nobrokenreed

Archives for June 2017

Life in a Day

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Can the darkness speak of your wonderful deeds?  Can anyone in the land of forgetfulness talk about your righteousness? O Lord, I cry out to you.  I will keep on pleading day by day. O Lord, why do you reject me?  Why do you turn your face from me? – Psalm 88

We proclaim to you what we ourselves have actually seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that you may fully share our joy. This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all. – 1 John 1

Over the past months and even years, there have been some incredibly dark times; as we look to go into the world and make disciples, to build a different sort of community, we have at times felt so lonely. Perhaps our writings portray something different? I hope not. At times, the darkness has been overwhelming. Recently especially, we have felt attack. The enemy is very real.

I don’t want to malign any church, but it would have been easy at times to walk into a ready made ‘fellowship’ and commit to the programmes on offer. But is that what we are called to do? We don’t believe so. For anyone pioneering disciple making and ultimately church planting, I would suggest that it can take years of seemingly fumbling around in the dark, wondering which way to go, how to structure things, where to find the support? Are we sure we heard the Lord correctly (let’s ask him one more time, just in case).

The times where people have wandered into our fellowship, speaking of the desire to do something different, out of the ordinary have been numerous. They are tired of church, how their church looks so different to the church in the Acts. But we have no building, no pastor, no sermon, only occasional music and a desire to be intimate and all share the load. We try to be a kingdom of priests here on earth, each one of us. We expect our everyday lives to reflect our beliefs, and give each other permission to speak into each others lives. While Sunday is a special day, we try to meet throughout the week, and on Sunday, our ‘service’ might last most of the day, with a good part of it spent on the streets and in the neighbourhood talking to people about Jesus. We take Jesus’ final words, ‘go into the world and make disciples’ quite literally.

Needless to say, most have not stayed and have moved on. Many move back to church. On the odd occasion, we have even asked some to leave.

Read through the Acts and Paul’s letters carefully, and you may realise that the description of the early church seems more like a family than a service, where people interacted with Jesus and each other, moment by moment. If it’s anything like ours, it will be messy, disorganised and spontaneous. We spend time looking across from one another, rather than at the back of each other’s heads; everyone has an equal voice, an opportunity to share what the Lord has been saying, and what they in turn have been saying to others. The question, “who are you speaking to about our Lord this week?” is a common one you will hear. There is expectation, even a demand perhaps. How are we obeying?

For some, this is too much. On the odd occasion, when we have had no interest from those we talk to on the streets, and nobody has turned up to a gathering, life has been very bleak. Darkness is not far away. Is this really what God wants us to do? Have we been disobedient? Loneliness.

We say this to those reading, wondering whether it will be worth trying something different, or for those who have tried or are trying to move into the realm of making disciples and feeling they are getting nowhere. Is this what it is meant to be? The truth is perhaps yes it may be.

Yet pursuing Christ is not an exercise in darkness, but an activity filled with light. Take last week as just an example. In our small group, we had children and older people mixing together throughout the morning. We prayed into each other lives, beginning to confess to each other some of our fears, hurts and joys. As we talked, we stopped throughout to pray, to invite Jesus then and there to speak and move on the issues as they came up. We celebrated and prayed specifically for those each of us were ministering to in the world. We discussed when we would meet, and asked for continual prayer. We celebrated communion, along with Christ.

Later we went through a ‘Discovery Bible Study’; we read a small passage, seeing what the Holy Spirit says as he leads us together through the passage. Is there something to share, to obey? What does the passage tell us of God, or of man? What questions do we have, what pierces our heart? Then, at the end, a challenge – who will we share this with this week?

Some left us at this point, while others of us had a brief lunch before we headed for the streets for the afternoon. There we spoke at length with a young Muslim man about Christ, convicted by the Holy Spirit to continue on, even when we felt the urge to stop. In the end, we prayed for the Lord to open his eyes, after we had explained the Gospel. Others spoke with a woman, and brought her up to the step of turning towards Christ, before we decided it was better to meet with her again later this week. We pray she will be available as we spoke to many others as well.

This is our Sunday, our church – a family of believers, living and sharing together, and moving out into the world filled with the Spirit with “God making his appeal through us.” It is the Light breaking into the ‘sometime darkness.’

We hope to share more of the real life we have over the coming weeks, but let us be truthful as well. There are times when we feel isolated, when God seems to have deserted us, surely as Christ must have felt often. Yet there are times of indescribable joy, when we get a glimpse that we are moving, walking, right where God wants us to be.

It doesn’t get any better. We are learning to be content.

Life and Death

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So you must remain faithful to what you have been taught from the beginning. If you do, you will remain in fellowship with the Son and with the Father. And in this fellowship we enjoy the eternal life he promised us. – 1 John 2: 24-25

We had a death in the family this week. As far as death goes, and I don’t want to be insensitive at a time of grief, it was a pretty good one. Peacefully, the person fell asleep with family beside them, praying. Death is the great separator though isn’t it, for all of us there is a time when we leave our home, those we know and love and we step into the unknown. I used to wonder, and still do at times, whether I will be able to find my way around the streets of heaven, and what the buildings will look like. Funny isn’t it, our imagination.

But death is also the great unmentionable in our society. We speak of ‘passing away’ or ‘moving on’ or if you’re really desperate, ‘being reincarnated.’ Most of us, all of us really hope we will go to a better place. The Bible though, is much less wavering and watery in its summation of death. It says each of us will stand before a Holy God and give an account of our lives, how we have lived and advises us accordingly that we should be thinking about this beforehand. It is more important than life insurance.

Further, it tells us that Jesus, who existed from the very beginning with the Father, was briefly separated from the Father at death. They must have been grief-stricken beyond imagination, yet because of that, we are able to live for eternity. Jesus’ separation, meant our connection in. Whenever I talk to strangers about the Gospel, I always try to bring these facts into the conversation. Death is a reality, will we be separated eternally, or connected in? How we respond is crucial.

But in this passage in John’s letter, he talks of fellowship here, being eternal. It is aimed at believers, but it has implications for an unbelieving world. It’s been two years since we came to Sydney and started a work we believed the Lord called us to. There have been ups and downs, highlights and lowlights. Part of this has been understanding the meaning of the type of fellowship that Jesus wants us to live in with other believers. The fellowship Christ talks of here, is far more than just an event. It is an existence, lived out day to day, week to week in our lives. Eternity, apparently and according to John, starts in this life.

It seems to me that deep down, both the world and the believer wants this above everything. More than anything else, heaven will be defined not as a place, but as a community centred around the Godhead. But Christ wants us to live this out now. Our small gathering here in Sydney is beginning to prayerfully work through this, to understand what it looks like. We are making progress.

At the core of it, is Jesus Christ leading us day to day through his Spirit. It means that we must be prepared to live within each other’s lives, and hold each other accountable as to how we live. A quick scan particularly of this letter of John will show us that is how we are supposed to live. It should be a Holy community, one fit for Christ to be part of. He will not tolerate blatant sin, and so we must be prepared within that community to confess to one another how we live. Scary stuff, but Biblical, as James calls us to ‘confess our sin to one another.’ Confessing my sin to my Christian brother who stands before me is quite different to confessing my sin to a God whom I cannot see. Perhaps though, if I do the former I may be spared the later embarrassment of the latter.

It should be governed by love for each other, where we love each other as family, real genuine family. There would be no need within such a family as we would all share what we have openly, honestly. Further, there would be healing within such a family, because as a family we would come to the one who does heal and ask that he heal our brokenness, whatever that looks like. There would be praise, song, teaching and daily walking together with Christ and each other.

Out of this family, which would be something the world would never see anywhere else, would be a natural tendency to minister into the world. Such a devotion to Christ and each other, would naturally spill over into our neighbours, the streets, the pub, the housing commission block – everywhere God sends us. At the centre of it all would be The Christ, Jesus as head of his ‘church’ breathing life into us, ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’

For most of us here, this seems like something we will have to wait for and so in the meantime we continue to bring God into our lives on certain days, at certain times. Our isolationist, independent society here in the West will prohibit such a family as this. Think so?

I don’t share that, in fact I am convinced more than ever that Christ wants this to become a reality in my life, in my small village here on this earth, now. That he wants us to be part of a community that is daily connected to each other and him, and in so doing that our love spills out onto those around us.

That’s what you want really as well, isn’t it? Let us pray fervently that it becomes a reality in each other’s lives. Watch this space for more adventures with Jesus.

The Challenge of Islam

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In the late ‘90s, David Pawson recorded his mammoth project, “The Challenge of Islam to Christianity.” The series was based on a prophecy David received from the Lord, around the book of Habakkuk, a prophecy which he tested by going to denominational leaders across the country, asking them ‘is this from the Lord?’ Unanimously the verdict was ‘yes.’ It is the correct way to handle prophesy and as such, the prophecy deserves to be taken seriously. Perhaps it is also coming to fruition.

The prophecy Pawson received was that God was going to use Islam to purify his church, and it specifically related to Britain, and to some extent the West. I have thought a lot about that over the past week or so, but have never forgotten the content of that video series. I don’t want to appear insensitive at a time of absolute horror, but it is worth reading the book of Habakkuk to put this into context. An abridged version, is that the Lord tells the prophet Habakkuk that he is going to use the barbaric Babylonians to purify his chose people the Israelites, because of their idolatry and rampant injustice.

Coincidentally, I am reading some of the later letters in the New Testament (Peter, James etc) as well as having just finished a book called ‘From Small Beginnings’, about how various threads of people came together to form a close-knit, Biblical community in the US. Where does all this fit?

One of the major thrusts of the New Testament, is not grace, nor the love of God even, but the need for Holiness in our own lives. We are called to obedience. But crucially, all the references in the New Testament are to the church being called to Holiness, the church being purified. There is little or no mention of the world, perhaps because God expects nothing better from the world. From beginning to end, the NT calls for repentance and obedience within the church, the body of Christ.

For too long, too much sin has been allowed to flourish in ‘the church’ and go unchallenged and unnoticed. When we have substituted a personal, daily relationship with a living God into an attendance-based activity, sin was always going to gain the upper hand. When we dress up for our weekly attendance, yet continue on as though nothing has changed in the rest of our lives, we make a mockery of what Christ’s coming was all about.

The most powerful thing about the church in Acts, was the body of Christ, living a unified, Holy life in his daily presence. How I live on Tuesday, is no different to how I live on Sunday. In case we’re unsure of this, it is exactly how life will be like for eternity. The Kingdom of God is within you, means we need to start thinking about this now. God, at least, is deadly serious about how the church looks for the coming groom.

Of course, none of this will happen with the current church structure. Not ever. While Sunday is still the ‘holy day’ and the priesthood still lives out our daily Christian lives for us, and when we only ever gather together for an hour a week, our lives will be no different to those around us. Sorry to burst the bubble. Smaller gatherings, led by the Holy Spirit, meeting regularly – challenging each other how they live before a Holy God so that ‘a little leaven doesn’t unleaven the entire batch,’ and reaching out into their community with the joy of the Lord, is exactly what the Lord calls us to do and how we should be living. Outside of the West, I would challenge that is exactly how the church looks – and is flourishing as a result.

Reading ‘Small Beginnings’ recently, the true story of a community in the West, formed by believers who all moved into the same neighbourhood and lived church as they did in the book of Acts is a remarkable story. Our faith becomes so attractive to the outside world, as we love, serve, sacrifice and live Holy lives in a daily relationship with each other and before our Lord; again, it is exactly how we shall live before the Lord throughout eternity. Most importantly though, and this is vital, we cannot hide our sinfulness when we live daily in each other’s lives.

It is our refusal to live differently that makes it so difficult in our culture to make disciples. Last week our entire gathering was out on the streets (what a delight!) but we hear the same story – surely, I am good enough to stand before God? This comes, in my view, from a long held belief in Western civilisation that it is okay for someone to believe in God and continue living unchanged before him. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that though. But, the world buys into it. Hold on a moment…so does much of the church.

The last word Jesus says to his church is ‘Repent’ (in Revelation). Rethinking Pawson’s original prophecy, it would seem that God is not so much interested in punishing us as changing us. Like the nation of Israel, his intention for the church is to be a light in the world, to be so pure before the world that many in the world will choose to join it.

There is a great cost in this though, and that cost is our choice to live differently. Are you, am I prepared to pay that price for Him? The rewards are out of this world.

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