Faith: Part 3

This is my third and final post on faith. In these posts, which focus on the calling of Peter and his friends, I have been trying to assert is that faith is never merely about what we 'believe', as if belief in something can be limited to the intellectual sphere. No - faith must necessarily spill over into what we do, into the essence of who we are as people. This is the lesson of Peter's encounter with Jesus. So how can we become the kind of people who are filled with that kind of faith?

The extent to which we respond in faith will always be the extent to which we know the risen Jesus. We cannot be filled with faith unless we know Him for ourselves and are filled with his Holy Spirit. Derivative knowledge will not do. Our churches are filled with people who leach their pastors faith, believing that they can live 'through' their pastor. They can't and this is why many church-goers' lives look no different to the world's lives. Vicarious knowledge of Jesus is not enough.

But how can we develop such a knowledge of Jesus? Firstly, we need to learn to be in Jesus’ presence. Just to sit with him. We need to become more and more familiar with him through any and every element of our lives. We need to get familiar with him through reading the bible, through developing an active prayer life, through talking with other Jesus followers and through acting on what we think he might be saying. We need to encounter Jesus on every level of the human experience and we need to do it often. We cannot survive on our 'conversion experience' alone. Every day God is waiting for us to meet Him afresh. Faith in God which does not engage the daily experience will soon become academic and stale, losing its vitality.

Jesus himself says this to his disciples in Luke 18.

"¹Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. ²He said: "In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. ³And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, 'Grant me justice against my adversary.'

⁴"For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, 'Even though I don't fear God or care about men, ⁵yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won't eventually wear me out with her coming!' "

⁶And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. ⁷And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? ⁸I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"

Persistence in prayer is one of the key ways we develop faith, because through it we find out about who God is what He is like.

We learn something more on this subject from Simon Peter. In verse 8 we see Peter’s response to the miracle he has just witnessed. He says “go away from me , Lord, for I am a sinful man!” This is typical of anyone who has come into the presence of the living God. Peter sees Jesus for who he really is and in so doing he recognizes who he really is too, a sinful man.

Peter's analysis of the situation is quite wrong at this point. He thinks that his sinfulness means that Jesus won’t want to associate with him. In reality, quite the reverse is true. Simon’s sinfulness is exactly the reason Jesus wants to associate with him. Jesus has come to 'seek and save what has been lost' and that begins with Simon and will eventually be done through Simon. Jesus knows there is something in Simon that is totally untapped and unrealized, and he wants to bring it out of him. He wants Simon to be his disciple. He thinks that Simon can become like him because Simon has the X-Factor - faith and humility. In other words Simon knows what he lacks and what he needs.

Jesus, in interacting with Simon in this way, is saying that Simon is up to the job of becoming just like Jesus. This, too, is his promise to us.

In verse 10 we see that Jesus sees beyond Simon's fear into his heart and ultimately into his future. He calls him, redefining what he has always done and re-directing it for the greater purpose of the Kingdom of God. That’s how Jesus wants to work in our lives too. He takes what we have and directs it for his greater good. Our job is simply to submit and obey. Jesus is not asking us to put a mask on before we come and serve him. In fact quite the opposite is true. He wants us to come just as we are and he will use what we have and multiply it.

Simon's response says it all. He is the representative of his accomplices here, making the same decision they all choose to make. This is the hinge point of their lives. They have seen Jesus do amazing things before this, but they have not yet made the key decision to follow. Here, they unmistakably and irrefutably do just that; “they left everything.” This is the true response of faith and also the test of faith. You know when someone has really given themselves over to Jesus because they choose to leave everything for Jesus.

It’s pretty amazing to think that Simon leaves even the catch of fish, which would have been worth a heck of a lot of money, as well as his business and family behind in order to follow this guy he has only recently met. Simon knows that the financial value of the haul, even the total value of the business is nothing in comparison with the value of being around Jesus. The young men don't even bother to sell the fish!

Simon has been made aware of the fruit of obedience and now he chooses to follow with everything he has. He, John and James now know that it will be totally worth their while. Meeting Jesus has put everything else in perspective for them. Even their livelihood has now taken second place to the call of Jesus. Their faith in them has led to greater obedience to what he wants for them. They could not bear to be without him after what they have seen.

What impact must this have had on the crowd watching? Surely it shook them to their core? What impact would it have on the places we live and work if we were known as people who would gladly follow Jesus even if it meant leaving behind all the trappings of the world? What kind of world would we inhabit have if those of us that believe in Jesus gave up everything for him, even the things that hold us back and stop us from being totally abandoned to Jesus? What would our gospel look like if we held it out especially to those who are fully aware of their inability to make it on their own - to the least and the poorest?

Jesus used these fishermen to change the world! He can do the same with us!

How much are you willing to give up for him to do that?

Faith is an event and a process; it is a departure point and a journey. Some of us have set off on the journey and are now walking with Jesus and keeping in step with His Spirit. For us, we need the encouragement to keep on walking and obeying as we go. Others have not yet set off. We need to make the decision to begin walking and trusting in Jesus with all we have, knowing that He will bring along what we lack. Others have walked with him before but have stopped walking. They need to begin again, knowing that there is enough grace for them to stand up and re-start the journey.

There is room for all of us in a story as big as this and there is grace for all of us too. Jesus says the same thing to one and all, 'come and follow me'. This is our duty but it is also our destiny. Only in following him do we discover who we are and what we were born to do.

Pastor is as Pastor does

I have observed a worrying trend in much of the church, which is that pastors are no longer willing or able to live up to their calling as pastors, instead choosing to be 'entrepreneurs' and 'visionaries'. I see the same trend in my own heart too. It is a sickness born of the desire to be significant before being obedient.

Reading from the introduction to 'Working the Angles' by Eugene Peterson;

"The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper's concerns - how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that customers will lay out more money.

"Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping, to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same.

"The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades."

'Pastor' is not a job title, nor is it a designation of the level one has reached in the organisation of the church. The Pastor is the one who serves the flock, who even lays down his own life for the flock. The true Pastor is the one who knows what the sheep need and is able to go to God with and for each flock member within his pasture to attain it.

It is not that we don't need teachers, visionaries or entrepreneurs. In fact, we need them all in greater measure. However, these gifts and roles are not, in my humble opinion, what is most important in the life of the church. The most pressing need in the church is for Pastoral care to emerge which will help 'average folks' become the saints that God has ordained them to be. God provides the growth, of course, but we are still told that Paul planted and Apollos watered (see 1 Cor 2). One of the things I most enjoy about the church I work at currently is that there is a sustained emphasis on the need to care for and train people to live out their life in Christ on a day-to-day basis. Even with such an emphasis it is a tough job. Imagine how things go when this emphasis is lacking!

Loving people is not something we do if have the time. It's not an optional extra in the mix of Christian leadership. It is, in fact, the primary requirement. If we can't act pastorally we should wonder what we are doing in the church at all. It is something that all of us are commanded to do by Jesus himself. If we are not doing this we are not Christians, never mind Christian leaders. It really is that simple. Let the visionaries first be pastors. Let the teachers be pastor-teachers and let the church entrepreneurs know that unless they do their work in love it will be as a 'resounding gong and a clanging cymbal' (1 Cor 13).

Yes, let us build the most innovative and exciting church the world has ever known. Let us work as hard as we can in this regard, but let us build it on the foundation of faith, love and care. And let those of us in leadership surrender our agenda for greatness to the greater gospel agenda of love, that we might 'present everyone mature in Christ.' (Col 1.28) 

Sharing

If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be ... Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, "Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land."

Deuteronomy 15:7-11

Sharing trumps giving because when we share we don't get to stay in control of our stuff. When we open up our lives to sharing with our community we allow others to invade our space and take what they need. We don't get to choose when and what we give, we give as there is need.

We get the same benefits in return too. There is a mutuality to sharing that is not present in the same way through giving.

The freedom of obscurity

"For you have died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God." Colossians 3.3

The gospel is first about death, Jesus's death and then our death. We enter into the story of the gospel through the cross of Jesus, which demands that we die. When we begin this journey of following Jesus we say 'no' to those things that used to drive us forward and instead choose to follow Him.

Our life is no longer our own, it is now hidden in His life. We no longer have a life apart from Him but our life is derived from His life. This is what it means to be hidden in Him. It's no longer about us. We're not the central figure in the play - Jesus is.

The advantages of this are obvious. Jesus is now with God. He enjoys all the benefits that being in the presence of God allow. He has intimacy with the Father and He knows the will of the Father. Through Jesus we now have access to all of these benefits which were once beyond our reach. We participate in the very life of God. This is the life after the death.

Peter puts it like this;

"His (Jesus') divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he (Jesus) has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires." 2 Peter 1.3-4

All this means that we must become hidden, obscure and discounted. It's not about us. We are freed from the need to be at the center of the story. It can't be about us any longer. It has to be about Him if it's going to work as it should. This truth has obvious implications for how we function as followers of Jesus. A sure sign of the authenticity of our faith will be our humility. We will live as if we are nothing and He is everything. We will get out of the way.

How often can we say this is our reality? How often are we actually more concerned with being noticed and approved of? I can say for myself that this is a big problem. I think the culture of Christian celebrities is one of the biggest signs that we have missed the gospel and one of the reasons we see so little of the power of God in our midst. We have made it about us and none of us has anything to offer.

Our job is to point to Him. To become hidden that He might be revealed. Are we ready for this? Are we ready to die again? There's nothing I want more but nothing I feel less able to do.

This is why John the Baptist is so amazing. What a humble man it takes to say
"He must increase, but I must decrease." John 3.30

A meditation on a Psalm

"The Lord is the strength of his people;
he is the saving refuge of his
anointed.

O save your people, and bless your
heritage;
be their shepherd, and carry them
forever."

Psalm 28.8-9 (NRSV)

Jesus is the strength of the church, which is his people. There is no other strength in the church than that which comes through and from Jesus. Everything else is weakness. Only he can provide the salvation of God that the church is called to receive and then offer to the world. No well-thought-through strategy can offer this; no perfectly designed sunday service; no conference, no gifted teacher and no celebrity pastor. No-thing.

Only one person. Jesus Christ.

He is not only the salvation but also the refuge of his people. "The name of the Lord (Jesus) is a strong tower. The righteous run into it (him) and they are safe (Prov 18.10)." Salvation and refuge are closely linked in Jesus. He is our salvation because he is our refuge and he is our refuge because he is our salvation.

We cannot ever be safe without him. Individually we must foster our relationship with him so that he becomes the place we run to for safety and salvation instinctively. Corporately we must do the same. Those of us in leadership within his people must learn that we cannot do anything without first submitting it to his will. We can only expect the cover and safety he promises us if we are walking in his will - walking in his path - as the sheep follows the shepherd.

We must ask him to pick us up and carry us forward. This will mean we have to stop trying to walk on our own and in our own strength. How might this happen?

Prayer. Prayer has to be the bedrock of everything we do. When we pray we await his direction and submit to it. We do not do what we want and then pray that it will work out - 'Lord bless this mess' - we ask him what he wants and then we do it. This must be our rule of life if we are to be effective in carrying out his work.

Resurrection

I am reading a book on the resurrection by Peterson (below). He writes that resurrection always happens at the fringes of things. Jesus was raised from the dead in the quiet of a garden with nobodies (Mary Magdalene etc.) there to witness the aftermath and no-one there to see the event itself.

This is a deep truth.

As Christians who want to make a difference in and to the world we must position ourselves on the fringes of things - this is where the life is. I think this is where God would have us be. It is in some ways a dangerous place to be. A cliff edge has drawbacks and great dangers attached to it, but I feel that God would rather us live there with the associated risks than in the certainty and boredom we often choose. He hates lukewarm, remember?

Why are our churches so boring? Perhaps because we are boring and safe. Is God bored? I think He might be.

"When the son of man returns will He find faith on the earth?"

Eugene Peterson

People have been telling me to read some Eugene Peterson so I have started a book called 'Living the Resurrection'. Here is one pearl from the first couple of pages...

"My conviction is that the church is the community that God has set at the centre of the world to keep the world centered."

(Eugene Peterson - Living the Resurrection, page 12)

better world or better church

I'm really excited about the focus on mission within the global church at the moment. Whilst there is certainly a lot of guff and spin flying around, the essence of the situation is this; the church has recognised that it hasn't done a great job of representing what the gospel is and actually getting that message to the people who need to hear it.

This cultural basis for 'mission shaped living' - fancy way of saying 'being a Christian' - is joined with strong biblical evidence too. In each of the gospels Jesus makes it his final priority to remind his disciples that the good news about his death and resurrection leaves them with an obvious imperative - go and preach the good news to all the nations. Get out there, tell them about what this all means and show them the evidence at the same time. Pronounce that the Kingdom has come and do it with all the resources that I am about to send you by my Spirit.

This mission is not an add on to the gospel message, but something very central. Just as the purpose of the Old Covenant was that the nations would be blessed through the seed of Abraham, so the New Covenant has the same aim. Jesus came to fulfill the Old and to bring the New whilst continuing the same thread. The difference of course between the two Covenants is that the New includes all who believe on Jesus, whether Jew or Gentile. Secondly, and as evidence for the first, there are new resources given for this work - namely the Holy Spirit! Those who have received the Holy Spirit are now God's people in the world, called to do the work of building His Kingdom and inviting others to do the same.

The point is this. The mission of the church is not to build a better church but a better world. Whilst the latter will obviously include the former, what history has shown us is that those that concentrate on the former never get much further. Instead our starting point as Christians is worship which flows out into Mission, not into ecclesiology (talk of the church). We will of course finally get round to talking about how the church should be shaped in the light of all this but it must never be our starting point.

Where hope can be found

As Scott Peck says at the start of his wonderful book 'The Road Less Travelled', "life is difficult". This is self-evident. We've all had times of plenty but they don't seem to last very long. They seem sometimes to be only short breathers amidst the real stuff, the hard stuff. Sometimes life gives less reason for hope than for hopelessness. Less reason for faith than cynicism. Less reason for love than for hatred.

Yet the marks of the christian are "faith, hope and love" (see 1 Cor 13 esp.). How can we be people marked out by these three when the tide of the world drags us to another place? I think that part of the answer has to do with where we are looking for our faith, our hope and our love.

If we look to the things of the world to provide our hope we will soon end up without any. If we base our love for others on what they can do for us and what we can do for them we will not love long. If our faith depends on how we perceive the world is responding to us, even to God, in this or that instant we will not be faith-filled for long.

No, the only appropriate source and destination for our faith, hope and love is God Himself. Everything else will let us down, confuse us or depress us. Nothing else is faithful. Only God will never lie to us, disappoint or cheat us. Only God will not ever let us down. Only God never defaults on his loans!

I have spent a great deal of my life trusting in the church and its leadership to give me hope and railing against it the minute it fails to do so. But no person, institution or movement can provide or sustain what really matters in life. To look to them for it will only lead us away from God.

The prophet Jeremiah puts it this way;

Thus says the LORD:"Cursed is the man who trusts in man
and makes flesh his strength,
whose heart turns away from the LORD.
6 He is like a shrub in the desert,
and shall not see any good come.
He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness,
in an uninhabited salt land.

7 "Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose trust is the LORD.
8 He is like a tree planted by water,
that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes,
for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit."

(Jer 17. 5-8)

Who or what are you looking to for faith, hope and love?

The sword and the staff

"It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ". (Eph 4.11- 15 NIV)

There is so much to see in this passage that entire books could be filled just working out what it all means, but what I want to focus on is the relationship that is proposed here between truth and love.

Four different kinds of giftings are mentioned here - apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastor-teachers - all of which have the same aim, to prepare God's people for a different kind of living, a holy oneness where we all pull in the same direction and increasingly resemble Christ's character. This is a great statement of unity in diversity. It should be possible within the body of Christ to exhibit the kind of unity that is seen nowhere else. A unity which is not based on uniformity, on us all being from the same place, but which comes from the fact that we are all going in the same direction - that is toward Jesus Himself. Perhaps the lack of such a unity in the church merely shows how little we have loved our saviour.

What stands out to me here though is one particular gifting, that of the pastor-teacher. The pastor-teacher is at once a shepherd and a warrior. She has to delicately balance caring for the sheep and fighting off the wolves, just as King David did all those years ago. The pastor must hold the tension between truth and love and constantly find the middle ground. It is not enough to simply be 'right', because rightness without love is not right at all. Neither is it enough to be 'loving'. There is no real love without truth. The pastor-teacher must find a way to hold both the sword and the staff at the same time with the same goal in mind, the advancement of the flock.

Perhaps the fact that this is such a difficult dance explains why so few even attempt it these days. We have our great teachers of course, but so many of them have withdrawn to the ivory towers of academia, caring little for the cold, hard realities of day-to-day life. We prefer to be purists, ever narrowing down on our subject so that we know all there is to know about one thing. Perhaps we avoid the human for this very reason - it is too complex. Humans don't sit still on the page as words do. Sadly we see this in the church as much as we do in the academy. Leaders who have chosen to withdraw from the day-to-day work of loving other people as Christ loves them. It is no surprise that their 'truth' is not really transformative. It may be academically sound and well researched, but it will not ever resonate or change us. It is no surprise that the best 'theologians' of every generation are pastors too (think Barth, Bonhoeffer, N.T. Wright).

There are also those who would prefer to police others instead of pastoring them. They have the title of the pastor but none of the love to go with it. They are managers of people but not shepherds and once again, their example will never lead others into maturity in Christ Jesus (see http://jonnyhughes.blogspot.com/2009/03/pastors-or-police.html)

On the other hand there are those who 'just want to love' those around them, without telling them what they need to hear. Out of a fear of offending, a fear of man, they end up blessing any mess and sacrificing their sheep on the altar of tolerance. I admit that I tend toward this end of the extreme, which is perhaps why I love to be around people with the guts to tell people the truth.

What is needed are those people and those communities that hold the tension between truth and love. Those who know that truth and love are not alien concepts but fraternal twins, different sides of the same coin. Jesus did this and if we are to grow into his likeness as mature followers we need to be around those who also do this. Yes we need prophets, apostles and evangelists too, but I sense our faith is lacking more from a lack of truthful love than it is from vision or evangelistic zeal.

Perhaps the answer is for us all to discover the place within us where we can hold the sword and the staff simultaneously. To practice loving people into truth. Wherever we find ourselves from day-to-day, I believe we are demanded to be the sorts of people who live in this tension wherever we go and whatever we are doing.

Pastors or Police?

All church leadership must place in the context of relationship. If it does not, quite quickly it becomes more like police work than pastoral work. Those in this line of work love to sniff around for clues; who is committing the crimes? When was the last time they did so? With whom? Have we got enough evidence? What sentence can we set to really teach them a lesson?

The problem with this approach of course is that it is completely and utterly ineffective. Police work does not often deal with crime as it focuses on symptoms rather than causes. Moreover, it can only punish those who are caught. Thus crime often ends up going underground and in a far more virulent form. Quite apart from this is the fact that people are as likely to rebel against such authoritarianism as they are to toe the line. Even those who fall in line won't necessarily know why they are doing so and soon they will be disillusioned, or far worse, they may join the force themselves.

Instead, those who want to take seriously the call to leading the church of Jesus should aim for nothing less than transformation of hearts and minds. Peoples actions will always fall in line with what they believe to be true about the world. So aim for the heart! If you can convince someone of the need to change at that level then real and lasting transformation will occur, which will likewise spread like a wild fire.