Lord why is this?

John Newton wrote:

I asked the Lord that I might grow

In faith, and love, and every grace;

Might more of His salvation know, 

And seek, more earnestly, His face.

’Twas He who taught me thus to pray, 

And He, I trust, has answered prayer.

But it has been in such a way,

As almost drove me to despair.

I hoped that in some favoured hour, 

At once He’d answer my request;

And by His love’s constraining pow’r, 

Subdue my sins, and give me rest.

Instead of this, He made me feel 

The hidden evils of my heart; 

And let the angry pow’rs of hell

Assault my soul in every part.

Yea more, with His own hand

He seemed intent to aggravate my woe;

Crossed all the fair designs I schemed, 

Blasted my gourds, and laid me low.

Lord, why is this?’ I trembling cried,

‘Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?’

‘’Tis in this way,’ the Lord replied,

‘I answer prayer for grace and faith.’

‘These inward trials I employ,

From self, and pride, to set thee free;

And break thy schemes of earthly joy, 

That thou may’st find thy all in Me.’

A road map to a healthy church culture

One of my favourite authors Scot McKnight has a new book being published later this year that explores creating a "goodness culture" in our church families.

Our first instinct may be to think well that automatically exists in a local church! Tragically, in recent years, Christians have gotten used to revelations of abuses of many kinds in our most respected churches--from Willow Creek to Mars Hill. We are not immune to this in the UK. In the last couple of weeks, we have read of a well-know leader announce his resignation with trustees citing concerns around an unhealthy church culture and specifically a culture that led to racism.

I am sure that no Jesus follower who hears the call of God and sets off to dedicate their life to serve God by planting or leading a church, expects to arrive at a place where they have to resign and suffer the consequences.

However, it seems to be happening with too much regularity at this moment in time. Our behaviours, beliefs and practices contribute so much to the culture we create. Let's take a time out to ensure we are taking steps towards health rather than a disaster.

Scot gives lists 7 characteristics he has noted in unhealthy church culture and 7 that help create a healthy culture.

(Below are my paraphrase of what I heard on a webinar and not exactly what was said)

Characteristics of a toxic culture

1. Narcissism is allowed.
2. Fear is common.
3. Care for the institution can trump the care of people.
4. False narratives are formed (e.g. to protect the institution)
5. There is a large emphasis on loyalty.
6. Celebrities and hero leaders are common.
7. A greater emphasis on leadership than pastoring.

Characteristics of a healthy culture

1. A high degree of empathy for others.
2. Shaped by grace and nurtures grace.
3. People are put first.
4. The truth is told even when it's hard. (no spin)
5. Justice is nurtured (do the right thing even when it hurts)
6. A culture of service is built (particularly in leadership)
7. Christlikeness is developed and valued (Christoformity)

An extract from Scot's book - A Church called Tov

Toxic, flesh- driven cultures breed a lust for power, success,

celebrity, control through fear, an emphasis on authority, and

demands for loyalty. These values may not be explicitly stated,

or even outwardly recognized, but as they fester in the heart of a leader, they can’t help but bear bitter fruit, damaging the culture of the church and seeking to destroy anyone who gets in the way.

A Spirit- formed, Christlike culture, on the other hand, nurtures truth, offers healing for the wounded, seeks opportunities to

show redemptive grace and love, focuses on serving others (rather than on being served) and looks for ways to establish justice in the daily paths of life. A Christlike church culture always has its eyes on people because the mission of the church is all about God’s redemptive love for people.

Can sickness be better than health?

The deepest, most precious, and most abiding spiritual lessons, which God has been pleased to teach me were learned in consequence of enduring my various experiences of sickness. . . . I feel it would have been nothing short of a calamity to have missed the physical suffering through which I have passed. . . . I am positive that I have sometimes met with God’s refusal to heal when I have been most in fellowship with him.

Hudson Taylor

If it’s good enough for one of the greatest Christian Missionaries 

A lousy job....

Being a priest is not a matter of winning victories for God. Countless stories, movies, television, and now video games have burned into our imaginations a certain heroic plot: the brave adventurer sent forth on a Mission Impossible, and eventually winning against all odds. Yet this is not, and never can be, the pattern of Christian ministry, for the simple reason that it is not the pattern of the gospel—which, as you know, is all about human defeat, the shattering of human hope, the excruciatingly painful disappointment of human desires . . . and after all that, in spite of all that, even through all that, God’s victory becomes perceptible. That is why being a priest is such a lousy job for an incurable optimist, because disappointment is so fundamentally built into the job.

Ellen F Davis

Living libraries of God’s Word

By choosing Christ to flesh out the word, God made a lasting decision in favour of incarnation. Those of us who are his body in the world need not shy away from the fact that our own flesh and blood continue to be where the word of God is made known. We are living libraries of God’s word. Our stories are God’s stories. Sometimes they are comedies and sometimes they are tragedies; sometimes faith shines through them and other times they end in darkness, but every one of them bears witness to the truth of God’s word. Preachers cannot “stay out of” their sermons any more than singers can stay out of their songs. Our words are embodied, which means we bring all that we are to their expression.

Barbara Brown Taylor 

(The Preaching Life)

A sketch of a prophet for today

A beautiful sketch of a prophet, 

 So, class of 2011, standing on Mount Elijah and looking toward Zarephath, what do we learn about ministry that might be called prophetic? This: you have to trust in God’s ability to create out of the most unpromising raw material a community of mutual caring. Like Elijah, you have to be willing to be called into a desperate situation, with no clue as to how to improve it. 

Like him, you have to go among strangers, as needy as you and even more clueless, with nothing more substantial to offer than a word that you trust is from God. Like Elijah, you have to go to people who don’t seem to know God at all, and risk everything on God’s ability to speak into their profound deafness—the deafness not just of individuals but of a whole culture. 

You have to trust that God’s Word and Spirit can awaken in them a capacity for generous and faithful action, so they will make your work fruitful in that unpromising place. 

 Elen Davis (Preaching the luminous Word)

Righteousness equals...

Which are the days that have furthered you most in the knowledge of God—the days of sunshine and peace and prosperity? Never! 

The days of adversity, the days of strain, the days of sudden surprises, the days when the earthly house of this tabernacle was strained to its last limit, those are the days when you learned the meaning of this passion of “Go.” 

Any great calamity in the natural world—death, disease, bereavement—will awaken a man when nothing else would, and he is never the same again. We would never know the “treasures of darkness” if we were always in the place of placid security.

Oswald Chambers

Righteousness = peace + quietness + confidence (forever)

“And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever.”

‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭32:17‬ ‭ESV‬‬

Get off the couch and gather round the table

St Francis had the table laid upon the naked earth as was his custom. And when meal lime came, St Francis & St Clare sat down together, and one of the Brothers with the companion of St Clare, and next all the other brothers, and they humbly took their places at the table. And with the first dish St Francis began to talk of God so lovingly, with such depth, so wonderfully, that the divine fullness of love descended upon him, and all were enraptured in God. And while they were thus transported with eyes and hands lifted towards heaven, the people of Assisi and Bettona and in the neighbouring towns saw that Santa Maria degli Angeli and the whole convent and woods, which then were at the side of the convent seemed to be in a great blaze.
St Francis and the foolishness of God p66

A few random unconnected thoughts

1. The table is possibly the greatest and underused tool that we have to build community & make disciples
2. Us charasmatic / Pentecostals dont have the corner when it comes to the supernatural 
3. “Worship” can never be contained in a building or a time, it needs no music just hearts enraptured by and directed to Jesus.
4. It almost sounds like a “small group” I’d go too! Lol

Paradoxes

Like it or not, the life of St Francis, presents us with startling paradoxes. An enormously free and spontaneous person, he nevertheless adhered faithfully to the institutional church; a fully alive human being, he embraced suffering; a true lover, he chose celibacy; born into relative affluence, he practiced a literal poverty. 

St Francis and the foolishness of God (p8)

What do you run on?

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way. . . . God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.

C S Lewis

Mere Christianity

I am not my own

The from now on to live for him.

That I am not my own, 

but belong with body and soul, 

both in life and in death, 

to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. 

He has fully paid for all my sins

with his precious blood, 

and has set me free from all the power of the devil. 

He also preserves me in such a way that 

without the will of my heavenly Father 

not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, 

all things must work together for my salvation. 

Therefore, by his Holy Spirit he also assures me 

of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready

from now on to live for him.

Divine & Heavenly Purity

Once, as I rode out into the woods for my health, in 1737, having alighted from my horse in a retired place, as my manner commonly has been, to walk for divine contemplation and prayer, I had a view, that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God, as Mediator between God and man, and his wonderful, great, full, pure and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension. 

This grace that appeared so calm and sweet, appeared also great above the heavens. The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent, with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception—which continued, as near as I can judge, about an hour; which kept me the greater part of the time in a flood of tears and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to serve and follow him; and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity. 

I have several other times had views very much of the same nature, and which have had the same effects.

Jonathan Edwards 

The Works of President Edwards, (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1881), 1: 21-22.

Ending up in Holland when you planned to go to Italy

At the moment I am reading The Magnificent Journey by James Bryan Smith. I’ve found it an enthralling and challenging read. But today I was caught off guard by a revelation by and a story shared by James. 

If you know our family you will know in recent years that we have discovered the reason for many of the limitations I have faced in my health and body have be caused by inherited chromosomes that were faulty. For me these limitations have not had a dramatic impact to my life, apart from stopping my football career with Aberdeen FC long before I could walk! lol

However the chromosomes I have passed on to my daughter causing CMT and another that I can’t even say the name of, are having a significant impact to her life. Disability wasn’t a destination or a path that I hoped or dreamed of for my daughter. Today I discovered that James, the author of this book also has had an unexpected journey with his daughter and chromosomes. Below is an extract from the book including his story and that of a mum whose child was born with autism.

Our daughter Madeline was born with a chromosomal disorder. We had been planning for a healthy daughter and all that goes with that, such as normal growth and development, watching her one day walk and talk. We did not get that. Things did not go as we planned. Instead, we got something different. At the end of the first year of Madeline’s life, someone gave us a piece written by Emily Perl Kingsley, who had a child born with autism. She compares this unexpected change of plans to having your vacation plans changed: 

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives.

You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” “Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.” 

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place. 

So you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you never would have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around . . . and you begin to notice Holland has windmills . . . and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. 

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy . . . and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.” 

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away . . . because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss. But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to go to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.

Supremely happy forever!

Heard and said the first part of this prayer many times but thinking the second part that I’m not sure I’ve heard before is even more profound. Especially the last stanza! 

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed 

Courage to change the things which should be changed, 

and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. 

Living one day at a time,

Enjoying one moment at a time, 

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,

Taking, as Jesus did, This sinful world as it is,

Not as I would have it, 

Trusting that You will make all things right, 

If I surrender to Your will, 

So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,

And supremely happy with You forever in the next. 

Amen.

The Secret of Joy

One day whilst out walking with St Francis of Assisi one of his fellow monks, Brother Leo, implored him to teach him what perfect Joy was. Here is what he said:

If, when we shall arrive at Saint Mary of the Angels, all drenched with rain and trembling with cold, all covered with mud and exhausted from hunger; if, when we knock at the convent-gate, the porter should come angrily and ask us who we are; if, after we have told him, “We are two of the brethren,” he should answer angrily, “What ye say is not the truth; ye are but two impostors going about to deceive the world, and take away the alms of the poor; begone I say”; if then he refuse to open to us, and leave us outside, exposed to the snow and rain, suffering from cold and hunger till nightfall—then, if we accept such injustice, such cruelty and such contempt with patience, without being ruffled and without murmuring, believing with humility and charity that the porter really knows us, and that it is God who maketh him to speak thus against us, write down, O Brother Leo, that this is perfect joy.

Go find a ladder....

With the annual season for stating resolutions that won’t make it into the second week of January, almost upon us, I thought this post by Seth Godin  had a truthful ring to it. For me anyway!

While it might be fun (or appear expedient, or brave, or heroic) to try to scale a cliff with no tools, it turns out that ladders are a more effective way to level up. 

When it’s time to drive a nail, a hammer is a lot more useful than a rock. Even if you have to invest in obtaining one. 

Often, we spend most of our time throwing ourselves at the wall instead of investing the time to find a useful ladder instead. Perhaps, instead of restating our audacious goals, we can spend more time finding useful tools–insights, skills, trust, attention, access–instead. 
It’s worth the search.

What does your ladder look like?

A hymn worth singing...to the Glory of God the father

It is suggested by Matthew Gordley in New Testament Christological Hymns, that the famous passage about Jesus, God and their relationship was written or adopted as a hymn by the church. Now that is a song worth singing!

6. Though he was in the form of God, 

he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit. 

 7 But he emptied himself 

by taking the form of a slave 

and by becoming like human beings. 

 When he found himself in the form of a human, 

8 he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, 

even death on a cross. 

 9 Therefore, God highly honored him 

and gave him a name above all names, 

 P10 so that at the name of Jesus everyone 

in heaven, on earth, and under the earth might bow 

 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, 

to the glory of God the Father.

Phil 2:6-11

Via Scot McKnight

Fasting because not for

I have been reading Scot McKnight’s book, Fasting: The Ancient Practices  I would recommend it to anyone who is looking to understand and take your first steps into this spiritual discipline.

Being brought up in Pentecostal church teaching on fasting was peculiarly absent. The picture I had assembled in my mind was, if you are asking God for something, you could turn up the heat on God by fasting. Although I’m sure this was not what people believed, fasting equaled a sort of manipulation on the divine. Even a way to control the will of an allmighty God. 

Scot encourages to look at fasting in a slightly different way: A > B > C

“If one wants to see the full Christian understanding of fasting, one must begin with A, the grievous sacred moment. That sacred moment generates a response (B), in this case fasting. Only then, only when the sacred moment is given its full power does the response of fasting generate the results (C)—and then not always, if truth be told.”

Scott suggests we are not fasting FOR something but more we are fasting BECAUSE of something! Answering the WHY rather than the WHAT.

I loved the way Thomas Ryan, Roman Catholic priest, describes fasting in his book, The Sacred Art of Fasting:

“Fasting is one of the ways the servants [of Jesus] keep themselves alert in this future-oriented waiting until the bridegroom returns. To what could you liken their discreet, mysterious joy as they wait? You could say it is like the quiet humming or whistling of a choir member earlier in the day of a concert. It’s like a mother and father cleaning the house and making up the beds in anticipation of the kids’ coming home at Thanksgiving or Christmas. It’s like standing in the airport terminal or train station, waiting for your loved one to appear. It’s like a fiancée patiently addressing the wedding invitations: The long-awaited event is not here yet, but it will come, and this is necessary preparation. In each case the energy is upbeat, forward-looking, and marked by the quiet joy of anticipation.”

To find ourselves we first must find Christ

“But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away "blindly" so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. 

Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. 

The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. 

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

C S Lewis, Mere Christianity 

The miracle of the Incarnation

All which is not itself the Great Divide was made in order that He might come down into it. In the Fallen World He prepared for Himself a body and was united with the dust and made it glorious forever. This is the end and final cause of all creating, and the sin whereby it came is called Fortunate and the world where this was enacted is the centre of worlds. Blessed is He.

- C S Lewis (Perelandra)