What would Jesus say about St Paul’s?

We’ve all been following the St Paul’s/Occupy London situation. I’ve been asked what I think about it a couple of times. Here’s a much better answer than the one I gave, from a member of another church in the square mile, St Helen’s Bishopsgate. This was at a lunchtime meeting for City workers.

Birthday prayer

It was my birthday a few years ago today, and I thought I’d post this section from a sermon preached by Charles Spurgeon a few more years ago today (2nd November 1884):

The best preaching is, “We preach Christ crucified.”

The best living is, “We are crucified with Christ.”

The best man is a crucified man.

The more we live beholding our Lord’s unutterable griefs, and understanding how he has fully put away our sin, the more holiness shall we produce.

The more we dwell where the cries of Calvary can be heard, where we can view heaven, and earth, and hell, all moved by his wondrous passion—the more noble will our lives become.

Nothing puts life into men like a dying Savior.

Get close to Christ, and carry the remembrance of him about you from day to day, and you will do right royal deeds.

Come, let us slay sin, for Christ was slain.

Come, let us bury all our pride, for Christ was buried.

Come, let us rise to newness of life, for Christ has risen.

Let us be united with our crucified Lord in his one great object—let us live and die with him, and then every action of our lives will be very beautiful.

If you want to pray something for me this year, pray this.

A message for the ages – Mark Ashton preaching Isaiah 1

I’ve spent the past couple of days reading through Isaiah chapter 1 as part of my second year of training on the Associate Scheme at St Helen’s.

It’s a brilliant chapter, made more brilliant for me by the memory I have of Mark Ashton, my vicar at university, preaching it five years ago. So I managed to dig out the recording of the sermon from the St Andrew the Great archives, and listened to it again this evening.

It really is a gem of a sermon, and I encourage everyone to listen to it. If you want to hear a modern British preacher at the top of his game, this is a great place to start. And more than that, as Mark says, this is a message for “all men, and all women, through all ages.”

I don’t know how many times over the past five years I’ve remembered Mark’s voice reading those well-known words of God – “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD”. But when I think about where I was as a Christian at that time, I’m sure that under God these 30 minutes of evangelistic, heart-felt, majestic proclamation of God’s Word have been instrumental in me still being a Christian today.

So I praise God for this message, and encourage you, with all my heart, to listen to it.

A song for the darker paths – Psalm 124

I’m writing a talk this week on Psalm 124 – one of the Songs of Ascent. I thought I’d write this in an attempt to express my thoughts on the psalm concisely.

Here’s the Psalm (NIV)

1 If the LORD had not been on our side—
let Israel say-

2 if the LORD had not been on our side
when men attacked us,

3 when their anger flared against us,
they would have swallowed us alive;

4 the flood would have engulfed us,
the torrent would have swept over us,

5 the raging waters
would have swept us away.

6 Praise be to the LORD,
who has not let us be torn by their teeth.

7 We have escaped like a bird
out of the fowler’s snare;
the snare has been broken,
and we have escaped.

8 Our help is in the name of the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.

The key verse – the chorus if you like – of this psalm is the last one. ‘Our help is in the name of the LORD, the maker of heaven and earth.’ The aim of this song is to help us as God’s people to sing this tune on our dangerous journey towards the new Jerusalem.

We’ve already had this line in another song of Ascent, number 121. The song we sing there is a song about God’s character. We’re encouraged that ‘our help is in the name of the LORD’ as we sing about our God’s character, the God who ‘neither slumbers, nor sleeps.’

Here we’re singing the same chorus, but we get there a different way. It’s like a hip hop song that’s sampled a pop song. We get to the feel good chorus by reminding ourselves of the difficult times. We share our memories of the times God has delivered us, and so we end up singing together ‘our help is in the name of the LORD.’

So imagine you’re on your way up on your yearly journey to Jerusalem, to go and celebrate the Feast at the temple of the LORD. But it’s a dangerous journey. Robbers lie waiting in the woods to ambush defenceless pilgrims.

As you walk through the dark forest, and find yourself peering desperately into the black spaces between the trees, you strike up this song to encourage your little group. The song looks back to a time when the danger was even greater.

In fact, the odds were overwhelming. Disaster was a split-second away.

“if the LORD had not been on our side
when men attacked us,
when their anger flared against us,
they would have swallowed us alive;”

The poet uses a particular technique to remind us how bad the danger was. He uses a group of three lines, all saying the same thing, but increasing in intensity.

When men attacked us
When their anger flared against us
They would have swallowed us alive

In the next group of 3 lines, the enemy horde that threatens to swallow up God’s people is compared to a flood. Again, note the increase in intensity:

the flood would have engulfed us,
the torrent would have swept over us,
the raging waters would have swept us away.

We go from flood to torrent to raging waters. They threaten to engulf, to sweep over, to sweep away.

The next line comes like an oasis of calm:

“Praise be to the LORD, who has not let us be torn by their teeth”

The waters are stilled, the lions’ mouths are shut. The LORD has intervened.

V7 gives us a final image, impressing the psalm’s wonder at our miraculous escape on our minds.

There’s nothing as free as a bird. And there’s nothing as pitiful or vulnerable than a trapped bird. The bird flies blindly into the netting and is trapped. As it wriggles and flaps it only tangles itself up even more. All it can do is wait for the fowler to snap off its life. And Israel was like that. Caught in a net. No human hope.

But incredibly, Israel escapes! Did you notice how the poet uses a mirroring technique to emphasise the feeling of unexpected freedom?

We have escaped like a bird
out of the fowler’s snare;
the snare has been broken,
and we have escaped.

And the deliverance is all God’s. His people were completely trapped, but God intervened and his people escaped.

Which leads us back to our chorus, and a tune we can hum even in the darkest forests and deepest valleys:

Our help is in the name of the LORD
Our help is in the name of the LORD
Our help is in the name of the LORD
The maker of heaven and earth

Is systematic expository preaching all it’s cracked up to be?

In my circles it’s a cliche to say that you’re committed to ‘systematic, expository preaching’ – preaching through whole books or sections of books passage by passage, or perhaps verse by verse.

Here are two articles from respected conservative evangelical Christian writers (both called Iain) who are questioning that practice.

Expository Preaching (pdf) – Iain H Murray

This is not an argument that the whole concept of consecutive preaching through a passage is wrong, simply that it must not be allowed to have an exclusive place in pulpit ministry. Let each preacher find what he is best able to do, and let it be ever remembered that, whatever the method of presenting the truth, it is men filled with faith and the Holy Spirit who are needed most at this hour. More than correct teaching is needed: we need messages that will move congregations and even sway communities.

Some thoughts on pulpit method – Iain D Campbell

I am not trying to advocate a method, simply to raise questions about what appears to me to be the prevailing methodology in contemporary evangelical ministry. I am also wanting to ask whether it is possible that the power which attended Spurgeon’s preaching might just be related to his methodology? Might there be some added benefit for our congregations if they came to church next Sunday wondering in what part of the fields of their Redeemer they might be gleaning?

In my estimation, this is not a question about method, but about style. Both writers are advocating a lively ‘preached’ style, as opposed to what they see as the more ‘lecture’ style of some systematic expository preachers.

What do you think?

One true earthly church, or a heavenly assembly?

I’ve found this question keeps coming up. Essentially your thinking about how much should we work for visible unity between local churches depends on your answer to this question.

Some links I’ve found helpful:

The One, True Church – John Frame in ‘Evangelical Reunion’

We must first be assured that Jesus Christ established on earth one church, not many denominations. Further, the unity of the church is not merely “spiritual,” but also organizational.

The Church and Denominations – David Broughton Knox

The Epistle to the Hebrews makes clear that the assembly, or church, which Christ is building now is primarily a supernal heavenly assembly.

The Locus of the Church: Heaven or Earth? – David Peterson

Most seriously, I believe, Giles has played down or denied the heavenly locus of the church as it emerges from certain key passages in the New Testament. This is a failure to highlight the way the ascended and enthroned Christ is at the centre of the church, gathering people to himself on the basis of his redemptive work to form a community whose citizenship is in heaven. It is a failure to see how the inaugurated eschatology of the New Testament should be applied to the church concept to deliver us from the earth-bound and organizational focus of much contemporary ecclesiology.

Assembled in Heaven? – Andrew Errington

In the twentieth century, the notion that the basic reality of the church is “assembly” was articulated by Sydney Anglican evangelicals Donald Robinson and D. Broughton Knox in response to the world ecumenical movement. They, and others who have since followed, argued that church fundamentally involves actual gathering, such that the church finally exists in two basic ways in the present—as the one heavenly gathering around the ascended Lord Jesus, which is in “continuous assembly”, and in local assemblies of believers, which “come and go” (Robinson 1965, 14). The notion of the present heavenly gathering is, however, highly problematic, and I would like here to offer a critique.

Any others?

On controversy

Here are 3 posts on 3 controversial issues. Read with an open heart and a critical mind:

on having a dual-practice credobaptist church

on being accused of being ‘new perspective’ in Sydney

on the defining features of New Calvinism

1 Peter on the back of an envelope

I’ve been reading through 1 Peter with a friend for the last couple of months. It’s a been a fun, suprising, and challenging read so far. We finished chapter 3 just before Easter, so when we met up last week, we took a session to take a step back and recap the whole book.

I thought I’d share the “back of the envelope” summary I came up with during our recap:

Obviously it’s all fairly tentative so far, so comments welcome!

The Bruised Reed, chapter 1

Tim Challies is starting another round of his book club ‘Reading Classics Together‘. The book he’s chosen next is the Bruised Reed, by Richard Sibbes. I’ve never joined in before, but I’m on a bit of a Puritan drive at the moment, and the chapters seem pretty short, so I thought I’d give this one a crack.

The book starts off by discussing Christ’s ministry to the ‘bruised reeds’ of Isaiah 42:

Behold my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my Spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a faintly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.

According to Sibbes, a bruised reed is “a man that for the most part is in some misery, as those were that came to Christ for help, and by misery he is brought to see sin as the cause of it, for, whatever pretences sin makes, they come to an end when we are bruised and broken.”

Sibbes emphasises that this bruising is a grace that causes us to know ourselves truely, and to set “a high price on Christ”.

What I particularly liked about this chapter was the way he applies the doctrine that bruising is a gracious act of God:

Hence we learn that we must not pass too harsh judgment upon ourselves or others when God exercises us with bruising upon bruising. There must be a conformity to our head, Christ, who `was bruised for us’ (Isa. 53:5) that we may know how much we are bound unto him.

I’d be interested to know what others think of this quote. If I’ve understood him correctly, Sibbes is saying that we shouldn’t judge our own or others’ brokenness through sin, because in a way this identifies us with Christ’s suffering for sin. I don’t want to push it too far but I think this will definately change the way I think about someone who’s going through a hard time struggling with something. This is God bruising them, so that they be bound more closely to the one who was ‘pierced for our transgressions.’

If you can’t get hold of a paper copy, you can read the Bruised Reed online. Let me know what you think!

Christian suffering in India

Watch this:

I used this passage to do what he said at the end:

Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust.

For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly.

For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.

For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.

He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth.
When he was reviled, he did not revile in return;
when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.
By his wounds you have been healed.
For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.

(1 Peter 2)