by John Mason | Aug 29, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
Earlier this month I drew attention to Dr. Greg Sheridan’s observation in his new book, God is Good for You (Allen&Unwin:2018), namely that ‘Liberalism (today) remains in furious rebellion against Christianity, its parent and its source. A certain panic at the existential emptiness of liberal atheism impels liberalism to a new authoritarianism. Everyone must genuflect to the same secular pieties’ (p.31).
Furthermore, as his book develops, he writes, ‘It is evidence of how Christianity has been marginalized in the popular culture in the West that there are very few Christian celebrities, or rather celebrities whose primary fame is due to their Christianity, their Christian works or writings,…’ (p.66).
‘The new atheist polemicists are really the bishops of the new atheist religion, fortifying their followers in their beliefs by reference to their own sacred texts and authorized teachings. But they are false prophets of a false religion.’
‘Christians,’ he says, ‘have a right to be worried about what is happening to their beliefs in the West. The primary challenge is not intellectual but cultural…’ (p.66).
How then do we respond? The Bible’s starting point – and ending point – is prayer. How important it is then that we consider, not just the importance and the power of prayer, but rather the One to whom we are praying.
Let’s look again at Ephesians 3:20-21: Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Now to him who… is able to accomplish abundantly far more…
Handley Moule (Ephesian Studies, p.133), quotes Adolphe Monod who wrote of these words: “After the grandest promises which human language can express, the Holy Ghost here closes by declaring that all which can be expressed is infinitely below the reality which is in God. In vain we mount, even in the track of an Apostle; we can only contemplate, after all, ‘parts of the ways of God’ (Job 26:14), and we must always conclude with ‘groanings that cannot be uttered’ (Romans 8:26). Yes, and nothing other can suffice us than this avowal of insufficiency; nothing less could respond to the vague and vast need of heart. All that the mind comes to see distinctly, and the mouth to enunciate with precision is incapable of satisfying us. This conclusion accordingly, astonishing and unexpected, is just what we required…” (Moule, p.133).
Too often, in our minds, God simply becomes the Great Being who, potentially at least, meets our needs and fulfills our aspirations. We think rather little of what he is like, what he expects of us, what he seeks in us. We are not captured by his holiness and his love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our imagination, too little of our discourse, too few of our priorities.
We need to pause and meditate on Paul’s words: Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish than all we can ask or imagine…
Handley Moule continues to quote Monod: “Nothing can restrain or bound the power of God towards us; nothing in him, nothing even is us; no limits set to his power, for it knows no limits; not even the weakness of our prayers, and the imperfection of our knowledge, for he is able to transcend all our demands and all our conceptions” (Moule, pp.133f).
Think of it: Paul the Apostle tells us we should be confident in praying for the limitless resources of God’s power to be at work within us.
Handley Moule comments, ‘The Doxology… seems to come less to close it (the prayer) than to waft it aloft into eternity. This is one of the great Scriptures, the Holy Spirit’s words of the first order. Let us recall it, let us ponder it, to be ourselves uplifted, and then abased, but only to be the better uplifted again in the power of God’ (HCG Moule, Ephesian Studies, pp.132f).
It may be that we have not reflected sufficiently on the awesome nature of our God. Or maybe God is saying to us, you do not have because you do not ask. You’re playing in the shallows. You’re not swimming in the deep crystal clear waters of God’s love.
Ask. And when we do, we will begin to understand just how much God does love us. Then we can know what it means for us to love the Lord our God, and to know his power at work within us as we live in today’s world.
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GettyMusic ‘Sing’ Conference – September 10-12. Location: Nashville, TN (Music City Center – 201 5th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37203) Theme: ‘Psalms: Ancient & Modern’
Visit the Anglican Connection Booth.
Lunch with the Anglican Connection ‘Focus Group’ – Tuesday, September 11 from 12:00pm to 1:30pm. Theme: ‘Thomas Cranmer & the Psalms – and 9/11’.
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© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Aug 15, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
Love. Back in the sixties Burt Bacharach sang: What the world need now is love sweet love … The Beatles were singing All You Need is Love. The problem was then and still remains today that it’s one thing to sing about love, but quite another to live it.
In his prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21, Paul prays that God’s people be rooted and grounded in Christ’s love and so have the power to grasp the love of Christ, how high and deep is the love of Christ and to know the love of Christ… (Ephesians 3:18f).
In speaking of our experience of Christ’s love Paul mixes two metaphors: one from agriculture— rooted, and the other from construction— grounded. On the one hand, our experience of Christ’s love makes us like well-rooted trees, able to withstand droughts. On the other, like well-built houses, we are enabled by Christ’s love to withstand the hurricanes of life.
We can have an intellectual understanding of God’s love, but Paul prays not only that we know but also that we experience Christ’s love deep in our hearts.
In 1 John 4:10 we read: In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. When John says ‘God is love’, he is not referring to some quasi-erotic ecstasy, but to Jesus dying on the cross.
In speaking of ‘love’ John chooses a rarely used word in the original language, a word that speaks of a love that is committed to making sacrifices, no matter the cost, for the good of others.
Paul uses the same word here as he prays that God’s people may feel in their hearts the deep love of the Son of God for us. God’s Son was willing, not just ‘to share in our human suffering on the cross’, as Greg Sheridan says (God is Good for You, Allen&Unwin: 2018, p.84), but rather to die in our place the death that we deserve. Drawing from the depth of his love for us, the most godly man who has ever lived chose to die for us in our god-forsakeness.
Sometimes it takes a sickness, a crisis, or a tragedy to awaken us to the reality of Christ’s love. Sometimes it’s not until we see houses, cars and the luxuries of the world for what they are – trinkets whose splendor is uncertain and fading – that we experience the heart of God’s love.
The power of God’s love. Paul knows that it is only when God’s power is at work in our lives that we really see what it meant for him to get into our skin and enter our world; what it cost for him to suffer and die in our place. And it is for this that he prays.
Early in the 19th century, Napoleon’s army opened prisons used in the Spanish Inquisition. They came across the remains of a prisoner in a dungeon deep underground. Bones hung limply from chains around the wrists and ankles. The prisoner had suffered a grim death, but he had left a witness. On the wall he had sketched a cross and written words at each corner. Written in Spanish they read at the top of the cross, ‘height’, at the bottom ‘depth’, on one side ‘length’, on the other side ‘breadth’. Even in his suffering this man had felt the impact of God’s love.
I want you to experience, Paul says, the power of the love of God, to feel in your hearts the reality of that love.
Significantly, he adds a caveat: That with all the saints you may have the power to grasp… God’s love.
Change. A personal experience of Christ’s love doesn’t tend come to lone ranger Christians. Rather, when we consider the kinds of people God saves by his grace, whose lives are transformed by Christ – the egocentric materialists and party-loving hedonists, the powerless and the impoverished, you and me – do we fall to our knees in humility, thankfulness and joy.
Sometimes we wonder how God can love some of these people because we ourselves find it hard to love them. And then it hits us that wonder of all wonders, God loves me.
Can this power change us? Can this power change our relationships with people around us? Can this power help us cope with the disappointments and frustrations of life?
Paul’s answer is very much ‘Yes’. God’s power can change us, direct us, enable us to say sorry, to say, ‘I forgive.’ This power of God, like the dynamite it is, can and does change this fallen, fragile life of ours.
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GettyMusic ‘Sing’ Conference – September 10-12. Location: Nashville, TN (Music City Center – 201 5th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37203) Theme: Psalms: Ancient & Modern
Visit the Anglican Connection Booth.
Lunch with the Anglican Connection ‘Focus Group’ – Tuesday, September 11 from 12:00pm to 1:30pm. Theme: ‘Thomas Cranmer & the Psalms, and 9/11.
by John Mason | Aug 8, 2018 | Uncategorized
In the Introduction to his new book, God is Good for You, released last week, Greg Sheridan, an Australian op-ed writer and author, observes that ‘the hostility to religion’ in the West ‘is unfalsifiable’. He comments that liberal atheism which is committed to ousting Christianity from the market-square, ‘is driven insane by contradictory impulses it can no longer control or balance. One is an anti-social self-absorption. The development of the metaphysical understanding of human identity has ended in a dry gulch’, he says.
Christianity, he points out, brought hope even for ‘the excluded and marginalized of the ancient world – they all had souls. But the soul… gave way to the self as the therapeutic age replaced the age of belief. Now, in our post-modern times, the world of social media and the universal quest for celebrity, even self has been supplanted by the brand… From soul to self to brand is a steep decline in what it means to be human’.
Springing out of the ‘brand’, Sheridan continues, liberalism, against the universalism of Christianity, is creating ‘a new series of tribal identities. Nothing is more powerful now in Western politics, or more dangerous, than identity politics. It sells itself as a way to help disadvantaged and marginalized communities. But eventually everyone wants a slice of identity politics and it sets all against all’.
How do we live in such a world? Paul’s significant prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21 goes to the heart of what we need.
In Ephesians 3:14 through 3:17a we read: For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,… that… he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;…
Paul links the power of God to the strengthening work of God’s Spirit in our lives – not in order to make us externally powerful people, but rather that our inner lives will be open to Christ, the Spirit of Christ, fully taking up residence within us.
Paul understands that while we may truly turn to Christ in repentance and faith, we tend to fear him being Lord of every aspect of our life. We might be seen as ‘fanatics’. We shrink from the idea that Christ is interested in changing those things within us which conflict with his expectations. We resist the idea that he may want to re-tune the desires of our heart.
While we might be truly Christ’s, we may not be fully Christ’s. This is not about a second blessing. Rather, it is the recognition that Christ’s presence within us is, as with all relationships, a process.
So Paul prays that the Spirit will use his supernatural power to open our hearts to the beauty and love that flows from Christ – so that when we see his overwhelming love for us, we will not fear putting our lives fully in his hands.
Further, Paul continues: So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;…
Dwell here is key. It means, ‘take up residence’ and ‘settle down’. There are many things in all of us with which Jesus Christ will not be at all comfortable. As we come to know him better we realize the need for cleaning up and even renovation. And, as anyone who has been involved in renovation knows, it takes longer and costs much more than originally expected.
Paul knows this and that’s why he prays for God’s power to be working in us through his Spirit. He knows that God’s intention is to make our lives a fit home for his Son.
Paul often uses the imagery of putting off the old and bringing in the new. Colossians 3 gives us an example of the kinds of practical things Jesus wants to see happen in our lives. So in 3:5, we read: Put to death therefore what is earthly in you:… Toss out of your life what doesn’t fit this new life with Christ. Is it sex outside of marriage? Is it pornography? Is it evil or greed? Is it anger or rage, or malice or slander, or perhaps cursing? Do you always tell the truth? These things belong to the old self.
Put on the new self which is being renewed after the image of its creator. So, Put on then,… compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
The key to living as God’s people in our rapidly changing world, is to have Christ, who has saved us, now living at the very center of our life.
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GettyMusic ‘Sing’ Conference – September 10-12. Location: Nashville, TN (Music City Center – 201 5th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37203) Theme: Psalms: Ancient & Modern
Visit the Anglican Connection Booth.
Anglican Connection ‘Focus Group’ Lunch – Tuesday, September 11 from 12:00pm to 1:30pm. Theme: ‘Thomas Cranmer & the Psalms, and 9/11.
– – –
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Aug 1, 2018 | Uncategorized
‘When it comes to knowing God, we are a culture of the spiritually stunted,’ writes DA Carson in A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Baker: 1992, p.15f). ‘So much of our religion is packaged to address our felt needs – and these are almost uniformly anchored in our pursuit of our own happiness and fulfillment…’
He comments, ‘In the biblical view of things, a deeper knowledge of God brings with it massive improvement in… purity, integrity, evangelistic effectiveness, better study of Scripture, improved private and corporate worship, and much more… One of the foundational steps in knowing God, and one of the basic demonstrations that we do know God, is prayer – spiritual, persistent, biblically minded prayer’.
Let me ask, ‘How can we grow as well as meet the challenges that confront us in today’s secular progressive society if we don’t adopt an ever-deepening relationship with God through prayer?’
Ephesians 3:14-21 gives us a glimpse of Paul the Apostle’s prayer-life. He begins: I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name (3:14f).
Genesis 1 tells us that God created all men and women in his image. It is, therefore, true to say that all of us have our fatherhood or parentage in God.
However, as the Bible unfolds, we see there is a special relationship between God and those who turn to him and enjoy a personal relationship with him. Paul tells us what Jesus tells us – we can call God, ‘our Father’. It is this great truth that stands at the head of Paul’s prayer.
With this thought in mind let me touch on the first theme in his prayer: ‘I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being,…’, he writes (3:16).
Notice he doesn’t simply pray, ‘God bless…’ Rather, drawing on his deeper understanding of God – the riches of his glory – he prays for God’s powerful work within us.
Change from within. Paul knows that life is not all downhill as we age. Rather, he says that if God is at work in our lives, changes for the better to our inner being can occur.
It’s here we begin to see the counter-cultural way God works as opposed to the way that the world expects him to work. The world expects God to work with great display of obvious power. And we can be tempted to think like this too.
But God in his goodness has a different plan. For the present, he chooses to work in secret— changing us from the inside out, not the outside in. It’s easy to miss this for we tend to think of God’s power in terms of what can be seen.
We might think God’s power in our lives will bring self-confidence, self-assertion, success. And when it comes to churches, we think that God’s power will be seen in high-powered church.
But what Paul is praying for is the work of the Holy Spirit, strengthening us at the very heart of our lives. Because of his understanding of the character of God, Paul wants God’s Spirit to strengthen our appetite for God. He wants the Spirit to strengthen our resolve to trust and follow Jesus so that we say ‘No’ to temptation and ‘Yes’ to him. He wants the Spirit to so focus our life on Jesus that we will drop sinful habits and adopt a new framework for living.
He longs to see the whole of our inner life affected by the Spirit—the desires of our hearts, our thoughts, and the choices we make. Paul is saying, ‘I pray that God will change you through the Spirit’s work within you.’
This can be painful for as the Holy Spirit begins to probe and question, to challenge, discipline and develop us, it hurts. The adage, ‘no pain no gain’ rings true when the Spirit begins his work.
Growth. When he takes the Word of God and reaches to the very depth of our lives, the Word becomes like a scalpel in his hands. Paul knows that God wants us to put on the qualities and integrity that Jesus himself displayed. So he writes in 2 Corinthians 3:16-17 that God is committed to changing us into the likeness of the Lord Jesus Christ— from one degree of glory to another.
Is your prayer life stunted because you don’t make the time to grow in your understanding of God?
In Knowing God, JI Packer writes, ‘Christian minds have been conformed to the modern spirit: the spirit, that is, that spawns great thoughts of humankind and leaves room for only small thoughts of God.’
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Jul 25, 2018 | Uncategorized
In her Wall Street Journal article (May 31, 2018), Peggy Noonan wrote: ‘I have been thinking about trust. All the polls show and have for some time what you already know: America’s trust in its leaders and institutions has been falling for four decades…’
She went on to observe, ‘It’s time to see our mighty institutions with their noble facades—the grand marble court houses, the soaring cathedral—for what they are: secretly frail and in constant need of saving.’
Is there a solution? If so, where do we begin? Pray.
How then should we petition God for our leaders, for his people, for the nations and for people in need? Daniel’s prayer in chapter 9 sets out principles for us.
The Honor of God’s Name. Following his confession of Israel’s sin (see last week), Daniel petitions God on the basis of God’s mercy. In 9:15 we read: And now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and have a name for yourself,…
Daniel reminded God that his Name was revered because he had brought about the release of his people from slavery in Egypt. People knew that you didn’t mess with this God. He did what he said he would do!
And while Daniel was honest about the sin of God’s people (Lord, we have sinned, we have done wickedly), he was bold to pray: Lord, in view of all your righteous acts, let your anger and wrath, we pray, turn away from your city Jerusalem, your holy mountain;… (Daniel 9:16).
Daniel didn’t ask God to put aside his righteousness and overlook the faults and failings of Israel. Rather, he asks God to act because of his righteousness.
We don’t live under same covenant as God’s ancient people. With the coming of Jesus the Messiah we live under a new covenant grounded in the unchanging character of God.
In Matthew 16:18 we read that Jesus plans to build his church and in Matthew 28:18-20 we see that this involves drawing people from all nations to himself as Lord. What is more, you and I are caught up in his commission to bring others to know and love him, to honor and serve him.
This brings us back to the principles of prayer that we find in Daniel 9.
Consider how he develops his appeal to God in 9:17-19: Now therefore, O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his supplication, and for your own sake, Lord, let your face shine upon your desolated sanctuary. Incline your ear, O my God, and hear. Open your eyes and look at our desolation and the city that bears your name. We do not present our supplication before you on the ground of our righteousness, but on the ground of your great mercies. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, listen and act and do not delay! For your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people bear your name!”
At the heart of Daniel’s intercession is the glory of God’s name. Daniel did not hesitate to remind God of what he’d already revealed in his Word and urged him to roll up his sleeves and act.
Daniel wasn’t being presumptuous. He was humble, honest and contrite about his own and Israel’s sin. But this did not prevent him from praying on the basis of God’s character and God’s promises.
The glorious thing about God which the Bible reveals to us, is that he is gracious and always willing to receive people back on the basis of repentance and a commitment to start afresh. No matter how great our sin, God is willing to forgive us when we turn to him in heartfelt repentance.
Furthermore, Daniel’s prayer challenges us to come to God, not just about the little things that concern us as individuals, but about the big things, namely governments, our loved ones and the salvation of people we know.
In the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, he told them – and us – to pray for the honor of God’s name and for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. These are promises we can take to God in our prayers for our country, our leaders and all our concerns – great and small.
Prayer is a precious privilege. It brings us into the very presence of the God whose nature is honor-bound always to have mercy. Yet so often our prayer life is dead. Why don’t we pray? God is the perfect father who loves to give.
Phillips Brooks once commented: ‘Prayer is not conquering God’s reluctance, but taking hold of God’s willingness’.
Optional – you may want to read Daniel 9:16-19; Luke 11:1-4; Ephesians 3:14-21.
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© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
