The Voters have Spoken

A lot of controversy covered the events following Thursday’s vote, but none so interesting as the requirement Nick Clegg felt to take the result personally. It was as if the question on the ballot read: “Do you like Nick Clegg?” Of which the 3 options were:
1. Yes
2. No
3. Hell No!

I only have a few short comments to make on the matter. The first being it isn’t personal, Mr. Clegg, we just don’t want what you want. The turnout for the vote was higher than usual, and the majority was self explanatory. I’ve already stated my opinion of democracy, but the numbers show what can be done with the power of a vote.

The higher than average turn out shows that people wanted to be heard on the matter. And the margin by which the resounding “NO” was said only further shows that this country will listen when it matters. It actually points to the involvement of the country on policy change as being more effective than voting for a party.

Whatever the motive behind each vote it wasn’t another back stabbing action to the deputy prime minister; he didn’t have enough votes the first time round for that to be the case!

 

Jim Colwright

I wrote this to make sense of what I saw:

“The man had lived on the streets for years. He obviously had experience of travel. He had a fairly well spoken demeanour, and spoke of seeing New York and parts of Mexico. Now he was ragged and confused. This once well-travelled, witty, family man, had been lowered to the observers of everyone’s success but his own. He sat on the tube that day; a pile of newspapers cushioning his seat. he spoke with excitement about the state of the world, and how our MPs were corrupt and selfish. But there was a pain behind his eyes. Had his perception of the world been shaped by some terrible past experience?

The loss of his wife came shortly after his relationship with alcohol had become a priority but didn’t mix well with the family and she’d left with the children without a trace. It had been a result of needing to unwind after stressful days at the office, soon they became nights at the office. And led to a considerable number of nights in the office, which was why he was dismissed. The compassion he required was not found in the city of Men. The competition had taken his marriage and his job.

He had crossed the Atlantic looking for the love of his life. He searched high and low, spent what little he had to travel from city to city. He just wanted to see his children again. Now he was on the streets. The simple need to speak was apparent whenever people were within a few feet of him. Alcohol wasn’t there anymore, but the damage of his experiences had done enough to make his behaviour repelling.

He sat, alone.

In his hands were a pile of A5 informational flyers from the London Underground, and a red marker pen. He carefully wrote:

“CITY WIDE
FLAT FARE 170p
25 MILES
NEW YORK”

The other side had “MPs SCUM TAX PETROL”

It made sense to him.

Once he had completed the task, he put the flyer at the bottom of his pile and started again. This was his way of coping. He was alone.”

 

Ministries of Mercy

I’ve read nearly all of Tim Keller’s material. And what I haven’t, I intend to. He is full of wisdom for today’s church. I first found his outlook on the gospel in 2005 and have followed a lot of what he’s done since. I recommend all of his teaching.

This book (Ministries of Mercy) is his first publication, from back in 1995. A lot of what he addresses is as a result to the facts of American poverty. He lays out a picture showing how many people are truly in poverty despite appearances. It isn’t just about the homeless undesirables, like the man on the tube this morning ripping up free newspapers but being ignored by the commuters; it’s about the elderly who can barely get by on their state pension, single parents in communities permeating with drug dealers; it’s about the families who’s father has just lost his factory job due to the economic downturn and is not skilled for anything else. Mercy is the undeserved ministry to these people.

Keller paints a picture in the first half of the book of what it would look like if we were merciful, challenging our individual perceptions, and presenting Jesus to bring us to a place of repentant faith to live a life of mercy. It begins with the story of the good Samaritan, expounds some key parts, works through the individual, then moves onto the church.

It is theological and practical in it’s presentation. There are some excellent guidelines for starting up ministries of mercy through the church. This especially resonated with me, as it gave a positive view to the eventual equipping of churches to show mercy, rather than guilt tripping those into action.

He shared his definitions and applications of justice and mercy. He showed how these work together; and how mercy ministries and evangelism are two sides of the same end, bringing the lordship of Jesus into all of life. It’s balanced in it’s approach but very positive in it’s conclusions.

I highly recommend this book. It’s challenging and gives a grand vision for what the church is capable of, but always brings it back to the ultimate ministry of mercy: Jesus on the cross.

 

Bell’s Hell

Rob Bell has caused a stir. I haven’t read the book.

“Love Wins” has become the latest topic of debate among Christians on Twitter, Facebook, the Christian blogosphere, and anything else that allows freedom of speech and those that believe in Jesus (primarily on the internet). I could wait for the book to find it’s way into my library, but after reading preliminary reviews I don’t think I want to own my own copy. Giving money to the cause won’t help it disappear, will it?

Of course, I shouldn’t have anything to say until I’ve read it, but my reaction has caught me off guard as I read prominent evangelicals discuss the impact this book could have. This isn’t another “The Shack” moment, where, regardless of the wobbly theology, the heart seems to be in the right place, and it is about helping people understand and improve their relationship with God, even though we have seen the trinity explained better using an egg. This is an individual with a MASSIVE following, asking questions (and providing his own answers) about a doctrine that is fundamental the Christian message.

Rob Bell is single-handedly, in the western Christian church, causing a shake up that is not dissimilar to what is happening in Japan right now.

This isn’t restoring the true message of Jesus and the Kingdom of God, this is removing the foundations and watching what happens.

As much as I’ve tried to stay out of it, it brings me close to tears as I watch this gifted individual, who has upset people, but remained faithful to Jesus, to suddenly rubbish the work of the Cross, take the God of Justice we know and love and cripple Him. The heaven and hell he is talking about is not the same as that of the bible. The future of every individual he describes is his own construction.

Rob Bell has got a lot to do to show me how it is possible the teaching of this book is not heresy.

Kevin De Young puts it well in his comprehensive review: If he’s right, most of church history has been wrong. If he’s wrong, a staggering number of people are hearing “peace, peace” where there is no peace.

 

The Church Meal

The Church Meal

I love food. Food is a wonderful thing. It shows what a culture is really made of. And eating together is by far the best way to enjoy culinary delights of any nation. I certainly don’t like eating alone, and it becomes an activity alongside something else. I can’t simply eat. I have concluded eating is a group activity. Best enjoyed in community.

That is, enjoyed by the people eating. It can be somewhat ruined from the preparation and serving end by those eating the food. Tables get moved, other customers are exacerbated, dietary requirements are magnified, all by a group who are larger than the average family.

So church, in all it’s diversity and life, tends to intensify this whole experience by nature. On more than a few occasions it becomes almost painful to watch as the church, being as close as a family by nature, enter an eatery and, requiring to sit together, cause immense disruption for the whole venue.

When Christians go for a meal they aren’t a great witness.

Self-awareness plays a large part to the fact that all these people want desperately to be a part of each others lives. No matter where we are there is a necessity to be together. This inner-city London church causes disruption and chaos as true community is trying to be worked out.

But when Christians go for a meal it’s not a good witness.

Just as the western church struggles to show how food and community work, so in Jesus’ time, the Corinthian church were doing no better. However, for them, the eating together had gotten pretty out of hand. They would set up a feast in someones house, and all the rich and wealthy would arrive first and eat all the food. By the time the poor had arrived all the rest of the church were drunk and stuffed and there was nothing left for the rest of the church. They were instructed as a new community, to ensure the logistics of eating together worked well, to eat before hand so they weren’t starving when they arrived. Then, those that had little or no food of their own, would have plenty.

This is preparation at it’s best:
• This is what we want to do
• This is the issue we come up against
• This is what we’ll do to make sure we don’t have that issue when we get round to it

Maybe in our church we need to sort out seating arrangements before we arrive. Maybe we need to humble ourselves and let the restaurants efforts be good enough. Maybe the importance of family should take a new form of being together as we are mixed around and moved that we don’t let our preferences of who we are near mean that it takes an extra hour for the food to be ordered.

Maybe we can still show London what it is to do life together at every opportunity.

I think we can.

 

Nostalgia Exposed

Do you ever dream of a time in the past when you were particularly happy with your state of mind and well-being? Whenever I find myself thinking I preferred my life I realise it’s ridiculous to think like that. If you want to go back to a time when you were younger you discount all the maturing and growing that is making who you are. If you are more mature those past times can be improved upon.

Of course we can reminisce, there are wonderful times past that were character shaping for all of us. As we play through our lives we seem to slow down over these beautiful memories of times when the complications of life faded into the background. And what it would be to have a complication free life. But now, and I’m much younger than most, but older than I once was, complications that were first an awful throbbing limb of a problem, have begun to gain the diminishing drug of perspective injected into their prominence.

Perspective, if we apply it, should show up the joys of yesteryear as warped realities that our foolishness meant we couldn’t see with our eyes half shut, blinkers on and headphones in, playing a movie-like soundtrack to the ever changing drama we called youth.

Some have had it tough. The reality that they have had it a lot tougher than others is rarely known to the majority of us, who had sheltered existence. But the journey we are on is always forwards. Progress. Growth.

Stubbornness, however, steps in. We, in our little world of our own, have everything revolving around us. Whether it is our problems or our victories, these planets change our gravitational capabilities to actually orbit the correct sun; the True celestial being that will allow life to finally form on our barren lands.

I have had a realigning in my life. Coming to terms with truths from my past has changed the crooked relationship I had with God, into something to build on. What difference alignment has made to my own life. Seeking first His Kingdom; wanting the Lordship of Jesus to be the purpose of all my actions has been so fruitful. Forgiveness, restoration, a life of faith. It’s all in Him.

Then your growth won’t be stunted. The cost of discipleship is a small price to pay for the reward that is on offer in this life and the next. As Jesus said: (Mark 10:29-30) “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.”

 

Spiritual?

Who on earth started the idea that religion is a social aspect for controlling communities and spirituality is the real way to finding comfort or peace?

It makes me sad the amount of people who are primarily convinced that they aren’t religious but they are ‘spiritual’. They seemingly have no idea what it means to say that, and though it is true we are all spiritual, the life choices made by these ‘non-religious-spiritual’ groups are far from spiritual. In fact these practices of regular drinking, partying, and losing all sense of reality is a religion of itself. It is a self salvation that no more adds to a persons spirituality than lighting a candle in a dimly lit church.

How many of these ‘spiritual’ people act in a way that can be compared to the ethereal experience we all aspire to. As far as I can tell, the aspiration is to an unattainable high that is experienced by connecting into drugs or other intoxications, dulling the true senses, and creating a false experience.

I ask for a continuing and increase in the gracious presence of the One True God, who can lift out of the chaos those who aren’t trying to hide from their own reality, but trying to be permanently rid of it.

 

Winning?

Ok. Don Miller is good. He makes me think. Like a lateral thinking puzzle.

He recently made me think about the psychological concept of loss aversion. People put more energy into keeping something they might lose, than try to gain something for the same cost.

Not to jump the gun too early, but what he says is pretty provoking. If you’re told you’re losing ground you fight to get it back. If you know you’re on the up and winning you get complacent. What language is used in church?!

More often than not I get to feel like a rare breed doing the radical thing when there are more believers in the world than I can picture. We get given pictures of glory days when Christendom was high, everyone professed Christ over breakfast, and no-one really thought too much about the ‘wrong things’.

All that is a myth.

I’ve come to realise cultural transformation is only possible if we are firm in our foundations of Christ. We know what’s best because of Jesus. No matter how many wind-farms or solar panels are used to create a climate change escape plan, this has no ultimate relevance for anyone. No matter how many children we rescue from sex-slavery, if they don’t see Jesus for who He is and believe in Him, their lives are still forfeit.

The church is taking ground, and the cultures they find themselves in must be properly engaged with to bring them to Jesus. Then, and only then, will true transformation occur. Health reform, civil partnerships, abortion, war; all these have surface results that will never be properly achieved unless Jesus is brought into them.

How about that for a Monday morning?

 

Either God and Ethics Exist, or Atheism is Our Way of Pretending That Any Rationality is Negative

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/opinion/21douthat1.html

On Avatar; and put better than I could.

 

Freedom part 2

Why do I think freedom is a myth?!

More to the point, I refuse to believe in any idea of free will. At least for regular people who don’t have a relationship with Jesus. As soon as we come into relationship with the living God shown to us in Jesus my position changes slightly. My basic position, however, is straightforward: No one chooses God. And everyone naturally chooses greatest gain, or minimal loss, for themselves. Whatever freespirited individual comes and sells me a big issue my thoughts on the matter are really that plain.

If we cannot save ourselves, because we are dead, God is the only one who can save us; make us alive. Without God’s initiation, we are lost and alone.

This is highly important. Ephesians lays it out relatively simply:
• You were dead
• Following the course of this world
• Following the prince of the power of the air
• We all once lived in disobedience
• Following the passions of our flesh
• Carrying out the desires of the body and the mind
• By nature provoking the wrath of God

Nowhere does it say that we were trying to break away from our evil practices and trying to please God.

The next bit:
• BUT GOD (important that)
• Rich in mercy
• Having a great love for us
• Made us alive together with Christ

So:
• By grace you have been saved
• This is not you own work
• This is a gift of God
• Not a result of works so that no one can boast
• We are His workmanship
• Created in Christ Jesus for good works
• God prepared the good works beforehand that we should walk in them

So it’s not us. We didn’t instigate it or persuade God to change us.

So what is Free will? Next time.