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Pursuing Love

Food, Drink, and Unity

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“Receive one who is weak in the faith, but not to disputes over doubtful things. For one believes he may eat all things, but he who is weak eats only vegetables. Let not him who eats despise him who does not eat, and let not him who does not eat judge him who eats; for God has received him.” (Romans 14: 1-3)


When Paul sends these instructions to the Romans in chapter14 of his letter, his focus initially is on the question of food and drink, but the text leads us into much deeper issues around the matter of unity. In a context where meat on one hand may have been sacrificed to idols, and on the other hand was subject to Jewish law relating to blood, some believers avoided the spiritual minefield of eating meat altogether by eating only vegetables. Paul’s view of this particular aspect of Christian life is clear: “I know and am convinced by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself; but to him who considers anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean.” (Romans 14:14) From his perspective, scrupulous avoidance of meat shows a weakness of faith, but he teaches that the basis of our relationships with our brothers and sisters is not our view of what they believe, but our acceptance of it: “Let not him who eats (meat) despise him who does not eat, and let not him who does not eat judge him who eats; for God has received him… Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather resolve this, not to put a stumbling block or a cause to fall in our brother’s way…if your brother is grieved because of your food, you are no longer walking in love…for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” (14:3, 12, 15, 17)

Paul widens the context beyond food and drink and other “doubtful things” in verse 21: “It is good neither to eat meat nor drink wine nor do anything by which your brother stumbles or is offended or is made weak,” summarizing chapter 14 with this: “We then who are strong ought to bear with the scruples of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbour for his good, leading to edification. For even Christ did not please Himself; but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached You fell on Me.” (Romans 15: 1-3)

The priority of Edification
God’s priority is that we build one another up (“edification”). Jesus said “I will build My church.” Anything I try and build will just collapse, probably on top of me. Jesus is coming for a bride without spot or blemish. If we try and remove each other’s blemishes we just make ourselves more blemished – “judge not lest ye be judged.. And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?” (Matt 7:1,3)  We build one another up to become more like Christ by pleasing one another, not by correcting one another. The unity that King Jesus is seeking among His disciples is what Paul calls being “like-minded,” and the scripture makes clear that this like-mindedness is not only a work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, but also that it glorifies God: “Now may the God of patience and comfort grant you to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus, that you may with one mind and one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Romans 15:5).

Like-mindedness
Our like-mindedness is an expression of our attitude to, not our analysis of, one another, and has its origin in the humility we learn from Christ. It has nothing to do with thinking along the same lines. We probably find the best expression of it in Philippians 2, and I will quote the full passage here, as the words of this famous portion of scripture draw together the threads of our acceptance of one another and our authority in Christ far more effectively than anything I could write:

“Therefore if there is any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and mercy, fulfill my joy by being like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others. Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil 2: 1-11)

True Unity
If we hold onto the understanding that true unity, indeed “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” (Ephesians 4:3), is really what Paul calls “like-mindedness,” and comes from humble acceptance of the fact that we all stand before God and not before each other, we cannot leave the subject without looking at the three verses that make up Psalm 133.

Here is verse one: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is For brethren to dwell together in unity!

As can so often be the case, the power of the original language is diluted in translation. There are lots of words that can be translated as “good.” But this one, “tob”  is the same as the “good” that God felt when He looked at His original, perfect, creation. When brothers dwell together in unity, it is as good as it can get; it is in alignment with God’s purposes. It is as good as Eden. Psalm 133 is a song of ascents: it was sung as the people of God ascended the hill to worship in the Temple. The unity it speaks of is not so much a state of mind, or even a state of being: it is unity in action, a group of people joined in a common purpose, each one carrying their own cross, and each one loving the others as they walk together up the mountain.

The Anointing
Verse two says that this unity is“like the precious oil upon the head,
Running down on the beard,
The beard of Aaron,
Running down on the edge of his garments.”

Our translations compare this unity to the anointing. “It is like the precious oil upon the head…” Not so the Hebrew: in the original text there is no word for “like,” just a repetition of “šemen,” the word for the anointing oil. A literal reading would be “It is the oil the precious oil…” Our unity, the unity of the Spirit, isn’t just “like” the anointing; it brings the anointing. Jesus makes an interesting statement in John 7: “If anyone wills to do His (the Father’s) will, he will know concerning the doctrine whether it is from God or if I speak on my own authority.” (John 7:17) In other words, when we make it our purpose to come into line with God’s will, He will sovereignly demonstrate the truth of His words. I can pray for the anointing all I want, but if I am operating in my own flesh – “on my own authority”- the Holy Spirit will not be present in power. If we want rain, we need to be where the rainclouds are. But when we are genuinely one in the Spirit, “like-minded,” the rain is ready to fall.

Revival
The final verse of Psalm 133 gives us another phantom “like,” which I will now leave out: It is … the dew of Hermon,
descending upon the mountains of Zion;
for there the LORD commanded the blessing— Life forevermore.

So like-mindedness is not just the anointing on an individual; the anointing falls on the whole mountain. The dew of Hermon was known to be abundant; a soaking, not just a dampness. It provided life-giving moisture for the parched lands of Israel over the Summer months, just as the living waters of the Holy Spirit bring His abundant life to revive spiritual deserts wherever He flows. The blessing is commanded from the mountains of Zion, a picture of the Kingdom of God. We often misquote this pslm, saying “The unity commands the blessing,” but this is not what the psalmist wrote. It is the LORD who commands the blessing, and He commanded it to come out of Zion, when we walk in the ways of the Kingdom of God. In the three verses of Psalm 133 we find a progression: when each of us, “by ourselves alone”, pursues like-mindedness as we ascend the hill to worship and glorify God, (v.1) we can expect the anointing to fall on our ministries, (v.2) and ultimately for the waters of revival to bring Kingdom life to our lands. (v.3)

Like-mindedness, anointing, revival. It might not be easy, but it’s as simple as 1-2-3.

Pursuing Love, Walking in the Spirit

The Passion of Agape: Love and Fire in Revival

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“Oh God of burning, cleansing flame,
Send the fire!
Your blood-bought gift today we claim,
Send the fire today!”
(William Booth)

Before Jesus saved me back in 1984, I was a New Ager. An old friend who knew me then – in fact he was one of the people who were praying for us at the time – has just sent me the following email: “Thought this might grab you.  Two New Agers moved to Stroud because they thought that’s where they’d find the answers.  Eventually, they turned up at John Street Baptist Church saying, “The New Age hasn’t worked.  What have you got to offer?” They became Christians and brought lots of friends along so that the New Age enquirers started to outnumber the members…”

God is clearly starting to move. People are hungry. But unless we are hungry for God ourselves we cannot expect to share our bread with others. The following is an extract from Wheat in The Winepress: I wrote this passage in 2017, but I’ve been feeling for the last couple of days that it’s appropriate to release it again now.

Our element
The zeal of the Lord of Hosts, the fire of the Holy Spirit which Jesus sends onto the world, and the perfect love, the agape, that casts out fear are all bound together: zeal expresses agape, agape sends zeal. Together they express the passion of the heart of God that yearns for the restoration of His Kingdom and the marriage of the Lamb. This is the Love that Jesus tells us to abide in. Like water to fish, as I’ve already said, the “sea of pure divine love” that they experienced at Azuza Street is actually the element in which we are called to live. It is no coincidence that the greatest miracles happened there when the fire was visibly present.

It is often said that in the developed, “free” world we don’t see the miracles of healing that seem to be much more the norm in third world countries and the persecuted Church. I, for one – and I think I speak for many here – have always explained this by saying “we think we don’t need faith: we have medicine!”   But as we know, Paul tells us that what counts – the only thing that counts – is “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). Even if I have the faith that moves mountains, without love I am nothing (1 Cor 13:2). I don’t think it’s the faith that sets these churches apart, so much as the love through which it is working. They “love each other fervently, with a pure heart.” They need each other, are committed to each other, and are contemporary expressions of the Church of Acts 4. They are one as the Father and the Son are one. Their unity commands the blessing. Because they are obedient to the command to “love one another” they receive what they ask from the Father. They are swimming in that sea of perfect Love; they are abiding in Christ, immersed in the river of Ezekiel 47; they are in their element. Am I? Are you? Or are we fish out of water, flapping about on the deck, gasping for Life in the Spirit, knowing that there should be more but somehow unable to reach for it? 

The longing of the Bride and the Groom
Wherever it is that we see the fire burning today, or if we look into history and see where it has been, we find the same initial spark: Christians who are hungry for more of God. Not just a little bit more – “If I clear the cluttered desk of my life – actually no, just my church meeting as long as You don’t stay too long – a bit, I can fit a bit more of you on this corner, God” – but really MORE; the more that will take us from our dimension into His. “Lord, I’m sweeping everything off my desk. Will You come and fill it? Nothing else will do!”

The cry of the heart, a two-word prayer, that went out from Toronto in 1994 and still goes out today was “More, Lord!” Another two-word prayer that I remember singing as a worship song in a UK Catch the Fire meeting in 1995 was “Yes, Lord!”. If we want More, first we really need to be hungry: it’s “the effective fervent prayer of a righteous man (that) avails much” (James 5:16); and second: God wants our total Yes.

The story of Gideon shows us how we can respond when God’s fire begins to take hold. If we want to see in the Word how the fire starts we need to look elsewhere: not to a New Testament treatise on the Holy Spirit, or to an Old Testament prophesy of Holy outpouring, but to the love poem on the longing of the bride and the groom for one another. As the unfolding of the intimacy between the Shulamite and The Beloved draws to a close, the bride says, in words that encapsulate the essence of the zeal of the Lord:

 “Set me as a seal upon your heart,
As a seal upon your arm;
For love is as strong as death,
Jealousy as cruel as the grave; 
Its flames are flames of fire,
A most vehement flame” (Song, 8:6)

The jealous, passionate love of the Father and the Son, burning in the fire of the Holy Spirit: for the bride of the Bible, nothing else will do. Before the Beloved comes to her, He asks for one thing:

“You who dwell in the gardens,
The companions listen for your voice –
Let me hear it!” (Song 8: 13)

And the bride responds, to end the poem:
“Make haste, my beloved,
And be like a gazelle
Or a young stag
On the mountains of spices.” (Song 8: 14)

Not even Jesus could tell us when He is going to return, but we know two things. One is a collection of signs of the end of the age that He gives us in Matthew 24 – signs which many would say are being fulfilled in our day. The other thing that we know is that He will come in response to hearing our voice. “Let me hear you call me!” says Jesus, the Beloved. ‘Let me hear you say the words “Make Haste, my Beloved!” I want you to be hungry for Me!’ At the very end of the Bible we hear the echo of the Shulamite’s response: “And the Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come!’” And we hear the Beloved say: “Let him who hears say, “Come!” And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely.” (Rev 22:17)

It’s not just the Bride who calls out; it’s the Spirit and the Bride. Just as Jesus completed the work that the Father gave Him to do at the cross, the Holy Spirit will one day complete the work that He has been given to do on the earth: the preparation of the Bride for the marriage of the Lamb, and the handing over of the kingdoms of the world to the kingdom of our God and His Christ. And as individuals and churches, we are ready when we hear Him ask us to call out to Him. We are ready when we acknowledge that we are thirsty. We are ready when we desire to freely take the water of life. According to the Song of Songs, this will be when we say “More Lord, Yes Lord, nothing but the most vehement flame will satisfy!” 

The Fullness of God
One final thing we can be sure of is this: when holy fire does bring revival to our street, it won’t be anything like what we expect. However in the parable of the ten virgins (Matt 25: 1-13) Jesus does make it clear what we have to do: we need to be ready for Him with our lamps trimmed and full of oil. This isn’t just about trimming wicks: it’s about the whole lamp. The Strong’s definition of the Greek word for “trimmed”, kosmeō (from which comes our word “cosmetic”) means to arrange, decorate, adorn, or put in order. In the book of Revelation the seven lampstands represent the seven churches that the risen Lord is walking among (Rev 1:20). Jesus wants our churches to be brimming with the oil of the Holy Spirit, and beautified with all the fruit of lives laid down, hungry for Him.

The last words of Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane were this: “I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which you loved Me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26). The Greek word onoma, name, means more than just the epithet by which a person is called – it refers to everything associated with the name, including character, rank, and all attributes. Jesus is saying that He has revealed the fullness of the Father to His disciples: as He said, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” And He says He will reveal the fullness of the Father in the future: “I will declare it.” How? By the Holy Spirit, whom He will send to bring the same revelation that the twelve had when they were with Him. Why? So that His agape may be in us. The agape of God being poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us is the fulfilment of John 17:26. Jesus tells us that it is by our love that the world will know we are His disciples. I don’t think that this is about the world looking at us and just seeing how much we love each other, or even looking at our humanitarian efforts and seeing how much we love the world. It means that when we truly walk in His agape WE WILL DO THE WORKS THAT HE DID, and revival will follow. This was Heidi Baker’s experience in Mozambique, and surely this is true discipleship.

Paul prayed (Eph 3 14-21) that we would be filled with all of God – the “fullness” of God, meaning that no aspect of the Divine nature (see 2 Peter 3-4) would be missing from our lives. This fullness comes from yielding our vain understanding to the truth that the Agape of Christ goes beyond anything we can humanly grasp; that it surpasses or goes beyond anything that we can call knowledge. Paul begins by praying that, with all the riches of His Glory at His disposal, God would give us the supernatural ability, the dynamis power, to enable the faith to rise in our hearts that Christ will make His home there as He promises (John 14:23). Paul uses the word katoikeō, meaning to dwell, inhabit, be always present. This prayer, for them and for us, is that the indwelling Christ would become a present, manifest reality in our lives so that agape can become the foundation for all we are and all we do; that Jesus would hold our gaze with that most vehement flame, reaching out through us with supernatural gifts to the people we are with, lifting our hearts into heavenly glory as we worship, and opening the storehouses of Heaven to all our needs as we bring His fire to the earth.

We are rooted and grounded in agape when the manifest presence of God is a reality in our lives and we walk in intimacy with Him, and this can only happen when we fully die to ourselves and yield our hearts to the mighty power of the Holy Spirit. Without dynamis there is no Gideon’s army and there is no agape; and without agape there will always be wheat in the winepress.

A picture has been with me as I have been thinking about this over the last few days, and it’s that of a bonfire that has burnt down from its original intensity and where the burning sticks have been scattered on the ground, charred black in places, still glowing red in places with a few small flames licking around them. I believe this is a picture both of the Church – where the sticks are individual congregations – and of churches, where the sticks are individual believers. For centuries the devil has been poking and scattering, isolating people, isolating congregations, always working to destroy unity and weaken the Church. I believe that God is gathering those burning pieces of wood together. He is leaning over them, His heart bursting with love, the marriage of the Lamb bright in His vision, blowing, blowing, blowing. As He rearranges those embers and burning brands new relationships will be formed and old structures broken. To be an army of Gideons in these last days we need to let Him gather us where the flames are and let His agape fill our lives: then we can set our world on fire.

(Adapted from “Wheat in the Winepress,” MD Publishing 2018)

Holiness: You shall be perfect, Pursuing Love

If the body were an eye, where would the hearing be? (1 Cor 12)

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Paul’s teaching on the gifts of the Spirit in the church and the diversity that He has placed within the body of Christ is a well-known passage. In the first part Paul shows how the Holy Spirit distributes supernatural gifts among His people when they meet together to reveal Jesus, the second part shows how each born again believer is a unique gift to the body of Christ that helps enable the kingdom of his Love to  be established on the Earth.

The world and worldly culture celebrate diversity. However the politically correct emphasis on diversity that we see in today’s society is not an expression of the rich variety that God has put into His creation, but is a worship of diversity for its own sake. Diversity in the world has become an idol: worshippers gather round it In abandonment to their lusts just as the children of Israel gathered round the golden calf and “rose up to play.” (1 Cor 10:7)

The devils’ idols are always a substitute for God’s truth. If the Lord is doing something in Heaven, the enemy will try to set up his copy on Earth, so where the Kingdom of God is advancing there is often an idol to be pulled down in order for God’s will to be done. If we look at the counter culture that the enemy is seeking to establish on Earth, we can often see the emphasis of the heavenly culture that the Holy Spirit is bringing to the church. Diversity is an example of this. The devil is seeking to establish his doctrine of diversity in the flesh, according to which every divergence from God’s created order is to be not only accepted, but celebrated. There are many bodies, but no membership.  In fact membership of any one group is often regarded as sectarian.

In God’s kingdom there is one body, and we are all members of it. Like the snowflakes, each one of us is different and each one of us is beautiful, and each one of us is a unique expression of God’s perfect order. But we are all made of water. “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit.” (1 Cor 12:13)  The devil, on the other hand, would have us celebrate snowflakes made of plastic, rubber, bronze…

How does this translate into Gods kingdom purposes today? I believe that the enemy is parading his version of diversity in front of our eyes because he wants to blind the world to the beauty of God’s Kingdom truth. Jesus is calling His body to unity, but in that unity is the essential principle that we recognise the diversity and beauty that He has put into each individual. A prophetic theme currently being expressed is that God will be removing many leaders from the platforms and podiums where they have become exalted, and raising up the unknown and lowly to minister in the power of his Spirit when he sends the next great wave of Revival. We will no longer gather around denominational flags and banners; we will just gather around Jesus under his Banner of Love, honouring and serving Him as we honour and serve one another. The Unity won’t command the blessing because we all sing the same songs, have all read the same books, or all agree with the same teachers; and not even because we all pray in tongues and prophesy (or not!): the unity will command the blessing when we love, serve, and prefer one another.

We will all be one when we have recognised that we are all different. If you are an ear and I am an eye, we may look like we have nothing in common, but the same blood flows through us, we both serve the same body, and we both have the mind of Christ. I’m not inadequate because I can’t hear like you, and – even more important – I’m not superior because you can’t see like me. When we really celebrate each other’s uniqueness I believe those beautiful snowflakes will fall more and more thickly, until the glory of God covers the Earth as the waters cover the sea.