Looking at Christ

LORD God, our God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, our Father, as your children in the northern hemisphere enter this season of the academic year, please give us fresh grace to walk, stand and sit aright. May those of us who enjoy running and walking in your creation give thanks to you for that privilege but not be as concerned about the daily step count on our trackers as in taking practical steps this summer in kindness, in compassion, in forgiveness, in building others up, in pleasing the Lord - steps of progress in gracious, sacrificial, Christ-like loving (Ephesians 4-5).  May those of us who look forward to getting out of the city give thanks to you for the privilege of travel but not ultimately be as concerned about the physical location in which we stand (whether "beneath the boughs" or on a hot and sweaty tube train) as about our location "in Christ" - the address of every spiritual blessing, complete forgiveness, intimate sonship, total security (Ephesians ...

We live in a culture where stability, stick-ability and consistency are not really seen as virtues but disabilities. We told that it’s good to be flexible, agile, constantly shifting, morphing, evolving, jumping from one thing to another. Everyone offers us change – politicians, internet providers, management gurus. To stick with one thing, to be the same person yesterday, today and tomorrow is strange, boring, old-fashioned, impractical and probably deadly. Change becomes the new constant, flux and flex the new buzz words. That culture affects us personally and as churches. And there are some things about willingness to change (reformation?) that are hugely positive. We've talked about the need to be willing to change as a good farmer seeking growth . And how change is often spiritually good for us . But there are negative aspects to a culture that makes a virtue of constant instability. Is it good for customers and companies if employees change jobs every year? Is it good for chi...

What makes swearing / cussing / profanity - whatever you want to call it - wrong? This is something I was too slow to work through as a new Christian and it is something that I've had to think through more recently as I talk to my children. Why should those following Christ avoid using certain words? Is it just prudish? Is it just middle class? Is it just legalism based on a few proof texts? Here's a first-draft sketch of a theology of profanity... The image of God Duncan Forbes and others have highlighted voice as a key element of the image of God. As God speaks creation into being and evaluates and names and blesses, so he gives humanity voice through which to rule and relate.  In the frame of that big picture, what is the problem with swearing? It's a wrong use of the voice. Instead of using my voice to build others up and benefit them, I am using my voice to cut them down and curse them. Instead of using my voice to praise and thank my creator and express my dependence ...

The idea here is that there are layers to Christ's fullness and when the biblical authors present Christ to us they might only explicitly refer to one layer but as they do that the underlying layers are also implied. or to put it another way, the glory of the underlying layers shine through the layer that is presented to us. That might sound strange, abstract and not particularly helpful but let me try to explain.  The incarnation implies the pre-existent Word In the beginning was the Word. The Word took flesh. When John identifies "Jesus Christ has come in the flesh" as the key test of orthodoxy, Augustine asks (Homily 6 on 1 John) how can this be when so many heretics happily affirm the humanity of Jesus but deny his deity? Augustine then asks us to dig a bit deeper and consider: From whence did he come? "Was he not God?" Simon Gathercole demonstrated (in his 2006 book, The Pre-existent Son ) that Jesus' phrase in the synoptic gospels, "I have come...

  “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; 38 therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.” What do you think of when you hear the words ‘harvest’ and ‘harvesting’? What would Jesus’ first hearers have thought of when they heard him talk about labourers being sent out into the harvest? How would they have reacted to the news that the harvest is ‘plentiful’? What if those of us who are twenty-first century Westerners are missing a lot of the intended force of Jesus’ language because we are deaf to the connotations that harvest would have had in a non-mechanised agricultural community? I asked a number of Kenyan friends to share their experiences of harvest to help me to hear Matthew 9:37-38 more clearly and richly. Here are seven things they taught me: 1. Harvesting is joyful “Growing up as a young boy, I really liked the harvest period. Harvest meant an exciting experience… happiness in the family… fresh food… It was a joyf...

Piper has a great section in his Marks of a Spiritual Leader  where he holds together two vital biblical leadership virtues: 1. RESTLESS Spiritual leaders have a holy discontentment with the status quo. Non-leaders have inertia that causes them to settle in and makes them very hard to move off of dead center. Leaders have a hankering to change, to move, to reach out, to grow, and to take a group or an institution to new dimensions of ministry. They have the spirit of Paul, who said in Philippians 3:13, “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Leaders are always very goal-oriented people. God’s history of redemption is not finished. The church is shot through with imperfections, lost sheep are still not in the fold, needs of every sort in the world are unmet, sin infects the saints. It is un...