Paul’s Favourite Church 3: Christlike Relationships (Philippians 2:1-11)

Philippians 2:1-11

What are our ambitions for our church? Is that a good question to ask at my first service at a ‘new’ church?

Typically, people say, we want to attract more members, especially younger people. Or we want our worship to be more lively. Or – well, you add in other examples.

Wouldn’t a better ambition than all of these be to say, we want our church to be Christlike?

Because it sounds to me like that’s what Paul is encouraging the Philippians to set as their ambition. He loves that church, and he wants the best for it. So far he has told them how he is sure God is at work among them and he has encouraged them with ways to bear their suffering for the faith.

But at the root of all of this is that he wants them to be Christlike, and especially to demonstrate that in their relationships with one another.

The quality of our relationships is so important. I don’t know the latest research in the UK about why people leave the church, but recent studies in the United States show that forty-two percent of all church leavers gave ‘hypocrisy’ as a reason for leaving. It was the top reason.

Now I know there is that witty rejoinder to people who say they want nothing to do with the church because of all the hypocrites where we say, ‘There’s always room for one more,’ but I think we should dwell on the issue for a moment. Hypocrisy means that our words and our actions don’t match up. In terms of our relationships, it means we talk about love but then don’t love one another.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what a lot of those American church leavers had experienced.

I therefore think it’s important that we give a priority to Christlike relationships, and in today’s reading Paul tells us what that will involve.

The first sign of Christlike relationships that Paul describes here is unity:

Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.

Christ is united with the Father and the Spirit; we are united with Christ and experience the fellowship of the Spirit; it’s only natural for Christians to experience unity of love, spirit, and mind.

What makes us one? Well, it’s not simply being members of the human race, because sin has fractured that unity. It’s unity in salvation by grace through faith in Christ, a salvation that comes to us from the Triune God, whose mind is authoritatively revealed to us in the Scriptures.

We don’t necessarily believe all the same things as other Christian traditions. We may differ on things like who may be ordained as leaders and our understandings of the sacraments. But if we hold together on salvation, the Trinity, and the supreme authority of God being revealed in the Bible, then we can have a united relationship that transcends our differences, even when those differences mean our unity is imperfect.

But Paul wasn’t thinking about our wider ecumenical debates of today. They didn’t exist then. He was addressing a local church. He wants them to hold together on these basic issues and live out their faith as one people.

Are we a church where we can count on one another when the chips are down? Are we a fellowship where we will speak well of one another, even when we disagree on secondary matters? Or are we just a collection of snooker balls, who bounce off each other every Sunday morning?

I grew up in an increasingly multi-racial church in north London. When my grandmother, who lived with us, died, our church friends rallied around. The West Indian and West African members of our house group treated us the way they would have treated bereaved friends at home. They turned up with meals they had cooked for my parents, my sister, and me. They came and took domestic duties off my mum. They did everything they could so that we as a family could spend time together, talking about my grandmother and grieving her loss. What a profound experience of united love that was. I shall never forget it.

If you know your Methodist history, you will know that the preacher who got John Wesley preaching in the open air was George Whitefield. However, later Wesley and Whitefield had deep theological differences. And one day, one of Whitefield’s followers spitefully asked him whether he would see Wesley in heaven.

But Whitefield’s reply was a model of Christian unity. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘but that will be because Mister Wesley will be far closer to the throne than me.’

How do we practise our unity in Christ?

The second sign of Christlike relationships is humility:

3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

As we go on to hear in verses 6 to 11, the Jesus story shows that he is the very example of humility, in giving up his status and position in the Incarnation and the Cross. If Jesus, with his ranking in the universe does it, then how much more us?

Yet too many churches have members who jostle for position, like James and John wanting to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand in glory. Too many Christians have the pathetic ambition to be a big fish in a small pond. I see it in church members full of self-importance and ministers chasing the ‘big jobs’ in the church nationally.

How sad that building for God’s kingdom and its vision of a new creation where earth and heaven will be renewed is too small and unsatisfying for these people. Yet what could be more rewarding than playing our part in God’s eternal purposes?

At the other end of the spectrum we have people who so undervalue themselves that they see themselves as worthless. This too is not humility.

What are we looking for, then?[1] The American pastor Rick Warren put it well:

Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. Humility is thinking more of others. Humble people are so focused on serving others, they don’t think of themselves.[2]

And CS Lewis described it beautifully:

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.[3]

You know what? I think those words of Lewis sound rather like a description of Jesus. We are looking for people who are thinking about others above themselves. And so the challenge is to ask whether that is a predominant characteristic of people in our church.

Finally, the third sign of Christlike relationships is servanthood:

The final verses of the reading may (or may not) be taken from an early Christian hymn, and they tell the Jesus story – from pre-existence with the Father through the Incarnation to the Cross and Resurrection, the Ascension and eventually the Last Judgment.

It’s a story we often tell in the church with the purpose of describing what Jesus did for our salvation. And that’s right. But it’s not what Paul does with it here.

In this case, Paul tells the Jesus story not to call people to Christian commitment, but to show us what living as a Christian disciple looks like. It’s ethical.

So we hear that Jesus ‘did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage’ but ‘made himself nothing’, took on ‘the very nature of a servant’, and ‘humbled himself by becoming obedient to death.’

And maybe ‘servant’ is the most important word in that cluster. For a servant was ‘nothing’ in that society. A servant had to be obedient. And so on.

If we want to look like Jesus, then we will serve others.

This is such a contrast to much of what we see promoted in our culture, where the talk is of self-fulfilment, meeting our own needs, charity beginning at home, and so on. The Christian church is meant to look different from this.

But sometimes we too imbibe the values of the wider world. We turn the church into a consumer organisation where the job of the church is to please me and give me what I want. This is not the spirit of Jesus.

I’ve been told to my face by people in the past that my job as a minister is to please everybody. Well, no it isn’t. That isn’t servanthood. That’s capitulating to consumerism.

I’ve also been told when arriving to take a service as a visiting preacher that I was there to entertain people. But that is an attitude that is all about taking and not remotely about giving. Therefore it is the opposite of servanthood. And once again, the church has become infected by the world.

I once knew a church where a minister called people to take on certain jobs to serve the fellowship. But people replied, ‘We don’t do these things. We pay others to do them for us.’

We need to recover the call to imitate Jesus who served. It was by an attitude of servanthood that he transformed the world. Let’s stop assuming that this is something that is done by others.

It means we take Jesus and his example seriously. He is not our comfort blanket. He is our Lord and Saviour.

If we serve one another, copying (however imperfectly) Jesus, then alongside our humility and unity there will be something distinctive about us that differs from so much of what the world offers and yet encapsulates what so many people long for.

This is central to our true identity as church. Let’s make sure we’re about this Jesus work.

[1] Both of the following quotes were found in Aaron Armstrong, C.S. Lewis on Humility: What He Wrote is More Powerful Than What He Didn’t

[2] Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), 149

[3] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins Publishers) 128

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Paul’s Favourite Church 2: A Model For Suffering, Philippians 1:12-30

Philippians 1:12-30

Arline was one of my church members in a previous appointment. In her sixties and suffering from a cruel lung condition, her husband David was devoted to her care. But when I went to visit them, I habitually made them my final call of the afternoon, because although I went to pray with them, they always blessed me with their faith. I thought I had gone to encourage them, but I came away encouraged myself.

They asked me to conduct a renewal of marriage vows for their fortieth wedding anniversary. Arline arrived in her wheelchair and with her oxygen tank. But when it came to the actual renewal of their vows, she pushed herself up out of her chair to stand next to David.

Not a dry eye in the house.

Maybe you too have known people who radiate joy or peace or faith in the middle of extreme trials. What a blessing – and a challenge! – they are.

The Apostle Paul was one such person, too. Dictating his letter to the Philippians from his prison cell in Rome, he speaks of his faith and joy in today’s reading.

But why? Is he boasting about what a great disciple of Jesus he is?

No. Near the end of the reading we hear how he has learned that the Philippians are facing opposition and suffering for their faith. I believe he hopes that his example will be an example of perseverance for his great friends in Philippi (verses 27-30).

What is behind Paul’s strong faith in the face of adversity? It is his belief in what we call the Providence of God. He believes that God can and does still work out his sovereign purposes even when life is not what it should be.

Two thousand years later, the Holy Spirit can take his inspired words and use them to encourage us too when we face troubles, especially when they are related to our faith, but not only then.

Firstly, says Paul, God is at work despite the circumstances.

In verses 12 to 14, Paul tells us that his imprisonment in Rome is not an unmitigated disaster, because the palace guards have learned about his faith, and the local Christians have become more courageous in proclaiming the Gospel.

It’s an outworking of what Paul says in Romans 8:28:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

This is divine Providence. God will make a way, even when it seems there is no way. Circumstances do not prevent him. He will be at work in surprising ways.

As many of you know, I have two Theology degrees. My second degree was achieved purely by the academic research of a thesis. My supervisor was a theologian called Richard Bauckham. At the time he was quite well-known in academic circles, but his career went into the stratosphere in his next appointment, where he was the Professor of New Testament at St Andrew’s University in Scotland.

Richard retired early from there to devote the rest of his life to academic research and writing, without the responsibilities of teaching and supervising students, let alone the administrative burdens of a professor.

So for him, working away reading and writing, and with a lifelong love of books, his eyesight was very precious to him. However, he suffered a deterioration of sight in his right eye, and by the time it was diagnosed it was too late to recover the loss. Then, around the time of the first lockdown in 2022, the same began to happen in his left eye. He was fearful of losing the ability to follow his calling and do what brought him joy.

Thankfully, despite an initial blunder by a doctor, he eventually saw a consultant who gave him some injections that brought back some of the sight in his left eye – but not all of it. To this day, he still sees straight lines as wavy lines. But he has been able to resume his scholarship.

He has written about this in a recently published book called ‘The Blurred Cross’. The title comes from him not being able to focus clearly on a cross in a hospital chapel, and his reflection on the thought that Jesus’ vision would have been blurred with blood and sweat when he was hanging on the Cross.

The book is worth the price just for the chapter on providence. He sees all sorts of reasons why he or others might reject the idea that God was still at work for good in his life, but discounts them all. His testimony through this traumatic test is that he was still held in the loving arms of God, and that God had good purposes in allowing him to go through this suffering. I am sure that part of those good purposes will be the fruit of this book, which I am sure will bring hope and encouragement to many people who are facing difficulties.

This is what Paul wants the Philippians to know. He is going through adversity, but God is using it for good. He will do the same for them as they face opposition for their faith.

This is the testimony of Richard Bauckham, too. God will still work for good in the bad times, even if what he does is not always what we would ask for. Our circumstances are no barrier to his good and loving purposes.

May that be our testimony, too.

Secondly, God is at work despite sin.

In verses 15 to 18a we have what always sounds to me a slightly strange passage. Unable to preach publicly himself due to his incarceration, Paul talks about those who are preaching while he is chained up. Some, he says, preach Christ out of goodwill, but others do so out of rivalry.

And you might expect someone with the strong convictions Paul has to have something negative to say about those who preach the Gospel out of rivalry. Surely he doesn’t approve? Wouldn’t we expect him to be annoyed that such people are muscling in to the space he has had to vacate?

But no. Paul is just glad that Christ is being preached.

There are some modern equivalents. One would be when we see some of the dubious TV evangelists, especially those who rake in millions of dollars from poor followers, and who make questionable claims about people being healed. Perhaps surprisingly, though, what some of these charlatans say about repentance and the forgiveness of sins is relatively orthodox.

I get angry about the TV evangelists. Their exploitation of the poor so that they can have another private jet is especially egregious to me.

But yet I also have to admit that a good number of people have become followers of Jesus through their preaching.

It’s not that Paul is silent about wrongdoing. We know from other passages that he isn’t. But it is to say he is confident that God’s plans cannot be stymied by human sin.

Goodness and evil are not equal opposites in the universe. God’s grace and mercy are bigger and stronger than sin. A battle may be going on, but God will not allow sin to have the final word. The end result is certain, and it has been certain ever since the Cross, when God took the very worst of human actions, the greatest injustice ever, and used the death of this Son for the greatest good. If we believe that Jesus died for our sins, then we believe in a God who is at work despite sin. He will not be thwarted.

What is going on in our world today that discourages or depresses us? Is it Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine? Is it the conflict between the Netanyahu government of Israel and Hamas? Is it abuse scandals? Or two hundred and fifty thousand abortions in the UK last year – clearly most of them were not when the mother’s life or health was in danger?

Whatever troubles you, remember, along with Paul, that God can work despite sin, and he does work despite sin. The Cross assures us of that.

Thirdly and finally, God is at work through prayer.

From the end of verse 18 through to verse 26 we read of Paul’s confidence that God will work for good in response to the Philippians’ prayers for him. He expects he will be released from prison but realises there is still a possibility he might be executed. But no matter, he says: to live is Christ, and to die is gain (verse 21). However God chooses to respond to the prayers of the Philippians, and whether it is what he would prefer or not, it will still always be for the good.

But just because Paul doesn’t know for sure how his imprisonment is going to work out, and because he can see that either outcome could be possible within the will of God, he doesn’t want people to stop praying for him. He wants to be held in the loving embrace of the Father by his friends.

And likewise, I’m sure he doesn’t know how the trials the Philippians themselves are enduring will work out. He isn’t surprised they are suffering. For one thing, it was his own regular experience. And for another, more specifically, he and Silas had faced suffering when they first proclaimed the Gospel in Philippi. You may remember the story in Acts chapter sixteen where Paul casts a spirit out of a slave girl, and when her owners then lose the income they had gained from exploiting her, the evangelists are thrown into jail.

But Paul will not give up praying for the Philippians. He knows God can and will be at work through their persecution and despite it. God is not confounded by opposition to his will. In prayer, Paul supports the heavenly battle to oppose evil and bring good out of it.

This is good news for us when our lives are under the cosh or we are praying for others who are going through unjust pain. We may not know what God’s will is for the situation in question. We can seek to discern his will and then pray for that, but we still may not discover what God wants to do.

And if we are praying for a need where we do not know the will of God, we can still do better than praying something like, ‘Lord, please heal Mrs Smith – if it be your will.’ Sometimes tacking on ‘if it be your will’ to the end of a prayer is a lazy way out or a way of moving onto the next thing. Would it not be better to pray an honest prayer where we say, ‘Lord, I do not know what your will is for Mrs Smith, whether you want her to be healed or to endure her suffering and go to be with you. But whatever it is, I pray that you will be glorified, and that you will bring good out of this situation.’

I still have to learn to pray more like that. What about you?

Conclusion

Paul loves the Philippians so much that he wants to use his own experiences of adversity to encourage and strengthen them. They can have faith to believe that God is at work despite their circumstances, despite sinful opposition, and despite not always knowing how and what to pray for.

As we face challenges, both new and old, may we look to the Holy Spirit to help us follow in their footsteps.

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New Series: Paul’s Favourite Church; 1. Christians Under Construction (Philippians 1:1-11)

Philippians 1:1-11

How do you choose a church? Some of us don’t: we grow up in it. My sister and I were fifth generation, same congregation.

Others of us move into an area and look for a new church. We may consider the denomination, the style of worship, or the theological outlook. We may look for one that has good children’s ministry. North American research has suggested that on that continent the number one consideration is the quality of the preaching.

But these options weren’t available in the early decades of Christianity. You came to faith and you joined the local group of believers in your city, who probably met in one of the larger Roman houses owned by a wealthy member of the congregation, and that was that.

Yet for an apostle like Paul, travelling from place to place planting new churches and overseeing them, there was an opportunity to see which churches were doing better. And while you might argue he shouldn’t have had favourites, the warmth of his letter to the Philippians contrasts strongly with the way he has to speak to some of the other churches, such as the Galatians and the Corinthians.

This doesn’t mean the Philippians were perfect: we shall encounter some issues they had as we explore the letter. But it does mean we can get an idea of what made them so attractive to Paul. And that may help us as we seek to be an appealing and attractive congregation today. Listen to his warm words in verses 7 and 8 to get a sense of his feelings for them:

7 It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart and, whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me. 8 God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.

In the surrounding verses, we hear of his joy, his confidence, and his aspirations for the Philippians. When we hear the substance of his joy, confidence, and aspirations we get a sense of why he loved them so much. From that we can ponder whether we have these lovable traits, too.

So firstly, why is Paul joyful?

3 I thank my God every time I remember you. 4 In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now

He is joyful, because the Philippians are in partnership with him in the gospel. In what ways have they done this?

We know from later in the letter that they have sent gifts via a courier named Epaphroditus to help Paul in need. That might be financial support, or that might be material provisions, especially because he is dictating this letter from prison. In those days, friends and family of the prisoner had to supply their everyday needs, such as food.

We also know that two women in the congregation called Euodia and Syntyche and a man named Clement have been missionaries or evangelists alongside Paul.

Partnership in the gospel is not just a matter of words but of deeds for the Philippians. They have raised money – not just generally for charity, but specifically for the work of the gospel. And they have sent people to be part of God’s mission. They have skin in the game.

In what ways do we go into partnership in the gospel? Take the question of raising funds. Many churches are good at doing that for charities, and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but I am saying it’s not the same as funding the spread of the gospel. Many churches are also good at raising money for Christian organisations that provide disaster relief or other support to the poor, and that is good, because it is a way of demonstrating the gospel. It’s part of sharing the love of God in our deeds.

But in my experience of Methodist churches, raising money and practical support for the spread of the gospel in word is far rarer. In what ways can we get behind those whose call it is to urge people to come to faith in Christ? We seem to forget that unless we support evangelism, there will be no church. The church is always just one generation away from extinction.

There are many organisations we could support. Some specialise in bringing the gospel to students. I know someone who runs a network out of Southampton for women sharing the gospel with other women. Some groups specialise in rural areas, others in our cities, and so on.

And what about releasing some of our people for this work? Who are the folk in our congregations who talk naturally and easily about their faith in Jesus? Are these the individuals we should be encouraging and supporting to pursue a calling more specifically?

Imagine the joy this would bring to the wider church and to church leaders if we were explicit in our partnership in the gospel.

Secondly, why is Paul confident?

6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

I will be open with you: this is one of my favourite verses in the Bible. It’s why I entitled this sermon ‘Christians Under Construction.’ ‘He who began a good work in you will complete it.’ Replace the roadworks sign that says, ‘Danger, men at work’ with ‘Danger, God at work’!

Or to put it another way, this is a time of year when I, who do not watch much television, set the Sky box to record three consecutive Monday night shows on BBC2. Because Monday night becomes brainy quiz night. Only Connect, Mastermind, and University Challenge. I don’t care that I can only answer a few of the questions: I like being stretched.

And there in the middle is the famous catchphrase from Mastermind: ‘I’ve started, so I’ll finish.’ This, says Paul, is what God has promised the Philippian Christians. And this, says Paul, is the basis of his confidence. He has seen enough to be confident that God will see things through in their lives. He will complete the work of what John Wesley called ‘Christian Perfection.’

The Philippians are indeed Christians under construction. They are not the finished article. Paul is well aware of that. Again, later in the epistle we shall come across some of their failures and foibles. But Paul sees that bit by bit, God’s Holy Spirit is doing the work of transformation. Slowly, they are being remade in the image of Christ. Paul is confident God will see his project in them through to completion. This is an attractive feature of the Philippian church.

And yes, this work is all of God, but it takes a co-operation with the Holy Spirit for it to happen. This speaks well of the Philippian Christians. They are committed to seeing God’s transforming work happen in their lives.

We too will be an appealing community of God’s kingdom if the same is true of us. I am sure many of us can look back on our lives and tell stories about how God has done a makeover in our lives – something the late great Christian philosopher Dallas Willard called ‘The renovation of the heart.’ I’m sure if we take a moment to reflect we can each identify an example in our lives.

But here’s the thing: so often, such testimonies are accounts of what happened in the past. Do we also have a testimony in the present of God’s renewing work?

This means we cannot be complacent Christians. By all means let us rightly rejoice in what God has already done in our lives. But let us also be committed to hearing the still, small voice of the Spirit whispering to us about the next item on God’s agenda of change for us. And let us also encourage one another when we see signs of God being at work in our brothers and sisters.

Thirdly and finally, what are Paul’s aspirations?

9 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ – to the glory and praise of God.

I suppose you could say that Paul’s aspirations are, ‘I like what I’ve already seen in you Philippians, now I pray that God does more.’ It’s the kind of prayer that follows through on his joy that they partner in the gospel and his confidence that God hasn’t stopped working in their lives.

But here Paul gets a little more specific about how he would love to see God continue to work among these people. It goes roughly like this: if you love God more that means you will know God more, which means you will know God’s will better, and then you will want to do that will. That seems to be the sequence he envisages: love God more – know God better – know God’s will – do God’s will.

My guess is that the Philippians share Paul’s aspirations for them, even if they can’t articulate them like he does. They want a deeper love and knowledge of God, so that they may know and do his will. That is what they are living for. That is what Paul longs to see fulfilled in them.

But in the modern church when we meet some people like this, it scares us. We think they are freaks or extremists. The late A W Tozer once said something to the effect that if someone with a normal New Testament commitment to Christ walked into one of our churches, we would treat them as if their spiritual temperature were a fever, when the reality is that we are spiritually cold.

Now of course there are some Christians who are genuinely extreme or unbalanced, who have an unhealthy intensity. Such people make me feel uncomfortable, because something doesn’t seem quite right with them. They may be sincere, but I am not sure about how healthily they are expressing their faith.

But I can’t dismiss every Christian who makes me feel uncomfortable in the same way. Sometimes, if I am honest, there are others who leave me with an uneasy feeling because their love for Christ is so wholehearted that it shows me up as being trivial and half-hearted. I don’t like that, and it’s easier to besmirch their faith than ask myself awkward questions about the depth of my commitment to Christ.

What if we made it our aspiration for ourselves and one another that together by the grace of God we would pursue a wholesome wholeheartedness for Christ, and rely on the Holy Spirit to lead us?

Conclusion

No wonder Paul loves the Philippian church. They partner with him in the gospel. They know God is at work in their lives. They are passionate to see more of that. What an encouragement they must have been to him as he spent time in a jail in Rome.

Imperfect as we are, still under construction as we are – just like the Philippians – what can we learn from them that we too might be attractive witnesses for Christ?

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The Dangers of Going Soft on Commitment to Jesus, John 6:56-69 (Ordinary 21 Year B)

John 6:56-69
I want to paint a picture in your minds of a different story about Jesus from the one we heard in the reading. I want you to imagine the encounter Jesus had with the person we call ‘The rich young ruler.’
You will remember how this young man came to Jesus and asked him what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replies by listing a number of the commandments.

The young man responds by saying, ‘Teacher, I’ve kept all of these commandments since birth’ – which is an amazing claim, if you think about it.

‘One thing you lack,’ says Jesus. ‘Sell all your possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.’

‘Rabbi,’ replies the young man, ‘I can’t do that. What about I give ten per cent to the poor?’

Jesus answers, ‘OK, it’s a deal. Come, follow me.’

What’s wrong with this picture?

I think you know. In the original story, Jesus doesn’t negotiate with the young man. He doesn’t compromise his call. He doesn’t water down the cost of commitment. He doesn’t soften the hard edges of discipleship.

In today’s reading we don’t have an individual who is rubbed up the wrong way by Jesus’ demands, we have a whole crowd that does.

60 On hearing it, many of his disciples said, ‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’

And just as with the rich young ruler, Jesus refuses to give an inch.

This is an important lesson for us. The Christian church is faced with many people who say, we can’t believe what you teach, or we can’t accept the morality of the Bible. We are tempted to dilute the challenge of following Jesus to keep these folk.

But I fear that, unlike Jesus, we give in to that temptation to strike a bargain with people. Jesus held firm, but then saw many of his disciples walk away:

66 From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

We, on the other hand, know that people are leaving the church or having nothing to do with it in the first place, and in the face of our declining and aging numbers succumb easily to the temptation to relax the demands of Jesus, or reinterpret them in a way that we think will be more palatable for today’s society.

Now of course there are areas where the church needs to self-correct. There are too many stories of where we have been cruel or uncaring to people, most shamefully perhaps in our failures to protect children. There are also places where we need to understand the teaching of Jesus in its original context to make sense of it.

But at the heart of our message, it is a catastrophic mistake to weaken our claims about who Jesus is and what Jesus teaches. I want to explore those two areas with you today and show why it’s vital that we hold firm on the Person of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus.

Firstly, then, the Person of Jesus.
In this passage, Jesus claims to come from the Father (verse 57) and the true bread that comes from heaven (verse 58). He also says he will ascend back to where he came from (verse 62). He’s pretty much making divine claims here, just as he did earlier in the chapter when he said, ‘I am the Bread of life’, where ‘I am’ is not simply the beginning of a sentence but the claiming of a divine name from the Old Testament.

The crowd doesn’t like this claim. As good Jews, they have problems with it. Jesus hears them grumbling and he knows they are offended (verse 61). But he doesn’t budge an inch.

Why? Because Jesus knows who he is, and he knows that unless he is fully divine as well as fully human, he cannot bridge the gap between heaven and sinful humanity and so save us. For as Lord of all he has the authority to forgive, and as a human being he identifies with us in our plight. So, however difficult it is to understand Jesus as having both divine and human natures, it is a doctrine we cannot row back on.

Where might that be important today? Where might we be tempted to dial down the claims of Jesus? I would suggest that one area is in our conversations with our Muslim friends. I have heard Christians say, ‘We are more similar to Muslims than we thought. Isn’t it good that they recognise Jesus as a prophet?’
But if Jesus is only a prophet, he can’t save us, because he isn’t fully divine. We may think it’s well-meaning from our Muslim friends, but it doesn’t help.

At its root, you will probably know that Muslims reject the idea that Jesus died on the Cross, and they say that it would be beneath the dignity of  a prophet, let alone the Son of God, to die in such a way. Immediately, that cuts out God’s chosen means of salvation.

And this is linked with Muhammad rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity, almost certainly because rather than coming into contact with people who believed in the Trinity, he encountered tribes that believed in three gods.

Of course, we should be kind and loving to our Muslim neighbours. We should have respectful conversations. But what we cannot do is agree with them about who Jesus is.

Ultimately, it’s not that different from the way many people from a western culture say that Jesus was a good man, but no more. However, it’s now many decades since CS Lewis made his famous rejoinder to that position. He said that when you look at the claims Jesus made about himself, either he was exactly who he said he was, or he was being deceitful, or he was deluded. The choice, he said, was between Jesus being Lord, liar, or lunatic. ‘Good man’ is not on the table.

So the first thing I want us to acknowledge today is we need to hold fast to the classical Christian beliefs about who Jesus is. If we move away from them, then salvation itself is at stake.

Secondly, the Teaching of Jesus.
Again, let’s begin by collecting some data from the passage.

Jesus says that people need to eat his flesh and drink his blood to be in relationship with him (verse 56). This isn’t a reference to the Lord’s Supper: there are no allusions to that in John 6: there is no wine, there is no eating and drinking in remembrance of Jesus, and so on. This language is about believing in Jesus and taking his life and words into themselves. The same thing occurs in the next verse where Jesus talks about people feeding on him.

Furthermore, Jesus then says he has spoken words that are full of Spirit and life (verse 63) and when Simon Peter rejects the idea of leaving him, he tells Jesus he has the ‘words of eternal life’ (verse 68).
It is clear, then, that Jesus is telling us that his teaching has divine authority. And if that’s the case, then we’d better not mess with it.

I did say in the introduction to the sermon that there are times of course when we need to be careful how we interpret the teaching of Jesus, because he gave it in a different time and culture, and we need to understand that background in order to make sense of it. Sometimes he does something typically Jewish and uses extreme language – we would call it ‘hyperbolic’ – to make a point. It’s like drawing a cartoon of someone in which their features are shown in an exaggerated way to make a point. Perhaps that includes examples such as when he said we should pull out our eyes or cut off our hands if doing so would prevent us from sinning.

But for all those important caveats, my experience is that Christians of all sorts of persuasions have their ways of trying to neuter the teaching of Jesus. And that’s dangerous, because we are called to be his disciples – that is, his apprentices, or students. To be a disciple is to come under his teaching and be formed by it.

So some right-wing Christians will do somersaults around Jesus’ teaching on money and concern for the poor, and come up with the heresy that we call ‘The Prosperity Gospel’, where wealth is taken to be a sure indication of divine blessing.

And left-wing Christians will do all they can to dance around Jesus’ plain teaching about sexual ethics, to justify relationships outside marriage.

In sum, many of us in the church, across varying social and spiritual persuasions, will find an aspect of Jesus’ teaching that we don’t like and we will look for a route to get around it and avoid it. Sometimes we do that, because it’s an element of Jesus’ teaching that we personally find uncomfortable. On other occasions we do it, because we are afraid that people will reject faith in Christ because of it.

But whatever our motive, this is dangerous. It is a delusion to invite someone to follow Jesus when we are going to alter his teaching to make it more palatable. For then we are not actually following him at all.

Believe you me, there are many parts of Jesus’ teaching that I wish were not there. I feel at times like Mark Twain, who once said that it was not the parts of Jesus’ words that he didn’t understand that troubled him, it was the parts that he did understand that gave him problems. I wonder if any of you share that feeling.

Conclusion
So what are we going to do? It’s not nice seeing people walk away from Jesus and his church, is it? I even get the feeling that Jesus was upset by it. At least, that’s the feeling I draw from verse 67 where he asks the Twelve, ‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’

Now if people are walking away because we haven’t been good ambassadors for Christ, then we have something serious to correct in our life of faith together.

But if they are leaving because they reject who Jesus is or what he teaches, then we need to learn to let them, however painful that feels. For them to stay and follow a false Jesus and distortions of his teaching is no good to anyone. It doesn’t save them at all.

I believe the challenge of this passage for us is to recommit ourselves to presenting a full-blooded Jesus and unvarnished accounts of his teaching to the world.
For we can trust the Father to draw people to Jesus, and we can pray for people to respond to that call.
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Breaking Barriers to Faith in Jesus in our Friends, John 6:35, 41-51 (Ordinary 19 Year B)

John 6:35, 41-51

When I started school, it was quickly apparent that I had an aptitude for Maths. Doing sums, learning my tables and all that came naturally to me. I just seemed to understand it.

But what I couldn’t understand was why the other children in my class didn’t get it. In my young naïveté I thought that what was natural to me was normal for everyone.

It took me a long time to realise that Maths is a ‘Marmite subject.’ To me, there is a beauty and an elegance to numbers, and I am of course immensely proud that this is what our son is studying at university. But now I realise that others don’t have that same flair – although they have talents I can only dream of possessing.

Nevertheless, for all the ways in which as adults we understand that people have different gifts, we still hit those moments in our lives when we feel like banging our head against a brick wall when we can’t get someone to understand something that it as clear as daylight to us.

And in our reading, Jesus knows that the members of the crowd are like that when it comes to spiritual matters. They ask the wrong questions, betraying their wrong desires, because they just don’t ‘get’ the life of the Spirit.

But rather than getting frustrated, Jesus knows what the blockages are. He knows that their grumbling (verse 41) and their failure to understand that he is so much more than the son of Joseph and Mary (verse 42) betrays the truth that they have no spiritual life.

But he knows how people come into the life of the Spirit, and we can be grateful that he explains it to us, because that’s what today’s reading is mainly about. So when we encounter friends and family members who seem to be caught in a spiritual log jam, not understanding what we desperately want them to know, the insights of Jesus here can help us.

The first requirement of the spiritual life is to be drawn by the Father.

Jesus says,

44 ‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day.

Nobody can come to faith in Jesus unless God the Father first draws them.

Does this mean that God only draws certain people, and leaves others to damnation, as John Calvin believed? No. It simply means that the initiative rests with God. Coming to faith is not a mere human act. We cannot know God unless God first reveals himself to us.

Why is that? Because we are cut off from him by sin. Our sinful nature and our sinful actions are a barrier between us and God. Because of them, we can never reach him on our own. We can never stand in his presence of our own right, because we cannot and do not match his perfection.

Thankfully, God has always reached out first to humankind. He sent patriarchs, judges, prophets, and finally his only begotten Son, who bridged the chasm between heaven and us by being both fully human and completely divine, and by dying for our sins on the Cross.

So where does that leave us when we have unbelieving friends and relatives? The answer is that it takes us to the place of prayer. No breakthrough happens in the spiritual life except it be underpinned by prayer. Don’t worry in the first instances about how you are going to convince your loved one about Jesus – although it is always good to be prepared with an explanation for the hope we have in us, as the Apostle Peter said (1 Peter 3:15).

Leave the arguments aside at this point. If life in the Spirit requires God to make the first move towards someone, then the application for us is to pray that he will indeed do that in the life of the person for whom we are praying. Let it be our prayer that God will reveal himself to him or her. Let us make that a simple daily prayer: ‘Lord, reveal yourself to [name].’

But be prepared to be in it for the long haul. The spiritual breakthrough may take years. In today’s climate where there is much ignorance and rejection of Christian faith, there may be a lot of barriers for God to break down in order to make himself known to those we love. Someone recently described our task today as what he called ‘low tide evangelism.’ The tide is a long way out, and for the waters of the Spirit to be back on the beach, lapping over those there, will take longer.

So be willing to be persistent. Be resilient in prayer. Be disciplined in regularly praying that simple prayer for God to reveal himself to those you care about.

The second requirement of the spiritual life is to hear the Father.

Jesus says,

45 It is written in the Prophets: “They will all be taught by God.” Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me.

God revealing himself to people will involve him speaking to them. He speaks so that there can be a response. God makes himself known, but then makes clear what needs to happen.

When I look back at my own coming to faith, I see something like this. I grew up in the church, but I mistakenly imbibed what we call a ‘legalistic’ view of religion. That is, I thought Christianity was about keeping the rules and being good – never realising that no-one could be good enough and we needed the Cross of Christ.  God showed up in my life at a confirmation class, where the promises and professions of faith in the 1975 Methodist Service Book spoke to me about what was required. That was the point at which faith in Jesus came alive in me.

There are more dramatic stories of God revealing himself and then speaking to people. Some of them come from the Muslim world, where it can be virtually impossible for Christians to speak openly about their faith to Muslims, because they would be arrested, tortured, and executed. Yet there is story upon story coming out of that context of Muslims on a spiritual search who find that Jesus appears to them in a dream, and he shows himself to be the answer to all their yearnings, and so much more than the prophet that the Qu’ran says he is.

For most people, of course, it doesn’t tend to be that intense, it’s more often a quieter experience. But at the heart of it is God revealing himself and speaking to people. In a church context, it may be through a preacher’s words in a sermon. It may be that God uses a conversation with a Christian friend. But one way or another, entry to the life of the Spirit requires that God both shows up in someone’s life and then speaks to them, so that they know how to respond.

What is the application for us here? For one, it stretches out that regular, disciplined praying I have already commended for the ones we love who don’t yet share our faith. Our prayer becomes not only ‘Lord, reveal yourself to [name]’ but, ‘Lord, reveal yourself to [name] and speak to them.’

It’s also about praying that our lives will speak of Christ. Some years ago at a conference, I heard a pastor speak about a lady who came to faith in Christ and joined his church. Her husband didn’t believe, and so she took to leaving out Christian literature on the coffee table, pointing out the Christian actors in TV shows, and incessantly playing Cliff Richard CDs.

It drove the husband mad, and he actually went to see the pastor to ask if he could do something about his wife.

So the pastor spoke to the wife and urged her to lay aside her rather manipulative approach. ‘Let your life speak of Christ,’ he advised her. ‘Ask yourself how Jesus would treat your husband, and do that.’

A while later, the husband asked to see the pastor again. ‘What did you say to my wife?’ The pastor explained.

‘That’s a Jesus I’d like to get to know,’ said the husband.

Only after these first two requirements of God revealing himself and speaking comes the third requirement, which is to believe in Jesus.

Jesus says,

46 No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. 47 Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life.

Jesus is the One sent by the Father. Jesus is the only One who has seen the Father. If we want to know what the Father is like, we look at Jesus. He makes him known. Hence why it’s Jesus who appears in these dreams of Muslims that I mentioned.

And therefore, the appropriate response to the Father’s revelation and speech is to believe in Jesus.

But what does that involve? It’s not simply believing in Jesus’ existence. The crowd believed he existed!

This is where all the talk of Jesus being ‘The bread of life’ (verse 48), ‘The bread that comes down from heaven’ in contrast to the manna in the wilderness’ (verses 49-50), and ‘The living bread that came down from heaven’ (verse 51) comes in.

For just as we need physical bread to sustain mortal life, so we need ‘The bread of life’ to sustain eternal life. It is Jesus, and the gift of his life, that sustains us spiritually.

All this comes down to being in relationship with Jesus. It means talking with him. We call that prayer. It means listening to what he has to say to us, certainly in the dialogue of prayer but supremely in the Scriptures. It means doing what he asks of us, because we want to please him. Just as Jesus himself told the tempter in the wilderness that we do not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, so, because Jesus himself is divine, we are sustained by his words.

So, what does this mean in terms of our praying for our friends and family members who do not yet know Jesus? Alongside praying that God will reveal himself to them and speak to them, we pray that they may be so captivated by Jesus that they want to enter into a lifetime – well, eternal, actually – relationship with him.

We do not content ourselves with explaining things away by saying, oh, they may not believe but they are good people with good values. That doesn’t bring eternal life. Sure, we may be proud of some of their achievements, but the bottom line is faith in Jesus.

And yes, that may well make some of our praying painful to us. I can’t pretend otherwise. That’s true for me in my praying for others. But Jesus gave his life that we may have eternal life with him – not just when we die, but as a quality of life now, even in the midst of this mortal life. If Jesus was willing to do that, surely we can bear some pain in prayer?

Surely, if we are motivated by God’s love for our friends and relatives, we shall pray for God to reveal himself to them, for God to speak to them, and we shall pray with passion that they may have such an encounter with Jesus that they want to follow him.

Would anything less really be love?

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Good Habits Versus Wrong Desires, John 6:24-35 (Ordinary 18 Year B)

John 6:24-35
Many of us remember fondly the Wallace and Gromit movies. The second one, The Wrong Trousers, finds Wallace taking in a penguin lodger to alleviate his debts.  

Unfortunately, the lodger is the infamous criminal Feathers McGraw, and he spies the special techno-trousers Wallace has developed for taking Gromit on walks. Rewiring them for remote control and getting Wallace into them while he sleeps, he attempts to steal a diamond from the city museum.

The crowd in today’s reading don’t have a problem with the wrong trousers. They have a problem with asking the wrong questions. And their wrong questions betray their wrong desires.

As I said last week, the crowd has a choice between the grace Jesus offers them and their own mentality of grabbing. Ultimately, their wrong choices (which are also driven by wrong desires) will lead to them deserting Jesus.

Our desires are important – more so than we sometimes give them credit. Some Christians say we just need to get our thinking right and everything else will follow. It’s the religious version of the famous statement by the philosopher Descartes, ‘I think, therefore I am.’

But as the Christian thinker James K A Smith points out, that just makes us ‘brains on a stick.’ He urges us to remember the teaching of St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), who reminded us that what actually drive us are our desires and our loves. These are what form us, especially the habits they encourage in us. Smith puts it this way: ‘You Are What You Love.’

So it’s important to examine our desires. And hence today we’re going to look at the wrong desires in the crowd that are betrayed by their wrong questions so that we can nurture the right desires in our lives as Christian disciples.

The first wrong desire is to prefer physical satisfaction at the expense of the spiritual.

25 When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, ‘Rabbi, when did you get here?’
26 Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. 

They are glad to have had their bellies filled – and Jesus was happy to meet their needs. But after that, it all went downhill. Or perhaps it’s better to say that their real attitudes were exposed.

Because there’s nothing wrong with Jesus and his people meeting physical and material needs. In fact, it’s important, and it’s often the first step in Christian witness. As General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, once said: if you want to give a hungry man a tract, make sure it’s the wrapping on a sandwich.

The crowd is happy to receive the gift, but not the Giver. It’s me-centred, or perhaps we-centred, but not God-centred.

These attitudes still persist today. If God won’t give people what they want physically, then God must be rejected. It can be summed up in the T-shirt slogan, ‘He who has the most toys wins’ – to which the answer is, ‘He who has the most toys still dies.’ Paul’s teaching that ‘godliness with contentment is great gain’ (1 Timothy 6:6) is not popular teaching with our culture – and nor with our politicians and economists.

Nowhere is this more evident in our society than in the attitude to sex, where the typical time frame for a couple first to sleep together is now on just the third date. They would prefer to believe that God is a spoilsport and Christians are prudes to the truth that God actually has their well-being at heart when he prescribes a different and stricter approach.

We in the community of faith are not immune to these pressures to prioritise physical satisfaction and diminish or exclude our need to feed on Christ and his word. How easily we forget the way Jesus quoted Deuteronomy to the tempter in the wilderness, that we do not live on bread alone but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

And that’s why we need to develop regular sustainable habits for our devotional lives. We have our regular habits for eating, and we know why we need them. So why do we shy away from doing the same for our spiritual sustenance? You cannot tell me that the average person cannot put aside at least ten or fifteen minutes a day for Bible reading and prayer.

And furthermore, we are spoilt for choice these days in the availability of resources to help us – from traditional daily Bible reading notes to apps for our smartphones.

Do we give an appropriate priority to our spiritual feeding as we do to the meeting of our physical needs? Or are we numbered among those the late AW Tozer had in mind when he said, ‘Most Christians live like practical atheists’?

The second wrong desire is to prefer human works at the expense of divine grace.

Continuing the conversation with the crowd, Jesus says,

27 Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.’
28 Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’
29 Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’
The crowd falls into the trap of Jesus mentioning working for food that endures to eternal life. They want to work in order to receive approval from God. Did Jesus know their hearts and minds? I rather suspect he did.
For Jesus’ response is to tell them to do something that isn’t really work:
29 Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’
There are no works you can do to win the approval of God, he says. What God requires is that you put your faith in me.

The crowd makes a common mistake. People use the following of God’s laws either as good works that they hope will win favour from God, or as boundary markers to show who’s in and who’s out – hopefully proving that they are ‘in’.

And it’s a mistake to say this is just a fault seen in Jewish opponents of Jesus. The idea that we are not fundamentally sinners and can be good enough on our own to be accepted by God has been called by some ‘The English heresy.’ It has a long and tawdry history in our culture.

It is seen in the relegation of the word ‘sin’ to the salacious stories that were always so beloved of Sunday tabloids, usually of a sexual nature. Even in our day as newspapers are replaced by the Internet, there are plenty of these tales around.

But Jesus says we just need to believe in him, and that isn’t a good work that merits us the love of God. Faith is to hold out empty hands to God and believe that he is going to fill them with his good things.
Sadly, the good works heresy still squirms its way into the church. I have had people ask me if they were good enough for church membership. To which the proper reply is no, but neither am I. We are here by the grace of God alone, and we receive that by holding out the empty hands of faith.

It’s why whatever we say about right and wrong in society and in other people, we must be careful not to become judgmental. We are only in the family of God by his grace, received by faith in Jesus and his death for our sins.

I once met a Christian who had a particular way of reminding himself of this. I met him when we were both patients on a hospital ward, and he gave me his business card. After his name were the initials ‘SSBG’, and I was puzzled. What degree or professional qualification was that, I asked him?

‘It stands for Sinner Saved By Grace,’ he replied.

‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’

The third and final wrong desire is to prefer signs at the expense of the Saviour.

30 So they asked him, ‘What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”’

When I hear this, I’m inclined to think: what a cheek! You want a sign to prove that this is the One you should believe in? Well, what do you think you saw when he fed all five thousand of you?

It reminds me of what the Apostle Paul said in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians on this subject:

22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

Some people have a lust for the spectacular and the dramatic. If there is a God, they expect a firework show with drones like the New Year extravaganza in London.

But Jesus points the crowd to the Father who gave bread from heaven in the wilderness, and ultimately to himself as ‘The Bread of Life’, because signs aren’t meant to be an alternative to faith in him and allegiance to him.

Now don’t get me wrong. Jesus did miracles. I believe he did. I also believe that miracles are not extinct. I do believe in a God who shows up in history and is not remote from us. And therefore, I believe in things like intercessory prayer.

But the signs are not an end in themselves. They are meant to point to Jesus. And that’s what we’re meant to focus on. That’s what matters.

Miracles are real, but rare, as CS Lewis said in his book on the subject. Why? Because the scientific laws by which our universe lives are a description of God’s habits – they must be, if it is true that Jesus ‘sustain[s] all things by his powerful word’, as Hebrews 1:3 says. The universe relies on God’s habits. Miracles are when God breaks his habits, but of necessity can only be rare, or the upholding of the universe will be disturbed.

Next time we want church or faith to be some kind of whizz-bang show, we need to ask ourselves whether we are putting our thirst for a religious performance ahead of our relationship with Jesus.
To be sure, I am not for one moment suggesting that church and faith should be boring. We believe in Jesus, and when we read about him we can be sure that he was many things, but one thing he certainly wasn’t was boring.

But the life of faith is not the explosive adrenaline rush of the hundred metres sprint, it is the marathon. We keep Jesus and the finish line before us in what Eugene Peterson called ‘A Long Obedience In The Same Direction.’

Conclusion

So what if we are to make the right choices, not the wrong ones? At the beginning, I linked this with the need to establish habits.

If we are not to prefer physical satisfaction over the spiritual, then I talked about the habit of regular Bible reading.

If we are not to prefer human works over grace, then we need the regular discipline of both confessing our sins and receiving the assurance of forgiveness. So yes, let us notice this as a rhythm in Sunday worship every week. But we might also consider a daily review of our lives. There is an old Christian practice called the Examen, where we review the day before going to bed. We rejoice in the good of the day and where we have seen God at work. We also repent of those times we have failed him and are assured we are forgiven.

If we are not to prefer signs over the Saviour, then these first two disciplines, along with our other commitments of worship, the sacraments, prayer, and fellowship will all be tools of the Holy Spirit to form us in the marathon race of God’s kingdom. Just so long as we keep doing them and they become regular habits.  
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Making A Choice About Jesus, John 6:1-21 (Ordinary 17 Year B)

John 6:1-21

You are at the pub quiz night – or community centre, if you prefer – and your team gets this question:

Apart from the crucifixion and the resurrection, what is the only story to appear in all four of the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?

Full marks if you said, the feeding of the five thousand.

Now do not let modern scepticism explain it away, for example, as a symbolic story. In Mark’s account, he makes the apparently incidental comment that the grass was green, which implies this happened in springtime. John corroborates this when he observes that ‘The Jewish Passover Festival was near’ (verse 4). Passover occurred in the spring.

No: this incident must have made a massive impact on the early Christians for all four evangelists to record it.

And in John’s case, you can tell that from the fact that he includes it as one of the seven ‘signs’ in his Gospel. John never just speaks about ‘miracles’. Even the healings at the beginning of this account (verse 2) are called ‘signs.’

Why a ‘sign’ and not just a common-or-garden miracle? Because a sign points somewhere. The signs in John point to Jesus. Read on in the chapter and we will find Jesus making one of his ‘I am’ sayings that are also a feature in John – in this case, ‘I am the bread of life.’ That is where ultimately the feeding of the five thousand points to as a sign.

But even before we get to that point, there is a very basic issue that both the disciples and the crowd must face. In different ways, they need to make a choice about Jesus. We’re going to explore those choices about Jesus, because the alternatives before them also come up for us.

Firstly, with the disciples, there is a choice between problems and possibilities.

We read that Jesus knew all along what he was going to do, and when he asked Philip where they were going to buy bread to feed the crowd, he did so in order to test him (verses 5-6). And Philip doesn’t do too well on the test:

‘It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!’ (verse 7)

All he can see is the problem.

Andrew does marginally better. He who had brought his brother Simon to Jesus in chapter 1 now brings the boy with the five barley loaves and two fishes, even if he also asks how that meagre offering will feed the multitude (verse 9). Andrew struggles, but at least sees a tiny possibility.

Meanwhile, all along, Jesus knows the divine possibilities.

If we are to be people of true faith in Jesus, then we need to start tilting towards possibilities rather than problems.

But I confess to you, I am far from perfect myself in this area. My wife will tell you how frustrating I can be when she comes up with a bright idea, and my instinctive response is to list all the hurdles it faces. I like to think that I’m simply setting out what obstacles we’ll need to cross in order to achieve her idea, but I’m not convinced she believes me. Maybe it’s my depression speaking, or a lack of self-confidence, but I know I can present as being a glass-half-empty person who takes the remaining water in the glass and uses it to douse the flames of enthusiasm.

Yet for all that, I’m very different when the boot is on the other foot. If I am making suggestions to a church about things we can do and all I get in response is, we can’t do that, we don’t like that, we won’t do that, then I become the frustrated one. Churches ask you to give them a lead and when you do, they don’t take it. Many a time I have come home from a meeting and told my wife that I am wasting my time as a minister.

Jesus calls us to be people of possibilities, not problems. He calls us to be people of faith. We nod our heads to that, but then refuse to live that out in practice. Some of us are addicted to middle-class comfort, rather than committed to living out a life of faith in Jesus.

The other day, I watched an interview with the late Tim Keller, who planted a successful Presbyterian church from scratch in New York City, and then when he stepped down, he set up an organisation to support anyone else who wanted to reach people in cities around the world with the Gospel. The interviewer asked him why he was so passionate about cities.

Keller replied that more and more people are moving into cities, but Christians are retreating from them. He said too many Christians are more concerned to ask where they will be comfortable than where they will be useful to God.

So I want to lay this out as a challenge to the church today. Are we so bound up in problems that we have forgotten that we are meant to have a live faith in Jesus? Could it even be that our obsession with problems is a way of avoiding the challenge of the possibilities he lays before us, so that we remain comfortable, rather than finding out where we are useful to Christ, with the attendant discomfort that may bring?

If we keep running away from the challenges Jesus sets before us, won’t we become like the man in the parable who buried the one talent he had, instead of investing it? You know what happened to him. The same can happen to a church.

Let’s make sure we choose the possibilities of Jesus over the problems we see.

Secondly, with the crowd there is a choice between grace and grabbing.

Right from the outset, Jesus is generous and gracious towards the crowd. Why should he feel obligated to feed them? Shouldn’t he have expected them to prepare and pack provisions if they were going to be out for the day? Surely they should bring the first century equivalent of a packed lunch or snacks? One lad did. If we encountered such thoughtlessness or laziness on a grand scale, wouldn’t we be inclined to say, it’s their fault, they can sort it out?

Not Jesus. In his kindness and compassion, he miraculously provides for this huge gathering.

And that is entirely consistent with what we know about the character of Jesus. Hasn’t he provided a world where there is enough for all, regardless of our selfishness? Doesn’t his Father send the sun to shine on both the righteous and the unrighteous? Isn’t he the One who asked sick people, what do you want me to do for you?

And isn’t it our own fault that we are messed up with our sins? Don’t we deserve to be left to our own devices and rot?

Jesus doesn’t see it that way. He offers his very life that we might find the forgiveness of sins. He rises from the dead for us to know new life. He sends his Spirit on us to begin the work of transformation. We don’t deserve any of that, but this is his generous, gracious love in action.

Jesus is characterised by generosity and grace. He isn’t stingy. The disciples filled up twelve baskets with the leftovers from the miraculously multiplied barley loaves (verse 13).

And after the feeding of the five thousand, look at how he calms the fears of his disciples when he comes walking on the water. ‘It is I; don’t be afraid’ (verse 20).

This is Jesus. He isn’t miserable. He isn’t mean. He doesn’t have a thunderbolt in his back pocket that he’s just itching to throw at you. He longs for us to know and experience his generous love and his grace.

But the crowd makes the wrong call. Having enjoyed all that Jesus had done for them and given them, then instead of gratitude for that love, they want to grab Jesus for their own purposes:

14 After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, ‘Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.’ 15 Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.

They just want to use Jesus for their own purposes and what they can get out of him. This is not the relationship of friendship and love that Jesus would later talk about. They just wanted to grab Jesus and use him.

The stakes are high. Had the crowd succeeded, then Jesus would have become a failed Messiah. He can’t afford that. He has to withdraw from them.

And if we just want to manipulate Jesus for our own purposes, he will withdraw his presence from us, too. What he offers us in his generous love and grace is the very best and most important gift we need, in his reconciling love. But if we want to use him for our own ends, he will withdraw from us. We have refused what he knows we need the most.

Does this sort of thing happen today? Yes. Plenty of people invoke God for their own political ends. Maybe it’s more obvious in the USA than the UK. Donald Trump claimed God protected him from the assassin’s bullet. I’m not sure what that says about the family man at the rally who nevertheless died protecting his wife and children. Joe Biden said that God led him to step down from the presidential race. Does that just give a gloss to what he should have done weeks or months earlier?

Us? Do we sometimes treat Jesus as some glorified fortune cookie? We just want what we can get out of him. We’ll follow him while he offers us the things we want from him, but when he asks for our loyal commitment to him and his cause, then we’ll drift away. It’s no coincidence that by the end of this chapter in John most of the crowd has given up on following him. Just being in it for what we can get out of him doesn’t last. It shows us up for how shallow we are.

Yes, Jesus is full of generous love. He is full of grace and mercy. It is his nature. But he also longs for us to follow him, and not just ask ourselves what’s in it for us.

And maybe that’s the point at which the two sets of choices come together for us. How we make those choices will determine whether we move from the crowd to the disciples.

Firstly, we need to receive the generous love and grace of Jesus, as in his kindness he forgives us our sins and provides us with everything we need. In gratitude we choose to follow him rather than just exploit him for all we can selfishly get out of him.

That moves us from crowd member to disciple. And then as disciples, hearing the call to follow Jesus, we join him on the adventure of faith when we refuse to play life safe by concentrating on the problems and instead embrace all the possibilities far beyond our own imagination that Jesus lays before us for the sake of his kingdom.

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Mission in the Bible 14: Our Of Our Comfort Zone (Acts 10:1-23a)

(This is a lightly revised version of a sermon I preached ten years ago.)

Acts 10:1-23a

There is an old joke that takes a Bible verse about some people not dying before the Second Coming of Jesus and applying it as a motto for a crèche or other gathering of babies:

“We shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed.”

Change. Children change your lives like nothing else. Marriage is a big change, but having children requires far greater adjustment.

We’ve heard a lot in the election campaign about change, too. Now, with a new government in office, we’re about to find out whether there will be change, and if so, what.

In our Bible reading today, we meet two people who are on the verge of major change in their lives – Cornelius the centurion, and Peter the apostle. Both are in a comfortable place in their lives, but things are about to take dramatic twists for both of them as their lives are about to meet.

First, Cornelius. To the readers of Acts, who are probably Roman, Cornelius as a centurion is an all-round good guy. Roman citizens admired their centurions, rather like the way many in our society see our soldiers as heroes. One Roman writer put it this way:

“They wish centurions not so much to be venturesome and daredevil as natural leaders, of a steady and sedate spirit. They do not desire them so much to be men who will initiate attacks and open the battle, but men who will hold their ground when worsted and hard pressed and be ready to die at their posts.” (Polybius, Histories, 6.24.9)

And not only that, Cornelius would have been regarded as a good egg by Jews – at least, as good as a Gentile could be:

He and all his family were devout and God-fearing; he gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly. (Verse 2)

He hadn’t quite gone all the way to becoming a Jewish convert – that would have required a painful snip for him – but in prayer and giving to the poor he practised two of the three basic disciplines expected of a Jew (the other being fasting).

But we can’t stop there. According to the angel who appears to him, even God has taken a shine to him:

Your prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a memorial offering before God. (Verse 4)

It’s all good, isn’t it? Admired in society, respected in the community of faith, and pleasing to God.

Except … God still has an agenda of change for him. That’s why he needs to meet Peter and hear Peter’s message. He believes in God, he does good deeds, and contributes to the well-being of society. Yet God says, ‘Cornelius, you need more. You need change in your life.’

Perhaps we know similar people today. We might be one of them. Good people – after all, the church has no monopoly on goodness. They may pray or even turn up at worship sometimes, but some say, “I don’t need to go to church to be a good Christian.” They may work hard at their job, love their families, and put in extra effort of an evening to do something positive in the local community. Perhaps they are in a profession that benefits the well-being of others.

And maybe God says the same today. ‘You need more. You need change.’ Specifically, I think he says something similar to what he effectively says to Cornelius. ‘You need to meet someone who will tell you about Jesus.’ Because that is what Peter would go on to do when they finally met.

Why do we need to meet Jesus when we believe in God, and do good in our community? Well, if we are serious about our belief in God and wanting to do what he likes, then we shall want to be acquainted with the One he sent to bring peace, forgiveness and true purpose of life. That One is Jesus. If God has been quietly working in our lives and we’ve been seeking to respond to him, then when we hear about Jesus we’ll be positive. If on the other hand all our talk about believing in God and being good is a smokescreen to avoid serious commitment, then the mention of Jesus will expose the truth of our hearts.

Happily, Cornelius wasn’t like that. He was truly interested in God and God’s ways. Change would come for him. Dramatic change, but good change.

Second, Peter. To get inside Peter’s attitude to life, let me ask you this question: have you ever been concerned with the fear that bad company corrupts good character? Perhaps if you are the father of a daughter and you are bothered what kinds of boyfriends she might have, you will understand this mindset. Can any young man ever possibly be good enough for your princess? What will you want to do to him if he wickedly steps out of line – say, he brings her back from a date five minutes later than promised? Really, you don’t want your angel influenced by such a wayward soul.

Translate that into a religious context and what you’ve got is a guy who has been brought up to believe that you shouldn’t mix with the wrong sort of people or your pure religious faith will be contaminated. And so, as a good Jew, he had believed he should have nothing to do with those who, in religious terms, were ‘unclean’. Cornelius, despite hanging out at the synagogue, was in some sense unclean to him, because he hadn’t become a fully-fledged Jew.

Now, it has to be said, Peter isn’t always consistent in his convictions. We learn in this story that ‘He is staying with Simon the tanner’ (verse 6), and that is suspect behaviour for a devout Jew. Why? Because a tanner in his trade deals with the skins of dead animals, and good Jews were not meant to have anything to do with dead bodies. Yet Peter accepts hospitality from such a man. Either he’s compromising his convictions or he’s beginning to change before this incident. I suspect it’s the former.

But here, everything definitely begins to change for him when he gets hungry at lunchtime. As he falls into a trance he sees this strange vision of a huge sharing platter. Some of the items on the menu are foods regarded as unclean by Jews, but in the vision he forgets that Jesus had declared all goods ritually clean. However, the call to eat ritually unclean food becomes a metaphor for mixing with people he would normally shun (verses 9-20).

If Peter is to live in the will of God according to the love of God, then he has to make a drastic change to his life. He has to begin hanging out with people who are different from him. He needs to start relating to people whom he would otherwise consider anathema. What’s more, he will have to do all this for the sake of sharing God’s love in Jesus Christ.

You see, up until now, the followers of Jesus were effectively nothing more than a small Jewish sect. Just about everybody who had begun following the way of Jesus had been Jewish. There was the odd exception, like the heretics of Samaria, but the new faith hasn’t burst outside Jewish boundaries. The question of whether it should hasn’t even been raised.

But it is about to be raised, and effectively it’s God who does so. God calls Peter to a radical change that will take his life-transforming love in Jesus beyond the Judaism where it has begun to the rest of the world. Christianity as a world faith is about to begin in this story.

And you know what? It means something similar for those of us who are church regulars, too. Those who have heard me a lot here won’t be surprised to hear me say this, but it needs repeating, because we must take this on board. It might feel nice and safe to draw most of our friends from the people like us who share our beliefs and values, but really that’s the way to build a spiritual ghetto. We need to make friends with people outside the church if we are going to make a missionary difference today. I hope we will not be known as the kind of religious people who are forever looking down their noses at those whose values we query.

The church is not a social club. It is a worshipping community and a base from which to launch God’s mission of love for all people. If we are to see God’s love spread to more people, then like Peter we may need to embrace a radical change where we don’t wait within the walls of the church building for people to come to us on our terms. Instead, we risk getting dirty in the world showing the love of God to people.

Maybe then we shall meet the Cornelius types. People where God is already on their case and who are reaching out for him. Perhaps we can have the humble privilege of making the introductions.

You know, it could even happen today if people are reaching out for God.

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Mission in the Bible 13: Divine Initiative Seen in the Conversion and Call of Saul/Paul (Acts 9:1-19a)

Acts 9:1-19

I don’t look forward to my eye test every two years. When they ask you how many dots you can see that have flashed up momentarily to test your peripheral vision, I’m always afraid of getting it wrong. I don’t like the sensation of the air pumped into my eye to test for glaucoma. And I’m not fond of the flashing light when they take a photo of my retina.

Last time, having gone into see the optometrist and she had completed all her tests with different lenses and reading letters on a board, and then shone her torch into my eyes, she then said to me, “Were you told last time that you are going to develop cataracts at a later date?”

“No,” I replied, while silently thinking, “Oh great, another sign of getting older.”

This famous story of Saul’s Damascus Road conversion can be organised under the theme of sight. Saul is blinded, but Ananias receives a vision. Note the contrast: blindness and vision.

When the Lord blinds Saul and later heals him, and when he speaks to Ananias in a vision, he is showing that he is in charge and he is taking a divine initiative to bring salvation not only to Saul, but also to many others.

Firstly, then, the blinding of Saul:

To all intents and purposes, Saul has a licence to kill. He is ‘still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples’ and asks the high priest in Jerusalem for letters permitting him to take prisoner any ‘followers of the Way’ in Damascus, with the help of the synagogues (verses 1-2). I think we can safely assume that even though he only has permission to arrest people, the religious authorities in Jerusalem will probably turn a blind eye if he also kills anyone. After all, they had stoned Stephen to death, and Saul had approved (Acts 7:1-8:1).

Since Stephen’s summary execution, persecution had broken out against the disciples of Jesus. Apart from the apostles, they had scattered from Jerusalem. Surely things were out of control. They feared for their lives. Some years later, Saul (by then named Paul) would tell the Galatian Christians that he was destroying the church. This is a lethal crisis for those first believers.

But God is in charge, and if his church is powerless, he is not. He takes the initiative. Jesus intervenes.

And he intervenes in a way that counters all the sentimental ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ nicey-nicey Jesus images. He acts as the holy king in blazing glory.

Of course, Jesus has wider purposes here. Not only does he save the physical lives of believers who would have been arrested and most likely tortured and probably killed, he acts here to bring Saul to him so that many more will be saved in the spiritual sense.

But to get to that point Jesus has to act in a way that the writer and friend of C S Lewis  Sheldon Vanauken called ‘A Severe Mercy.’ Saul is so set in the ways of his misguided zeal that it will only take something radical to stop him, and, moreover, to humble him before his Lord.

So the Damascus Road conversion is dramatic, but for a specific reason. And those of us who worry that we might not be Christians because we have not had what is often called a ‘Damascus Road experience’ need not worry. A survey some years ago showed that little over a third of Christians can name the date or time of their conversion. I am one of that minority. For me, it felt like a sudden revelation. But for most believers, it is a gradual process.

Think of it this way: do you have to remember the moment of your birth to know you are alive? Of course not! None of us does! We know we are alive because we manifest the signs of life. Our heart beats. We breathe. We eat and drink. We think. We get signals from our senses and our nerves.

In the same way, the question for us in terms of faith is less, do you remember the day you were converted, and more, are you showing signs of life in Christ? Do you love Jesus and want to know him more? Is the fruit of the Spirit growing in you? Do you have a desire to worship him and to serve him in the world?

Saul needs to be stopped in his tracks and humbled. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for us in our prayers for some people and places to ask the Lord to do ‘whatever it takes’ to humble people before him and bring them to repentance and faith.

Secondly, the vision of Ananias:

Saul will become famous as Paul and will become probably the most influential follower of Jesus ever. He will carry the Gospel to nation after nation and write letters that reverberate down the centuries. Just one of them – Romans – transformed the lives of St Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and John Wesley, each of whom went on to have major impacts on Christianity and the world.

But Ananias? He makes this one appearance in the story and then disappears from view. Yet, by being the model disciple he leads Saul to Christ and the implications are, as I just indicated, transformative for the world for over two thousand years so far.

When the Lord calls him in a vision, he gives the exemplary response of a Jesus-follower: “Yes, Lord” (verse 10) – or “Here I am, Lord,” as other translations render it. It’s reminiscent of the boy Samuel in the Temple in the Old Testament, hearing the voice of God for the first time and learning from Eli to say the same thing: Here I am.

Yes, Lord. Jesus appears and speaks to one who says yes to him. But if the thought of saying yes to Jesus makes us nervous, note that it did to Ananias, too. When he hears that Jesus wants him to go and lay hands on Saul (verses 11-12), he responds with an understandably anxious question:

13 ‘Lord,’ Ananias answered, ‘I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your holy people in Jerusalem. 14 And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name.’

I think he is somewhat like Mary when the Archangel Gabriel appears to her and tells her she is going to conceive the Messiah, despite being a virgin. She certainly had her questions.

And it’s OK for a ‘Yes, Lord’ to be accompanied by questions, because Jesus is patient to explain to Ananias why it is important that he obeys:

15 But the Lord said to Ananias, ‘Go! This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. 16 I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.’

Ananias has questions, but they are not a reason for him to turn ‘Yes, Lord’ into ‘No, Lord’ (which is a contradiction in terms, anyway).

Jesus gives us no guarantees of whether we will be well-known believers like Saul/Paul, or obscure ones like Ananias. What he requires of each of us is, ‘Yes, Lord,’ even if it is accompanied by questions.

Thirdly and finally, the scales drop from Saul’s eyes:

Blind Saul has nevertheless received a vision of Ananias coming to lay hands on him to restore his sight (verse 12), and now it happens. As Ananias prays, scales fall from Saul’s eyes (verses 17-18).

In a sense, scales have fallen spiritually, too, from both Saul and Ananias. Saul receives the Holy Spirit (verse 17), and he will now be able to redirect his zeal in the holy cause of Jesus and his kingdom. His baptism (verse 18) confirms this radical change of direction. Moreover, he will now have the spiritual strength to endure the suffering that will come his way as he sets out on this mission (verses 15-16).

And in Ananias’ case, he addresses Saul as ‘Brother’ (verse 17). They are not biological family, and nor is this about shared ethnic identity. They are family in Christ. Saul takes food (verse 19), which likely means that he and Ananias share table fellowship[1]. Yes, the persecutor and one who was possibly a fugitive from him[2] are one. This is the miracle of the Gospel. It is similar to Jesus bringing both Matthew the tax-collecting Roman collaborator and Simon the Zealot freedom-fighter together in his twelve disciples. Faith in Jesus does this – even, dare I say, making Spurs and Arsenal supporters one!

There is a lot of talk in the world about how there is only one race, the human race, and that there is more that brings us together than keeps us apart. Unfortunately, that well-meaning talk overlooks the way in which sin has broken relationships. But here, Saul and Ananias’ eyes are opened to see that it is Jesus who restores this unity. That human unity is now found in him.

This is what Saul, later as Paul, will say to the Galatians:

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

This is Jesus opening our eyes to the fact that the Gospel is not just personal, individual reconciliation with God – the forgiveness of our sins. It is also the healing and reconciliation of our relationships with one another.

And that’s why it’s important that the church demonstrates this if we are to be a sign of the Gospel. It’s why I love going to my church at Lindford, where the worshipping congregation goes right across the generations, across races, across social and educational backgrounds, and we hang together as one body in Christ. The politicians should be envious! Because they can’t create something like that! But Jesus can!

What will we do so that our church life is not just fellowship with people who are just like us? Do we believe at this election time that we can hold unity in Christ with Christians of differing political convictions, for example? In a deeply divided nation, this is the sort of thing that can become a powerful witness. We need to ‘see’ this so that the world will see Christ.

Conclusion

In using this metaphor of sight and blindness for this sermon, the old chorus popped into my head:

Open our eyes, Lord,
We want to see Jesus,
To reach out and touch him
And say that we love him.
Open our ears, Lord,
And help us to listen,
Open our eyes, Lord,
We want to see Jesus.[3]

But open our eyes, Lord, that we may walk with you and not resist you and need blinding and humbling to find you. Open our eyes, Lord, that we may say yes to you, even when we have questions. Open our eyes, Lord, to see that your Gospel brings reconciliation both with you and with others and help us to practise that to your glory before the eyes of the world.

[1] Craig Keener, Acts, p282.

[2] Keener, p281.

[3] Robert Cull, b 1949; Copyright © 1976 Maranatha Music.

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Mission in the Bible 12: Listening with Two Ears (Acts 8:26-40)

Luke 8:26-40

If Debbie tries to speak to me about something while I am watching the television, there is more than a fair chance that I won’t take in what she’s saying. She will have to tell me to stop listening to the TV in order to listen to her. After all, as a man, I can only ever do one thing at a time. And I certainly can’t listen to more than one source simultaneously.

It makes me think of something I was told in a training session for people who were going to engage in prayer ministry. The instructor said that we had two ears, and that we had to listen to the person in need with one ear and the Holy Spirit with our other ear. That sounded tricky! It was better when they advised a team of two people to pray with whoever came forward, with one team member listening to the person and the other listening to the Spirit.

But part of our task as the church is to engage in multiple listening. The late John Stott called it ‘double listening’, where we listen to the Bible and to the world. Not that we squeeze the Bible into today’s standards and values, which happens far too often, but that we find where the Gospel speaks to today’s world.

And in our strange and wonderful Bible reading today, Philip engages in multiple listening. And it’s this multiple listening that enables him to lead the Ethiopian eunuch to faith in Christ.

Firstly, Philip listens to the Holy Spirit:

An angel (speaking on God’s behalf) directs Philip to go to the desert road (verse 26) and when he is there, the Spirit tells him to go near the eunuch’s chariot and stay near it (verses 27-29).

Well, it’s easy to say ‘listen to the Holy Spirit’, isn’t it, but harder to get to grips with it for ourselves. At one end of the Christian spectrum we have people who say they have never known God speak to them along with others who say that God only speaks to us now through the Bible.

At the other end there are Christians who, in the words of one preacher, claim to have more words from the Lord before breakfast than Billy Graham had in a lifetime. Some of these people are harmless fruitcakes, but others are manipulative and abusive leaders.

I once heard a story about a man who went to his vicar and said, ‘Wonderful news, vicar! You know that gorgeous blonde woman in the choir? The Lord has told me to marry her.’

‘No he hasn’t,’ replied the vicar.

‘Yes, he has!’

‘No, he hasn’t.’

‘Yes he has!’

‘NO HE HASN’T,’ insisted the vicar. ‘You’re already married.’

I think there’s a healthy middle path to be found here. I do believe God still speaks to us, but I also believe we test that against what he has revealed to us in the Bible.

And I would also say that some of us who think God hasn’t spoken to us are mistaken. He has told us things, but perhaps we haven’t always recognised it was him. Take the common example of feeling prompted to phone a friend or a relative, only to do so and discover they are ill or in some other predicament. We can then pray for the person or help meet their needs. Isn’t that something the Holy Spirit would do?

An Anglican priest friend of mine used to lead an organisation in London called the Christian Healing Mission. In teaching Christians about prayer, John would invite people to sit quietly and ask God to speak to them, then keep silence. He would encourage them to write down whatever impressions came into their mind, believing that God did indeed want to speak to his children. He never denied the need to be discerning about what people thought they heard, but he believed we should be optimistic about God’s desire to speak to us.

So why don’t we open ourselves all the more to the possibility of the Holy Spirit speaking to us? What adventures might he take us on for the sake of God’s kingdom advancing?

Secondly, Philip listens to the eunuch:

Here I’m thinking of where Philip enters into a conversation with the eunuch about what he is reading and what it means (verses 30-35).

When I was a child, we had a family GP who seemed to start writing you a prescription before you had finished telling him what was wrong with you. He didn’t really listen to your problems.

And we have seen something similar in the current General Election campaign. How many of our leaders, when a member of the public asks them a question, be it in a TV debate or on a radio phone-in, just launch into their prepared answer on that subject without listening to the nuances of that person’s personal concerns?

It happens in the religious sphere, too, when well-meaning evangelists splurge out the Gospel without listening to the people they are trying to reach. And while they have a point that the Gospel is unchanging, we need to find the point of contact or even perhaps the point of conflict so that we can make the Gospel connect with folk.

So Philip takes the trouble to listen to the man’s concerns. On his way back from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, a journey that would have taken a couple of months by chariot, this man is serious in his enquiring after God. He seems to think there is something in the Jewish faith and is reading the Hebrew Scriptures, but as a eunuch he will not be allowed to convert fully to Judaism. I think there is a desire for God and for belonging here, and Philip picks up on it. Philip knows this man’s deepest longings can be satisfied in Jesus.

W E Sangster, the famous minister at Westminster Central Hall in the mid-twentieth century, said that the Gospel is like a diamond with many facets. We need to discover which facet shines on a particular person in order to make the Gospel connect with them.

And the moment we understand that, we see the need to listen to people, not just regurgitate a pre-packaged version of the Gospel that we have memorised. It’s a good thing sometimes to learn summaries of the Gospel and also to be able to recount our own testimony, but we must be careful first to listen to the people we are aiming to reach for Christ so that we may share the Good News in the most appropriate way.

Thirdly, Philip listens to the Scripture:

I think the fact that the eunuch is reading this powerful passage from Isaiah 53 that we often call ‘The Suffering Servant’ means that the Holy Spirit is already at work in his life, preparing him for the Gospel and pointing him in to where he needs to ask questions. Perhaps he realises that attempts to explain this passage in terms of it merely being about the prophet himself can only go so far and are ultimately doomed to fail. There are parts of it that just don’t fit.

And along comes Philip for a meeting orchestrated by the Spirit. He listens to the Bible passage the eunuch is reading, and he responds.

But notice how he responds:

35 Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

Philip does what the early church did. They listen to Scripture and interpret it in the light of Jesus. The Hebrew Scriptures had pointed to a coming Messiah. Now he had come in the Person of Jesus, it made sense not just to read the holy writings to quote proof-texts out of context, but to read and understand them in the light of Jesus.

So that’s what Philip does here. He listens to these verses from Isaiah and says that ultimately they only make sense in the light of the Good News of Jesus. And as a result, this man who could not fully belong in Judaism due to his castration can fully belong to Jesus. His baptism (verses 36-39) is surely a joyful expression of that truth.

What Philip is doing is rather like Jesus on the Emmaus Road. As Jesus came alongside the two travellers, he opened the Scriptures and related them to himself. Philip comes alongside the Ethiopian eunuch and relates the Scriptures to Jesus.

This approach grounds us in the centrality of the Bible as the authoritative account of the Christian faith, but we do not act as Bible-bashers. We are not using isolated Bible texts as weapons to hurt people. There will always be the odd prejudiced person who accuses us of that and we can’t do anything about that, but our main task is to listen to the Scriptures and share how they point to Jesus. The Holy Spirit uses this to make Jesus real to people and lead them to him.

However, most of the people we encounter will not be reading Bible passages and asking us to make sense of them to them – although it might happen occasionally. We instead need to be people who are listening to the Bible ourselves anyway and looking for how it points to Christ. As we feed ourselves in this way on Jesus, the Bread of Life, we shall be more fully equipped for the conversations we have with friends and family members who don’t share our faith. Our own willingness to engage in spiritual discipline with the Bible is not only good for us, it has benefits for our witness.

Conclusion

When we consider mission and especially evangelism, we give a lot of emphasis to speaking. And the speaking is of course necessary.

But we need to appreciate the importance of listening too, as Philip knew. We need to listen to the Holy Spirit, who guides us into divine appointments. We need to listen to those we are aiming to reach, so that we may share our hope in Christ in a way that connects with them and challenges them. And we need to listen to Scripture, particularly to the way it points to Christ, because that is the truth we are seeking to share.

Thank you – for listening.

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