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PENTECOST: LOVE

PENTECOST: LOVE

In his recent book, The Road to Character, David Brooks observes,

For many people, religious and nonreligious, love provides a glimpse of some realm beyond the edge of what we know. It also in a more practical sense enlarges the heart. The act of yearning somehow makes the heart more open and more free. Love is like a plow that opens up hard ground and allows things to grow…

– The Road to Character (p.173).

Love. When we stop and reflect on life, most of us acknowledge our need for love – be it marital love, familial love or filial love. But even then we are not satisfied for long, for we know that this kind of love will never satisfy the depths of our soul. Nor will it last.

Douglas Coupland in his Life After God confessed:

Now—here is my secret. I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.

– Life After God .

Consider Peter’s words in his First Letter:

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours made careful search and inquiry, inquiring about the person or time that the Spirit of Christ within them indicated when it testified in advance to the sufferings destined for Christ and the subsequent glory Life After God.

1 Peter 1:10-11.

Notice the words, the grace that was to be yours It is the promise of God’s love. It is a love that is humbling and disturbing, for God’s love is unmerited on our part and costly on God’s.

God’s love involved the greatest sacrifice of all – the pure for the stained, the powerful for the weak, the glorious for the inglorious. As Peter tells us here, God had long planned to do what he had to, to reveal a love that is far beyond our imagination, a love that would rescue us from his just condemnation of our sin.

Notice how Peter puts it. He tells us that the prophets of old anticipated God’s grace, his act of love, and that the apostles and the gospel-preachers proclaimed it. God’s action in and through his eternal Son was developed over centuries. What the prophets of old searched and inquired about concerning God’s Messiah and his suffering, has now been announced through the gospel.

God’s love and the salvation he holds out to us is found in the sufferings and subsequent glory of the Messiah. Jesus is his name; Messiah or Christ is his title. His sufferings and his subsequent glory have made our rescue possible. As Peter goes on to write in chapter 2:24, Christ’s sufferings were sustained when he bore our sins in his body on a tree. Messiah’s ‘glory’ occurred when God raised him from the dead and gave him a position of honor and power.

Two great themes that bubble throughout the Bible are the ‘sufferings’ and the ‘glories’ of the Messiah. Isaiah, Jeremiah and other prophets had important things to say to their generation, but ultimately they were speaking about the coming of Messiah and the unfathomable blessings he would bring. The Old Testament prophesied the Messiah, the New Testament proclaims him.

No wonder John Newton could pen the words, Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me….

When our own faith is awakened afresh to the reality of God’s love – a love that is deeper and more satisfying than any human love – we will surely want to live in it and live it out. Indeed, when we experience the riches of God’s love we will want to do great things for him.

PENTECOST: JOY

PENTECOST: JOY

There are times in our relatively comfortable world when we are surprised by an unexpected turn of events – it may be a sudden fall in the stock market, loss of a job, a divorce, a heart attack, or the death of a loved one. And then there are unexpected moments when people around us make life difficult because of our faith. Our first thought may be, ‘Doesn’t God care?’

In his First Letter, Peter the Apostle was writing to people who were facing hardship because of their faith. His response, as we saw last week, was to remind his readers of the vital hope they have because of the imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance that Jesus Christ has made possible through his death and resurrection.

In this you rejoicehe continues, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials. He knew the reality of tough times and suffering. He is aware that people who follow Jesus Christ as Lord may suffer physical persecution. But notice what he says in verse 7: so that the genuineness of your faith —being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire— may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

Don’t be surprised by the unexpected challenges and tough times in life, Peter is saying. God is using these moments to refine and purify your faith in him, for true faith, he says, is more precious than gold. While gold is one of the most durable of substances, it perishes.

This is profound. If we think about it, God’s evaluation of something is the ultimate standard (the ‘gold standard’) of meaning in the universe. Anyone who has faith in this God has a secure framework for meaning and purpose in their life. This subverts the popular wisdom that says only fools believe in Christianity. Peter is saying that to know that God loves us, and is committed to us, is all we need.

We may not always understand all the events in our lives – even over the course of a lifetime. We may only discover the purpose of our experiences when the Lord reveals the secrets of all and gives special honor to those who trusted him, even though they couldn’t see the reason for what was happening at the time.

JOY

Believe… Rejoice. Consider what Peter says in v.8. It’s quite amazing: Without having seen him, you love him. The normal experience of those first readers was a genuine, ongoing love for Jesus Christ, even though they hadn’t seen him. This suggests that they had a daily relationship with the Lord Jesus through prayer and Bible reading, through church and the singing of songs and hymns. Two words stand out: believe and rejoice. They are the keys.

Peter is telling us that there are two ways to live – either without belief in Jesus Christ and therefore without hope and without joy, or with faith in the risen Lord Jesus Christ and therefore with hope and with joy. And the joy of which he speaks is an ongoing, continual activity and experience. It is an ‘unutterable’ joy.

The word unutterable occurs only here in the whole of the New Testament and speaks of a profound joy that can’t be expressed in words. Luther and (eventually) John Calvin, had it right. Singing is vitally important for God’s people because it enables us to express the fullness of our joy in a way that is more effective and helpful than merely speaking. This is why Christianity has inspired the great variety of hymn writing that is lyrically and musically rich as we find, for example, in that of JS Bach, Watts, the Wesleys, Newton and, more recently in the Getty music.

Joy. Peter is speaking about the joy that springs from being in the presence of God himself. This joy is more than happiness. It is a joy that is tested and deepened through suffering. It is the joy that springs from knowing and trusting our Living Hope – the risen Christ Jesus.

PENTECOST: FEARLESS

PENTECOST: FEARLESS

In an interview in October 2011 (Guardian) the musician, Jarvis Crocker said, “I think basically becoming famous has taken the place of going to heaven in modern society, hasn’t it? That’s the place where your dreams will come true. It’s an act of faith now; they think that’s going to sort things out.”

It is very easy for us to despair about our world with its indifference to the faith that has had such a great impact on western culture. In many ways our world has come full circle back to the Graeco-Roman world of the New Testament. Apart from dramatic technological changes, there is little that has not already been.

The 1st century Roman world was marked by narcissism and political correctness. Sexually decadent, it was preoccupied with entertainment and plagued by alcoholism and gambling. What we often forget is that the gospel of Jesus Christ triumphed in that world.

Over these next weeks I plan to identify themes in 1 Peter that touch on Peter’s response to the challenges God’s people faced in the 1st century. He begins by focusing on the theme of ‘hope’.

In 1 Peter 1:3-4 we read:

 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!  By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,..

The good news of Christianity had brought a dramatic change in the lives of Peter’s readers. They and he (he says ‘us’) had been ‘born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ…’ They had a confident expectation that life here was not the totality of their existence. This hope is living in that it grows in strength as the years go by. Psalm 92 says that in old age the righteous will still yield fruit: They shall be full of sap and very green.

Godly, chronologically-enriched people often reveal this hope in their eyes, their demeanor and in their attitude to life. They are not on the way out: they are en route to a far better place.

You may have friends who say, ‘that’s all very nice, but how can you be sure that there really is an after-life? How do you know that it won’t just be one big party?’

Indeed, a recent article in The Telegraph noted that AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ was regularly heard at funerals: Hey momma, look at me, I’m on my way to the promised land, I’m on the highway to hell (don’t stop me); And I’m going down, all the way down, I’m on the highway to hell. Within months of the release of this song in 1979 the lead singer was dead after a drinking binge.

The Apostle Peter anticipated the kinds of questions people ask about Christianity when he anchored his words in Jesus’ resurrection. ‘The living hope,’ he says, ‘has been brought about by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.’ The fact that Jesus’ tomb was empty on that first Easter Sunday assures us that Peter’s words are not make-believe. Believing that Jesus was raised from the dead is a center-piece of the gospel the Apostles preached. Every sermon in The Acts of the Apostles references Jesus’ resurrection. We have every reason to have a fearless hope.

This is so encouraging. Peter tells us this living hope is an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. It will not decay. It will be the opposite of our experience now where, despite the best efforts of the cosmetic and fitness industries, our bodies age and decay. It will not be stained by sin. There will be no evil, no suffering nor pain. Furthermore, it is an inheritance that will not lose its value, its beauty or its glory. Nor will it disappear.

What is more, for the present we are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time (1 Peter 1:5). ‘Protected’ means ‘guarded’ or ‘shielded’. God’s power continually sustains and energizes our faith at every twist of life.

Peter wants us to know that God’s people are born anew to an inheritance that is far superior to anything we can ever possess here on earth. Because our hope is not something vague or uncertain we can face life now without fear. God’s promise is rock-solid.

NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE WITH GOD

NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE WITH GOD

Last Thursday (May 28) The Wall Street Journal reviewed The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray, an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics. The reviewer, Thomas Meaney, comments that Mr. Gray ‘has been at odds with the easy assumptions and smug remedies of what might be called a “progressivist” worldview… Gray believes that something went wrong in the long development of modern society and that the germ of the problem may well be our idea of progress itself.’

The reviewer notes that in The Soul of the Marionette, John Gray says ‘we all today believe that we possess a mastery over the natural world that sets us apart from our benighted ancestors. “The Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess, … has become the predominant religion”’.

Gray’s response to his proposal that there is no such thing as ‘progress’, Meaney notes, is ‘a variation of the great holding pattern known as stoicism – the acceptance of all that is out of one’s control and a realization that knowledge in itself is never redemptive.’

As I read this review I reflected on how the world of academia claims to canvas and consider carefully all aspects of knowledge, yet constantly dismisses the historical evidences as well as philosophical arguments that support the Christian faith. Assuming Meaney’s review is a fair treatment of Gray’s work, where did our sense of a creator ‘god’ originate? Why do we have a conscience and an awareness of justice? How should we respond? Reasoning will play a part, but we need something much more. We need God’s promised Spirit to be at work.

In his conversation with Nicodemus (John 3:1-15), Jesus pointed out that we need the Spirit of God to give us a birth ‘from above’ if we are to enter God’s kingdom. In John 16:8-11, Jesus developed this when he said:

When the Spirit (he) comes, he will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.

– John 16:8-11

It is the Spirit who awakens a sense of moral shame and spiritual reality. Notice, the sin the Spirit convicts us of is not our breaking of the Ten Commandments, but our failure to turn to Jesus as our rightful ruler. God will one day ask us all: ‘What did you do with my Son?’

Furthermore, the Spirit alerts us to a new certainty of the vindication of righteousness. We hear of the atrocities in Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, Libya, and in Yemen and our hearts cry out for justice. Jesus’ death, resurrection and exaltation guarantee the ultimate triumph of goodness.

The Spirit also brings us a new urgency about the reality of the end of the world. When Jesus died Satan’s attempt to usurp the throne of the universe was confounded. With the exaltation of God’s Messiah, God’s kingdom arrived. Before Jesus ‘went away’, humanity ignored God’s claim. However, on the day of Pentecost, because the Holy Spirit had come convicting the world, three thousand were cut to the heart by the words of the Apostle Peter.

Like the wind the Spirit comes silently and unexpectedly, going where he wills, and changing lives. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12:3No-one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.

What should be our response to the opposing voices around us? Pray! When Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them to pray, he went on to say:

“Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you” (Luke 11:9f)“How much more will your Father in heaven give you the Spirit,” he concluded (Luke 11:13).

Impossible? No. Not if we ask God to send his Spirit to do his works of mercy, opening the eyes of the blind, unstopping deaf ears, and softening hard hearts. With Jesus’ departure, the Holy Spirit has been poured out on to the world.