocking end to the parable where the king finds a man who has managed to get into the wedding banquet without wearing wedding clothes. He suffers a cruel fate as the king orders him to be bound and thrown out. What could explain such an apparently harsh reaction?

When you attend a wedding today you normally dress up. I remember conducting a wedding in my first appointment and wearing my customary suit and clerical shirt only for a guest to complain that the minister ‘had no sense of occasion’. He was expecting a robed Anglican and got me!
They dressed up for weddings in the ancient world, too. Although a wedding feast could begin at almost any time, there was the tacit understanding that you had time in between receiving your invitation and the wedding beginning for you to find appropriate attire and put it on. There was also a tradition where a king would provide guests with festal clothing. Either way there was no excuse: if you come to the wedding, you will be dressed appropriately. To do otherwise was to bestow a grave insult upon your host.[2]

Now we can understand what was so wrong about the man who was not in wedding clothes. He has insulted the king. Either he had the chance to dress properly and he didn’t bother or the king offered him clothes and he had the temerity to turn him down. The man has enjoyed the invitation but he has not accepted the responsibility that came with it.

Hence this is a powerful picture to challenge the way we respond to God. We may not be like the religious people who refuse the need for grace – indeed we may know only too well that we are entirely dependent upon grace in order to enter God’s presence.

But some of us stop there. We know that Jesus accepts us as we are, but we then coast along complacently. We do not accept the obligation to change – to be clothed differently.

The old saying is that Jesus loves us just as we are, but he loves us too much to leave us as we are. In other words, he provides new spiritual clothes. He expects us to be different. The dirt must go and a clean, holy lifestyle replace it. What else is appropriate as a thankful response to the King for inviting us to his Son’s wedding banquet?

Tragically, some of us are just not serious about living a holy life. God offers us the new clothes – that is, he himself makes it possible for us to be transformed. He does this by the power of his Holy Spirit whose work is to make us more like Jesus. Think of the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – is that not a description of Jesus’ character? This is what God offers us.
But some of us are happy just to wear the same old dirty clothes. I have to admit that too often my wife has to remind me when my suits need to be dry cleaned. I don’t notice the marks on them. Part of my function as a minister is to hold before us all the need for a spiritual dry-clean. We need the reminder that we have got dirty again and we need to be cleaned up.

What does this have to do with mission? Quite a lot, to be honest. The Gospel is the Gospel of the kingdom. God’s kingdom is one of free grace that accepts us as we are. However, God is calling us to be community that is a sign of the kingdom, a sign of what is to come, and that means transformed lives. This too is part of our witness. Our call to mission is not only to go into the streets and gather anyone we can find, it is also to be dressed in our wedding clothes.

Are we playing our part in getting ready for the great wedding?

[1] Now Christian Guild Holidays.

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Sermon: Overcoming Sin

1 John 2:12-17
The highest grossing film in British cinema history is ‘Mamma Mia!’. You may well know that it began life as a West End musical, in which the story is woven around songs by ABBA. It tells of a bride-to-be named Sophie, who is trying to find her real father. She discovers from reading her mother’s diary that her father could be any one of three different men, and so invites them all to the wedding.

In a conversation with her fiancé, a character called Sky, she says, “I want to know who I am.”

He replies, “That doesn’t come from finding your father; that comes from finding yourself.”[1]

Knowing who you are is vital to healthy living. And knowing who we are seems to be John’s point here in the battle against sin. When he tells us not to ‘love the world’ (verse 15) – that is, the parts of creation organised in rebellion against God – it would be easy to issue a list of what to do and what not to do. A set of rules. He could tell us what is wrong in terms of the greed and lust he describes ‘the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride of riches’ (verse 16), naming and shaming all the wrong behaviour. It would all be so easy.

And so wrong.

It would fail. A list of rules on its own doesn’t work. Telling us what is right and wrong isn’t enough to induce good behaviour. It doesn’t transform us. If anything, it makes wrongdoing more appealing.

John has a different tactic here. He encourages us to know our identity first. He wants us to know who we are in the sight of God. Because that will make a difference.

So to get to how we resist the allure of a world in opposition to God, we examine the words before that, the words addressed to ‘children’, ‘young people’ and ‘fathers’ – because in spiritual terms,

All Christians should have the innocence of childhood, the strength of youth, and the mature knowledge of age.[2]

To be innocent, strong and mature in the face of temptation to sin requires knowing our spiritual identity. We need to know who we are in God’s eyes.

Firstly, we are forgiven:

I am writing to you, little children,
because your sins are forgiven on account of his name. (Verse 12)

You will recall, no doubt, that my predecessor was a big fan of Doctor Who. I do not share his passion. However, Rebekah and Mark avidly watch repeats of the children’s spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures and Debbie loves the adult spin-off, Torchwood. This last summer, there was a Torchwood story called Miracle Day, where suddenly humanity becomes immortal. A convicted child killer thus survives execution and lives to make this statement:

I have been forgiven, a substantial number of people have forgiven me. I can feel that in my heart, my guts. And forgiveness is like a tide or storm – it clears the air. I’m very lucky to have been forgiven and I feel very blessed. And I think of forgiveness as a cure.[3]

The character is right. Forgiveness clears the air. It is a cure. Amongst other things, it is not only a cure for past wrongs, it is a cure as we face present temptation.

How so? Like this: if we face temptation and simply invoke the ‘right and wrong’ approach, we shall get worked up about failure, because we shall feel both guilt and hopelessness on the occasions when we fail. There is no good news for someone who breaks the rules, if that is all there is.

But what if we know we are forgiven? People who are forgiven still have a deep sense of right and wrong. They too do not want to depart from God’s ways. However, their motive is different. They know they are loved, even when they transgress God’s laws. They still want to do what is right, but it is not out of fear. It is because they long to please the God who loves them enough to forgive them in Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Next time you face temptation, remember that God has already forgiven you in Jesus Christ. Remember what that tells you about the God of love, grace and mercy. When fear paralyses you, remember what kind of God we believe in: the God of the manger, the Cross and the empty tomb. He offers forgiveness before we receive it. Let that set you free in the face of temptation.

Secondly, we know Jesus:

I am writing to you, fathers,
because you know him who is from the beginning. (Verse 13)

‘Him who is from the beginning’ could be God the Father, but he gets a name check in the next verse, so we’ll assume this is Jesus[4]. In any case, knowledge of one is similar to knowledge of the other. However, for the purposes of this point we’ll stick with knowing Jesus, and see that as covering what John says about knowing the Father, too. But what is the significance to overcoming sin of knowing Jesus?
Let me approach it this way. I expect you remember the quiz show Mr and Mrs. Husbands and wives took it in turns to answer questions about each other while their spouse could not hear their replies. Then the spouse came back and we saw whether the answers were correct. You would see how well they knew each other. Sometimes it was surprisingly accurate, sometimes the surprise came in what they didn’t know about each other, however many years they’d been married.

Let me venture to suggest that our relationship with Jesus is a little bit like that. We come to know him through the forgiveness we have just talked about, and that relationship grows over the years. Our knowledge of him is far from perfect, but as we get to know him better we discover someone who is an amazing support in our struggle against sin.

It isn’t that Jesus is like an indulgent grandfather who trivialises the misdeeds of his grandchildren, who explains away their actions and makes easy excuses for their wrongdoing. Such an answer would not go down well on a spiritual ‘Mr and Mrs’.

Nor is it true to envisage Jesus as a severe monster, ready to rip to shreds any being that puts the slightest foot wrong. Again, that would be a wrong answer about our relationship with him.

The Bible presents an image of Jesus as full of both acceptance and holiness. His holiness means he cannot abide sin, but he also accepts us through the Cross, in which he has conquered sin. And furthermore, he is the Lord of the broken and the weak. If he has a particular group that he targets for criticism, it is religious leaders who harshly apply the rules and end up excluding people for no good reason.

When you know you are loved, warts and all, you can stand strong. If you doubt whether you are loved or accepted, you will wobble in the face of sin. If you are unsure of Jesus and his love, you will struggle. But if you know a relationship with Jesus in which you are accepted then yes, you will still stumble and fall from time to time, but you will be able to pick yourself up because Jesus does that for you and sets you on your way again. To know he loves you is to be in a different place when facing temptation.

Remember – Jesus is ‘him who is from the beginning’ – and since the beginning of all things, the Father and Jesus have had grand designs on your life. They have planned good things for you. Jesus is called ‘the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world’ (Revelation 13:8). Jesus is on our side in the war against sin. He is not standing back, waiting to condemn us at the earliest opportunity. He is for us, he has always been planning for our welfare, he is our cheerleader and he gives us all we need to fight against the lusts and desires of the world.

Thirdly and finally, we are winners. Compare the two statements John makes to those he calls ‘young people’:

I am writing to you, young people,
because you have conquered the evil one. (Verse 13)

I write to you, young people,
because you are strong
and the word of God abides in you,
and you have overcome the evil one. (Verse 14)

When our children are having one of their altogether too frequent wars with each other, they insult one another by calling out, ‘Loser!’ And sadly that’s what a lot of us think we are. We don’t see ourselves as winners, but as losers. We know our failures. The idea that we are in any sense winners makes little sense to us. We are conscious of our many failures, and some of us go further, tipping into low self-esteem, practising what someone once called ‘worm theology’ – as if we say, ‘I am only a worm.’ We might see ourselves the way Elvis Costello once described in a song:

I was a fine idea at the time
But now I’m a brilliant mistake.[5]

So talk of being winners in the spiritual life may sound like a foreign language to us. But John says we have conquered the evil one, we are strong, the word of God abides in us and we have overcome the evil one. In other words, whatever mess we have made of our lives, whatever mistakes and failures we can count, whatever disappointments we have caused, the Holy Spirit gives us the tools that can enable us to be winners – to ‘conquer’ or ‘overcome’ the evil one.

What are those tools? They come in our being ‘strong’ and in ‘the word of God [abiding] in [us]’. We have a new strength in that the Gospel is about more than the forgiveness of our sins. The kingdom message is not only that we are forgiven through the Cross of Christ. It is also that we are given power to live differently, because the Holy Spirit lives in us. Therefore, in the face of temptation, we have new resources to call on. When we struggle on our own, we frequently fail. But we are a new creation in Christ, the Spirit of God resides within us, and sometimes what we need to do is call out to the Holy Spirit for help.

We also have the ‘tool’ of ‘the word of God [which] abides in [us]’. The message of the Gospel, encapsulated in the Scriptures, is available to us, just as Jesus used it time and again in the wilderness when he was tempted. One of the things we can do to build up our defences ready to withstand seasons of temptation is to soak ourselves in the Scriptures. Not so much the quickly dashed off reading of the Bible for daily devotions, but taking the time to meditate on the Scriptures and give time for them to soak into us.

All in all, then, we don’t have to face the temptations of worldly lusts and desires with just our own willpower. We face temptation, knowing that it is not about struggling to achieve a certain performance level of holiness, because we are already forgiven. We face it too, in the knowledge that we are known and loved by Jesus and his Father. We cannot earn their love by attaining perfection; rather, we know already they are on our side, full of grace, mercy and love for the broken and the failures. And to our astonishment, we are no longer weak but strong, because the Holy Spirit gives us not only his own power but also unlocks the power of the Scriptures, as we take deliberate steps to store them up in our hearts and minds during our ‘seven years of plenty’ before the spiritual famine comes.

Let us be encouraged, then, that by the grace of God, the love of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit, we have the resources to resist worldly appetites. May we live more closely according to this Good News.

[1] Tools For Talks; subscription required.

[3] Tools For Talks; subscription required.

[4] Marshall, op. cit.. p 140.

[5] Elvis Costello, Brilliant Mistake.

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Sermon: Energised By Faith

Here’s my sermon for tomorrow. I’m preaching at another church in the circuit, and I get to kick off a sermon series they are following on the seven signs of a healthy church. ‘Energised By Faith’ is the first of the seven signs. What I’ve prepared is heavily influenced by my recent reading of Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost‘s book ‘The Faith of Leap‘, but I hope I’ve put my own stamp on it.

1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Luke 17:1-10

Recently, my wife and children and a friend left me for Beaver Camp one weekend, while I stayed home to take church services. On the Saturday morning that they set out, I expected our daredevil eight-year-old daughter to be excited. But our cautious seven-year-old son was excited, too.

“What’s in the programme?” I asked. Out came the list: tug of war, slippery bungee, rifle shooting (with blanks, I hoped), archery, hammock making, inflatable slides, rope bridge building, cooking full English breakfast around a camp fire, barbecue, curry. I was exhausted just listening to them reel it off!

“Why are you asking?” they interrogated me.

“Because I want to talk about it soon in a sermon,” I replied.

“Why?”

“Because I want to talk about how following Jesus is meant to be an exciting adventure,” I told them.

My daughter yawned. She has teenage attitude five years early. “But church is boring,” she complained. “Sitting in the adult service for ten minutes before going into Sunday School is boring. I prefer all age worship!”

Put that attitude down to, well … attitude, but don’t miss the fact that many perceive church and faith as boring. It was never meant to be. I went on to talk with my children about how in the Bible faith in Jesus was an exciting and dangerous adventure. But that isn’t what we often notice in our churches.

And in a week when I kick off your sermon series about the seven characteristics of healthy churches with the first of those characteristics, ‘Energised by faith’, would we not think that associating the word ‘faith’ with ‘energised’ might mean that faith is rather more dynamic than it often is?

Honestly, what do we make of it when we listen time after time to hearing that someone in our church had a ‘quiet faith’? If that means peaceful and serene, then fine, but if it means their faith never got in the way of someone else and led to energy or even conflict, then something is desperately wrong.

Think back to our Bible readings this morning: when Paul commends the faith of the Thessalonians, it involves imitating him, even in facing persecution, and becoming an example to other churches in the region. It involves their faith being known here, there and everywhere, not least for their rejection of idols in order to serve Christ. Is that ‘quiet faith’?

And when the disciples ask Jesus, “Lord, increase our faith”, and Jesus replies, talking about mustard seed faith that can tell a mulberry tree to be uprooted and planted in the sea, is that quiet faith? No! Whatever the text means, we can be sure Jesus doesn’t lead his disciples into growing quiet faith.

These two passages aren’t untypical of the New Testament. Jesus calls men to leave their occupations and follow him at the drop of a hat, just as God told Abram to leave everything and go somewhere unspecific in the Old Testament. When you get to the Book of Acts and you see the apostolic church putting into practice the Great Commission of Jesus, you see daring and courageous faith exhibited by Paul, Peter, Stephen, Philip and others.

By that reckoning, we should stop a lot of the silly talk in our churches that says someone is ‘faithful’ when all we mean is that they are ‘regular’.
Anyone who knows me for any length of time will hear me quote time and again something the late John Wimber said. Let me ask you this: how do you spell ‘faith’? Whenever anyone replied by saying, F-A-I-T-H, Wimber would say, “No”. The answer, he said, is that ‘faith’ is spelt R-I-S-K.

Faith as an adventure, a living on the edge, is normal. But you wouldn’t guess it from some of our churches, and I wonder whether the lack of it has contributed to our decline. Could it be that churches are declining, at least in part, because we have lost the daring, risky side of discipleship that is fundamental to faith in Jesus?


David Murrow is a television producer in the United States. He got bored with his Christian faith, and started exploring other religions, including Islam. He noticed that Christianity was the only major religion to have a major deficit of males in comparison to females. He wondered whether this might have anything to do with his boredom.

At the risk of grossly over-simplifying things, he discovered the work of an historian who showed that while there had been a seven-hundred-year history of reduced adventure in the Church, a major effect on this was the Industrial Revolution. By and large, as the men had to find work in mines, mills and factories, often far from home, the women who stayed behind rightly kept the notions of gentleness and nurturing. This showed itself in the rise of church nurseries, craft groups, Sunday Schools, soup kitchens and the like – all worthy and honourable things. However, with the men less able to contribute, the sense of adventure declined. In time, it became a vicious circle.

Now before anyone complains, I am not saying that all men are of the same style and all women are alike. The irony of me preaching this is that I am someone who was born with scoliosis, curvature of the spine, and this has affected what physical efforts I can make all my life. I of all people would not argue for a ‘macho’ culture in the church. It does exist in places, and it can be ugly. But you and I know that many men outside the church view it as like a lifeboat – ‘women and children first’. If we have downplayed adventure and risk, which are at the heart of the faith to which Jesus calls us, is it any surprise?

Might it be, then, that in order for the church to be ‘energised by faith’, one thing we urgently need to rediscover is this sense of living on the edge? Could it be that faith for us needs to be something where what we aspire to do can only be delivered by God, and if God doesn’t come through, we’re sunk? Could it be that too often what we call faith is really ordinary human action that is explicable in other ways, and we don’t like to admit it?

Now you will say to me that the church needs to be a safe place, never mind all this talk of danger and risk, and I will agree with you – up to a point. We do need to be a safe place for the broken and the wounded. In that sense, we are a little like the spiritual equivalent of a hospital. But just as hospitals aim to treat people so they can return to ordinary life and not spend their whole lives on a ward, so our aim is the healing of people in order that they might return to the action.
It may be worth remembering the exchange in ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ that the children have with Mr and Mrs Beaver when they first hear about Aslan, the lion, who serves as the Christ figure.

“If there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than me or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” asked Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

And of course the Narnia novels, along with that other great twentieth century Christian fantasy series, The Lord of the Rings, depict faith as an epic adventure. Can Narnia be rescued from permanent winter under the White Witch? Can Frodo and his friends dispatch the ring with its terrible curse and defeat Sauron and all the armies of wickedness? How will they cope with Gollum, who cannot be trusted as he vacillates between good and evil?

What C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien describe in those stories is an experience of fellowship being deepened as people go out on a limb in daring faith. It is something that has been observed through other disciplines, not just literature or theology. Those who study human society in anthropology and sociology have noticed this, too. Now I can give you the long words if you really want them – they are ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’ – but what it all comes down to is this: when a small group of Christians gets together to work on a mission project that puts them out beyond their comfort zones, they are pulled together into a much deeper sense of fellowship than they experience in any other form. The home group doesn’t compare. Certainly coffee after morning service doesn’t amount to much fellowship, compared with what these people experience as they forge new frontiers in the name of Christ.

Here is just one example of what I mean. It’s an experience I had in my first circuit as a minister. An elder at the local United Reformed Church had a vision to bring the teenagers of the churches in the town together for worship. This wasn’t too difficult. Representatives of most of the churches came together to form a planning group, and we started holding youth services every six weeks, going around various local churches, taking over their evening services.

However, youth services like that were altogether too safe and predictable. The teenagers needed something more credible, and relevant to their culture. We found an empty shop in town, and borrowed it for a very low rent from the landlord while he looked for new tenants. It was the days of the MTV Unplugged programmes and CDs, and we did ‘worship unplugged’, only having room for a simple acoustic set-up in the cramped shop.

But more young people were coming, and we reluctantly went back into church premises. We took over the URC church hall and decorated it appropriately. However, the teenage Christians wanted to be able to invite their non-Christian friends, and we were crowded for space. As we leaders talked, we realised there was only one viable option: we would need to move into the local night club.

One of our number, a businessman, approached the owner of the night club. He was willing to hire out to us, one Sunday night a month, and agreed that no alcohol would be served on those nights. However, the cost of renting the club was well beyond any level of finance we had ever raised for the project. What should we do? We were out of our depth.

As we talked, we concluded that God had always been stretching us that bit beyond what we had got used to each time. This was surely one more example of the same. We agreed to the night club owner’s terms, not knowing where the money would come from. But when we did, some wealthy local Christians backed us financially, and we never lacked the money to hire the club.

Is it any surprise that as a group of Christians, we experienced deep fellowship, deeper than the average Bible Study group? We did read the Bible and pray together – fervently! We also hung out together, eating pizza, watching videos and drinking non-Methodist liquids. We helped one couple move house. We babysat. We picked each other up when we were down – in my case, they rallied round when I had a broken engagement. Most of those things would happen to some extent in ordinary church fellowship, I know, but I can only testify that they were deeper in that group. To this day, I have never known better friends than the members of that group, and I miss them terribly.

Friends, could God be calling you to go beyond the boundaries of what you have done for him in faith before? Believe me, if you are willing to live on a knife edge for Christ by faith because he has called you, then every aspect of church life – worship, community, discipleship and mission – will be infused with an energy you have not known before.

Trinity Methodist Church: is God calling you to dive in at the deep end?

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Covenant Service Sermon: Knowing And Obeying Jesus

1 John 2:3-11
One thing we did at college was to take a survey to find out what kind of a learner we are. A man called Peter Honey had invented what he called his ‘Learning Styles Questionnaire’, and we all had to complete it. There were four types of learner you could be. I came out very strongly as what was called a ‘theorist’, someone who learns in a theoretical way. Next, I was a ‘reflector’, someone who reflects on what has happened and tries to interpret it. I only had quite a low score as an ‘activist’, someone who learns by doing, and I hit a big, overweight zero as a ‘pragmatist’, someone who learns on the basis of ‘if it works, it’s right’.

Today’s passage from 1 John poses us a question about learning or knowledge – specifically, our knowledge of God. The theorists like me can use knowledge of God to go off into our ivory towers (or onto another planet, Debbie says of me), contemplating all sorts of deep things, but not doing anything about it. We might be able to write complicated sentences with long words, but what happens as a result?

Whether we learn by theory, reflection, action or pragmatism, John tells us there is one basic test for true knowledge of God: does our knowledge turn into action? And this is the first theme I want to share this morning. Knowledge of God is only shown in obedience. Here again verses 3 and 4:

We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, I know him, but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

You can be as clever as you like, but if you don’t turn knowledge of God into obeying him, it isn’t true knowledge of God, says John. On the other hand, you can have a simple faith, but if you have grasped certain things about God and put them into practice, then you have more knowledge of God than the most learned professor.

This seems to be relevant as we renew our vows to Christ at this Covenant Service. Today we say again that we shall obey him. Today, then, we promise that we shall put our knowledge of God into obedient action.
A story is told about the great stunt man Charles Blondin. He had a tightrope stretched high above Niagara Falls, from one side to the other. Before a crowd, he walked the length of the tightrope, from one side of the Falls to the other.

When he got to the other side, he addressed his audience. “I am Blondin! Do you believe I can carry a man on my back all the way back along the tightrope to where I began?”

“Yes!” shouted the crowd. “We believe!”

“Then if you believe,” asked Blondin, “who will volunteer to climb on my back?”

From a crowd of thousands, only one person volunteered.

How many people knew Blondin could accomplish this feat? Only one.

It’s easy to affirm our knowledge of God. We sing hymns, say prayers and read the Scriptures. But the only people who truly know God are those who obey. I have been in Anglican churches where the person leading the worship has said after the sermon, “Let us affirm our faith by saying the Creed.” Well, I have nothing against the historic Creeds of the Church. I affirm them, too. But the real place we affirm our faith is after the service and in the world, by our obedience. You could say that it isn’t now that we know we are covenant people, it’s this time tomorrow – when our obedience matters.

Now if the first thing John does here is link knowledge and obedience, the second move he makes continues the sequence. He links obedience and love. This is summarised in verses 5 and 6:

But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.

Now why would John make the link from obedience to love? For one thing, he is saying that obedience is a sign of love. We say we love God, fine: how do we show that? Is it enough to sing hymns and songs? To say our prayers? To read our Bibles? To make solemn promises? However worthy any of those are, they mean nothing unless they are translated into action. So one thing John is emphasising here is what we have just said about knowledge and obedience: what counts is putting it into practice. Knowledge of God must be put into practice as obedience, and love of God must also be put into practice as obedience. We can make the most fervent declarations of devotion today, but what will they mean if we do nothing about them tomorrow?

Think of it this way: two weeks ago, I conducted a wedding at Weybridge. I had the privilege of taking the couple phrase by phrase through the solemn vows. They promised to love and cherish each other for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, until they were parted by death. Heart strings were duly tugged. Eyes became moist on cue. But what would the point be if they didn’t go on to love each other through thick and thin?

In a similar way, then, our love for God is shown only by our actions – in this case, our actions of obedience, because unlike marriage, our relationship with God is not one between two equals. Knowledge cannot remain abstract and theoretical; neither can love.

But maybe there is another reason. Perhaps we also need to be careful that love, and nothing else, is the motivation for our obedience. There are people in church circles who say all the right things on a Sunday and who then lead good lives in the week, yet still something is missing. They have things the wrong way round. They obey in order to be loved, instead of obeying because they are loved.

What I mean is this: our churches still have people who think that if you do all the good things, you can twist God’s arm to love you. If you are good enough – whatever that is – God will love you.

But that stands in contradiction to the Gospel. John will put it eloquently in a couple of chapters’ time: ‘We love, because God first loved us.’ In other words, the love that is translated into obedience is only something we do because God loves us in Christ in the first place. Jesus has died for us, therefore we love in return. None of us can be ‘good enough’. God knows that. He has made provision in Christ for that, at great cost. Today, we affirm that we receive the love of God, because he has made the first move, and we shall love in return as a sign of gratitude, and we shall express that love in our obedience to his will.

To sum up so far – knowledge is linked to obedience; obedience is the sign of responding love. Finally, John makes a third link: from knowledge to obedience, from obedience to love, and finally from love to light. In the middle of verses 9 and 11 where he discusses how those who hate a brother or sister are in the darkness, not the light, we get the positive side of the coin in verse 10:

Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble.

Again, hear a double meaning: the first meaning is again about putting it all into practice. If we claim to live in the light, we will love. Christianity isn’t about receiving some enlightened knowledge and then posturing around like some élite spiritual class. Coming into the light only happens when we live a life of love. Living in love in response to Jesus is what prevents us from stumbling. To continue living in hatred is to remain in the darkness, says John.
And is not that pertinent on this tenth anniversary of the so-called ‘9/11’ attacks? The American Methodist bishop Will Willimon has been reflecting on the anniversary, and he sees darkness not only in the terrorists, but also in his own nation’s response:

The criminals who perpetrated 9/11 and the flag-waving boosters of our almost exclusively martial response were of one mind: that the nonviolent way of Jesus is stupid. All of us preachers share the shame; when our people felt very vulnerable, they reached for the flag, not the Cross.

But I want to suggest another meaning here: living in the light by living in love is not simply something we do in order to benefit ourselves – we don’t stumble – how can it be? Love is for the sake of others, not ourselves! The light does not shine on us in private. Love is something done in the world. If we live in responsive love to Jesus by loving him and loving others, and if that means we live in the light, then … will not others see the light shining, because we love in the name of Jesus?

That is to say, there is a missional reason for love. We want the light of Christ to shine in the world. OK then, says John: get on with loving people!

Put it this way: some churches exhaust themselves with endless reinventions of their worship, their buildings and all sorts of other accoutrements, thinking they can make themselves attractive to non-Christians. But are non-Christians beating a path to their doors? No. Are they beating a path to many churches? No, again. In one previous appointment, I inherited a building refurbishment project that ran to a six-figure cost. The congregation sincerely thought that having swish new premises would attract the community. It never did.

But what if we were so committed to an obedience of love in the world that the light of Christ shone through what we do? What if we were the people known for loving the broken, loving the wounded, loving those whom society is too afraid to love?

Do we want more people to meet Jesus and follow him? Then let’s see what we can do to reduce our church bureaucracies that consume so much of active church members’ time and concentrate on the essentials: worship, community, discipleship and mission. If something doesn’t build up worship, community, discipleship or mission, we should jettison it. We need to be freed to love the lost and the needy in the name of Christ, so that Christ’s light may shine in the world and people may realise they have a choice to make between the light and the darkness.

This Covenant Sunday, may it be that the promises we renew in the light of God’s faithfulness to us take us on a journey from this building to God’s world. May our knowledge of God issue in obedience. May our obedience be motivated by love, a responsive love because God first loved us. And as we love, may the light of Christ shine: in darkest Knaphill, in darkest St John’s, in darkest Bisley, in darkest West End, in darkest Pirbright, in darkest Lightwater, in darkest Camberley. Everywhere we go, may we take Christ’s love and reflect his light.

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Sermon: Jesus Be The Centre

1 John 1:1-4
The Prologue. Say those words to Brits of a certain age and above, and they think of Frankie Howerd plying Lurcio in the TV series Up Pompeii.

But ‘the Prologue’ deserves a much more distinguished meaning for Christians. From the first eighteen verses of John’s Gospel, those famous words that begin, ‘In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God and the Word was God’, to the reading we have heard this morning, which constitutes the Prologue to the First Letter of John.
We reflect this morning on the Prologue to the First Letter of John as we begin a sermon series on that Epistle. Why 1 John? Because – at the risk of sounding like John Major – it helps us get ‘back to basics’. 1 John gets back to basics in two main areas – what we believe about Jesus and how we behave as Christians. Both were under threat in the community to which John wrote. It appears that some people had come along saying that Jesus hadn’t really taken on human flesh, it only looked like it. They also seemed to be saying that you could lower your ethical standards as a Christian. These people felt superior to the ordinary Christians, and had broken away. Who knows, perhaps they were trying to persuade others to go with them?

Are there not some similarities today? Are we tempted to water down what we believe about Jesus in order to keep the peace with people? And are there not serious issues about how some of us choose to behave in the church today? In a sermon at Knaphill last week, I alluded to problems of heavy drinking in some church circles. But whether it’s drinking or some other issue, isn’t it the case that we often amend our behaviour to fit in with society? If so, then 1 John is for us.

But enough by way of general introduction. What about the Prologue itself this week? How does that set the agenda for what is to come?

You may have heard the story about the preacher who gives a children’s address and asks the children, “What is either grey or red, is furry, has a tail and climbs trees?”

A child puts up her hand and says, “I know the answer should be Jesus, but it sounds like a squirrel to me.”

Well, the Prologue to 1 John is one place where the answer is Jesus. John puts Jesus up front and central for our faith from the word ‘go’. In fact, not merely up front and central: Jesus is essential, says John in the Prologue, in three areas.

Firstly, Jesus is central to life. Hear again all those references to life in the first two verses: Jesus and his message are ‘the word of life’ (verse 1). ‘This life was revealed’ (verse 2) – that is, Jesus, the eternal Word of God, according to the Prologue of John’s Gospel, took on human flesh. John and co ‘declare to [their readers] the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to [them]’ (verse 2). That is to say, Jesus, who always has been and always will be, and who also gives eternal life, is the content of John’s preaching.

So Jesus is the life, and he is the life-giver. And when John says ‘life’, he does not merely mean ordinary life into which we are born. John means spiritual life, eternal life, the life of faith in God through Jesus Christ.

If Jesus is central to life, then, what we have here is the claim that you cannot contemplate any true discussion of what it means to have faith in God and find spiritual life unless it is centred on Jesus. God does not base entry into his kingdom on being good, being nice or being sincere, but on faith in Jesus Christ crucified and risen, whom he gave up for us.

And so we cannot water down our commitments when it comes to faith being centred on Jesus. This doesn’t prevent us from talking courteously and lovingly with people who disagree with us, whether they be people of other faiths or of no faith. It certainly doesn’t mean we have to put on our spiritual hobnail boots. In fact, it means the opposite, because the centre of our faith is Jesus Christ crucified. It is a faith that is based not on inflicting violence upon others, like a crusade or a jihad. It is a faith grounded in suffering love.

But because it is about Jesus and the Cross, it is difficult to speak as if all roads lead to God. If we say that all roads lead to God, then we are telling Jesus that his death on the Cross was unnecessary. Why go through that if there were paths to God that didn’t involve the suffering?

It will be tempting to compromise on the uniqueness of Jesus in our witness to faith today. To many, it seems that the different religions are just trying to claim that they are right, everybody else is wrong and using coercion or fear to persuade. However, as I said, the Cross is not about force. It is about the opposite. And what we know as Christians is that there is nothing else to compare with the transforming power of Christ and his Cross. It means the forgiveness of sins. It means the defeat of evil. It means there is a God who loves us so much he will stop at nothing to bring us back from the disastrous mess we have made of life and creation. How many of us know that it is Christ crucified who has changed our lives beyond recognition?

However tempting it may seem, let us not shrink back from humbly but clearly holding onto Jesus and his Cross as the centre of life and faith.

Secondly, Jesus is central to fellowship. Listen to verse 3 again:

we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.

All true Christian fellowship is based on Jesus and his Father. It starts with them, it extends to us and all that we truly share as Christians is in Christ. I want us to get away from that notion that fellowship is just a warm, fuzzy feeling of friends being together, perhaps induced by a caffeine buzz we get from the coffee we drink. I heard one minister say he was in favour of church bazaars, because they promoted fellowship. I suppose he was getting at the camaraderie that comes from working together, but it seems to me that he – and many of us – have sold the New Testament notion of fellowship short.

The word translated ‘fellowship’ has to do with what we share, with what we have in common. At the heart of the life of the Father and Son is that they share the divine nature and love. What Jesus shares with us is that love of God. What we share together is the love of God in Christ.

Is it not strange, then, that for many Christians we can’t get our conversation past the weather and our aching limbs to talking together about our faith in Jesus? How sad! Of course it happens in home groups and the Discovery Group, but might we not also strengthen each other more on a Sunday if we were able to encourage one another in the faith, and not merely listen to the preacher? (Not that I’m against you listening to the sermon!)

And does not our sharing in Christ go further than that? Remember, 1 John is about both belief and behaviour. You could say our belief leads to our behaviour. When it is Christ that we share in fellowship, then not only do we have that knowledge and experience in common, we also share together the call to walk in his ways. You’ll remember that the early church shared money, possessions and even land together. Why? Because they understood fellowship in Christ. Following Jesus doesn’t just commit each one of us to him: it commits all who follow him to each other.

You’ll often hear me say that the church is a sign of God’s kingdom, a witness to his kingdom. Surely when we share fellowship in these ways we are witnessing to the world that God is building a new community. It isn’t based on greed, it isn’t based on grabbing power and it certainly isn’t based on celebrity. True fellowship – sharing all that we are and all that we have in Christ – is a powerful witness.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus is central to our joy. Verse 4:

We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

Why would writing a long tract about belief in Jesus and the behaviour that follows make John’s joy complete? The great New Testament scholar Howard Marshall puts it as simply as this:

He has the heart of a pastor which cannot be completely happy so long as some of those for whom he feels responsible are not experiencing the full blessings of the gospel.[1]

Who or what makes us happy in the church? A good sing? Enough money in the accounts? Increased numbers? None of these is a bad thing, but they are secondary. When we focus on them, we are looking in the wrong places. If they flow from concentrating on the main thing – Jesus himself – then they are good and healthy consequences of that.

As the saying goes, we need ‘to keep the main thing the main thing’. And Jesus is ‘the main thing’. He is our joy. He is the one who brings the blessings of the gospel. When we concentrate on the gifts rather than the giver, the blessings rather than the blesser (to coin a word), we get it all wrong. We worship idols instead of Christ.

And what if we accept the poor substitutes the world offers us for joy. Money? Possessions? A good job? Food? Drugs or drunkenness? Sporting success? All can be idols, and all are pathetic substitutes for the joy that comes from Jesus Christ.

Why? Because in Jesus God gives us the way to himself. In Jesus we have fellowship with the Creator, and so we enjoy his creation, but not for its own sake: we enjoy it with thankfulness to him. In Jesus we see the Father. In Jesus we see and experience the sacrificial love of God. In Jesus we have the forgiveness of sins. In Jesus we have the call to join the cause of God’s transforming kingdom. In Jesus, all we do for him will prove to be worthwhile. Why would we look anywhere else on earth or in heaven for the foundation of joy, happiness and fulfilment?

I said just before I launched into the first of these three points that ‘John puts Jesus up front and central’. At the beginning of this sermon series, and indeed at the beginning of a new Methodist year, may we too put Jesus up front and central in our lives. May we renew our devotion to him in our commitment to worship, reading his Word and prayer. May we allow all that we learn of him to shape our lives so that we don’t just believe things about him, he affects our behaviour too.

May we hold onto him as the centre of our lives and the centre the universe, humbly but without compromise. May he so shape our fellowship that the life of the church is a powerful witness in the world to God’s redeeming love. And as we devote ourselves to him, may we be filled with ‘joy unspeakable’, joy that the world cannot match, joy that the world will envy.

In the words of one modern worship song, ‘Jesus, be the centre.’

[1] I Howard Marshall, The Epistles of John, p 105.

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Sermon: Be Filled With The Spirit

Ephesians 5:18-21
When I arrived in my first circuit, I could tell that people wanted to ask me a question, and they were nervous about it.

“Do you drink …… tea or coffee?”

Why were they nervous to ask me that? Because my predecessor didn’t drink caffeine at all, only water. Honestly, he wasn’t a Mormon. He also – perhaps unsurprisingly – didn’t drink alcohol, and there was much amusement at a church lunch when he innocently took delight in a trifle that had the odd additional ingredient. When he asked for seconds, his wife looked furious, and he didn’t understand why.

Whatever our views on alcohol, it wouldn’t be too contentious to suggest that Paul’s words, “Do not get drunk on wine” would command our widespread assent as Christians, whether or not we are teetotal. (Although the number of Christians who seem to disregard this in practice worries me.)

My own conviction is this: the argument for being teetotal is usually based on the idea that alcohol is misused in society, and so Christians should set an example by abstaining. However, I think that is a flawed argument. The existence of misuse is not necessarily a reason for disuse, but for right use. There are many good things that are misused in our society, but imagine if we expected all Christians to abstain from all of them. I’ve never heard anyone say that because sex is misused, even married Christians should be celibate!

There is a case for some Christians abstaining from something that is abused in our society, as a witness that life is not about being given over to these things as idols. So I believe some Christians will be teetotal, some will be celibate, some will embrace voluntary poverty and so on. The issue for all Christians is whether we receive these things with thanksgiving and are not given over to them.

That, I believe, is key to what Paul says here. Are we given over to things such as wine, or to the Holy Spirit? We know what being given over to wine looks like, and it isn’t attractive.

The question for us then becomes, if we give ourselves over instead to the Holy Spirit, what will that look like? We could have a discussion about whether or not that involves ecstatic experiences – after all, some of the disciples at Pentecost were mistaken for being drunk – but the real issue for Paul is not the ecstasy. He isn’t against it, he documents his own dramatic spiritual experiences elsewhere. For him, what matters is that when we are given over to the Holy Spirit, certain changes happen in our lives.

We’ve already thought about that earlier in this sermon series when we considered ‘the fruit of the Spirit’, where Paul’s focus seems to be on what the fullness of the Spirit looks like in our character. Here, he goes on to describe what the fullness of the Spirit looks like in church life, before we ever get out into the world. In urging his readers here to be filled with the Spirit, then, he maps out what a Spirit-filled church would look like. That description comes in four verbs: speak, sing, thank and submit.

Firstly, speak:

Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. (Verse 19a)

When I became a Local Preacher in my early twenties, the chaplain at the Church of England comprehensive school I had attended heard about it and invited me back to preach at a Christmas communion service there. When I was a pupil at the school, I was uncomfortable with the high church worship and never took communion. However, when I returned to preach, I joined the queue and took the sacrament.

Afterwards, the chaplain, whom we all knew as Jim, said to me, “I’m so glad you came and made your communion.”

I thought about those words: ‘made your communion.’ ‘Made my communion?’ They’re very private and individual, aren’t they? Sometimes we see worship as a bunch of individuals all separately in the same building worshipping. We speak to one another before the service and afterwards, but speaking to one another with the ‘psalms, hymns and spiritual songs’ makes little sense to some of us.

Well, it does unless worship is a place where we are meant not only to address God but to encourage one another. A Spirit-filled church is a place of encouragement.

Hence you get someone in the New Testament like Barnabas, whose name means ‘Son of Encouragement’. He certainly was. He believed in Paul and commended him to the apostles when they were distrustful of him. He took on Mark when Paul thought he was unreliable. He was responsible for encouraging two men who between them would go on to write half of the New Testament.

Were time to allow me, I could tell you more tales than I wish about church members who were the opposite of Barnabas – who stabbed people in the back, or who had Olympian levels of bitterness. But a Spirit-filled church will be a place where we encourage each other. Specifically, we encourage one another in the faith. It is not that our speaking is limited to social pleasantries, but that it has a spiritual, Christ-centred content and goal. We can display that on Sundays, but also in home groups (which are so vital in this respect) and at other times. If our spirituality at KMC were measured by how much we speak encouragement to one another, how would we rate?

Secondly,sing:

Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord (verse 19b)

Some people read here about singing ‘in your heart’ and assume that this is something we do silently and perhaps privately. However, that would be to misunderstand the Jewish use of ‘heart’. For Jews, the heart was not the seat of the emotions (that was the bowels), but the centre of a person’s being. So to sing and make music to the Lord in your heart is to sing to the Lord from the very centre of who you are.

This, then, tells us that Spirit-filled worship is not just our public praise in a Sunday service. It is something that we do ‘at all times and in all places’. It comes out of who we are, so it is not merely about completing some formalities. Spirit-filled worship is a response to the grace of God in Jesus Christ that comes from the depth of our being and co-opts every part of our lives to express the praise that is due to his name.

Yes, Sunday worship is in some sense central to that, but only if it is representative of what is going on in the rest of our lives. Unless that is true, we are guilty of hypocrisy.

Not that any one of us is perfect, and in that sense we are all hypocrites when we worship, but does our worship come because we are grateful for what the Father has done for us in Jesus Christ? Does it come because we therefore think that the only gift we can give is the entirety of our lives laid down in adoration and service? Is that at least our basic orientation?
Hence worship only begins on Sunday. As Brother Lawrence famously learned to practise the presence of God while peeling vegetables in the monastery kitchen, so we practise his presence in our conventional daily tasks, doing them as for him. Any duty can be offered in worship. Any job or profession can, too, not just the caring professions and church work.

The Spirit-filled church is not just detected on Sunday. Her worship continues from the call to worship on Sunday morning to a benediction on Saturday night.

Thirdly, thank:

always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (verse 20)

This, of course, is a continuation of what we’ve just been thinking about in the ‘singing’ of worship: true worship is about thankfulness, gratitude for what God has done. Specifically it is ‘in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ’.

I have occasionally conducted an experiment in a church service that shows whether this is the focus of a congregation’s worship or not. Here is what I have done: you can be briefed, in case I ever try this here!

At the opening prayers, I have asked people to suggest topics for praise and thanksgiving, with the idea that I will then weave their suggestions into an extempore prayer that expresses the congregation’s sense of praise. It is interesting to note what themes people suggest – and, perhaps more to the point, what they don’t mention.

Time and again people will say they want to praise God for the goodness and beauty of creation. But only rarely will they want to praise God for what he has done in Jesus.

Now granted if you’re going to nit-pick, Jesus was involved in creation. But what hardly ever comes out is someone requesting that we praise God for his redemption in Christ. Either we are too shy to mention it, or it is not central to our consciousness. Whichever alternative you take, it’s pretty devastating.

Yet as Paul reminds us that our thanksgiving to God is ‘in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ’, one thing he is surely reminding us of here is that Spirit-filled worship is Christ-centred. All sorts of people can be thankful for creation, but who can be thankful for redemption? Those who follow Jesus can.

Jesus told his disciples that when the Holy Spirit came, he would remind them of what he had said and done. In other words, the Spirit comes not to glorify his own name, but that of Jesus. (Hence the old chorus, ‘Father we love you, we worship and adore you’ is wrong in the third verse.)

So a third sign of Spirit-filled worship will be that it is Christ-centred. Specifically, it will focus on the Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection as much as on the creation. Do we regard the Cross as a tragedy, or does it make us sing? Do we shape our lives by the Cross? Because Spirit-filled worshippers will sing in gratitude for the Cross, and they will take up their own crosses of unjust suffering in devotion to the cause of God’s kingdom that Jesus is bringing in.

Fourthly and finally, submit:

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ (verse 21)

There is a lot of argument as to whether this verse belongs with the section we are thinking about, or the subsequent one about relationships. I believe it belongs to both, and acts like a hinge between them. ‘Submit to one another’ is Paul’s tagline for all Christian relationships, both in the church and in the home.
In this respect, all the issues about leadership, power and authority are secondary. People with more concern about whether they are exercising power – or whether they can – are not concentrating on the main thing, which is that we submit to one another. Not only do we no longer belong to ourselves but to Christ, it is also true to say that we no longer belong to ourselves, we belong to each other. This raises issues about how we share our gifts and possessions, and how we seek to give consideration to one another, preferring others ahead of ourselves. No wonder one of the early Christian leaders, a man named Tertullian, once said,

We share everything except our wives.

That’s the kind of mutual submission that the Spirit brings. When we know what Jesus has done for us, giving up the glory of heaven for the poverty of a manger and the ignominy of the Cross, all questions of lording it over people have to be crucified.

I guess many of us have problems at one time or another in our lives with going on ego trips. Sometimes it’s self-conscious, sometimes it’s an unconscious thing, broadcasting our insecurities to the world without us even knowing we’re doing it, or perhaps even knowing we’re insecure. Either way, however, the person who goes on an ego trip is demonstrating one area of their lives where they are not filled with the Spirit.

Why? Well, what is God doing in building his Church? He is forming us into a new community, the community of his kingdom. He is making us into the sign and foretaste of the coming age. And in the age to come, all the ugly designs on power in this world that see people belittling others, or trampling those below them while grovelling to those above them, will be gone.
To prepare ourselves for God’s kingdom, and to be a faithful witness to it now, the Spirit leads us into the counter-cultural practice of mutual submission. Our status in society doesn’t matter, nor does our level of authority in the church. What matters is that the Spirit leads us into mutual submission. As the hymn puts it, ‘Brother, sister, let me serve you, let me be as Christ to you.’ So in the early church slaves became bishops, because social status was immaterial. There was even a Bishop Onesimus – could it have been Philemon’s runaway slave whom Paul wrote about?

In conclusion, then, Paul has begun to show us what giving ourselves over to the fullness of the Spirit looks like in church life. We become a community known for speaking encouragement. Our worship comes from the heart of who we are, and permeates all of life. Our thanksgiving means our lives are focussed on and shaped by the Cross. And we joyfully submit to one another, regardless of rank and in defiance of social norms, because the power games of the world are unlike Christ and must not be allowed to infect his Church further.

All this is, of course, a work in progress. Can we see signs that God is doing these things among us? Where do we need to be more open to the Spirit?

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Sermon: The Spirit Of Adoption

I’m back after holiday to preach tomorrow morning for the first time in three weeks. Here goes:

Romans 8:1-17

When I was in my early years at secondary school, the girls used to debate who was the dreamiest pop star. Was it Donny Osmond, Michael Jackson, Les McKeown from the Bay City Rollers, or was it David Cassidy?

In David Cassidy’s case, they would sing along with a glazed look in their eyes:

How can I be sure
In a world that’s constantly changing?

That others, such as the Young Rascals and Dusty Springfield, had charted before him with the song, was immaterial. It was David Cassidy singing ‘How can I be sure’.

While I’m not trying to suggest that we boys were too superior, given that the music wars for us at that age were between Slade and Gary Glitter, I do want to concentrate on that question: ‘How can I be sure?’

It’s a question that has been asked in many ways by many people over the ages. In particular, Christians have asked it this way: how can I be sure that God loves me? Catholics would point to the sacraments as a sign. Calvinists would talk about the promises of God in Scripture – except then someone would say, but how do I know they apply to me as one of the elect, not one of the damned? So some moved on to other supposed signs of divine favour, such as wealth and prosperity.

Into this debate came John Wesley, with his particular doctrine of assurance. One thing Wesley stressed (along with such things as the promises of Scripture) was the work of the Spirit in assuring us we are children of God. And the classic passage about the Spirit revealing to us that we are children of a heavenly Father is this one in Romans 8.

So, then: in what ways does the Spirit affirm and strengthen our knowledge that we are sons and daughters of God?

Firstly, it’s a matter of being led by the Spirit:

those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God (verse 14)

Let’s be careful here: language of being ‘led by the Spirit’ has been horribly debased in the church. ‘I feel led’ gets reduced to the most trivial of forms: ‘I feel led to eat a Mars bar’; ‘I feel led to wear blue jeans’, and so on. No: Paul’s point about being led by the Spirit is altogether more serious, and far removed from the frivolous use of the language sometimes found in Christian circles. For what precedes is this:

For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live (verse 13)

We are led by the Spirit in order to be Christlike. The Spirit enables us to resemble the family likeness.

Most of you have noticed how much Mark looks like a redheaded version of me. When he was born, a church member jokingly told me never to take a paternity case to court, because the judge would take one look at me, one look at Mark, and throw the case out with laughter. On the other hand, when I was born, someone next to my mother in the maternity hospital looked at me and said to her, “He doesn’t look like you, he doesn’t look like your husband – what does your milkman look like?”

We expect children in some way or another to display a family likeness. One of the ways we know we are children of God is that over a period of time, we start to behave more like Jesus than we did before.

This is not to say it is easy. Nor is it to expect instant miracles. For ourselves, we may find it hard to detect the changes. I find that the key more often is that others notice the changes in us.

The story is told of a pupil at a school whose behaviour was so bad and so disruptive that the staff no longer knew what to do with him. One sanction after another had been tried. Every punishment and every incentive failed to bring about any change in him. He was as dreadful as ever.

Eventually, the Head Teacher called the boy into his office one day. He said to the young man, “We are at the end of our tether with you. There is only one thing I can think of to try, if you and your parents will agree. I want to adopt you as my own son. You will come and live with me. You will take my surname. Every time you are in trouble, it will be my name that is dragged through the mud.”

The boy agreed. His desperate parents agreed. This was the turning point in the boy’s life. Not that he became perfect, but he knew he was loved and wanted as an adopted son. For it isn’t just the fact that we take on the family likeness as evidence that we are adopted children of God, it’s also that spiritual adoption changes us. It works both ways. Being led by the Spirit is the evidence of adoption, and adoption entices us to be led by the Spirit.

All of which leads to the second strand I want to share with you this morning. If the Spirit reveals to us that we are adopted children of God, then that means we are loved by the Father. Hence Paul says in verse 15,

For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, Abba, Father.

The Holy Spirit not only changes us in holiness more into the family image of Christ, nor only does the impartation of grace motivate us to live differently, the Spirit also enables us to call God, Abba, Father. Not merely reverence, but closeness: you will have heard many preachers tell you that ‘Abba’ is the word a Jewish child used to address their father in tenderness and trust. No wonder Paul goes onto say in verse 16,

The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.

Not only in the pages of Scripture but also written on our hearts is the knowledge that we are children of God, dearly beloved children who can address him as Abba.

I have a favourite story I love to tell about this. Several years before I met Debbie, I once went out a few times with a girl whom I used to meet in London. We would have a meal and see a film together. On one occasion, she told me over the meal before the film that she had something serious to tell me. I went into pastoral mode and she said, “I’m an adopted child.”

Endeavouring to be sensitive, I adopted an expression of concern.

“No,” she said, noticing my response, “you don’t need to worry. I’m glad I was adopted. It means I know I was wanted.”

Those words have stayed with me. ‘I know I was wanted.’ I believe we can see our status as adopted children of God the same way. Being adopted into the family of God means we know we are wanted. When the Holy Spirit whispers into our hearts that we are God’s sons and daughters and that we can tenderly call him Abba, we know we are wanted. After all, God set out on a mission of love to draw us into his family. In Christ he even took on human flesh and later died for us. How much does God want us? Jesus opens his arms wide on the Cross and says, “This much.”

What does that do for us? Does it not give us the most amazing sense of security in the love of God? We do not have to be like the girl in a field pulling petals off a flower, saying, “He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not.” The Spirit’s testimony to our adoption through Christ as God’s beloved children gives us a rock solid hope in the love God has for us. Let us never allow ourselves to think that God only begrudgingly has us in his kingdom because Jesus won him around through the Cross. Yes, Jesus died for our sins, but all that he did for us came from the Father’s heart of love for his created beings.

This wonderful love of God, then, is not only meant to be a ‘safe space’ for us, it’s more. The safety that God’s love gives us is then the jumping-off point from which we can leap into great risks of faith for him.

And that takes me neatly into the third and final point I want to make about the Spirit’s witness to our adoption into the family of God. It’s about our inheritance as God’s children. Verse 17:

Now if we are children, then we are heirs— heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

Parents who care for their children will make provision for their future, as much as they reasonably can. Our wills lay that out for Rebekah and Mark, not only financially, but also we considered their care, should we die before they reach the age of majority. All being well, they will have an inheritance.

The curious thing for the children of God, though, is that we have an inheritance, even though there is no remote possibility of our heavenly Father dying! We shall inherit the glory of a resurrection body (verse 23) along with our great elder brother, Jesus. It will be our inheritance to reign with him in God’s new creation.

And that knowledge holds us in good stead now. For while the certainty of God’s love for us enables us to dare great things for him, we also know that daredevil faith leads to suffering, just as it did for Christ. Just as Christ suffered, so shall we. But just as Christ had an inheritance to anticipate and it kept him going, the same is true for us. As children of God, we have an inheritance with Christ. We have an eternal destiny in the purposes of God, and so when difficulty or opposition comes our way now, we need not keep our eyes fixed purely on the trials of the present: we can look into God’s great future and remember what our heavenly Father has willed for us – a will we inherit not when he dies (which he won’t) but when we die.

In this, we have something that not everybody has. The story is told that during Jim Callaghan’s tenure of 10 Downing Street in the 1970s, he had one particularly tortuous meeting about the Troubles in Northern Ireland with Ian Paisley. Callaghan and Paisley could not agree about anything in their conversation. Eventually, exasperated, Callaghan said, “Surely we can agree that we are all children of God?”

“No,” thundered Paisley, “we are all children of wrath.”

To our ears, that may seem a typically severe Ian Paisley statement, and in one sense it is. But Paisley was right that not everyone is a child of God. While we are all God’s offspring in the sense that we owe our existence to him, not all are adopted into his family. That happens by his grace to those who entrust their lives to him in Christ.

And when we do that, we receive the love God has been longing to pour out on all (which may be obscured by a term like ‘children of wrath’). We are adopted, because he so wants us in his family and not outside, and we can take risks because we have that great security. And we are guaranteed an inheritance that means we can cope with the setbacks and the resistance to our faithful living, because we know what the Father in his love has for us.

This is what the Spirit of adoption does, in revealing the Father’s boundless love to our hearts.

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Sermon: The Unity Of The Spirit

We’re two months through a three-month series on the Holy Spirit. This was our subject last Sunday morning, but it was an all-age worship service, where we couldn’t go into much depth. Normally we have an evening service on the same day where we take that morning’s them deeper. However, this time that service got delayed by a week, and so here is the adult sermon for tomorrow night based on last week’s theme. You’ll see the odd reference back to last week in this text. Longstanding readers will also notice one or two favourite old sermon illustrations coming back into play.

John 17:20-26

Ephesians 4:1-6

Are we united? Are we one as Christians? As Methodists? As worshippers at KMC? To listen to some Christians, you would think that the whole matter of unity was simple. Someone in a previous circuit once glibly told me that Methodists and Catholics believed the same things. Er, no we don’t. And after the recent episode where Liverpool’s Roman Catholic cathedral withdrew permission for a Methodist ordination service to take place there, it’s clear the Catholics don’t think we believe the same.

Or is it right what I heard in a prophecy at an ecumenical renewal gathering many years ago: “Weep, for my Body is broken”? Yet on the other hand, there is so much we have in common.

So which is true: are Christians united, or not?

The answer, surely, is both. Yes and no. And in the two passages we have different answers. As Jesus prays for all who will believe in him, he assumes his disciples are not united and prays for the Father to make them one. As Paul writes to the Ephesians, he assumes that the church is one in the Holy Spirit, and so his concern is not to make them united but that they maintain it. Both will be a challenge to us. Let us explore them in turn.

Firstly, we are not united. Jesus prays that all who believe in him may be as united as he and the Father are united, and that this unity will be a missionary witness to the world (John 17:20-23).

One of my previous churches had what I thought was a rather tacky letterhead for official correspondence. The logo was an outline drawing of the church building. I objected that the church was not the building, but the people. I asked that we have a new logo, showing some people gathering around the Cross. Because that was the church.

Did I get my way? No.

But I think I was right. I believe Jesus came to form a community, centred on him, even if it was in continuity with Israel. The New Testament word ekklesia literally means, ‘those called out’, and it originally referred to the assembly of people who made decisions in a Greek city. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, it renders a Hebrew word qahal, which also means assembly: it refers to the assembly of Israel in the wilderness, when she was called out of Egypt. We are ‘called out’ to be an assembly of people. No special buildings existed for a long time.

We become one, then, when we are drawn to the Father through the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Our unity is based on the Father’s love, the atoning work of Jesus and the enabling of the Holy Spirit. So deeply do we share in what God has done for us that we become one.

And we become one, not only in the sense that we have these things in common, but that God binds us together and makes us into one body. We are not isolated individuals who share a common interest: God binds us into a new community, because his purposes were always bigger than just saving individuals. Human beings were created as social creatures, and society needs a model of a new community. That is God’s great purpose for the church.

So our witness is seen when we so live for Christ and for one another, that we put God and one another ahead of our own desires. This is what speaks powerfully to the world. They will not be impressed by a mutual love of Wesley hymns, or a preference to hear different preachers every week. Solid, binding love in the company of Jesus will make an impression. Nothing less.

What will not give a good witness is when we major on minors, when we behave as if we can live without each other, when we gossip or when we tear each other to shreds. There is more than enough of that in the world. It does not need the Church to add to it. Of course, we shall have conflict, but our task then is not to pretend that the conflict does not exist, but to model a path of love, grace and truth towards resolving it. We have the same differences as human beings as the rest of the world, but what Christ has done for us gives us the resources to work through those tensions and be a model of harmony.

So we do not have unity without God giving it to us in Christ, but the fact that he has leads on to the second half of our thoughts, where Paul says we are united. He builds on what God has done for us in Christ, and which the Holy Spirit makes real and present. Now we do have the gift of unity, our task is to maintain it.

And so before we ever get to all the protracted and apparently fruitless discussions between denominations about formal unity, Paul gives us some basic tasks in our relationships that will enable us to maintain the unity of the Spirit:

Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. (Ephesians 4:2)

I wonder if you remember the four sets of contrasts I set up between different types of people in the all age worship last Sunday morning? Some of us are such opposites that it requires these very qualities of humility, gentleness, patience and bearing with one another in order to maintain our unity. We need to deploy these qualities so that we appreciate the different gifts other people can bring, rather than being frustrated by them.

So the person who loves being in crowds mustn’t tell the one who loves solitude that he is not a people person, and the one who appreciates solitude must not say that a sociable person is shallow. The person who uses her five senses and has an eye for fine detail can be a gift to the man who operates by a sixth sense and only sees the big picture. The man concerned for the truth and the woman who cares for harmony and love both have essential gifts for the church. The one who plans and the one who is spontaneous need patience to avoid winding each other up, when in fact each of them has a useful contribution to make.

I’ve not always found it easy to believe that the church can exhibit this kind of unity in the Spirit. I’ve been in gatherings where we’ve sung Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘All praise to our redeeming Lord’, and we’ve come to verse four and found it hard to sing:

E’en now we think and speak the same
And cordially agree;
Concentred all, through Jesu’s name,
In perfect harmony.

Because my experience has not been of cordial agreement, but of rabid disagreement, sometimes on the most fundamental areas of Christian faith, sometimes because people were not prepared to have a generous spirit towards those whose personalities or cultural tastes were vastly different. It made it agony to be a Christian in those circumstances. I can think of one or two churches and religious institutions to which I would happily never return.

However, the challenge is clear, and the elements of healing and peace present when you encounter Christian communities and congregations that are committed to the humble, gentle, patient love that the unity of the Spirit entails make such places like iced water on a hot day. In fact, more than that, a community that exhibits these qualities can be a powerful witness to God’s love in the world.

And that leaves me with just a couple of closing questions. One is, how can we be like this? It seems to me that this is a basic issue of Christian holiness. And like all other matters of holiness, the New Testament holds two things in tension: one is that we are called to obey, and the other is that we need the Spirit’s empowering. I put these together and say that holiness is active co-operation with the Holy Spirit. Therefore we need to hear God’s call to this unity of the Spirit and be prepared to obey with the humility it requires to put it into action, but to do so in reliance upon the Holy Spirit. We say ‘yes’ to the Father, and at the same time seek the Spirit’s help.

My other question is this. It’s all very well saying that a Christian community living in the unity of the Spirit can be a powerful witness, but how will that be seen by the world? It isn’t much good if the only way this is experienced is within the inner confines of the church family. And seeing as most of the population don’t come much into contact with who are, what we are like and what we do, isn’t that all a bit hopeless?

I would suggest that this therefore comes down to another of those issues of where we need to reimagine church. Just as I’ve emphasised since coming here that mission is a primary function of the church, so we must carry that through to all areas of church life. One such area would be our small groups, where the love and unity is often best experienced. We need to think of our small groups as more than Bible study, fellowship and prayer for each other. We need to see them as cells for mission.

I have no time tonight to go into the details of what has become known as the ‘cell church movement’, but Graham Horsley, who is coming to preach at our Missions Sunday on 9th October, is a Methodist expert on that subject. But essentially, we can see small groups as the church in microcosm. They follow what has become known as the ‘Four ‘W’s’: welcome, worship, word, witness. In ‘welcome’, they get to know one another better. In ‘worship’, they worship in a form appropriate to the group size and members. In ‘word’, they study the Bible, but with an emphasis on practical application. And in ‘witness’, they pray for people who need God’s love and they plan outreach activities of all sorts. With that stress on witness, the cell group has a great opportunity to demonstrate the unity of the Spirit as it interacts with the world.

So the challenge of unity in the Spirit is clear and important. We have no unity save that in Christ, but what unity that is. It is to be guarded and maintained. If we do that with the humility that entails, and depending on the Holy Spirit and in the presence of the world, then we have a gift for those we live among, a missional gift of God’s love.

May it be so.

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