Seek first the Kingdom and the things you deem so important will follow

John D Rockerfeller made the point that if all you seek in life is wealth (or power or success), you will never achieve it.

Most who achieve great things in life, do not pursue success. Their goals are narrow and they serve the goal not the other way around. They put their backs into it over a long period, until their inputs derive a greater outcome.

Paul said, “I sowed, another watered but God added the increase” (1 Corinthians 6). He was an “inputs” man, who concerned himself with doing the right things and doing things right, whilst entrusting God to translate that into something significant.

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The church's one and only true foundation, is Jesus Christ her Lord

When Jesus met the woman at the well, He introduced some remarkable truths. Rather typically, our regal king used few words to convey volumes of meaning across many dimensions: He specifically addressed the needs of the woman, but that overflowed to the needs of her community. Beyond that He spoke to Jews and Samarians and ultimately also addressed the church that would follow in His footsteps.

Sometimes I ponder how gainsayers fuel their doubts, for even if I had nothing else I would still be compelled to believe Him: His words are just so profound. Through great economy of language, He managed to reach the poor, the rich, the simple and wise, the Jew and the Gentile.

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Less is more, more or less, until less becomes less and more becomes more

A friend appropriately encouraged me by SMS to keep things simple and to take more of God's truth at face value. He closed by saying, "Less is more".

Now, whilst in essence I agree with his challenge and indeed as a family we have significantly simplified our lives of late, I still have some dilemmas, most notably that it is just too easy for outsiders to oversimplify the realities of others.

How do I tell my wife and children that we should find ways to simplify our prevailing challenges, without provoking a cynical response? How do I tell them it will all be okay, whilst in reality it is anything but? How does my friend reconcile mounting debts against a non-existent income? Or how does my missionary friend, who lives in a completely off-the-beaten track village in Zambia, rationalise his trust in God whilst his resources are being consumed by the disease that is threatening the life of his child? I could go on, suffice to say that for those in crisis, life is rarely simple.

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The unchanging ways of the Great I am, give us an objective faith and great hope

Our fathers have a great penchant for saying, “Later”. The cat’s in the cradle song put it well, saying, “We’ll get together then and we’ll have a good time then”. For so many of us, a father’s word is somewhat flexible, offering well-meaning promises with no guarantee of fulfillment. This is not a go at Dads – I am one and I know how imperfect I am. Its more about contrasting the consistency of God.

Hebrews 12:4 confirms that our fathers discipline us from time to time according to their whim or at their own pleasure, but God chastens us for our good so we can share in His glory. What that means is that God is not capricious, but I will go further in suggesting that God does not even dispense favors. He is not a heavenly butler or vending machine, He is God.

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Jesus is the only name given amongst men whereby we might be saved

Just two days ago I posted a blog on Newton's involvement in Arianism and how that signalled one of the great threats to our faith. I made the point that it is not the glaringly obvious errors that we must worry about, especially in this age of compromise, it is more the insiduous, subtle shifts in doctrine that are sadly quite widespread in modern Christendom. The more we try to contemporise the church, the more we expose ourselves to the risk of drifting off course and becoming assimilated into the world culture.

Well, today I found that on this day in 1553, John Servetus was arrested as a heretic and subsequently burnt at the stake. As a scientist and philosopher his public stature was significant, but we must add to that the fact that he actively participated in the reformation. He was no obvious heretic and even his Arianist views were ever so subtly removed from the central dogmas of the Christian faith. He accepted that the Logos, as described in Genesis 1 and John 1, was the eternal word of God and the force of creation. However, that Word only became Jesus when the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. Accordingly, He regarded Jesus as a created being, less than God. In no other respect did He discredit Jesus. 

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Praying effectively: What role does Jesus play in our daily trials and struggles

According to Romans 8, "The Spirit makes intersession for us according to the will of God". I don't wish to be contentious, but Romans 8:26-27 is not about the Holy Spirit (in spite of any Greek subtexts in the passage).

The context is about Jesus and His role in sustaining our walk of faith. Thus Paul opens the chapter saying, "there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ", whilst adding later, "if anyone has not the spirit of Christ, He is none of His." It is Christ's indwelling life that sustains us in our journeys of faith, thus bringing about the transformation of our minds that ultimately reconciles us to the Father's will.

Therefore the interceding Spirit is Christ and the text is not an argument for speaking or praying in tongues. According to a number of New Testament writers (1 Timothy 2:5), there is only one mediator between God and man, and that is Christ. He alone is the great High Priest so adequately described by the writer to the Hebrews. To that end, Hebrews 2 argues that He had to be made like Hs brothers (verse 17) so that He might become a merciful and faithful High priest. No one else was more qualified to intercede between us and the Father, than the Lord Jesus Christ.

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There is empirical evidence that prayer heals, as reported by AFP

The following was so intriguing I replicated in full to be true to the originator, AFP:

Washington - Prayer heals when it's close-up and personal, and there's a study to prove it.

It's not just any kind of prayer, but "proximal intercessory prayer", or PIP - when one or more people pray for someone in that person's presence and often with physical contact - that was found by a team of doctors, scientists and religious experts to have remarkable results in healing some patients.

A team of medical doctors and scientists led by Indiana University professor of religion Candy Gunther Brown found in the study, conducted in rural Mozambique, that prayer brought "highly significant" improvements to hearing-impaired participants and significant changes to the visually impaired.

Fourteen hard-of-hearing and 11 visually impaired study participants were recruited at meetings of Pentecostal Christian groups in Mozambican villages and towns.

They were tested with a handheld audiometer or vision charts, depending on their impairment, before and after they took part in a prayer session.

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Its time to let go and move on, time to walk on the waters and live again

No matter what part we play in initiating our own crises, more often than not there is a degree of injustice in it all. If you think back to David's struggle with Saul, you might argue that David got ahead of himself and thus provoked the king to jealousy, but the ongoing persecution of David was still unwarranted and unjust. Yet David submitted to God and did little to defend his own cause until Saul fell on his own sword. The resulting closure enabled David to move on and live again.

Similarly Moses, who had done astonishing things, was challenged by Korah and his sons. Instead of defending himself, Moses turned to God, surrendered his rights and submitted the issue to divine counsel. When the disputing parties met again, God made His own position very clear by causing the earth to open up and swallow Korah and his family. God, not Moses, saw that justice was done.

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In the living years: settling accounts whilst we can so we leave with peace

In the beautiful movie, "The blind side", Lee Ann Touhy bemoans the fact that Michael, her adopted, black giant of a son, so struggles to remember his school work. Her husband then interrupts to say what will stay with me forever: "Michael's greatest gft is forgetting". After years of being rejected, forced to forage for food, facing cold and lonely nights or walking in the rain, Michael learnt to forget, let go and move on.

Today my own father told me of the reasons he wants to die and go. I told him stuff I can't fully share here, except to say that there are many outstanding accounts in his life. I urged him to call in each of his children, to forgve them and secure their forgiveness - as an act of release.

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The book of Eli - do we own the Word of God or is it written on our hearts?

Denzel Washingon's portrayal of Eli in the Book of Eli, is a dark, apocalyptic movie. I can't say I enjoyed it much, because the violence was quite gratuitous.

What a pity to give such a great idea the Hollywood treatment, which generally translates into: if its a disaster make it in NYC (by now it should be the worst place on earth to live), if its got any romance in it, it must reduce to a sex scene (that must be a directorial interpretation of love. They even dare to call it lovemaking, which it isn't, its just plain sex) and if its a family movie where four-letter words are inappropriate then revert to some Oh my God's or maybe some blasphemy.

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Poem: Starting again - to the end of every season, comes a new beginning

To every brokenness

of our personal hells,

each empty soul ends,

what started so well.

The naked cry of souls,

in search of covering,

to make the broken whole -

is a long road, unending.

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Seasons come and go - does God orbit our lives or do we orbit His?

The comings and going of seasons are never because the sun moves, but because we move around a fixed sun. So much for the science lesson – I am sure you knew it was always that way, even if the dark ages had the sun dancing around our insignificant orb.

The principle is as true of our relationship with God. We move into and out of seasons, but God never moves. He is the independent variable of this universe. The picture of a divine constant is also seen in heaven, where the glory of God is its eternal light.

The point here is potentially as radical as the moment when the inquisition finally buckled under the compelling evidence of Galileo’s heliocentric universe model.

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Flying the meatball to find the sweet spot of God

One of the most demanding skills around involves landing a high powered jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier. With only 500 feet of landing space on a surface that often heaves on the sea, it is a very dangerous activity.

There are all kinds of support systems, including approach guidance systems, flight deck communications and a triple arrestor system that is used to snag the plane’s arrestor hook and bring it to a safe, albeit quick stop.

One of the systems used is the long range line-up system or Lens, which uses a number of green, orange and red Fresnel lights supported by a gyroscopically stabilised platform. If a jet has the right angle of approach, the pilot will see what is called, “The meatball” – the amber lights in line with a row of green lights. If coming in too high, the green lights will be above the orange lights. Too low and the pilot will see red light.

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Where do we stand?

One of the greatest causes for human crisis results from misrepresentations of God. The dark ages marked a significant eon of human crisis driven by ignorance about God and His heart for humanity. Fear of the unknown reduced all unknowns to the devil’s work which enslaved humanity to ignorance, suspicion, superstition, fear and all the more obvious consequences of that age: dungeons, death and disease.

Aside from many other obvious social deviations, we each have our own personal misconceptions of God. It all reminds me of a little Church Mouse cartoon, which shows a mouse saying “Lord, just look at what is now available in the Internet”, to which a voice in heaven replies, “I’d rather not”.

Okay, enough of the more patently negative aspects of human attitudes to God. To me it is more tragic that believers are getting into trouble because of their misconceptions.

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Work in progress

Wendell Phillips said, “Every step of progress the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake”. Of course there is a double meaning, for our world as we know it was as much formed on the scaffold of the stone-mason as on the scaffolds where truth died to spare the lies of thrones. Our own lives are also under the scaffold, an incomplete work whose time must surely come.

Many years ago I lay on the floor of the Sistine chapel to admire Michelangelo’s profound adornment of the ceiling. At the time the last supper was under renovation, masked behind scaffolding and workers sheets. For all the wonder of that equally famous painting, I was denied something of its true greatness.

At the time many other great buildings across Europe were undergoing renovations, so I found similar scenes of scaffolding and workers tools in a number of cities. Right now my own part of the world is facing similar refurbishment, so many of our buildings and other public places are encased in their own frameworks of scaffolding.

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Naked before God

I knew a man who had the privilege of meeting Richard Branson. He had a great idea and Branson was interested. A helicopter took him to Branson’s island, where he disembarked with a studied look, his laptop on his arm and determination in his heart.

He was led to a room where Branson sat in a large Turkish bath, sans any clothes. My friend was taken aback, but Branson was unmoved. Clearly the laptop would never do in the bath and yet it was clear that no meeting would happen unless they both shared the bath, to “break bread” as it were. So my friend took the plunge, stripped off and joined Branson in the bath. Then they talked man to man about his idea.

Branson cared little about the technical brilliance of his presentation, but did want to see if they could be real and open. I suppose he felt that if my friend could not be vulnerable it was not worth doing business with him.

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