Tag Archives: walk after the spirit

Discipleship and witness, Living by Faith, Walking in the Spirit

Pressing on – or being pressed?

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“Now when evening came, His disciples went down to the sea, got into the boat, and went over the sea toward Capernaum. And it was already dark, and Jesus had not come to them.” (John 6: 16-17)

Getting on with the Mission
I love this story: I don’t think there are many cameos in the Bible that point the contrast between the life of the spirit and the life of the flesh as well as this one. While Jesus was up on the mountain, the disciples headed for the boat. There are “big picture” examples of the flesh taking matters into its own hands and the consequences that are brought about – Saul’s hasty sacrifice when Samuel was delayed, narrated in 1 Samuel 13, comes to mind – but the disciples in their boat seems to speak particularly eloquently into our lives as disciples today. Unlike Saul, they were they were not disobeying any of God’s commands (1 Samuel 13:13): there is no record of Jesus telling them to wait until He came back. They were just getting on with their mission as well as they could.

Feeling Compelled
The main parallel with the story of Saul’s sacrifice is that, like him, they would have “felt compelled.” (1 Sam 13:12) Saul had picked a fight with the Philistines and now they were gathered against him in their numbers; and the people, trembling, were hiding in caves and pits and “were scattered from him.” (vs 6-8) The disciples knew they had to go to Capernaum and “it was already dark.” Although they didn’t know where Jesus was, there were plenty of people around with boats, so they probably assumed that He had either gone on ahead or would soon follow in someone else’s boat. He would either be at the house in Capernaum waiting for them, or would turn up a bit later, but wherever He was it was time to get moving. It’s also quite possible that they were exhausted and wanted to get away from the demands of the crowd. So the situation was compelling, and all very human. And all very plausible: have you never lost contact with someone in a group and thought: “Well, we’re headed for the same place. We’re bound to catch up with them there.” I certainly have.

Lost Authority
So it’s easy to be critical of the disciples for setting off without the Lord, but actually what they did was very natural, and it’s the naturalness of their action that makes it such a valuable lesson for us. And although they were not disobedient to God in the way that Saul was, there is a similarity in the consequence: they both resulted in a loss of authority. Saul lost his authority to rule Israel (1 Sam 13:14), and the disciples lost their authority to rule their circumstances. Sudden squalls were common on Lake Galilee, so whether or not this particular one was whipped up specially by the enemy to destroy them, or whether it was a natural occurrence, the disciples knew the risk they were taking and were confident that their skills and experience as fishermen would take them safely to Capernaum. It’s when we assume we are in control that the opposite is often the case.

Recognising the Difference
After three or four miles with the waves buffeting their boat and “a great wind blowing” (v.18), that confidence was probably ebbing away, and they were still only a little over halfway to their destination (Bethsaida to Capernaum was about six miles). Just as the disciples will have agreed with the Lord that they would go over to Capernaum, we too can have objectives that we have prayed over and been in agreement with the Holy Spirit about, but we can still set off without Him in the boat. We can employ all the natural resources we have at our disposal to act on a word, but we can leave out the presence of God and be following our own agenda. Smith Wigglesworth said this: “I must recognise the difference between my own spirit and the Holy Spirit. My own spirit can do certain things on natural lines, can even weep and pray and worship, but it is all on a human plane, and we must not depend on our human thoughts and activities or on our own personality. If the baptism (in the Spirit – my parenthesis) means anything to you, it should bring you to the death of the ordinary, where you are no longer putting faith in your own understanding; but, conscious of your own poverty, you are ever yielded to the spirit. Then it is that your body becomes filled with heaven on earth.“ (For transcripts of Wigglesworth’s sermons and other material relating to his life and ministry, see http://www.smithwigglesworth.com)

The Valley and the Mountain
How much of our worship and our mission, are “on natural lines,” rowing stalwartly towards God’s objectives without His presence in the boat? We pray for the wind and waves to abate but to no avail, because, whatever our gifting or our position in the church, we have no spiritual authority in our own strength. And when we are drenched, exhausted and storm-tossed, the enemy whispers into our hearts: “What do you think you are doing in this boat anyway? You’re never going to get to your Capernaum: you might as well give up now…” Yes, we are able to silence that voice and we row on through the storm, pressing on towards the goal as we shout Philippians 3:14 into the wind. We stay afloat but Capernaum doesn’t seem to get any nearer. But the “goal” that Paul is referring to is “the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Lake Galilee is at the bottom of a valley, 200 ft below sea level. The mountains that surround it rise to 2000 ft. And here, for me, is one of the central points of this story: While Jesus was up on the mountain, the disciples were down in the valley.

The Upward Call
What are our goals, as individuals and as churches? Where is our Capernaum? I think in many cases we can get into the boat and start rowing, but never actually get there, and the dream of seeing the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven becomes seeing the Kingdom of God in heaven when our ship has finally sunk on earth. But although it’s true that the Old Testament heroes of faith “did not receive the promise,” (Hebrews 11:39), the next verse starts with the words “God, having provided something better for us…” God has provided something better for us than rowing through the storm until our ship has sunk. God has given us His son, He has given us the Holy Spirit, and He has given us a choice: do we stay lower than sea level and do what circumstances and our natural thinking dictate, hoping we’ll meet God when we’ve arrived; or do we go up the mountain to seek His face first (Psalm 27:8), and not move until we know He’s coming with us?

The way Up is Down
We need to remind ourselves that we can no more climb the mountain through our own strength and abilities than we can row to our destination. In his sermon “Keeping the vision,” Smith Wigglesworth says this: “There are two sides to this Baptism: the first is, that you possess the Spirit; the second is that the Spirit possesses you. This is my message at this time – being possessed by the Baptizer, and not merely possessing the Baptizer… I believe that God’s ministers are to be flames of fire; nothing less than flames; nothing less than mighty instruments with burning messages, with a heart full of love, with such a depth of consecration that God has taken full charge of the body and it exists only that it may manifest the glory of God.” Later in the same message he says: “It seems to me that the way to get up is to get down.” In his book “Pride versus Humility,” Derek Prince says the same thing: “The way up is down; the way down is up. If we want to go up, we must start by going down.” The only thing we can be certain of is that we don’t know where Jesus is going at all, unless we are with Him: He might not even be to Capernaum; and if He is, the chances are that it won’t be when we think, because His thoughts are not our thoughts. If we want His plans, we need to be dead to our own. Our abilities, our understanding of what God has done in the past, our ideas of what His next move is going to be: these all need to be at the bottom of the lake before we start out, because we don’t actually ask Him to come with us: we go with Him. We’ll find Him up the mountain.

If we want to press on, we need to respond to the upward call of God, and start by going down.

Christian Life, Knowing God, Living by Faith, Walking in the Spirit

Between the Chapel and the Damned

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The Parable of the pectoral sandpiper

The Chappel Hide
The pectoral sandpiper (shown above) – or “Pec” as it is known in the birding community – is a wader that is scarce in the UK. (Waders are long legged, long billed birds that feed mostly around water margins.)   One had turned up in our local bird reserve, so  I decided one night I would go there before work if I got up early enough. Pecs are usually “passage migrants” – they stop by somewhere for a few days before moving on to their breeding or wintering grounds somewhere hundreds of miles away- so when there is one around, most birders make an effort to go and see it if they know where it is. According to the bird club blog, this one seemed to favour one particular part of the reserve, conveniently just in front of one of the hides. All the hides have names – this one is called the Chappel Hide.  I woke at 5 am and said: “No that’s too early. Lord, if I’m going birding, please wake me at 6 o’clock.” ( Nothing like spiritualising one’s hobby) But God seemed clearly happy with my hobby on this occasion, because I woke at 6 am exactly, practically to the second. What I didn’t realise at the time was that what He got me up for was rather more important than the bird…

I set off after coffee and a quiet time and got to the reserve at about 7.30. There are two very experienced and dedicated birders, Steve and Mark, who are often on the dam wall at one end of the reservoir at that time of day, scanning the whole reserve with their telescopes. The Hide is towards the other end. I felt quite strongly that when I got there, I had to go straight to the hide, and that I would see the pec if I did. However when I got to the end of the path and reached the edge of the water where the path forked I saw my two friends on the dam wall, and instead of turning left to go to the hide, I turned right to go and talk to them. I thought that they would probably know where it was, so it was worth checking with them first. But when I got there, Steve said, “it’s at the Chappel Hide!“ I knew what he was talking about of course. I stayed and chatted for a couple of minutes then set off for the Chappel Hide. However, when I got there, the pec was nowhere to be seen. I waited half an hour for it to show again but to no avail. Then the door to the hide opened and Steve walked in. “Have you seen it? he said.
“No.”
“It was just there,” he said, pointing to a very open spot just in front of the hide, where it would have made a perfect photograph. He scanned the whole area expertly with his binoculars and said, “No it must be skulking in the undergrowth again. But when you came up onto the dam it was there in front of the hide. I could see it with my telescope!”

Confluence of circumstance
When I had decided to go and talk to Steve and Mark where the path branched, it was about equidistant between the dam and the hide. If I had turned left, as I felt the Holy Spirit, who got me up at 6 o’clock practically to the second to go there, had told me, I would’ve seen my bird. But instead, I had decided to go and listen to man, as if their advice would be better than the Lord’s. Chappel? Chapel? Is that a coincidence? And what about the Dam wall? I was between the chapel and the damned, and I chose the damned. And when you start thinking about how God organized that confluence of circumstance the mind slowly explodes…

Driving home I was kicking myself for my stupidity. But the Lord made it clear that He knew what I was going to do, and that it was an important lesson for me that He wanted me to learn. It might only have been about a bird that I didn’t photograph or even see on that particular occasion, but the principal was one that had to be applied in much more important situations. It can be drawn from a number of scriptures, such as

The wisdom of this world is foolishness to God (1 Cor 3:19)
Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly (Psalm 1:1)
There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit (Rom 8:1)
We ought to obey God rather than men. (Acts 5:29)
There is a way that seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death. (Prov 14:12)

There is one more, too, because this isn’t quite the whole story. Isaiah 30:21 says “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” The path that I took was path B (below). But there was another path, path A, which is the one that I had intended to take and which I had seen myself taking as I drove to the reserve. If you are going along with my “leading of the Spirit” assumption, this is the one that I felt God was showing me. Path A was the way I should have been walking in. When I decided to take B instead – “just to see if Steve and Mark are on the dam” – I had actually already decided to go and talk to them if they were there. When I took that path I was already  in “the way that leads to death.” But what do we all pray? “Lead us not into temptation…” If I had gone the way I had been shown at the beginning, when I “heard the voce behind me,” I would not have been led into temptation…

The Valley of Decision
Is this all ridiculously over-cooked? Well, maybe; but it worked for me. Because when I got to work the same day (I am CEO of an educational supplies business when I am not writing or birding) there was a very important financial decision to be made. All “human” thinking pointed strongly in one direction, but we (myself, my wife Anne, and two other Christians in senior management) chose to seek God instead of doing what circumstances seemed to dictate. Anne had already felt that the Lord had told her not to “go down to Egypt,” which represented the obvious choice in the particular circumstance where we found ourselves, but if it hadn’t been for the pectoral sandpiper I would have been inclined to override her. Then as we prayed, we received a very clear course of action that no-one had seen before, which has turned out to be the wise choice, for a number of reasons. God is faithful, and His sheep hear His voice. But we have to be prepared to go to the chapel…

There will be more decisions for us all to make: as darkness covers the Earth and world systems tremble and collapse we will need increasingly to follow the paths that God shows us, and not the ways “that seem right to a man.” We need to be yoked to Jesus, because in that day there will be “multitudes in the valley of decision;” and if we can listen to that voice behind us – and obey it –   we will be following the right paths ourselves, and many will follow us to the chapel instead of going to the damned.

(The photo is the only other pectoral sandpiper I have seen. I took the picture in 2021, at Titchwell Marsh, in Norfolk UK.)

Knowing God, Pursuing Love, Walking in the Spirit

Yes and No: Life and death in the power of the tongue.

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Jesus said: “By your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matt 12:27), and Proverbs 18:21 reminds us that “Life and death are in power of the tongue.” Every  time we open our mouths we release life or we release death.  Paul wrote the following to the Corinthians:

“The things I plan, do I plan according to the flesh, that with me there should be yes, yes, and no, no? As God is faithful, our word to you was not yes and no. For the son of God, Jesus Christ – who was preached among you by me Sylvanus and Timothy- was not yes and no, but in him was yes . For all the promises of God in him are yes, and in him amen, to the glory of God through us.“ (2 Cor 1: 17-20)

In Christ there is only Yes
“In Him was yes.” There are no negatives in Jesus. He only spoke words of Life. There are negatives in the flesh – “yes, yes, and no, no” – but in Christ there is only “Yes.” In the realm of the Spirit, where all the promises of God are ours and where we are called to live, there is only Yes and Amen, and for every yes and amen God receives the glory. Whatever context Paul was referring to here when he talks about his plans, the statement he makes is absolute and so I think we can rightly apply it to our own lives. In Christ there is only Yes. Does this mean that we say yes to every request or agree with every suggestion made by others? Of course not. But it does mean at the least that we remain affirming of the people whose requests or suggestions we refuse; at the most it means that what looks like a “no” to our flesh is actually a massive “yes” in the Spirit; and always it presents an opportunity to release something of the promises of God into the circumstances where we find ourselves.

So how do I move from the flesh, with its yes yes and no no, to the spirit of Jesus Christ and the life affirming faithfulness of God that is always Yes?

The answer begins with a question. When we read the account of the woman with the issue of blood in Luke (Luke 8: 43-48) we see Jesus on a mission, pressed by the thronging crowds, to raise to life the dead daughter of one of the local rulers of the synagogue. Here indeed was one of the “lost sheep of the house of Israel“ coming to worship him in faith. Surely nothing could be more important than to demonstrate the sovereignty of the Son of Man to one of the religious hierarchy? But a woman in need touched his cloak, He put aside his urgent agenda, and He stopped to asked the question “Who touched me?”

We know what follows. Power had gone out of him. The Holy Spirit was responding to the woman’s need as she came to him in  faith.

The dynamic of the miraculous
This was the moment of choice. The disciples saw only the agenda of the flesh, which was to say no in response to the pressing crowds; but the Spirit had a different agenda, which was to respond with a life affirming Yes to the sick woman’s need. Jesus ignored the pressing of the flesh and the negativity of His disciples to stop and see where the Holy Spirit was flowing.

We see the same contrast at work when Jesus fed the multitudes. Faced with His compassion for the 4,000, the disciples only saw the impossibility of feeding them:  “Where could we get enough bread in the wilderness to fill such a great multitude?” (Matt 15:33), whereas Jesus saw the limitless resources of Heaven and “commanded the crowds to sit down.” The flesh said No, the Spirit said Yes. The blind, the deaf, the lame, the demon-possessed – yes, yes, yes, yes.

This dynamic of the miraculous is available to us in the details of our everyday lives, where we can choose to release life or death into every situation that we face. We may not be ministering healing on every street corner and in every conversation, but if we pay attention to the exhortation of James to be “quick to hear, slow to speak,” (James 1:19) we never know when those opportunities might arise, our eyes can be open to avenues that only the Holy Spirit can reveal, and even our objections and refusals can be clothed in Grace.

To walk after the Spirit and not after the flesh we need to silence the “No!” that rises up when the negative voices are clamouring in our ears and circumstances are pushing us along their road, and we must be open to the touch of need and  ready to stop to ask the question that will connect us to where Jesus is saying yes.

(See also “Pursuing Love” for more around the story of the woman with the issue of blood).