by John Mason | Apr 11, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” So wrote the noted 20th-century science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein.
He anticipated the thinking that has become commonplace in Western Society. Like Caligula in Albert Camus’ play of the same name, freedom has come to mean the absence of self-restraint.
A good question to ask is whether Caligula was really free? A careful reading of Camus’ play reveals Camus’ doubts about this. In the closing scene, we find Caligula saying, as he looks in a mirror: “I have chosen a wrong path, a path that leads to nothing. My freedom isn’t the right one…”
Properly understood, freedom is choosing to submit to good and wise constraints.
It is essential that we know in our minds and hearts that Christianity does not begin with rules. Rather it begins with a new life made possible by Christ Jesus. In Colossians 1:13 we learn that God is committed to rescuing us from this present world of darkness and sin, and giving us a new life in the new world where his Son is king.
In Colossians 3:1-4 Paul frames our new life with specific exhortations – on a vertical axis: If then you have been raised with Christ, set your minds on the things above; and on a time axis: For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
Paul urges us to let the light of our resurrection state fall on every aspect of life— our priorities and goals, our words and actions, and our attitudes. Everything is to reflect our new identity.
‘Let this new life of ours be the governing principle’, he is saying. ‘Everything in our old world will die. But in Christ, we are now linked to a new existence on the other side of the grave. In one sense we’re in heaven already. If our physical body packed up now, we wouldn’t cease to exist.
It makes a great deal of sense therefore that we start living as members of the new age to which we belong. It’s logical that we should adopt a new lifestyle.
All the dos and don’ts that follow on in Colossians 3 flow logically from this. Since we have entered a new kingdom, we should …Put to death therefore what belongs to our earthly nature…
This is so different from the legalism Paul writes about in Colossians 2. The legalism he rejects is this: ‘Here is a list of rules, obey them, and one way or another you’ll maneuver yourself into God’s presence’.
Instead, he is saying, ‘Since you have been transferred into God’s kingdom, live accordingly’.
Let me identify three themes that Paul addresses – sexuality, the tongue, and relationships.
First, Put to death… what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. ‘If you say you are one of God’s people’, Paul says, ‘sex outside of marriage is not on’. People sometimes say they are ‘making love’. Rather, Paul is saying that it is ‘self-gratification’ – hence his reference to greed.
Second, Paul speaks about the tongue. But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator (Colossians 3:8-10).
To us it seems strange that Paul speaks about controlling the tongue in the same context as controlling sexual appetites. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk are so much part of everyday language that it seems incongruous for them to be put alongside sins of the flesh. We forget that Jesus taught that angry words are the same as murder.
Indeed, James says that the tongue is a restless evil (James 3:8). Malice, obscenity, and rage cause damage. ‘Therefore’, says Paul, ‘put off this old self. It isn’t consistent with our new nature’.
Sometimes people say that to be interesting and attractive we need to be a little sinful. But that is to forget Jesus: he was hardly aloof and boring. He was man as man was meant to be.
Third, relationships: In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all! (Colossians 3:11).
People today cry out for the breaking down of barriers that divide – be they race or religion or whatever. Most of us long for a world without antagonism, without need, and without loneliness – a world where there is genuine love.
Churches ought to aim at being such a society. That is the way of God’s new world.
Indeed, one of the purposes of ‘church’ is to set up a signpost to that other universe. So the world can see and wonder. We ought to be a microcosm, pointing beyond this age, this world, to heaven. Rule-keeping won’t achieve this. Lives that are being set free and changed by God’s truth, will.
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Apr 4, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
In his article, ‘The Easter Effect’ in The Wall Street Journal over Easter (March 31 – April 1, 2018), George Weigel asks, ‘How did a ragtag band of nobodies from the… edges of the Mediterranean world become such a dominant force in just two and a half centuries?’ He notes that by the beginning of ‘the 4th century Christians likely counted for between a quarter and a half of the population of the Roman Empire, and their exponential growth seemed likely to continue…’
Weigel goes on to comment that ‘there is no accounting for the rise of Christianity without weighing the revolutionary effect on those nobodies of what they called “the Resurrection”’.
While though at first some like Thomas, questioned and doubted the accounts that Jesus was physically alive, when they saw him their lives were transformed – so, Thomas’s “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). Indeed it was Jesus’ physical resurrection from the dead that changed their lives.
Let me take up two examples of the way Weigel demonstrates the impact of Jesus’ resurrection on his followers.
Drawing on the work of NT Wright and Pope Benedict XVI, Weigel observes that the resurrection Changed the way they (Christians) thought about time and history. ‘God’s kingdom had not come at the end of time but within time – and that had changed the texture of both time and history. History continued, but those shaped by the Easter Effect became the people who knew how history was going to turn out. Because of that, they could live life differently’.
Furthermore, Weigel notes, ‘The way they thought about their responsibilities changed’. Seeing that their future was caught up with Jesus, ‘they could face opposition, scorn and even death with confidence; they could offer to others the truth and even the fellowship they had been given’.
Indeed, without Easter there would have been no gospel mission. Every outreach talk in the New Testament is founded upon Jesus’ resurrection (so, Acts 17:31).
A better world today? Most of us don’t find it hard to imagine a safer, happier fairer world, but the question is, ‘How do we get there?’
Changed people. In Colossians 3:1-3 we read: So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
We need to read text in context and so recall what Paul writes in Colossians 1 and 2. There he tells us that when Jesus came a dislocation in human history occurred. In Jesus, God’s rule over the cosmos took on a new form. With Jesus a new world order began, and that new world now co-exists with the one we see about us.
In Colossians 1:13 Paul put it like this: God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and has transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves...
God is working out his cosmic strategy in world events and in the arena of our lives. The key element is now in place – Christ Jesus. Truly God and truly man he has given his life as the one perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world, satisfying in full all of God’s righteous requirements.
But Jesus’ death was not the end. Rather, it was the end of the beginning— the first stage of God’s cosmic plan. It also marked the beginning of the end— the last stage of God’s plan for the cosmos as we know it. How can we be sure about this? Jesus’ resurrection is the key.
Jesus’ resurrection was not simply a good ending to a fantastic life. It demonstrates that all Jesus tells us about God, the world and us, is true. But Jesus’ resurrection points to more than life beyond the grave: it points to a new world order that exists; a world order that we can begin to experience now.
Two great realms now co-exist—the dominion of darkness and the kingdom of God’s Son.
The dominion of darkness we could say, is centered around a black hole. It is a shrinking world, shrinking to eternal destruction. But the other world, the kingdom of God’s Son, is centered around a bright nova, and it is an expanding universe, expanding to eternal glory.
For the present, there is an interface between these two parallel worlds, a door in time that allows people to pass from one world to the other. Those of us who turn to Jesus and give him our allegiance have an identity in both worlds. Physically we are still in the old, but our names are registered in the new.
In his concluding remarks to his WSJ article, George Weigel comments, ‘However important the role of sociological factors in explaining why Christianity carried the day’ (in the 4th century and beyond), ‘there was that curious and inexplicable joy that marked the early Christians, even as they were being marched off to execution. Was the joy simply delusional? Denial?’
Weigel concludes, ‘Perhaps it was the Easter Effect: the joy of people who had become convinced that they were witnesses to something inexplicable but nonetheless true. Something that gave a super-abundance of meaning to life that erased the fear of death. Something that had to be shared. Something with which to change the world.’
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Mar 28, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
Back in August 2011, The Wall Street Journal carried an article, ‘Reversing the Decay of London Undone’ by Dr. Jonathan Sacks, then chief rabbi in Britain.
Dr. Sacks stated, ‘In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works for you…
He further observed, ‘The collapse of families and communities leaves in its wake unsocialized young people, deprived of parental care, who on average—and yes, there are exceptions—do worse than their peers at school, are more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, less likely to find stable employment and more likely to land up in jail…
‘The truth is,’ he commented, ‘it is not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement…
‘Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives,’ he went on. ‘Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent. Alexis de Tocqueville saw it then, Robert Putnam is saying it now. It needs religion: not as doctrine but as a shaper of behavior, a tutor in morality, an ongoing seminar in self-restraint and pursuit of the common good…’
Let me, with respect, sharpen the focus of what Dr. Sacks suggested, by saying that, humanly speaking, we need a re-fresh moment of God’s good news. True and lasting changes in society occur when individual lives are transformed from the inside out through God’s mercy alone.
Consider Paul’s words in Colossians 2:13-15: And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 having cancelled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him.
Paul is writing of the condition of the Jewish and the non-Jewish peoples. The Jewish people cannot keep God’s written law; and the world that knows not God fails to keep the law of their conscience. All men and women are morally bankrupt.
Furthermore, we are captive to spiritual forces we cannot defeat. Satan, holding himself out as a chief prosecutor, holds the catalog of our failures up to God. Being the demanding prosecutor he is, Satan insists that the penalty must be paid – something that God, in his justice, cannot refuse. And because sin is a capital offense we are all en route to a death we cannot avoid.
C.S. Lewis brilliantly captures these elements in his Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Edmund has betrayed Peter, Susan and Lucy, and Aslan himself. The Witch demands Edmunds’ life. “He has broken the laws of the deep,” she insists. “He is mine,” she shrieks. “His life is forfeit.”
On Good Friday this week, we particularly remember Jesus’ crucifixion. It is worth pausing and meditating on Paul’s words. He tells us that God has smashed the bars of the spiritual prison of self-interest – he has canceled the debt through Jesus’ death. That is, the charge sheet against us has been wiped clean. What is more, in the same way that the charge against Jesus was nailed to his cross, he has taken the charges against us and nailed them to his cross as well.
Verse 15 goes on to tell us that Jesus through his death has also disarmed the demonic powers that we could not overcome. Had those powers known the awesome power that Jesus wielded through his voluntary sacrifice, they would have dismissed any thought of putting the Lord of glory to death (1 Corinthians 2:8).
And so it is supremely that Jesus Christ through his own death has abolished death for us. No longer do we fear its inexorable approach: God made you alive with Christ, he says in verse 13.
The cross is where Jesus turned our captivity into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
As Keith Getty and Stuart Townend have written: This the power of the cross: Christ became sin for us. Took the blame, bore the wrath; we stand forgiven at the cross.
Jesus’ death is the means of our transformation from the inside out. This is the news we need to know deep in our own hearts. This is why we pray for opportunities to promote it to our family and friends, our work colleagues and neighbors. God not only exists, but his nature is always to have mercy. And that mercy we see supremely on the first Good Friday.
As FF Bruce comments (Colossians…, p.112): ‘The message proclaimed by Paul to the Colossians remains the one message of hope to men and women in their frustration and despair. Christ crucified and risen is Lord of all.’
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Mar 21, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
Many around us seem to have lost what used to be the common courtesies of please and thank you. Sadly, this is not just true of the wider community but is also true of many families and church members, particularly in the large urban centers.
Yet, to say please and thank you is firmly grounded in the Scriptures. When we respond to God’s call to us to turn to Christ Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we need to be like the tax-collector in Jesus’ parable and pray, ‘Lord, please be merciful to me, a sinner’ (Luke 18:13). And when we know God’s extraordinary mercy, how can we be otherwise but thankful.
Is the absence of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ a sign of immaturity?
Paul the Apostle wrote to the young church in Colossae: As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving (2:6-7). These two verses unlock the central theme of the Colossian letter.
One of the key reasons some of God’s people are constantly looking for extra experiences and blessings is their lack of on-going Christian growth and maturity. They have accepted Christ – that he died for their sins – but they have never gone any further. Consequently their faith has shrivelled and dried up. This is the very opposite from what the New Testament expects.
Paul expects a number of things to be happening in our lives. For a start, having received Christ Jesus the Lord, so we are now to live in him. We can think of it like this. When Christ moves into our lives there are many things with which he is not comfortable. There’s a lot of cleaning up to be done, repairs and renovation. But, as anyone who has been involved in renovation and repairs knows, it takes longer and costs much more than originally thought.
And it’s like that with our lives. It takes a lot longer and costs a lot more to make our lives a place fit for the king. The challenge is to make Christ Lord in all our affairs – something he develops in Colossians 3.
Furthermore, Paul continues, as you were rooted… be built up;… Despite the mixed metaphors – one is from the world of botany, the other from building – Paul’s meaning is clear. He is keen to see growth. He doesn’t want stunted Christians in Colossae – or anywhere for that matter.
How does this growth occur? By chasing after more and more ecstatic experiences? By adopting more and more ritual and ceremony when God’s people gather? No. A genuine experience of Christ rarely comes to someone who is not spending time in the Scriptures. This is also true of churches. Too often, as the ceremony increases the sermons become shorter.
Yes, there are times when we’re not motivated to dig deeper into the Scriptures. Sometimes sickness, a crisis in life or the death of a friend, leaves us more open to reading our Bible more rigorously. Sometimes it’s not until we see the houses, cars, the trophies of the world for what they are – transient trifles which have a fading and passing splendor – that we see the lasting treasure of God’s truth. And then we begin to grow.
As you were taught… be established in the truth, Paul continues.
For some years a little saying kept me focussed on the need for consistent Bible reading in my life: ‘No Bible, no breakfast; no prayer, no paper.’ The danger with this kind of line is that Bible reading and prayer become a law. But if it is taken as a guide it can be a useful reminder of the need for daily Bible reading and prayer.
Here are the keys: As you received… so live – godly living; as you were rooted… be built up – spiritual growth; as you were taught… be established in the truth – biblical understanding.
To return to where I began. It’s important that we don’t overlook Paul’s exhortation. It is brief but to the point: …abounding in thanksgiving. To have a thankful heart is to have a contented heart.
Let me ask, how often do we get anxious because thankfulness to God is not part of our Christian DNA? The sense of thankfulness within us is a real measure of our growth in Christ. We can’t get taken up with our own desires and self-interest for long if we are truly thankful to the Lord Jesus Christ – for who he is and all he has done for us.
If deep down in our hearts we know that he is the Good Shepherd who has not only died for us but who is also committed to bringing good for us out of all the confusion and troubles of life, we can be nothing but thankful to him.
And this spirit of thankfulness, I suggest, will flow over into our relationships where others have played a part in serving us. Isn’t it time we reintroduce the biblical motifs of please and thank you?
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Mar 14, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
There are times in life when we can feel cut off from God, sometimes because of feelings of failure or unworthiness, sometimes because of feelings of ignorance or unbelief. How important it is for us to continue to read and reflect on God’s written self-revelation – for that is what the Bible is.
In Colossians 1:25-27 we read Paul’s testimony: I became a minister according to the divine office which was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now made manifest to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
Paul’s words reflect the way God reveals his plans. Typically prophets first declared God’s promises concerning his plans for the redemption of a fallen humanity. However the timing and the ‘who’ of the plans were kept under wraps. ‘But now’, Paul says, ‘God has revealed his plans – to include non-Jewish peoples with Jewish people in the benefits of the salvation found in Christ Jesus.
There is a generosity and simplicity in Paul’s words as he sets out the meaning of our faith: Christ in you, the hope of glory. On the one hand we enjoy a present experience: Christ in you. On the other hand there is a future reality: the hope of glory.
For many the Christian faith is a moral code they must struggle to observe. Their faith is legalistic and tedious. But Paul tells us that the essence of Christianity is found in a relationship with the One who is at the heart of the universe. It’s about knowing Christ and having his Spirit live within us. ‘God in the soul of men and women,’ is how one ancient writer put it.
The tragedy is that many expect too little from Christianity. If we don’t know anything about a living relationship with Jesus, we have a faith in name only. It’s the heart experience of knowing Jesus Christ personally that we need to pray for.
And, coupled with this present experience of the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ in our lives, there is something else: …the hope of glory. There’s a future expectation.
Blessing though the presence of Christ is in our lives now, this is only a foretaste of something far greater that God has in store for us. Christianity is not just a present experience but a future hope – glory.
Death casts a long shadow over life. Indeed, many of God’s people in the Middle East, in Southern Sudan, in Nigeria and many other places, face the reality of death from one day to the next.
Glory. Paul is telling us here in summary form what we find more developed elsewhere. In Romans 3:23 we learn that all humanity has lost its pre-fallen glory. But in Romans 8:18, 21, Paul speaks of the glorious destiny God has planned for his people through the work of the incarnate Son of God. The good things that we experience of Christ living in us now are a tiny glimpse of what it will be like when we live with God. The best is yet to be.
There will be times when we will feel disappointed with the way life treats us now. We might feel that God has let us down. But if we think this way, we accuse God falsely. He doesn’t promise us that life will be a bed of roses. There will be difficulties and disappointments.
What the gospel message offers us here and now is not transformed outward circumstances, but rather transformed inner spiritual resources: Christ in you. That’s what the gospel is about now, says Paul. Outwardly our bodies are wasting away, he writes elsewhere. Inwardly we are being renewed, day by day.
Yes, there is a better world of which the Bible speaks, a world free from pain and frustration, a world in which there is no loneliness or grief. But we need to understand that is a future world, a world that at the moment we see by faith, not by sight.
That said, the hope of glory is not some vague, wistful, ‘maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t’. Paul speaks of a sure, confident, guaranteed kind of hope. And hope, by definition, is unrealized in the present.
To forget this is to invite a tragic, despairing disillusionment. The tragedy for many is that they expect too little from Christianity. The tragedy for others is that they expect too much.
Jonathan Edwards once wrote, Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Mar 7, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
Despite extraordinary advances in science and technology, we are still incapable of making a just and lasting peace for all peoples of all nations. Peace at the best of times is an uncertain affair. It seems the only way we can ensure it, is through more laws, greater security and the loss of more personal freedoms.
Commenting on why he had written The Lord of the Flies, William Golding said: “I believed then, that man was sick — not exceptional man, but average man. I believed that the condition of man was to be a morally diseased creation and that the best job I could do at the time was to trace the connection between his diseased nature and the international mess he gets himself into.”
Alienation is a good word to describe our situation. In his Letter to the Colossians, Paul the Apostle speaks of our hostile, alienating attitude towards God. In Colossians 1:21 we read: And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, as was shown by your evil deeds, …
The evil deeds are the outcomes of the hostility, the enmity within us towards God. They are not the cause of the breakdown of our relationship with God. Our evil deeds spring from our hostile attitude towards God; we might say he is real, but we don’t want him to come too close. And the outcome is that our world consistently demonstrates the tragic results of our attitude to God. Injustice and greed, hatred and conflict, pain and death, mar the harmony and joy that God had intended. ‘Sin’ – our refusal to honor God or give him thanks – not only causes separation between us and God and so with one another, but also means as Paul says Ephesians 2:12, that we live without God in the world – something we see in our culture today.
The question becomes: ‘If there is a God who is all-powerful and good, will he do something about the mess?’
When evil first entered the world creating enmity between us and God, God could have written us off as a failure and started again. But that would have been an admission of failure.
Instead, as the narrative of the Bible unfolds, we learn that God resolved to implement a more costly strategy. Rather than abandoning this evil and ungrateful world, he himself came to the rescue. He needed to adopt a plan to destroy the enmity without destroying us. Only by doing this would a just and lasting peace be possible.
Colossians 1:21-23 provides an insight into God’s strategy: And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, as was shown by your evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, …
God’s strategy was neither political nor military, nor was it educational. Rather he chose a path of self-sacrifice. From the standpoint of God’s perfect righteousness, a just and lasting peace could only be made possible through the voluntary sacrifice of someone who was perfect.
Suppose a family member has profoundly and unjustly hurt us. One day we learn that they are in really serious trouble and we know that we alone have the resources to help them. We could tell them to go to hell – and forget them. But what if within us there was still a love for them? We would need to find a way within ourselves so that we could justly absorb the pain, the hurt, and the anger boiling up within us at the very thought of them, enabling us to reach out and help them.
The extraordinary news is that through the death of the Lord Jesus, who was both truly God and truly man, God provided the perfect means by which he could reconcile us to himself. When Jesus died, God in his love absorbed within himself the just pain and anger we have caused within him. When we bow our proud heads and truly ask Jesus Christ for his forgiveness, God can justly declare us to be at one, to be at peace, with him. Indeed, as FF Bruce (Colossians: 1984) observes, ‘… peace, to be worthy of the name, must be founded on righteousness’ (p.77).
Our response? In her Christmas broadcast in December 2012, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II said: “This is the time of year when we remember that God sent his only son ‘to serve, not to be served’… The carol, In The Bleak Midwinter, ends by asking a question of all of us who know the Christmas story, of God giving himself to us in humble service: “What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; if I were a wise man, I would do my part”. The carol gives the answer “Yet what I can I give him – give him my heart”.”
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
