Category Archives: Christian Life

Seeking God’s presence and walking in His ways as a Spirit-filled believer.

Knowing God, Pursuing Love

The kaleidoscope of liberty

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“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” (2 Cor 3:17)
“You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)

We are not just set free from our personal limitations or bondages: we are set free from the limitations of self and released into the understanding that we are one with God in Christ. Truth isn’t what you know; it is not wrapped up in knowledge. Truth will never be found in opinions, however well they are proven and however eloquently they are justified. Truth is a person who is the Way the Truth and the Life. Knowing the truth is knowing Jesus, and understanding that the greatest height and deepest layers of human knowledge are never more than one piece of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope, and cannot even begin to reach the dimension of truth that is only found in Jesus. If our God is the Truth, then truth is a heavenly commodity; we cannot find it through the evidence of science or even the insights of theology, because it exists beyond all things that pass away. Jesus, who is the Truth, tells us that Truth can only be revealed by the Holy Spirit whom we receive from God and whom the world cannot know:

“And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever—”the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.”

 (John 14:16-17) Knowledge itself will pass away, as well as this world, and in that day all our truth will turn to ashes. But we can speak truth and we can know truth when we speak love and know love, for this is where the truth resides. When we speak the truth in love “we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.” (Eph 4:15) It is when we love one another that we walk in the truth.

I feel that the Lord is saying this to the Church:

“You are my kaleidoscope. Each one of you is like one of those little pieces of coloured glass. I made you all different, to be different shapes and colours, so that my light can reflect off you in different ways. Just as the mirrors inside a kaleidoscope reflect images off each other to create the appearance of an infinite pattern, so it is that my light reflected off you is creating a pattern in the infinite dimensions of the spirit. As I move the kaleidoscope, so you are arranged differently and the pattern changes. Do not despise or judge those whose shape or colour is different from yours, for I created you that way in order to make my pattern with you. It is my pattern, not yours, and it is more wonderful and beautiful than you could ever imagine. When you love one another and are one with each other, my pattern emerges. When you stand alone in your opinion or ambition, or to fulfil the desires of your flesh or of your minds, you are not part of what I am doing and you create nothing. It is I who sees the pattern, not you; but when I choose to reveal it through you and in you the world will see and they will see me in it.

I am moving the kaleidoscope: some of you will find yourselves with new people in new situations, and they will not be like you. Love them and accept them, and always look to me knowing that I am creating a pattern that you cannot see. But a time is coming soon when it will indeed be visible and many more will come to know me because they will see what I am doing and will want to join themselves to the pattern that I am creating.”

Discipleship and witness, Prophesy and the prophetic

Water what’s fruitful; burn what’s dead.

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“I am the vine and you are the branches. He who abides in me and I him bears much fruit, for without me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he has cast out as a Branch and is withered, and they gather them and throw them into the fire. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, you shall ask what you desire and it shall be done for you. By this, my father is glorified, that you very much fruit; so you will be my disciples.” (John 15:5 – 8).

I was in the garden a few weeks ago, burning rubbish in our garden incinerator in an enclosed area that used to be a chicken run. I had a hose pipe to hand in case any sparks jumped from the fire, and was directing it onto the roots of an apple tree on the other side of the enclosed area so that the water was doing something useful. I felt the Lord spoke to me quite clearly as I stepped back, away from the smoke for a moment. He said, “Water what is fruitful, burn what is dead.“ I took the above picture as a reminder to myself.

This is a time of transition. We have heard many times, and we know, that God is doing a new thing. So why do we persist in carrying on with our old ways? I wrote about making disciples in my last post. Jesus says that discipleship is this: abide in Him and let his words abide in us. What does this mean? I think it’s quite simple: Walk with him and do what he says. Forty years ago, before cars were computers on wheels, I rebuilt a car engine (a morris minor, if you remember them) from a DIY manual. You read the information and did what it said. It was tried and tested, and – unless you misread the instructions – it worked. For too long, we’ve been doing it ourselves in the church: repeating strategies that worked in a previous era in the hope that they will work for us today. But it’s time we threw away and burnt our DIY manuals and let Him build His church, because what He is doing today is not the same as it was 40 years ago.

I believe the Lord says:
 “You cry out to me to pour out my spirit and bring my anointing to what you do. But I will not pour my water on that which is cut off from me. I will not water your DIY efforts. Where is there life and growth in your church? Where is there life and growth in your family, in your marriage? Cry out to me for those areas, and I will water them. I will even water one little seedling, I will water a tree that only bears a single fruit. If it is growing, I will water it. Where there is love, I will water it. But I will not water a pile of dead branches, however big and impressive it is, however hard you’ve worked to assemble the pile, and however long it’s been there.

So burn what is dead, abide in me, listen for my word and do what I say. And I will watch over my word to perform it, and I will water what grows when my word springs forth through your obedience.”

Discipleship and witness, Walking in the Spirit

Being disciples; making disciples.

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We all know that Jesus calls us to “go and make disciples of all nations.“ Some of us obey the call geographically and go to other nations to make disciples; some of us find “the nations” in our own neighbourhood or workplace; some of us ignore the call altogether and leave it to the evangelist. But even if we don’t live in a mixed race neighbourhood and everybody at work was born in the same country as we were, our home country is still a nation, and we still have to “go” to it, and the purpose of “going” is to make disciples. So assuming we have “gone” with a willingness to share the gospel, how do we go about the business of discipleship?

“Follow me as I follow Christ,“ said Paul to the Corinthians. (1 Corinthians 11:1)  We can’t really expect to make committed disciples if our own discipleship is flabby and inconsistent. I don’t think it’s enough just to lead people through discipleship courses: the Holy Spirit has to be at work in and through the people leading the courses if the spirits of new believers are going to be impacted and their minds renewed. If we want new believers to grow to maturity and find their place in the Kingdom of God, we need to launch their walk with the power that they will eventually need to carry on without us and be discipling others themselves. The alternative is a church that is bloated with members but lacking in love and power – what Smith Wigglesworth called “leafy trees” that bear no fruit.

“Freely you have received, freely give,” said the Lord when he sent out the twelve. (Matthew 10:8) when we “go” to make disciples, we can only give what we have received ourselves.

In all your ways acknowledge Him
I found a key verse for discipleship in an unexpected place: proverbs 3:5. We all know it: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not upon your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths” The first part of this verse tells us clearly where to place our trust, and it tends to be the one that is quoted the most often. But it’s the second part that caught my attention. The word translated – rather weakly, I feel – as “acknowledge,“ is yada. In Hebrew this is the word used for “knowing” in life-giving intimacy, as when Adam “knew” Eve. What the second part of Proverbs 3:5 says to me is that God will “direct our paths” when we take every step in intimate relationship with him. Following this, the word yasar, translated here as “direct“ our paths is the same word used in Isaiah 40:3 for “make straight” a highway in the desert.

The voice of one crying in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the LORD;
Make straight in the desert 
A highway for our God.”

When God is with us – not just notionally, but experientially – at every step, he won’t just be “directing” our paths in the sense of telling us where to go, but he will be ‘making them straight’ before us, clearing the ground and removing obstacles so that we can move forward with Him even though it may feel as if we are lost in the desert.

Zachariah 8:23 says this:

 “Thus says the Lord of hosts: In those days ten men from every language of the nations shall grasp the sleeve of a Jewish man, saying “let us go with you, for we have heard that the Lord is with you.”

It is when the men (and the women) of the nations know that the Lord is with us that they will want to “go with us.” Surely this is a picture of how we are to make disciples. As we walk closely with the Holy Spirit and He directs our paths, so we can direct the paths of others; not by weekly meetings following a discipleship course, but by walking alongside new believers who have joined themselves to us because they can see God at work in our lives. But there’s a health warning here, too, especially for people (like myself) who cherish their own space: when revival comes and we have ten people grasping our sleeves, we won’t have a lot of time for ourselves. Are we ready? Am I?

Christian Life, Walking in the Spirit

Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength

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Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The everlasting God, the LORD,
The Creator of the ends of the earth,
Neither faints nor is weary.
His understanding is unsearchable.

He gives power to the weak,
And to those who have no might He increases strength.

Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
And the young men shall utterly fall,

But those who wait on the LORD
Shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint.

(Isaiah 40: 28-31)

I have always seen “waiting on the Lord” in the context of extended time frames: waiting for the Holy Spirit to show up in a worship service; waiting for an answer to prayer; waiting days or weeks for a word from God before making a decision. In addition, I have never thought deeply about running and not growing weary, or walking and not growing faint, although in my advancing years I certainly look longingly at those verses and hope they will apply to my physical state. Mounting on wings like eagles has been a  metaphor for growth, increase, victory, in fact any undefined superior state that can be attained under God’s blessing: the verse has never had a very practical application for me, just a rather undefined sense of promise that I can’t say I have often known to materialise outside of some worship services where “rising up” to a higher level of worship in the Spirit has been the goal. I have never applied the scripture to short term, immediate contexts.

Until today. When I was a child, my mother used to say to me “Bobby, you’re always rushing.“ (A word to the wise: if you know me, please do not call me Bobby!) It’s a character trait I’ve battled with (or maybe so much not battled as be driven by…) all my life. I’m a “fast adopter“ when it comes to decision-making; I tend to try to do things quickly so I can finish them rather than aim for thoroughness ; I seem to miss significant details on the few occasions when I’m trying to think things through, and – probably most importantly – I tend to say the first thing that comes into my head in conversation without really checking if it’s coming from a positive or a negative place. This is at age 74, after more than 40 years of being a Christian, when I really should know better. Not much about me seems to have slowed down except my body.

But this morning I saw these verses differently. It was in an all too familiar context, where I had gone into something without giving it sufficient forethought, when I realised that “waiting on the Lord“ can also mean waiting for as short a time as a few seconds for my flesh to die and “the wisdom from above” to rule my thinking before responding to words or circumstances. And then I saw the rest of the scripture. Mounting on Eagles wings takes me into the heavenly places where my new man is seated in Christ, where I can draw on all I have been given in the Spirit. When I do this, I renew my strength in the Lord. I can “walk worthy of my calling” (Eph 4:1) and “not grow weary of doing good.“ (Galatians 6:9). I can “run with perseverance to race marked out for us,“ not growing faint, but “fixing my eyes on Jesus the author and finisher of my faith.“ (Hebrews 12:1–2)

When we “mount up with wings like eagles” we take our place in the Spirit, in the Lord who “neither faints nor is weary.” We don’t grow faint or weary because He doesn’t, and we are in Him. Out of His unsearchable understanding comes the wisdom we need, “the wisdom from above,” which is “ first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. (James 3:17). In our weakness we are strong. (2 Cor 12:10)

Verse 30 says this:
“Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
And the young men shall utterly fall…”

I have always seen this verse as a dramatic contrast with the favourable consequences of waiting on the lord in the rather woolly sense that I have always understood it, but now I understand it more as a contrast between walking ( or running) after the flesh, which always leads to failure, and walking in the Spirit. “Waiting on the Lord” becomes taking the time to step  into the Spirit  – or as Graham Cooke calls it, to “step back into the Lord” – to receive all that there is for our situation from where we are seated in Christ in heavenly places. Yes, we need to wait for Him in our meetings if we want to see the power of God move and His Presence fall. Yes, we need to wait in faith for Him to answer our prayers. But, and just as importantly, we need to wait for Him in the dynamic of our daily walk with God if we want to walk after the Spirit and not after the flesh.

In the light of this, the urgency of psalm 27:14 takes on a new meaning:

“Wait on the LORD;
Be of good courage,
And He shall strengthen your heart;
Wait, I say, on the LORD!”

Let’s do it. It appears to be a recommended route to victory in Christ.

Knowing God, The word of God, Walking in the Spirit

Understanding the Sabbath: Peace in Christ

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“He Himself is our peace.” (Eph 2:14)

“For this reason the Jews persecuted Jesus, and sought to kill Him, because He had done these things on the Sabbath.” (John 5:16)

There is a lot more to the Sabbath law than observance of the fourth commandment, which instructed the Jews to “Remember the Sabbath Day, and keep it holy.” Just as Jesus’s “work” on the Sabbath was emblematic to the Jews of His disrespect for the whole of the Old Covenant law, the sabbath itself looks forward to the New Covenant in His blood that sets us free from condemnation under the Law and into the peace of His Sabbath rest.

The Bible tells us: “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” (Genesis 2:2-3) The new testament adds another layer to the Creation account: the specific involvement of Jesus in the work of creation.

“For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.” (Col 1:16) “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.” (John 1:3) God rested from his work on the Sabbath, or the seventh day, so the Sabbath was instituted. But it wasn’t only the Father who rested: the Son rested too.

A way of life, not just an observance
God rested when the work of creation was finished. And He rested again when the work of the new creation was finished on the cross. When God blessed the sabbath day and sanctified it under the old covenant, He was looking forward to the time when, in Jesus, His rest would be a way of life, not just an observance. But in the era of the Old Covenant also, God’s rest extended beyond the seventh day. The writer to the Hebrews says:  “To whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who did not obey?” (Heb 3:18) For the rebellious Hebrews, who “did not enter because of unbelief,” (Heb. 3:19) entering God’s rest equated to entering the Promised Land, where they would find rest from the toil of slavery.

Just as Canaan represented God’s rest for the Israelites, we enter our rest in Christ when we believe in His promises to us, or as Hebrews 3:14 puts it, “if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end.” The Greek word used for God’s rest is “katapausis,” which means “a calming of the winds.” Katapausis Is the spiritual atmosphere of Heaven. Jesus tells us “My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you” (John 14:7), and when we walk in His peace we walk in the atmosphere of Heaven and find “rest for our souls.” (Matt. 11:29). All the winds are calm, because – as Jesus physically demonstrated – it is He who calms the storm.  As every Christian knows, He famously said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27). God gave us the Sabbath to enshrine in His Law that we need to enter His rest, not that we need to stop working every seven days.

Finished – but still working
Two notions that seem to be at odds with each other are that “God finished His work” on the seventh day, and the words of Jesus to the Pharisees when they confronted Him over healing the man at the pool: “My Father has been working until now, and I have been working.” (John 4:17) What is the difference between the work that the Father and the Son finished on the seventh day, and the work that they were – and still are – continuing to do?

I think the answer lies in the fact that creation was perfected on the seventh day, so all of God’s dealings with Man – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – from then on were from His place of rest. Whether it was Christ’s miracles of healing and deliverance, God’s victories in the reign of David and many other heroes, or His repeated call to His errant people through His prophets to return to Him, the focus of God’s work has always been to restore His people to their Sabbath state of wholeness and relationship with Him. The lame man was healed on the Sabbath so the he could walk in the wholeness that the Sabbath represents. Just as the first creation was finished on the Sabbath day, so the new creation was perfected when Jesus cried out from the cross “It is finished!” And so the writer to the Hebrews says: “We who have believed into that rest.” (Hebrews 4:3) Through faith in the redeeming blood of Jesus that was shed on the Cross, we become “the righteousness of God in Him,” (2 Cor 5:21) and enter into the perfection of God’s rest.

“True righteousness and holiness.”
This perfect state is the condition of the new man, “which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.”  (Eph 4:24) Peter exhorts us to  “be diligent to be found by Him in peace, without spot and blameless,” (2 Pe 3: 13) while Hebrews 4:9-11 says “There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience.” The peace of His sabbath rest is the gift of God’s grace through Jesus, yet two new testament writers exhort us to be diligent to “enter” that gift. So while we cannot earn God’s peace by our religious works, we need to “work” at keeping a short account of sin in our lives (“without spot and blameless”) and “work” at remembering who we are in Christ, what He has purchased for us, and that “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you.” So rest does not come without some effort (Romans 8:11), but if we are diligent to keep these truths foremost in our thinking we will walk away from the paralysis of religion and into God’s rest.

Only in that place we can really access everything that is our promised inheritance in Christ.

(The topic of “entering into God’s rest” is also explored in “Walking in Newness of Life.”)

Knowing God, Walking in the Spirit

The Pool of Bethesda (2): the paralysis of religion

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After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda,  having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had. Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” he sick man answered Him, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another steps down before me.” Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” And immediately the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked. And that day was the Sabbath. (John 5: 2-9)

God’s house of mercy
The healing at the pool took place on the Sabbath. In the sequence of signs as John recorded them, this was the first time that Jesus challenged the religious order by “working” on the designated day of rest, and John records it as the opening skirmish of His battle with the pharisees that ended at Calvary. “For this reason the Jews persecuted Jesus, and sought to kill Him, because He had done these things on the Sabbath.” (John 5:16) “Bethesda” means “house of mercy,” or “flowing water,” and it was by the Sheep Gate. This is not just a place in Jerusalem: it is a picture of the church. The healing at Bethesda was certainly a sign pointing to our need for an encounter with the living Christ, but it also tells us that there are many sheep in God’s house of mercy and flowing water who are immobile on their beds by the pool, and that one of the main types of paralysis is the paralysis of religion.

Paralysed by religion
The dictionary definition of religion refers to worship of a God or gods and the activities surrounding that worship, and in a broader sense to “enthusiastic and repeated engagement” in a particular pursuit. Avid sports fans are often referred to as making a religion of their sport, for example. However, I worship the Christian God, enthusiastically and repeatedly, yet if someone asks me the question “are you religious?“ I say, “No I’m not religious; I have a living faith.“ So in the church many of us now see the term religion as not so much describing our worship of the living God, but the practice of those who, in the words of Paul to Timothy, have “a form of godliness but deny its power.” (2 Timothy 3: 5–7). The question for those of us who say we have a living faith is this: is it possible for us also to be paralysed by religion?

We tend to Pillory the Pharisees today as archetypal examples of everything we want to avoid in our worship of Christ. And so we should: they lived by the law and missed Jesus. There is no need to quote here any of the many things that Jesus said against them: the important point is that we don’t follow their example and find ourselves as paralysed and lifeless as they were. They too were lying by the pool on their bed, the bed of the law, waiting for the waters to be stirred by the Messiah – who was standing right in front of them.

Flowing in the spirit?
The Bible tells us, “Whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction so that we could have hope through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures.”  (Romans 15:4) The Holy Spirit hasn’t just made it clear how tragically fruitless the religion of the Pharisees was so that we could feel superior in our relationship with Him: those scriptures are also there for our instruction so that we can take care not to follow any of their practices. How much of this instruction are we actually taking on board? For example – and I know I’m far from being the first person to say this – I was born again In 1984, when the charismatic movement was surging through the established church. We used to think of ourselves as “flowing in the spirit,“ and (I’m ashamed to say) how superior we were to the church down the road whom we saw as ossified in their “hymn– prayer sandwich“ format. I now belong to one of the larger modern evangelical Charismatic/Pentecostal networks. We consider ourselves to be free in the spirit, and to be hosts of the presence of God during our meetings. But before I go to church on a Sunday, I know that we will start with a couple of fairly lively praise songs, the host for the day will do the notices, the children and teenagers will go out to their respective groups, we will continue with worship for about another half an hour, then there will be a preach (we used to call them sermons, but that was  too religious) for about 30 minutes, and then a closing song and an appeal for ministry at the end. We will start at 10:30 and finish around 12:15; gather for refreshments after the meeting, and will be out of the building by about 12:45. We do make room for the gifts of the Spirit during the worship time, so three or four people might bring a word of encouragement, a prophecy or a word of knowledge; maybe a tongue and an interpretation – but how different is this really from the “hymn-prayer sandwich?“ The fillings might be a bit different, but it is no less predictable, and I suspect that we are not very different from many modern evangelical churches.

The Spirit of God does graciously meet with us in the little box that we give him, and we rejoice in the fact that we have been in his presence, even though it may have just been the hint of a reflection of a glimmer. We say, and pray, that we want more of him; we long to see healings and deliverance; yet how much more of ourselves will we give? Would we know more of His presence and His power if we gave him more of our time? Or even if we took the compartments out of the box and, for example, allowed the allocated time for worship to eat into the allocated time for the sermon? Or even – shock horror – not have a sermon (sorry, a preach) at all?


The mountain and the chocolate box
I think we can be very easily satisfied with the experience that we describe as “entering the presence of God.“ When the presence of God came into Solomon’s temple at the time of its dedication, the priests were unable to stand. When the Roman soldiers came to Gethsemane to arrest Jesus, they fell to the ground when He identified himself with the words “I am He.” (John 18:6) In our own church we had a half night of prayer a couple of months ago (we should have them more often…), from 8 pm to 2 am. People came and went as they pleased; not many stayed for the whole six hours. But it wasn’t until about 1:30 that the presence of God really came, so powerfully that most of the few of us who were there had to fall to our knees; and then someone gave a prophetic word that brought a long awaited breakthrough in the life of one of those present. When the presence of God came to Toronto, He changed lives and impacted people like Heidi Baker, (Iris Global) Che Ann (Harvest International Ministries) Bill Johnson (Bethel Church) and Nicky Gumbel (the Alpha Course) whose ministries have brought the Kingdom of God into millions of lives. A hallmark of Toronto Airport Vineyard meetings in the 1990s, as well as of other revivals, was daily meetings that went by the clock in heaven and not the clock in the kitchen. I think we can package the presence of God in a chocolate box when He wants to take us up a mountain. God has a much bigger space to move in than we often allow Him. If the dimensions of our box are so far away from His, it’s because our religion keeps it small and keeps us too easily satisfied.

The dynamic of Life
Jesus said , “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself,” (John 2:26) and that He had come to “give life, and that in abundance.” (John 10:10) I love to go out and take photographs of birds. One of the great difficulties in bird photography is the fact that the subjects rarely keep still. Life is always on the move. When the cells in a body become motionless, that body is dead. When Jesus told the paralytic to pick up his bed and walk on the Sabbath day, He was giving him life: He was asserting the dynamic of Life over the inertia of religion.

So how much are we really free from the constraints of religion that we see in the Pharisees of Jesus‘s day? Anne and I lead one of the small groups in our church (we call them “life groups.“ What do you call yours?) This Summer each life group is  leading an evening midweek meeting for the whole church. Everyone in our life group comes to the school of prophecy that we host at our house, and our vision is to encourage the other groups to pursue the presence of God more actively in their gatherings. I had planned how I felt our meeting should flow, and who should contribute what. Anne was most dismissive. “And where exactly is the Holy Spirit in control of all of this??“ she asked. And she was right. How easy it is to operate in the flesh when we think we are being spiritual. When man controls he brings religion. When the Holy Spirit controls, he brings liberty.

A living, breathing bride
Jesus comes to give life. His words are words of life. Walking is not doing the same things the same way, but doing what He says, when He says it. Life is movement. When He speaks, the life He speaks brings into us movement. We can be walking in the Spirit while we have a meal out with friends because we can be responding to His promptings between mouthfuls in the conversation, and we can be walking in the flesh every Sunday at our Church meetings because we are following our prepared format and not His dynamic instructions. When He returns, He will coming back for a living,  breathing bride that He has perfected and made beautiful in His presence, and He is longing for us to run to meet Him, however our theological lens views that moment. We may not fully understand how we will be caught up in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:17), but one thing we do understand is this: He will not be pleased with a bride who sits in her pew and recites the litany of the wedding service without even looking into His face.

Be prepared; hold on., Christian Life

The Great Deception

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(Image generated by AI from its “reading” of my text…)

Every time I ask Google a question read the detailed AI overview of its answer, I think about the Great Deception that Paul writes about in 2 Thessalonians 2 1-12. Is artificial intelligence part of it? Recently I stumbled on a blog on the subject of the great deception and how to be sure not to fall away, and I read it with interest. It was all Bible based and made a lot of sense: basically it was telling us that if we keep our eyes on Jesus and remain grounded in faith and the word of God we won’t be led astray by Satan’s lies. All good stuff, followed by lots of practical applications for family life, similar to material we find across a broad swathe of Christian writings.

I scrolled down the article, and came to other material written by the same guy. But I stopped short when I saw an article that claimed to be “a detailed study of the biblical proof for a flat and motionless earth.“

Is someone who is exhorting Christians to believe the word of God, hold fast to Jesus, and be guided through the complexities of life and the snares of satanic deception by discernment of the truth, suggesting that I believe that the world is flat and that I can find evidence of this in the Bible? I really hope not, yet I believe it’s probably true.

I know the Earth is not flat: I’ve travelled a lot of the way round it, I’ve seen the curved horizon, and I’ve seen photographs from space. I know that none of Magellan’s ships fell off the edge between 1519 and 1522. I’ve got enough experience to tell me that science has got this right.  But it made me think:  what do I do in the areas where the Bible tells me that science is wrong and I don’t have the experience to align with my acceptance of its authority? Did God really create the earth in six days, less than 7000 years ago? Did Methuselah really live to be 969? What about the other end of the Bible: Is there really going to be a rapture? How can the new Jerusalem come down from heaven, for example? And then of course we come to the basics of Christian Faith. Virgin birth? Resurrection? Ascension? Science tells us that none of this is possible, but our faith says it’s true. It’s totally understandable that many people who genuinely ask the question “is there a God?” dismiss faith because it doesn’t make sense. Faith is a “a gift of God, that none may boast,” (Eph 2:9), but it also has to be a gift of God because the human brain simply can’t comprehend it.

I do believe that God is in and through all things, and that he has progressively guided the man that He created through an understanding of the world that He put him in. I think that this is sometimes has been by revelation, and sometimes by exploration. God has given us science. But He has also given us His son, and He has given us the Holy Spirit. He has given us brains, but we also have the mind of Christ. The universe is material and it is spiritual. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned: we can no more understand the mind of Christ with our human reason than we can prove whether or not Christ will return to the Earth in the manner that He ascended, if there really was a worldwide flood and Noah’s Ark, or if we will all be raised up at the last day, and more importantly which eternal existence we will be raised up to – the resurrection of Life or of condemnation. (John 5:29).

Ultimately, truth is neither science nor the printed pages of the Bible, which can be taken at face value to prove almost anything – even, it appears, that the Earth is flat. Truth is a person. Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life.“ We are called to follow His way, walk in His truth, and to share in His life. The truth can’t be separated from the way and the life any more than one can separate the heart from the brain and the nervous system and expect them to carry on functioning. Whatever the great deception ultimately is, its main purpose will be to lead us away from the person who is the way the truth and the life.

I do happen to think that AI will play its part in this, and I think it is part of the fulfilment of Daniel‘s end time prophecy that “there will be a increase in knowledge; (Daniel 12:4) however Paul writes “knowledge puffs up, but Love builds up.“ (1 Cor 8:1)  Knowledge alone, whether we gain it from Google’s AI overviews or from our own intellectual understanding of the Bible, is not the truth. The truth is only in Jesus, the fulfilment and the flesh of the word, and we live in the truth when we walk in Him. And since God seeks worshippers who worship “in spirit and in truth,“ we cannot walk in the truth unless we also walk in the spirit, and none of the fruit of the spirit even marginally hints at the supremacy of the intellect. In fact the Holy Spirit tells us in Proverbs 12:15 that “the way of a fool is right in his own eyes.” One of the most brilliant people the world has ever known, Leonardo Da Vinci, said “The greatest deception that men suffer from is from their own opinions.”

Our understanding of the truth as it is in Jesus will always find its expression in God-given faith and love, and our first rule in gaining this understanding will be to learn from Him and be yoked to His gentleness and humility of heart. (Matthew 11:29) This means that if any of us thinks he is a “better” Christian than anyone who doesn’t share our theology they have missed the point entirely. God’s goodness, revealed to us in Christ, is as far above ours as the heavens are from the earth, so the differences between us are as insignificant as the differing widths of two grass stems in the face of the sun. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians that the Lawless one was already at work in their time, and I believe that a part of the great deception that Satan had been working on since the birth of the church is to convince us that one person’s idea of how to follow Jesus might make them “a better christian” than someone with different ideas.

As for me, I choose to believe the Apostles’ creed over the atheistic writings of Richard Dawkins or the algorithmic manipulations of AI, however convincing their deceptions may be. And whether a brother or sister in Christ chooses to believe that the Earth is 6000 or 6 billion years old, or even that it is flat, there is nothing in the Apostles’ Creed or in what I know of scripture that tells me that I should correct their beliefs. If we build each other up in love we will all come “to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to the perfect man,” (Eph 4:13) whatever views we hold about science or prehistory, or about Great Deception itself; and when we do that we will really know the truth, because we will be seeing Him face to face.

Knowing God

Sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise

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“In Him you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also, having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory.”

If you drop a container of liquid on the floor from a height of about five feet, what will happen to the liquid? Stupid question. It’s going to part company with the container and make a mess on the floor. Unless of course it’s got a lid on, or something else that is sealing it in. Or unless there is something unseen going on…

A friend of mine regularly takes communion at home as part of her morning prayer time. A few weeks ago she had got her little communion glass balanced on the back of her phone (don’t ask – I didn’t) and dropped it on the floor. The photograph shows how it landed.

It made a bit of a splash, then landed upside down, with the rest of the wine inside the glass on the floor. Not only that, but it didn’t leak around the rim: it was sealed inside. Is this even possible? If you want to do a lot of mopping up try it yourself. I just can’t see it happening – except that it did.

The only explanation we can give is that God was involved. Or an angel maybe, but it had to be a supernatural force of some sort. The Lord was giving us a supernatural sign that He wanted to speak through, both to my friend and to everyone else who sees the photo. So what is He saying? I passed the picture round a group that meets at my house, and people had different interpretations. Bearing in mind that it was the cup of the new covenant upside down on the floor, what it says to me is this:

“I have made my covenant with you, and it is sealed with the Holy Spirit of Promise. Even when you mess up and let go of me, I will never let go of you. Even when everything is upside down, it will never leak or spill because my seal is eternal and the blood that I shed for you will always be enough to keep you in me, even though you feel as though you have fallen onto the floor. I have loved you with an everlasting love, and will never leave you nor forsake you. Your inheritance in my Kingdom is guaranteed. This promise is sealed forever by my Spirit which I have given to you.”

What does it say to you?

And if you aren’t sure if the covenant of Calvary is for you, give your life to Jesus now and you will be sealed in His forever.

Christian Life, Living by Faith, Walking in the Spirit

Four rules for walking in the works God has prepared for us.

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Ephesians 2:10 says that we are “God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for Works prepared beforehand, we might walk in them.“ God’s word doesn’t say that we should do the works or complete them or carry them out, or any such similar term: he says that we should walk in them. So what does that mean? How do we walk in what God is prepared?

God has given us parameters for walking. We are to walk by faith and not by sight, we are to walk in Love, and we are to walk in the Spirit. There are other specifics too, like walking in newness of life,  walking circumspectly, and more; but these three enough to go on with. If we are to be walking in God‘s works – His works and not our own – we need to pay attention to them.

Rule One: “Walk by faith and not by sight.” ( 2 Cor:7)
To walk in God‘s works, we need to walk by faith. Among all the other things that can be said about what it is to walk by faith, one top level definitive is that it is contrary to walking by sight. We know this because scripture says so. A first requirement for any of God‘s works is that we cannot see everything that we need in order to carry it out, but that we trust God to provide it. If He has prepared the works beforehand, He has also prepared the resources. We cannot see them because we’re walking by faith, but we trust him to provide. We don’t wait to see his provision before we take a step: we start walking beforehand, knowing that He is El Shaddai, and will provide. Rule one stands alongside rule two:

Rule Two: “So likewise you, when you have done all those things which you are commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants. We have done what was our duty to do.’ “ (Luke 17:10)

When the disciples asked Jesus to increase their faith, he gave them the model of the unprofitable Servant. The walk of faith has to be a walk of obedience: we do what we are told to do, no more, no less. So what has He told us to do? I think  there are two levels of command. There are scriptural commands which are for everyone, and there are specific directives which are unique to each of us. Jesus told us to love God with all our being, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. His “new commandment” was that we love one another. Without love, we are nothing (1 Cor 13:2), and as the whole of 1 Corinthians 13 makes clear, our works are worthless.

I think we find another “level 1” directive in Micah 6:8, where we find these famous words:  “And what does the Lord require of you But to do justly, To love mercy, And to walk humbly with your God?” If we are walking humbly before our God we are more likely to hear the specific directives at level two – whether we are Heidi Baker being told to go to Mozambique, or A N Other being told to give $100 into a specific ministry, or to pray for someone’s healing in the street. If we are looking for power encounters and adventures of faith without paying attention to level one, the chances are that we will be operating out of personal ambition and spiritual pride and not humility and love, and it’s unlikely that the Lord is going to give us any of the John 14:12 “greater things“  to do. But when our hearts are set on obeying the Lord at level one, “you will hear a voice behind you saying this is the way; walk in it” (Isaiah 30:21), and that word will be confirmed in such a way that we will not doubt the instruction. This leads us to rule three:

Rule Three: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”  (John 13:34-35)

Rule three is to walk in love. Not only is nothing we do of any value if we don’t walk in love, but Jesus tells us that we will glorify Him if we do – because all will know that we are His disciples. The love Jesus is talking about is His sacrificial “agape” love. Somebody I know well in our church has been given a vision for a project in Liberia, where there is 85% unemployment. This project, when completed, will provide income and employment and bring a little bit of God‘s kingdom to earth. Her dream is to do something that will lift a community out of poverty, and she thinks about it night and day. She said once that she wasn’t sure if it was from the Lord. I said I’m sure it is. Why? Because, apart from other confirmations she has received, she gets absolutely nothing out of it for herself, yet is prepared to invest a significant amount of time and money into the work. It is an expression of agape love with no self interest. Where does God’s Love point us? Because that is where His works will be prepared.

Rule four: “Pray always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit“ (Eph 6:18)
Faith and agape  Love are only ours by the Spirit: “The flesh profits nothing.” (John 6:63)  Faith is “the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast,” (Eph 2:9) and God’s love is “poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.“ (Romans 5:5) Faith and Love are two of the only three things that “remain“ when all else has passed away (1 Corinthians 13:13) Spiritual projects are carried forward by spiritual prayer. Paul asks the Ephesians to be “praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints— Paul’s work as a messenger of Christ was sustained by the prayers of the body of Christ. If Paul needed prayer support to walk in the walks prepared for him, then so do we, and we need to be upholding others with our own prayers.

So to fulfil the purposes that we were created for in Christ Jesus, we receive our instructions from the Lord, and we trust Him to provide us with what we need to carry them out. We are 100% motivated by the blessing that we are expecting others to receive from the work, and we ensure that every step is covered and guided by Spirit-led prayer. If we take our steps according to these principles, I think we will see the works that God has prepared starting to take shape in front of us as we walk.

Discipleship and witness, Holiness: You shall be perfect

Redeeming the Time: The Biblical Call to Action

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“See you then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” (Ephesians 5:15)

The Greek word translated as “circumspectly” is Akribos. It means diligently, accurately, perfectly, not deviating in any way from the set path.  Akribos is how we have to drive a car: “with due care and attention.” It describes doing something in manner that doesn’t ignore some aspects of the situation, checking that everything is in order, that all requirements are met, and nothing is left out. Luke uses Akribos  to describe how he wrote his “orderly account” of Jesus’s life and ministry (Luke 1:3). Paul uses it when he writes to the Thessalonians to remind the them that they know perfectly well (akribos) that “the day of the Lord comes as a thief in the night.” (1Thess 5:2) To walk circumspectly is to pay full attention to every step we take. The scripture tells us it’s how we “redeem the time:” we don’t just skip along n the light; we watch our every step. The question is, what does redeeming the time actually mean?

It’s one of those phrases that I think I have glossed over until now, when I started studying Ephesians. What’s opened it up for me is that word translated here as “time“ is kairos, which is a definite and fixed measure of time, (it could be a moment or a longer period, even an epoch. It is sometimes used today in the term “Kairos moment” to describe a moment of special significance when God‘s kingdom purposes intersect our lives.) Redeeming the time seems to mean bringing God’s purposes into our current situation; in other words seeing God‘s will done on earth as it is in heaven.

The days are evil
The temporal context is also relevant. Paul exhorts us to redeem the time “because the days are evil.” Does he mean the particular days that he is writing in, or does he mean that all days are evil outside of God’s Kingdom rule? I think it must be the latter. The Holy Spirit was addressing the body of Christ through the ages, not just Paul’s contemporaries, therefore the text must mean that all the days are evil. Evil is the default setting until and unless we redeem the time. Microsoft has a default setting called oneDrive where it will save your work unless you choose another folder. You can’t change the setting, but you can override it. I never use oneDrive, so I always choose my own folder. When we redeem the time, we choose to override the default setting and save the kairos into God’s folder and not the devil’s.

In the previous verses, Paul has already shown us that we “find out what is acceptable to the Lord“ when we walk as Children of light (see my previous article, “Walking as Children of Light: Discovering God’s Will”), but he’s reminding us here that we also need to watch our steps as we walk. It is when we are diligent in our walk as Children of light that we redeem the time, and that in doing so we walk in wisdom because we have an understanding of God‘s will. The instruction “walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise“  suggests that we are not being wise when we are not walking circumspectly. If we are not diligent in how we walk, we are actually being fools.

Paul continues his letter to the Ephesians by giving specific examples of applying this godly wisdom to how we conduct ourselves  in the world and in our relationships, and then he returns to the theme to close the letter. I think we tend to separate the famous passage on the armour of God from the rest of the text, but I don’t think this is what Paul intended. “The days are evil” (Eph 5:16) because they are ruled by the powers of evil whenever God‘s kingdom rule is not established. Evil is the fallen world’s default setting. We put on the armour of God in order to “withstand in the evil day.” When is the evil day? It’s today, tomorrow, the next day, and every day that the time is not redeemed.

Putting on Christ
Putting on the armour of God is the same as putting on Christ: He is our armour. To put on God‘s armour is to put on Christ, and to put on Christ is to put on the new man. (Again, see “Walking as Children of Light: Discovering God’s Will.”) The analogy is a practical step-by-step illustration of how to be diligent when we do so. We must put on all the armour, and we must wear it all the time. The picture tells us exactly what we are wearing and why. Unless we are circumspect and make sure we are wearing it all, the new man is incomplete and won’t walk very far before the enemy has tripped him up. But when we wear it, we are walking as Children of light and are in full understanding of God’s will, redeeming the time because the powers of darkness flee before the light.

The conclusion of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is not an additional section dealing with spiritual warfare for those who have the mettle to take it on, but is a summary of what has gone before. It’s worth repeating his introduction to the armour here:

“Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age,  against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armour of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.” (Eph 10-13)

The days are evil because the prince of this world has been given dominion by fallen man, and his wiles are carried out by the “the rulers of the darkness of this age,” and the “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” who administer his evil rule. (Eph 6:12) Our calling as the army of God is to seize back that dominion and to place it under the feet of our heavenly Captain, or, has He himself said, to take the kingdom by force. (Matt 11:12) This is what it means to redeem the time. Every day is an evil day unless we redeem the time by walking circumspectly, which means paying careful attention to our Captain, seeing that we are fully equipped as Children of light to carry out His commands, and being careful to watch our every step as we advance through the battlefield.