A Loving Friendship With Jesus, John 15:9-17 (Easter 6 2024)

John 15:9-17

In those sadly increasingly rare times when I get to prepare a couple for marriage, one thing I impress upon them is that the success of their relationship will depend on the effort that both of them put in.

I say this, because we so often hear quotations in the media from famous couples who are breaking up, saying things like, ‘Marriage didn’t work for us.’ And it’s nonsense. Marriage is not some separate entity like a car that might malfunction. Nor do we say it in other parts of life. When a friendship ends, we are usually more honest and say, ‘We fell out with each other.’

Now why put this up front in this sermon? Because our Bible passage is about the relationship we have with Jesus and the effort required to maintain it.

Yet putting it as starkly as that will set off the alarm for some Christians. Effort to maintain our relationship with Jesus? Whatever happened to God’s grace? Don’t we depend entirely on God’s grace for all good things?

Well, yes we do, and no, I am not about to preach a religion where good works earn our salvation. In that sense, grace is certainly opposed to good works. But what I want to emphasise today was caught in the words of the late great Christian philosopher Dallas Willard, when he said that while grace is opposed to good works, it is not opposed to effort.

In other words, this is not about effort in order to be saved, but effort in response to being saved.

Jesus speaks about this in the two ways here in which he describes our relationship with him: love and friendship.

Firstly, love:

⁹‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. ¹⁰If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. ¹¹I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. ¹²My command is this: love each other as I have loved you. ¹³Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

God’s love comes first, before any love we give. We do not love in order to be loved by God: we love because God in Christ loves us first. That’s why Jesus says here, ‘Remain in my love.’ What we do is only ever in response to what God has done for us. Our love does not earn favour with God. We love because God has already favoured us with his love. I often like to say that our love for Jesus is an act of gratitude.

So that may clear up one puzzle here, about our motivation to love Jesus. But it isn’t the only conundrum. It sounds strange to our ears to hear Jesus saying that the way to remain in his love is to keep his commands. In our day and age, we are used to the idea that a relationship of love is a relationship between two equals. So the days of a bride promised to obey the bridegroom in her wedding vows are ones we have left behind. In our marriage service, both bride and groom make the same vows to each other.[1]

We should freely admit that our relationship with Jesus is not a relationship of equals. He is Lord. We are his disciples. Yet despite that, love stretches across the gap. His lofty divine status does not stop him from loving us. Indeed, it is his very nature, for God is love.

We do see examples of this in smaller ways in other parts of life. I remember a church member who was the boss of an engineering company. Any time one of his staff was ill, and particularly if they were in hospital, he took time to visit them. He would enquire whether there was anything the employee’s family needed. He was not checking up on them; he was in a small way imitating Jesus.

And therefore since we are under the authority of Jesus it isn’t out of place for obedience to his commands to be the way in which we show our response of love to him. He has the right as Lord to command us, but his commands are characterised by his love for us. Therefore it is only fitting that our response of love is to do what he commands.

I could put it another way, although this may sound like a slightly diluted version of what Jesus says, and it’s simply to say that if we love someone then we want to do what pleases them. If we love Jesus, because of his great love for us, then we shall want to please him. You could say that of a relationship between equals, as well as our unequal relationship with Jesus.

However we express it, our response of loving obedience constitutes remaining in his love, because this is what we do on our side of the relationship in order to maintain it and keep it strong.

We move on to the second dimension of the relationship, namely friendship:

¹³Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ¹⁴You are my friends if you do what I command. ¹⁵I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve read verse 13 for both love and friendship. It’s the verse that acts like a hinge in the passage, for it mentions love and friendship, it talks about love for friends:

¹³Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

Jesus has loved us into friendship. It’s still the unequal relationship, but the friendship crosses that. And it’s still the case that what maintains the relationship from our side is obedience, because on his side Jesus still has the right to command certain things of us, yet he does so from a posture of friendship, not authoritarianism. And on our side, we want to please our friend Jesus by doing what he wants. It’s not a shallow, matey friendship: it’s much deeper than that.

And that ‘hinge verse’ shows us just how deep. It’s a friendship where our love for one another is such that one would lay down his life for his friends. Of course, the primary reference here is to Jesus going to the Cross to die for his friends and for all who would become his friends. In his case, the laying down of his life accomplishes things that no other sacrificial death ever did or ever will.

But at the same time it is also a model and an example for us of what friendship looks like. It’s more than drinks together in the pub after work. It’s more than what passes for fellowship in many a church. It’s a willingness to lay down our lives, if that’s what our friends – or even our Great Friend – need.

Yet this deep, loving friendship is not wholly described by this solemn obligation. It is also described in the amazing privilege that Jesus grants to us because he has called us friends:

¹⁵I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

He gives us an inside track on the will and the purposes of God. He does not simply give us commands to follow: if obeying his commands was all there was on our side of the relationship, then we would be mere servants. But no. We are friends. He lets us in on his Father’s business. It is possible for us to know what God wants of us and of his creation.

Now of course, some Christians take this to silly extremes. I remember hearing one preacher castigating those ‘who claim to have had more words from the Lord before breakfast than Billy Graham had in a lifetime.’ I think of those who reduce the will of God to trivia – although I concede there will be the odd occasion when it’s right to pray for a parking place.

But there are others among us who act as if we don’t know the will of God and we can’t possibly know the will of God. And that is a sad state of affairs, which misses the beautiful gift Jesus offers us here, arising out of our relationship with him as friends.

There is a middle ground to be struck between those who think we should know every fine detail of our lives from God and those who don’t think we can hear anything from him.

Jesus has let us in on God’s overall plans for creation and his specific plans of salvation for the human race. He has let us in on his commands to follow so that we remain in his love. But within that overall revealing of his Father’s business he often leaves us to apply it specifically. He does not micro-manage us.

For example, I have seen too many Christians get over-wrought about finding a marriage partner. For most of us, Jesus and the apostles simply give us God’s general will in this area, and leave us to apply it. Only in a few rare cases, usually where someone has a particularly tricky calling in life anyway, do I believe God has just one particular person in mind for us. The rest of us can choose – just so long as we remain within the general will of God. That is one way in which divine sovereignty and human freedom hold together.

And all this leads us to the concluding verses:

¹⁶You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit – fruit that will last – and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. ¹⁷This is my command: love each other.

Jesus reminds us that it all starts with him, not us, so it cannot be that we earn his love. He always makes the first move, and anything we do is in response to his love and friendship for us.

And we live out that response to his love and friendship in the church and in the world – bearing fruit and loving one another. These are the signs that we have a loving friendship with Jesus.

[1] “But what about ‘Wives, submit to your husbands’?” some will object. In Ephesians 5 where Paul says this, he also calls husbands to love their wives like Christ loves the Church – that is, by being willing to die for them. In other words, Paul calls both spouses to radical self-giving, but in different language.

May 5, 2024 0

New Beginnings 4: You Have Not Been This Way Before (Joshua 3:1-17)

Joshua 3:1-17

The late American church leader John Wimber used to say that Christians are like people who go down to the quayside, expecting to board a ship that will take them on a luxury cruise, only to find when they get there that their ship is gunmetal grey in colour. It’s a battleship.

He used to recall how, when he first found faith from a background as a rock musician (he was the keyboard player for the Righteous Brothers), he would go to church and hear all the Bible readings about Jesus and the apostles performing great miracles of healing. And he would say to the other church members, “Great! When do we do this?”

To which they would reply, “Oh no, we just talk about it.”

At some point for Christians, the rubber has to hit the road. We’re good at talking, planning, and preparing. But actually ‘doing the stuff’? Hmm, that’s a bit radical.

What I’ve said so far in my three previous sermons about New Beginnings was potentially challenging, but it could just be treated as preparation. Israel still had to take that final step of entering the Promised Land. We have to take that final step from theory to practice.

So yes – we must not live in the past but look to what God wants to do today. Yes – we must live by faith in what God says he wants to do, and not be constrained by fears based on our human limitations. And yes – we need courage and obedience to the Scriptures, all nourished by the promise of God’s presence.

We have to do something new. ‘You have never been this way before,’ say the Israelite officers to the people (verse 4). But that’s no excuse for staying put. This goes way beyond just singing an unfamiliar hymn! It means getting out of our comfortable space in church fellowship and taking God’s redeeming love in Christ into the world in both our deeds and our words.

Here are four things that Joshua 3 teaches us we need in order to live out our calling in the world.

Firstly, follow God’s lead.

“When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the Levitical priests carrying it, you are to move out from your positions and follow it. ⁴Then you will know which way to go, since you have never been this way before. But keep a distance of about two thousand cubits between you and the ark; do not go near it.”

The ark of the covenant is the portable presence of God with Israel, especially in the centuries before the Temple is built at Jerusalem. For the ark to go ahead of Israel is to signify that God goes ahead of them. Their calling is to follow God’s lead. God will lead them forward into the land.

The Christian call is also to follow God’s lead. He leads and directs the mission to which he calls us. We don’t invent things and just do what we fancy. We seek God’s lead and we respond.

That is built right into all Christian theology in one way or another. In the Methodist tradition, we talk of God’s ‘prevenient grace’, which means that God acts graciously before we ever do anything.

There are some similarities in the way Christians widely talk about mission today. We say that Christian mission is the mission of God, not our mission. We are called to find out what God is doing, and join in.

But how do we do that? Well, there is no getting around the need to practise what Wesley called ‘The means of grace’ and which modern Christians ecumenically call ‘The spiritual disciplines.’ It means actively seeking to be in tune with God. That requires a serious commitment to prayer and to meditating on Scripture. It’s no good thinking that we can just tick those off as done on Sunday mornings in the service, these need to be daily personal habits.

There are many ways to practise these disciplines, and we shall vary according to our personalities and gifts how we do them. I don’t have time to list different options now, but speak with me if you want some ideas.

What is certain is that the church sinks without them.

Secondly, imitate God’s character.

⁵Joshua told the people, “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you.”

To consecrate oneself is to dedicate oneself to God’s service. It is to be set aside for holy work. It is not just for the priests (or modern-day ministers, for that matter!) but for all of God’s people.

God’s mission is not something that merely requires a certain amount of religious competence. It needs character, too: God’s character. God’s mission is to make all things new, and that includes our character. If we are to be in harmony with God’s purposes, we need to grow in his likeness and utterly dedicated to his cause.

If you want an engineer or a plumber, character may not matter, only their competence. But not with the mission of God. It requires a people who are growing in Christlikeness.

So we are called to consecrate ourselves before God does amazing things among us.

Joshua does not tell us here how the people did this, but we may have a clue from a similar event. When they had arrived at Mount Sinai after leaving Egypt, Israel had been called to be consecrated at the foot of the mountain while Moses climbed up to meet with God. How did they do it then? By various forms of fasting. Not simply fasting from food, but married couples also abstained from marital relations.

Fasting takes various forms. We can fast from food, from marital relations, from TV, from gadgets, and so on. In each case we are giving up something good for a season to concentrate on something far better and much more important. That’s why when we fast we also pray.

And as we show God just how serious we are about his will by abstaining from something good in order to find extra time for prayer, so he will respond to a commitment like that by forming us more like his Son through the gift of the Holy Spirit in us.

It is no good being recklessly unholy when God turns up in power to do amazing things. If we are, either his power will burn us or in his mercy he will not act powerfully at all.

But if we long for God to act in power, we need to consecrate ourselves.

Thirdly, grow in faith.

⁸Tell the priests who carry the ark of the covenant: ‘When you reach the edge of the Jordan’s waters, go and stand in the river.’”

Have you noticed the similarities and differences in this passage with the account of Israel crossing the Red Sea out of Egypt into the wilderness? Here at the end of their wilderness wanderings, they are again faced by a mass of water, and the waters divide.

Only this time, Joshua’s command differs from that of Moses. At the Red Sea in Exodus 14, Moses told the frightened people that all they needed to do was stand still and they would see the deliverance of their God. But here, the command is not to stand still at the water’s edge.

On this occasion, however, they don’t get to wait on dry land. Or at least, the priests are going to need some towels afterwards, because they have to go and stand in the river before God divides the water this time. They were called to do something more by faith before God enacted his promise.

Faith, like love, is something that needs to grow. If I still loved Debbie the same amount today as I did on our wedding day, our marriage would be long over. If I still had the same faith that I had on the day I was confirmed and received into Methodist membership at the age of sixteen then my faith would have collapsed years ago. It is for good reason that God calls us to grow in faith.

In my first circuit as a minister, I got involved in some youth ministry that worked across most of the churches in the town. We began by holding Sunday night youth services, but they became a bit cheesy, and in order to challenge ourselves in a more difficult situation, we then hired a vacant shop in the town. We couldn’t use as much gear, and so we did what we called ‘Worship Unplugged.’ If any of you remember the MTV Unplugged shows from the 1990s, you’ll have an idea of what we did.

But we had too many numbers to cram into the shop, and so we moved to the church hall at the URC. Again, that was fine for a time, until the numbers made that venue too uncomfortable. There was only one venue in the town that would hold us, but it required a step of faith. It was the local nightclub.

One of our team, a Christian businessman, approached the nightclub owner, and he said he was willing to take our booking for one Sunday night a month. He would provide bar staff who would only sell non-alcoholic drinks on those occasions.

There was just one thing: the fee he wanted went beyond our existing budget.

This was the time which we identified as our ‘put your feet in the water’ moment. God wanted us to go further than we had before. We agreed to the terms for the nightclub without having the money.

But when we did, another Christian businessman in the town stepped forward and underwrote the project.

If you want to go forward in faith (and why wouldn’t you?), then is it time for you to get your feet wet, metaphorically speaking?

Fourthly and finally, remember God’s deeds.

¹²Now then, choose twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one from each tribe.

What’s that about, then? The twelve men get mentioned but then Joshua goes back to talking about the priests.

We find the answer in chapter 4, which we didn’t read. These men take stones from the river and create a memorial to the miracle God does here.

Why? This is no monument or museum. This is no living in the past. This is about learning from the past. It is easy to forget what God has done. In later Old Testament times, tragically the prophets record that Israel had forgotten her God. Not that she forgot God existed, but she forgot what God had done for her. And when she did, she went off the rails spiritually.

We need to do something similar, because it stirs our faith to believe again in a God who does mighty things. The supreme memorial for Christians is of course Holy Communion, when we remember what God did for us in Christ at the Cross.

But we need to create smaller memorials too, by recording things God has done individually for each of us. Here’s how I have found that to be important.

Like many ministers, I have on more than one occasion become discouraged and considered resigning. If that shocks you, then you would be even more shocked to know the substantial percentage of ministers who have felt like that.

But when I have been down in the depths, on some occasions Debbie has said to me, how can you consider such a course of action when you look back at all the ways in which God guided you into this calling? My metaphorical memorial stones brought me back – even if reluctantly at times!

What are your memorial stones? If you don’t have a heap of them, then perhaps now is the time to start collecting them.

Because it’s time to set out on that new beginning to which God has called us, following his lead, living in his ways, stretching our faith, and being sustained by remembering his mighty deeds.

September 24, 2023 0

The Tyson Fury Of Prayer? Luke 18:1-8 (Ordinary 29 Year C)

Luke 18:1-8

Back in the 1970s on Radio 1 the now-disgraced DJ Dave Lee Travis used to invite frustrated wives to send in stories of DIY jobs that their husbands had failed to do or failed to complete. Should their story be read on air, Travis sent them a circular object known as a ‘Round Tuit’, for when their husbands got ‘around to it’.

Perhaps stories like that encapsulate the unhelpful stereotype of nagging women. And if you read today’s Scripture superficially you may think it is about a nagging woman, the widow who wears down the unjust judge.

But that is to ignore the very first sentence of the reading:

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. (Verse 1)

The theme is not ‘nagging’ but ‘Don’t give up.’ Specifically, don’t give up praying.

And if we pay attention not simply to that first sentence generally, but to the first word, we realise we need to take into account the context. The first word is ‘Then.’ Luke is telling us this is related to what has just gone before.

Now we didn’t read that, but let me point you to the way near the end of the previous chapter that Jesus is in discussion with people who are longing for his Second Coming, but who will not live to see it:

Then he said to his disciples, ‘The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it.’ (Luke 17:22)

As the woman in the parable longed for justice, so there are many who long for the justice of God. But we shall only see it fully when Christ appears again in glory.

So why in the parable is the widow in need? The scholar Ian Paul lists three signs of her need:

First, she has to represent herself; courts are normally the province of men, and it appears that she has no male relative who will represent her. Second, she has to return continually, which means that she does not have the financial resources to offer a bribe and have her case settled quickly (not an unusual issue in many courts around the world today). Thirdly, she appears to have been denied justice, and the implication is that she has perhaps been deprived of her rights in inheritance. It might be that she has been deprived of her living from her late husband’s estate; later rabbinic law suggests that widows did not inherit directly, but makes provision for her living from the estate for that reason.

That’s quite a list. No professional representation. A corrupt legal system. And no financial support. How extraordinary that she is not cowed by her circumstances but is feisty enough to demand justice. She takes responsibility and takes the initiative in her relentless quest for justice.[1]

As such, she is an example for us. We may not face the same set of personal challenges as her, but there are so many terrible things in our world that we long to see changed, and so caring about justice can be disheartening. But just when we feel tempted to draw the curtains, curl up in a ball, eat comfort food, and ignore the wicked world outside our door, the widow in the parable says, ‘No!’

What we have here is a character in the story whose own circumstances and actions remind us to do what Jesus said on the tin at the beginning of the parable: ‘always pray and not give up.’

Look how she speaks up boldly in the face of corruption. She is so tenacious! The unjust judge gives up because he fears that she will come and attack him (verse 5)! Yes, he, the strong male judge, fears the poor, weak widow.

In fact, the Greek word for ‘attack’ here is one taken from the realm of boxing. It means ‘to beat’. Paraphrasing it, the judge fears the widow giving him a black eye.[2]

The world sees a poor, defenceless widow. The judge sees Tyson Fury!

Perhaps we too feel weak and feeble in the face of the wickedness and suffering in our world. Certainly, our opponents love to construe us this way. But a church that is bold to keep praying even in the face of unequal relationships and insurmountable odds is not a pushover.

One of my favourite images of this reality is C S Lewis’ description of it in The Screwtape Letters. You will remember that these are fictional letters written from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior one, his nephew Wormwood. In one of the letters, Screwtape writes this:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided.[3]

In our ministry of intercession we may present as a poor widow but we are in fact terrible as an army with banners. We are the Tyson Fury of all things spiritual. That’s why we ‘should always pray and not give up.’

Nevertheless, bold as we may be with our prayers God is still playing the long game and we do not always see our prayers answered. I pray regularly that God will bring to naught various wicked regimes around the world that inflict persecution on their populations. But it hasn’t happened yet. I long for regimes to fall in China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, and other nations. I watch and I pray, longing for the day.

So how in the meantime do we cope with unanswered prayer? If God is so unlike the unjust judge and promises a quick administration of justice, why have these governments not fallen yet?

I have found a response by Pete Greig, the founder of the 24/7 Prayer movement stimulating in considering this. In the midst of seeing many wonderful answers to prayer in the movement in its early days, Greig was facing caring for his wife who developed epileptic seizures. His prayers for her health went unanswered. Much of his wrestling with that painful dilemma can be found in his remarkable book God On Mute, a book I highly commend.

But he gives a shorter account in a YouTube video where he describes three reasons why we don’t always see the answers to prayer that we desire.

One reason Greig calls ‘God’s World’, in other words the laws of nature. He talks about how because God has set up a creation that works consistently according to reliable laws then miracles must by definition be rare occurrences, as C S Lewis (that man again) said. You would no longer be able to rely on those laws in good ways if every time something painful were about to happen they were suspended. Suppose, says Lewis, every time a Christian dropped a hammer that God answered the prayer for the hammer not to hit their toe. We would be walking around in a world where we could no longer rely on gravity. We would be making our way every day through lots of hammers floating in the air!

One preacher I heard described scientific laws as being descriptions of God’s habits. Miracles happen when God occasionally changes his habits. But these occasions really are occasional. Otherwise, the many good things that follow from having predicable laws of nature would fall apart.

A second reason Pete Greig gives for prayer being unanswered is ‘God’s Will.’ There are many ways in which we do know God’s will, particularly in terms of the ethical ways in which we are to live. But there are other ways where we shall not always know God’s will, and where his ways are not our ways. His ways are higher than ours. No mere human being knows the entire will of God.

Perhaps you thought it was God’s will that you married a particular person but it proved to be unrequited love. How many of us look back on things like those in our lives and are glad that life did not pan out the way we wanted? God did something better for us, but we could not have seen it, and so our initial prayers went unanswered. It may have been painful at the time, and it may be something we can only appreciate with hindsight, but sometimes God overrules or ignores our prayer requests because he has a better outcome in mind than we can anticipate.

The third reason Greig describes for not seeing answered prayer is what he calls ‘God’s War.’ There is opposition to God’s ways. There is a spiritual conflict. I am not blaming everything on demons, but I am saying that human beings actively choose to do things that are opposed to the will of God, from small acts of selfishness to large-scale acts of violence. Jesus may be reigning at the right hand of the Father, but there are still forces arrayed against his kingdom, just as we have King Charles III on the throne but there are still criminals at work in our society.

What should we do in such circumstances? Why, we should pray all the more boldly for God to overcome his enemies. It may take a long time, but it is worth the investment in prayer.

Indeed, in the face of all that we encounter in creation that is not according to God’s purposes of love, let us be bold in prayer. The weak widow is but a disguise for the heavyweight boxer. Spiritually speaking, we can punch above the widow’s weight.

And if we do, then the Son of Man will find faith on the earth (verse 8).

[1] See Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke, p640.

[2] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/does-god-respond-to-nagging-in-luke-18/

[3] Cited at https://www.thespiritlife.net/about/81-warfare/warfare-publications/1877-chapter-2-the-screwtape-letters-cs-lewis

October 16, 2022 1

Finding The Will Of God (Mark 7:1-23) Ordinary 22 Year B

Sorry about the typo in the opening titles!

Mark 7:1-23

I have known more than one friend who went vegetarian find themselves derailed from their noble intentions by the same stumbling block.

They couldn’t face life without bacon. The smell of it sizzling in the pan drove them back to the carnivore world.

I also know friends who are going vegan, because they believe the research that shows the amount of red meat production in the world to be a contributor to climate change.

Neither my friends who are former vegetarians nor those who are currently vegan made their decisions in the light of Jesus’ teaching in our passage today that all foods are ritually clean. There is a tiny minority of Christians who believe we should still follow the Old Testament kosher laws on food, but overwhelmingly the Christian Church has taken Jesus’ abolition of the kosher laws here as read and we make our ethical decisions about food on other bases.

If that’s the case, how is today’s reading relevant to us?

The answer is that it has a wide relevance to how we understand the will of God and put it into practice. It helps us guard against living our faith in the sincere but sterile way of the Pharisees and instead in the life-giving way of Jesus.

I have three ‘H’s for you.[1]

Firstly, the Holy Spirit.

The Pharisees had the Scriptures, such as were recognised at the time. Jesus had the same Scriptures. But what set them apart?

The Pharisees knew that the Scriptures weren’t exhaustive for every single situation you would face in life, and so they made up for that by fencing the Scriptures off with their own traditions which they believed enabled you to be faithful. You heard some of them in the reading. It was a sincere effort to do the right thing, but it wasn’t a godly one. It was much like the way we prescribe our own rules for churches and organisations.

But Jesus said these traditions were signs of how far from God they were, not least because the human rules and traditions tended to take over from the Scriptures.

Jesus lived differently. The Son of God lived as a man empowered by the Holy Spirit. As the Son of God, living by the power of the Spirit, he isn’t someone who can be contaminated by what is unclean. He doesn’t need the precautionary measures against ritual and moral uncleanness that ordinary people needed, according to the Old Testament Scriptures.

For us, the application is simple. The example of Jesus leads us into the New Testament era where all disciples of Jesus receive the Holy Spirit. We don’t become divine like him, but we do receive the Spirit when we commit our lives to him.

And it is living by the Spirit that is our answer to hedging every Scripture around with particular rules and regulations of our own making. When we live by the Spirit, who inspired the biblical writers, then we have our way of being faithful to divine teaching.

In his Epistle to the Galatians the Apostle Paul called on believers to keep in step with the Spirit, that is to live by the Spirit and be led by the Spirit (Galatians 5:16-18). For the Holy Spirit desires the opposite of sin and will guide us in the spirit of scriptural teaching, having himself inspired those same Scriptures.

So this is our first strategy in seeking the will of God – it is to listen for the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit making sense of the Scriptures to us.

Secondly, history.

Just because we believe the Bible is inspired doesn’t mean we can read a verse from here, a verse from there and another verse from somewhere else, treating them all the same. There is more to the Bible than that. We don’t seek guidance by playing ‘Bible Bingo’, where we almost randomly select verses and treat them all as having equal weight.

No. We set them in their historical context. We take account of where they fall in the canon of inspired writings to which the church submits. What is the cultural background? What is the historical context?

A good example is to compare two different things in this passage. We have the food laws, which Jesus says are no longer needed (‘Thus he declared all foods clean’, verse 19), but we have other ethical standards, including sexual behaviour, which certainly come over from the Old Testament, but which he clearly retains. Hence, the way the reading ends:

²¹For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, ²²adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. ²³All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’

What’s the difference? Historical context in the great story of God’s salvation that the Bible tells provides us with the answer.

In the case of the food laws, they do not originate at creation, where the first humans are given some simple vegetarian permissions, nor later in Genesis after the Flood where meat-eating is also allowed. They come specifically in the context of how Israel will inhabit the land. I have heard a doctor suggest they may even be specific to what was hygienic at the time, but I am not qualified to judge that.

The sexual laws here, banning fornication and adultery, however, have a much bigger context. They can be traced back not only to the prohibition of adultery in the Ten Commandments but to the earliest teaching about such relationships, way back in the creation stories, in Genesis 2:24, where sexual relations are defined as being between one man and one woman exclusively for life. Furthermore, Jesus and Paul both base their teaching on sexual ethics on that verse.

So history shows us that the food laws were for a particular context which has since passed, but the sexual ethics were for all time.

One of the things we can do when we are faced with difficult biblical teaching is to look for the context of the canon of Scripture, the cultural background, and the historical context. We may need to ask those more learned than ourselves, or to research on the Internet, being careful to keep to reputable websites. But probably many more Christian homes could do with having a one-volume Bible commentary on the bookshelf, and maybe one or two other helpful resources as well.

Two ‘H’s so far: the Holy Spirit and history.

The third is the heart.

Jesus is very clear here and in the Sermon on the Mount that it’s the inner attitudes which determine the way we live as Christians. What goes on inside our lives determines what comes outside into the world. What we dwell on, what we love, what we spend our time thinking about will have an effect on our actions.

That’s why so much of Scripture is addressed to the inner life of disciples. It’s not to keep everything inside and private. It’s to recognise that the rôle of Holy Writ is to address those inner attitudes and tune them towards our life with God.

What we cannot do is simply treat the Bible as a collection of rules that regulate human action. That would make it no different from the kinds of laws that Parliament passes and to which the Queen assents. If we treat biblical teaching as just a collection of laws that regulate our behaviour, we will find that it lets us down and that we let God down.

I once heard a Muslim teacher say that this was one area where Muslims and Christians disagreed. Islam, he said, had no time for the question of inner motives and the workings of the heart. It only looked at the outer actions.

Followers of Jesus cannot go down that road. When we read the Bible and seek to hear God speaking to us about our lives through it, one thing we need to do is to ask, how does this form my inner life? How does it impact all my affections and the things I love? As one Christian writer has put it, ‘You are what you love.’

If we do that, then we will draw closer to God and that will have the knock-on effect that we live in greater holiness. Let the Scriptures focus on our attitudes of heart and the result will not be that grimy list of sins that Jesus lists at the end of the reading: that is what comes when we focus on the outer rule-keeping without the inner formation of the spirit.

No: allowing the Scriptures to mould our hearts will lead instead to the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

So in conclusion, this is how we work with the Scriptures to discover God’s will. We listen for the voice of the Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures and are willing to be led by that same Spirit. We explore the history, including the cultural context and the place in God’s great story. And we let the Spirit use the Scriptures to work on our hearts, forming us into the people he wants us to be, rather than just folk who forever struggle and fail to conform to outward regulations.

[1] My inspiration for what follows (but not the three ‘H’s) comes from Ian Paul’s blog post, Do followers of Jesus obey OT food laws (Mark 7)?

August 29, 2021 0

Are We Called?

‘Calling’ is a major theme in much Christian spirituality. Being called to faith, called to serve in a particular way and so on. It’s something that was big in our circuit this afternoon with the ‘ordinand’s testimony service’ for one of my colleagues, a probationer minister who is about to be ordained this summer at the Methodist Conference. We listened to Chrissie telling us the story of her ‘call’. And throughout the process, she will have been asked – as I was – whether she still felt as called to the ministry.
But a recent article in Ministry Today, The Concept of Calling in Christian Discipleship, challenges this popular understanding. David Kerrigan points out that the examples of being called in Scripture are much less common than the more regular pattern of looking for character and qualifications. He argues that the idea God has a meticulous, detailed plan for all of our lives is defective. Although there are exceptions where God does have particular plans for certain individuals, it does not apply to most of us. He argues this on pastoral, intellectual and biblical grounds.

Pastorally, when someone misses what they believe to be the detailed will of God, it can be catastrophic – as it is also when others do not agree with them. Intellectually, he sees providence as more about the overarching big picture than the fine detail. Biblically, there is much on general discipleship to set alongside those examples of specific calling.

In particular, Kerrigan commends a book called Decision Making and the Will of God by Garry Friesen (sadly not available through Amazon UK).

Read his article and see what you think.

May 22, 2011 6

Finding (The Will Of) God

That’s the theme that has popped up a couple of times today. In both cases, it’s been a resource that challenges popular evangelical practice.

Firstly, I met my weekly Bible Study group. We discussed what they might do as a Lent course when I start my sabbatical next month. With the support of the church treasurer, I had recently bought a few DVD courses, so that groups might feel more confident to run some studies without ‘expert’ input.

One DVD I invited them to look at this morning was ‘Stop Looking For The Will Of God‘ by the redoubtable Jeff Lucas. His theme is that rather than worrying about discovering the will of God, we should concentrate first on seeking God for himself.

When I came home, I found an email from The Transforming Center. It containd one of Ruth Haley Barton‘s regular devotional articles for church leaders. Entitled ‘Discernment: Finding God In All Things‘, she encourages a more Ignatian approach of discerning the presence of God with us in the contrasting themes of ‘consolation’ and ‘desolation’. That is, what gives us life and what drains us of life? We are more likely to find God’s pleasure for our lives in those activities which energise us rather than those which suck the life out of us.

It’s an attractive theory, but would need testing at greater depth than a seven-page article can offer. It would be interesting to know where Barton sees the place of doing something uncongenial, because we are servants, for example. I am sure she has a place for that in her spirituality, it just isn’t obvious to me in the article. (Unless I wasn’t being very attentive, perhaps.) Certainly that is in my mind, having taken a Methodist Covenant Service on Sunday, which delicately balances the fact that we may like what God calls us to do, or we may find it unattractive. The Covenant Service neatly avoids the two contrasting traps of God’s will either being something we love or something we hate.

Both Lucas and Barton are subtly different from evangelical convention, which speaks of finding God’s will supremely through Scripture, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, trusted Christian friends, circumstances and the resources of reason, tradition and experience. They don’t eschew these filters of understanding God’s will, but they place the emphasis elsewhere. While certain biblical characters are castigated for not ‘enquiring of the Lord’, Lucas and Barton avoid the kind of paralysis some find themselves in where they won’t get out of bed without divine guidance. They put an emphasis back on the relationship with God, in place of a more mechanical approach.

So I wondered: what is important to you in finding and following the will of God?

January 7, 2009 2

Tag: will of God