Look to him

"We don't mainly mortify sin by looking at it... We suffocate sin by redirecting our gaze to Christ."

Thus Dane Ortlund, in Deeper, p 139.

It is a strange kind of fight we're in, the fight against sin.  In pretty much every other war, the essential dictum is 'know your enemy'.  There is something of that in the fight for holiness - we are not unaware of the devil's schemes - but knowing our enemy is not going to take us to victory.  Doing reconnaissance, getting to understand sin and our own dark hearts better, is not going to get us there.

The only thing that will bring victory over sin is looking to the Lord Jesus, gazing at him, seeing his beauty and glory and goodness, delighting in him.

This is a battle of loves.  The problem with focussing on the enemy is that at some level, even as Christian believers, we love the enemy.  There would be no temptation to sin if we did not love sin.  But we do.  All human beings love sin; in certain circumstances we also hate it, and as Christians that hate becomes a real and significant force in our lives by the Holy Spirit.  But we still love sin.

So it is all well and good to assess what our chief idols are, or to pick up what false beliefs we might be holding.  But those things won't make us holy.  We fight the sin that we still love by seeing Jesus and loving him more.

Can I make a particular appeal to preachers and pastors?  It is common to hear McCheyne quoted from the pulpit - "for every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ".  Great, that's wisdom.  But can I encourage you to look at your sermons, your counselling sessions, your Bible studies - is there ten times as much time going into describing and depicting and verbally delighting in the goodness and grace and glory and love of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus?  Please, don't just set this as homework ('this week let's try to look at Jesus more') but actually devote sermon time to it.  If we're meant to be looking at Jesus, show us Jesus.

And for those of us who are not preachers and pastors, think about what the main goal of your private devotions is - how much time is spent in just looking at Jesus?  And how do we respond to our sin, whether temptation or actual failure - is it to look to Jesus?

Love elicits love, you see.  Do you see the Lord Jesus, suffering the agony of the cross?  Then you see love, deep love, love for sinners who hated him.  When he prayed for the forgiveness of those who crucified him - that was love, the eternal love of God displayed in mercy and grace to his enemies.  And you and I were just such enemies.  We weren't there, but it was our sin that he bore.  We can stand before the cross of Calvary and say with the apostle "the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me".  We can sing of that love vast as an ocean, loving kindness like a flood - and know that it reaches me, even me.  His love has no beginning - he is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, the one who has always been devoted and committed to your good even at the cost of his life, at the cost of cross and hell - and his love will have no end, because the crucified One is risen and now lives to intercede for you before the Throne.

Let the love of the Lord Jesus for you draw out your own love for him.  And then follow what you love, and that will suffocate sin.

On death and Christmas parties, or How to inhabit time

The office Christmas party - more likely in my experience to be the office meal out - is a standard fixture of December, and often the only occasion when colleagues will socialise together.  I've been out of the office environment for a number of years, and this is one of the things I've really missed.  But this year I've noticed that it doesn't seem to be really happening.  I know people whose 'Christmas' meals have already happened; others who will delay having lunch together until January.  The festive period is just too busy already, perhaps with work or perhaps just with the preparation for Christmas proper.  So the office do gets moved, one direction or the other.

At one level this is just perfectly sensible pragmatism, and it really doesn't matter at all.  But on another level I wonder what it says about the way we view time.  I think we are used to being able to rearrange time around ourselves.  It doesn't suit me for it to be Christmas right now, so I'll move the date.   This picture - the individual sovereign over time - really doesn't sit well with the biblical picture of time at all.

Consider the structure of the biblical account of time.  The first creation account in Genesis 1:1-2:3 is built around the seven days of the week; it is a time focussed account of creation.  (The second, in the rest of chapter 2, is space focussed.  One of the reasons I think it is a mistake to try to harmonise them is the loss of these two crucial perspectives on created life).  Time is given, according to Genesis, by God as the gracious framework for human life.  That time is a gracious gift is underlined by the institution of the Sabbath, a day of holy rest, for worship and the enjoyment of God - not to be filled with the strivings or the pleasures of the individual, but to be entered into as a thing prepared by the Creator.  The Sabbath gift shapes and defines the rest of the week.

This pattern continues through the history of Israel.  The weekly Sabbath, along with the annual festivals, define time as something which relates the history of the nation with God, and therefore as a means of living into the relationship established in that history.  Israel is not to claim mastery over time, but to live in its God-given rhythms.  It is only as part of the covenant curse that the relationship with time becomes fraught and desperate.

This matters for two reasons.  Firstly, in a big picture theological sense, time is the created echo of God's own eternity - his gift to us to allow us, finite beings, to enjoy relationship and being-in-sequence, analagous to his own eternal Being and Trinitarian relationship.  So to inhabit time properly matters.  Time, with its proper structures, is to be received and entered into as a gift, not regarded as a resource to be infinitely manipulated for my convenience.  Time is about knowing God and relating to him.  The church, I think wisely, has followed the example set by the Lord for Israel and related time to salvation history through the calendar of fasts and feasts, and I see that as an important way to reflect this approach to time.  It isn't necessary to do it this way, but it is important to do it some way.

Second, one day you will die.  Time, you see, is not infinitely malleable.  There is a date and a time marked in the calendar - not in your calendar, not on your personal timetable - when the last bit of time (as far as you are concerned, at least) will befall you.  (The only way this will be avoided is if Christ returns first, in which case your last bit of time will be everyone's last bit of time; at least, time as we know it).  Pretended sovereignty over time in the day to day of our lives does not prepare us well for the fact that we will one day hit an appointment we can't shift.  It certainly doesn't prepare us to receive that appointment as coming from the hand of the gracious Lord of our time and all time.

So anyway.  Have your Christmas party as and when, I guess.  But don't kid yourself that you are master of your time.  It is a gift; enter into it with joy, and perhaps then you will leave it when you have to with contentment.

Some disconnected thoughts on All Saints Day

1. I'm guessing not many people in my ecclesiastical neck of the woods will be celebrating All Saints Day, and there are good reasons for that.  However, if we carefully observe that in biblical usage a 'saint' is not a believer of superior rank, but simply anyone who is sanctified (saint-ified) by union with the Lord Jesus through faith, that removes most of the theological objections.  All Saints Day is a day to remember the believers who have gone before us.

2. In our day, there has been a lot of helpful pushback against talk of 'heaven' as the Christian's ultimate destiny, with the more biblical emphasis on 'new creation' coming to the fore.  That is all to the good, but it would be a shame if in the recovery of the great Christian hope we lost something of the penultimate hope, which is to depart and be with Christ.  It is true that we will not all sleep, and we cannot say whether we are the generation that will not die but will see Christ's return - but many of our brothers and sisters have slept, have gone to be with the Lord, and it's right that we bear in mind that they are safe in heaven.

3. It is a huge encouragement to know that there are those who now enjoy something of what we will one day rejoice in forever.  It seems to me that the New Testament does not say that departed believers currently enjoy the vision of God which will captivate them for all eternity; there is a sense in which they cannot yet see the Lord as he is, because they are not wholly themselves - they await the resurrection at the Lord's appearing.  They currently rest in peace; they will rise in glory.  Like us, they do not yet know what they shall be.  But what a blessing to be in the presence of the Lord, even if it means being away from the body!  Better to be a doorkeeper in the house of our God...

4. There is real and living fellowship between those who have gone before and those of us who still labour on earth.  I don't think we have immediate access to the departed saints - I don't think we can or should pray to them, for example - but we have something in a sense more intimate than immediacy.  We are joined to Christ, and they are joined to Christ.  We are one body with them, united by the one Spirit.  They pray and praise above, we pray and praise below, and it is all taken up in one great worship service, presented before God as the offering of the whole church in Jesus.  When we gather we worship, we gather into their presence, because we gather to Christ and to the heavenly Zion.

5. All of this answers, with a firm and unsentimental reality, the dim groping after hope that we see in so much funeral mawkishness.  They are not dead, but have simply gone nextdoor - that sort of thing.  For the dead in Christ, how gloriously true it is that they are not really dead!  How we can rejoice in their comfort and joy!  In Christ they all live.  Alleluia.

Some reading

Here are some brief thoughts on three books I read recently - they're not particularly connected, except to say that they are all books which take things seriously, and I appreciated that.  All three are good reads, and I'd recommend them to you.

Firstly, and most substantially in terms of both volume size and intellectual depth, I got around to reading Carl Trueman's The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.  The book is itself a triumph, albeit a painful one.  Here we get a reasonably detailed look at how the West got to be where it is today - framed by looking at how it came to pass that a statement like 'I am a man trapped in a woman's body' came to be taken as both serious and important, rather than considered to be nonsense, as it would have been until relatively recently.  In short, Trueman shows how the self became psychologised (that is to say, my internal reality defines who I really am), the psychological became sexualised, and the sexual became politicised - broadly, those movements correspond to the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in the intellectual history of the West.  I found the analysis compelling, and I would say the book needs to be the starting point for any attempt to address, from a Christian perspective, the descent of our culture.  Trueman only begins to hint at a potential answer t the question of what should be done, but there is material here to build on in the future.

Second, a much briefer book: Mike Reeves' Gospel People.  Subtitled A call for evangelical integrity, this book falls into the genre of 'appeals to evangelicals to be more evangelical'.  Against the backdrop of debates over whether the very term 'evangelical' has become too tarnished to be of use - especially given the political associations the term has picked up in the US - Reeves shows the theological priorities at the heart of historic evangelicalism and calls the church to return to its roots in the gospel.  His summary of the heart of evangelical identity, in terms of theological markers, is very helpful, rooted as it is in the doctrine of the Trinity.  The only disappointment in the book, for me, is that Reeves repeats the old Stott line about adhering to compromised denominations.  I understand his point that evangelical unity is not primarily institutional but spiritual and doctrinal, but I can't understand why institutional expression of that unity should be so quickly dismissed as a desirable goal, nor why it should be okay for evangelicals, given their beliefs, to be institutionally bound up with heretics.  But the reason that sticks out for me is that the rest of the book is so clear on gospel priorities.  I commend it to you, particularly if you've been troubled about the future of evangelicalism as a movememt.

Third, I've been reading Deeper by Dane Ortlund.  I'll be honest, I've not finished this one.  I've had time, and it's a short book, but it does demand slow reading, and so that's what I've been giving it.  The question of how we go deeper in the Christian life is perennially important, and from my perspective half-way through, this book is a good answer.  It is by pressing into Christ, continually repenting of sin and looking to him, that we grow as believers.  Our great need is not a technique, but the Lord Jesus himself.  This one would be good for anyone, even or perhaps especially if you don't particularly feel the need for it at the moment.

Take up and read!

On doubt, and unbelief

Prompted by a number of different people I know wrestling with doubt in their Christian faith, I've been thinking a little bit about the role that doubt and uncertainty play in our understanding of faith today.  I have heard a lot of folk speaking very positively about uncertainty.  I have myself at points been tempted to think that doubt is the mark of a mature faith, a faith that doesn't shy away from the tough questions.  On reflection, though, I think that's just wrong.  In most cases, I've come to think, doubt is a bad thing; in many cases, uncertainty is actually the sin of unbelief.

There are at least two forces in our culture which predispose us to think positively about doubt.  One is the culture of suspicion.  There is a long philosophical backstory to this, but the result is that we have been taught to view authority as being usually a mask for some sort of power play.  Questioning everything therefore becomes a virtue.  To accept authority is to enter into ia kind of slavery, to give up the right and necessity of autonomous thought.  No authority can be immune from this, not even 'thus says the Lord'.  In such a culture, doubt and uncertainty naturally come to be seen as healthy and virtuous.

The other, related, force is the value of personal authenticity.  In our culture, your highest calling and your greatest responsibility is to be yourself, defined somewhat vaguely as the person you feel yourself to be.  Because we value authenticity so highly, we would much rather have someone who is wrong but true to their convictions than someone who does the right thing for bad reasons.  In a culture like that, a story of doubt and uncertainty just plays better.  It sounds genuine.  It is easy to assume that those who don't express doubts are just concealing them, being inauthentic.

These two forces are not wholly bad.  Often authority is a cover for a power play, and 'thus says the Lord' can be just a device for exercising control.  Sometimes those who seem most certain in their faith are indeed hypocrites, who teach others by their example to bottle up their questions.

But I can't help noticing how keen the New Testament authors seem to be that we have certainty about what we believe, that we be confident in the one we've trusted, that we have a clear and growing knowledge of the truth.  There is no praise for doubt and uncertainty in Scripture!

So here's what I think.  The reasons for doubt and uncertainty are broadly the same as the reasons for sin: weakness, negligence, our own deliberate fault.  Weakness because sometimes we cannot understand, or because we are carrying wounds from an authoritarian church background, or because we are caught in the storms of life and thrown off balance.  Negligence because sometimes we don't do the work, because the answers are there in Scripture but we don't seek them out, because the certainty is to be found in prayer but we don't pray.  Our own deliberate fault because sometimes we nurture doubt and uncertainty to avoid the implications for our lives of the truth, or because we like the sense of superiority our sophisticated doubts give us.

I also think a lot of the sting of doubt and uncertainty would be removed if the church took seriously it's calling to be merciful to those who doubt - if questions were met with sensitive efforts to understand the backdrop to the question and to apply the truth gently.  This requires a context in which it is okay to express doubts and questions - just as church should be a context in which it is okay to confess sins!  And that in turn requires a solid confidence that God's revelation is true and his gospel is good.

Counting the Cost of Planting

The FIEC have put out an episode of their podcast entitled When Church Plants Don't Work, with Dan Steel.  Dan has done a lot of work on church planting, and the ups and downs thereof, and I think has some really useful insights as a result.  For the sake of fair disclosure, it's worth pointing out that I was the pastor of the church plant from Dan's church that didn't work out - so I also have some thoughts on the subject.

One of the most useful things in the chat on the podcast is the recognition that church plants 'fail' for a variety of reasons, and whilst there are many mistakes that we can learn from and try to do better in the future, there are also situations in which - it just didn't work.  That has to be okay as an outcome.  If it isn't, we will become highly risk averse, and ultimately we won't plant churches in the places that need them most.  It would help a great deal, as the boys on the podcast point out, if we were prepared to tell the stories of 'failure' as well as those of 'success' - and let me just take a little swipe at the cheery triumphalism of much evangelicalism that makes that impossible.

There is just one supplementary point I'd add to that, which is that recognising that 'failure' is a possible outcome needs much more serious counting of the cost for all involved in church planting.

I hope we know that there is a cost involved.  If a church is remotely functioning, then it is a family, and it is the community around which life is structured.  To leave a church, then, even to go and do something potentially exciting like planting is really costly.  Relationships don't need to be completely left behind, but realistically they will be attenuated when we're no longer worshipping together on a weekly basis.  Valued programmes will be left behind - perhaps youth groups or other things that the plant is not of a size to run.  It is, and should be, a wrench to leave a church.

But then if we're going to throw ourselves into planting, we need to be all in.  We need to build relationships in the plant on the assumption that we're going to be together for the rest of our lives.  We need to build rhythms of liturgy and discipleship that are intended to bed in over decades.  We need to build outward looking relationships with people in the local area which we hope will bear fruit, perhaps in many years.  What we can't do is keep our lines of retreat open.  If you allow awareness of the fact that the plant might not make it to cause you to keep one foot in the sending church, I think you probably make the 'failure' of the plant a self-fulfilling prophecy.  You have to be all in.

But that means that if it doesn't work out, it will be hugely painful.  It will be like the wrench of leaving the sending church, but worse, because instead of being the pain of being sent out into an exciting horizon, it will be the pain of dissolving a community you loved, a return tinged with disappointment and perhaps bitterness.  There will be wounds.  We need to count the cost of those wounds before sending people out - the cost of sending, but also the potential double cost of receiving back.

Who elected him?

A man was, briefly, arrested in Oxford yesterday for heckling during the proclamation of the King.  In response to the proclamation, he shouted a question: who elected him?  For this he was briefly detained and driven home.  I don't intend to comment on the rights and wrongs of this situation.  Not least, I am aware that the only account I've read is that of the republican in question, and it's quite likely there is another side to the story.  If you want to read a defence of his protest, from the point of view of freedom of speech absolutism, Steve has an article for you.  I don't entirely agree, but it might be a good place to start from.

I was thinking that I would instead write a little piece about how this protest in many ways captures the spirit of the age.  This is, after all, a deeply democratic age, in the sense that we want to believe that all power and authority starts with us, the demos, and is then passed on to whomever we choose.  That is why you get people saying 'not my king!' - they mean, I think, I didn't choose him, and I can't imagine any other grounds of legitimate authority.  This attitude does, of course, get us into trouble even with the democratic elements of our politics.  Some want to disown political leaders they disagree with (not my PM!) in the same way that others would disown the Monarch.  This is just the individualistic version of the democratic impulse - nobody can have power or authority over me unless I chose them.

There certainly is an extent to which this is the spirit of the age, but as I've thought about it I've been struck that this is really just the spirit of humanity.  The obvious verbal parallels in the story of Moses jump out at me - who made you a ruler and judge over us?  The deacon Stephen makes it very clear that this attitude was a rejection of the one whom God had chosen, and sees it as the archetypal reaction of Israel to God's authority.  Psalm 2 shows us that it's not just Israel, but all of humanity.  We will be in charge of our own destiny.  I will be my own ruler and judge.  Isn't this just the spirit of sinful rebellion?

I am not suggesting that there is a one to one relationship between political republicanism in the UK and spiritual rebellion in the human race!  There are all sorts of reasons (none of them good, in my view, but that's by the by) why one might be a republican.  After all, the answer which the proclamation gives to the protester's question - God, by whom kings and queens reign - is in the case of earthly leaders open to question.  But I do think there is something in the attitude that we ought to be wary of.

In the end, a King has been elected - by Almighty God.  The rule of King Jesus does not depend on our choice, or even our assent.  God laughs at our attempts to be 'spiritual republicans'.  Every knee will bow.