Grace pt3

You might also remember the preacher I made you all listen to on the way up to Scotland last summer – the one Dad said sounded like a Disney voice actor. I wish I’d played almost any other of his talks from that series, because they were quite a milestone for me. He points out something that’s been right under my nose all my life, but missed in my utilitarian religious looking at things. “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him”.

What this means is, it isn’t our good behaviour, our radical lifestyle, our acts of love to people in need, that will best show the world how great Jesus is. Weirdly, it’s our dependence on him. If we do good stuff on our own it makes us look impressive, not him. Because the Father’s primary aim is to bring about a full appreciation of his glory (he actually deserves it so this is not the selfish arrogant thing it would be if we were to attempt the same), he is actually way more pleased by our coming to him with a ‘please help’, than a ‘look what I did for you’; with us spending loads of time enjoying being with him and getting to know him than doing what we do every night - try to take over the world.

Me and you have rightly been brought up to believe in ‘put your money where your mouth is’ Christianity – ‘faith without deeds is dead’. We never forget that when Jesus answered ‘what is the most important commandment?’, he gave two answers, because it is so important to love other people. But I recently realised that I had been forgetting something about Jesus’ answer – ‘love people’ still comes ‘second’ to ‘love God’. What I sense is that we’re supposed to focus on loving God, and we will then find ourselves loving people.

I think I’ve spent most of my Christian life, not trying to earn my ‘ticket to heaven’, but the Father’s smile. And I’m beginning to realise it was all a waste of time, because he was always smiling at me. And I never noticed because I was too busy trying to impress him, or impress myself. I think what I really want to say is, learn to just sit and enjoy his smile. That’s what he most wants you to do. It will give you real quicksilver joy, whatever else is happening in your life. And people will see your joy, instead of your weariness, and think they want that for themselves. Don’t worry about doing good works – you’ll end up doing them without thinking about the fact that they are ‘good’. All you have to do now is enjoy the Father’s love for you.

Big big lumps of fudge,
Tim

Grace pt2

I’m sure you remember Katy’s 21st. The party in Chester, where you mixed with all her friends, and I only caught up with old Southampton-ers in the corner. I had a bit of a revelation (as often happens) when talking to Chris.

I suddenly realised that all the effort I’ve poured in to becoming a radical super Christian like Mark Driscoll has resulted in no positive impact on myself or the world whatsoever. Either I’ve failed to carry out my intentions (x hours of Bible study before breakfast), or I’ve done what I meant to (told my school mates throwing conkers at me, ‘I forgive you’) and it’s just been seen for the put-on religious nonsense it is.

But by contrast, I saw, the wonderful things that happened in my life when I ‘selfishly’ enjoyed God’s love for me, and then joyfully did not what I thought I ought to but what I actually wanted to. The best times of prayer, the most enjoyable routines, the most exciting conversations, tough acts of service that left me more psyched than when I started.

I’ve never had a problem with the idea that we are saved by grace – that our restored relationship with God is entirely achieved by Jesus, and that I contributed nothing to it except the evil from which I had to be forgiven and released. I don’t think you find this difficult either. Maybe I’ve found this easy to swallow because I don’t feel I’m a very bad person – I don’t feel the debt that God had to write off for me was very large. My problem with grace is that I didn’t realise there is more to it than that.

God doesn’t stop treating us with undeserved favour when we become a Christian: “Aha! Now I’ve got you! You’d better work solidly from now until you die, or I might change my mind and not save you from hell.” It’s completely the opposite. “If God did not spare his own son,... how will he not also graciously give us all things?” Being a Christian is receiving grace from start to finish. We’re chosen undeservedly, saved undeservedly, made like Jesus undeservedly, used to restore the world undeservedly, and undeservedly enjoy God’s direct and indirect love throughout the whole process. We weren’t just saved by grace. We get to live by grace.

A few things about grace I've never found the words to tell you (Pt1)

Hi Lyds. I wrote this in Pembrokeshire, intending to just give it to you; instead of asking and trusting the Father to give us the right moment to just talk about it... and then he did, in the car on the way home. I guess that is just a classic example of exactly this! Anyway, I thought you might want it in writing; and to be honest, I also might like to put it in a blog, so let me know if you’re okay with that. You don’t have to say yes.

I was sitting eating chips with Matt and Josh after a bike ride, watching the sky slip into dark, and your move came into the conversation. And I realised if there was one thing I wanted for you (or anyone) in a church, it’s not that they practice the presence of the Holy Spirit, or believe in the sovereignty of God, or are actively engaging with the poor in their community; it’s this. That they teach and practice grace.

You probably remember the story about CS Lewis and the congress of religions. They were arguing away for days, Christians trying to identify what makes Christianity any different to anything else. So they ask CS Lewis. ‘That’s easy’, he says. ‘It’s grace’.

You know what an irritating do-gooder I am. You know how I patronise you and look down at some of your behaviour. You know how I spend hours on family holidays writing myself ‘to-do’ lists to make myself a better person. It’s a wonder you don’t hate me. It would certainly be no wonder if you were put off my lifestyle; or my God.


But I hope you’ve noticed me going on a journey with this. I hope these days I’m a bit less judging, a bit less driven, a lot easier to be around. My journey has been getting to know the God I’ve spent so long trying to serve. I want to help you see that when Jesus said, ‘Come to me all you who are weary and I will give you rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light’, he wasn’t telling us a massive lie.

Leadership

I noticed a couple of years ago that all the different house groups in our church had very distinct cultures. One group played endless pranks on each other, ‘I love you lottery’ and facebook rape; one group pulled in masses of well mannered young ladies; another seemed overrun with extrovert guys. My group were thoughtful, fun, and a bit shy. Then I got it – each of these groups were just like the people leading them.

I think this is a phenomenon common to all leadership situations. Through whatever mysterious combination of means, every team/group/community/organisation ends up looking a bit like its leader.

I’ve only just realised the scary import of this idea. If every team ends up looking like its leader, King’s Care is going to end up looking like me!

A specific: I was pacing my room one morning, asking God to make instant supernatural healing happen at our Sunday drop in, and he put a pretty clear idea in my head by way of reply. I wrote this in my journal: “If the project is going to break through into doing this, you’re going to have to do it first.”Convicted.

Of course, this is exactly the picture the word ‘leadership’ conjures up: someone moving forward, someone following behind them. We instinctively despise people in positions of leadership who aren’t ‘leading by example’. Think of Melchett in Blackadder Goes Forth: “remember, brave Tommy, I’m right behind you.” “About 35 miles behind you,” says Mr B.

If I have any dreams I want to see become reality, any vision for how King’s Care could be different, I need to realise it myself in my own life before it will appear anywhere else.

I’ve been reading a book on revival. Obviously I wanted to know what we need to do to get another revival on our watch. And I was surprised to read that recent and Bible history show NOT that we need to get worried about the evil in the world around us; but that we need to get tough with the evil in the church, the evil in ourselves.

A national paper once published a series of essays on theme What is wrong with the world? A man called GK Chesterton (read his stuff) sent in his in the form of a letter:

“Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, GK Chesterton.”

Ghandi apparently said, ‘be the change you wish to see in the world.’ This stuff about leadership gives us hope that we might see the rest of the world change, too.

Conscious of the need to develop myself in order to develop King’s Care, I recently picked up a copy of the classic business book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Guess what? This whole inside-out leadership thing turned up again! The guy says you can’t do anything to make your staff more committed or your kids achieve better. They will see through any leadership techniques to the essential truth that you don’t really love them, just want them to perform better for you.

What you actually have to do is change yourself to love and accept them as they are, and they will feel encouraged to contribute all they uniquely have to offer. The point is, you change the world by changing yourself.

I’m not telling you to lead by example. You already do. I guess I just want to let you off the lead to explore. How can that example be a better one?

Revival

For the first time, I’ve been getting excited about the idea of revival.

I was having a classic in depth with my great friends Chris and Lorna, and we were coming to terms with the reality that despite all our intentions, efforts and talents to change the world for the better, ultimately the best we seemed to have achieved was just to stop it getting any worse... for the brief time we were involved. Lorna spent a couple of years caring for mentally ill teenagers locked up for committing horrific crimes. It nearly killed her.

As usual, this is exactly what Jesus says we should expect. He said that people who follow him will act as ‘the salt of the earth’, preserving it like meat from going off. He didn’t say we could make it fresh again. This is also echoed by the scientific law of ‘entropy’; everything is gradually inevitably always breaking down, unless dramatic efforts are made to stop it. You can see this in relationships, in society, in your own body... Which led me to the question, on Chris and Lorna’s sofa, Mumford and Sons admitting they’d really fucked it up this time, as to why there was any good left in the world at all?

Jesus once said, ‘what is impossible for men, is possible with God.’ And I remembered my history. In the 18^th century Britain was on the verge of revolution. The Americans had done it in 1776, the French in 1789. It looked like we were next. But I read some historians say that we were kept from anarchy and bloodshed by a completely different sort of revolution: the evangelical revival. Famous for people like John Wesley (is a weatherman) and George Whitfield, the revival was a period of few years when millions of ordinary people in Britain stopped drinking their families’ money, stopped living hypocritical religious lives, followed Jesus, and as a result, completely changed the face of the country.

People who became Jesus-followers in that revival abolished the slave trade; pioneered massive social and democratic reforms in the UK, putting ahead of the rest of the world for a century; and built massive successful businesses like Cadbury and Guinness that nurtured their employees and made the British economy the most powerful in the world.

Do you think we need a revival like that again? Human trafficking and trade injustice today is at least as shocking as the slave trade then. 20% of the British population are cut off from the prosperity of the rest by a cocktail of addictions, depression, debt, family breakdown, and generational worklessness. And our economy is royally screwed.

I’m a realist. I don’t believe any government can sort out this mess. In fact, I don’t believe any people could at all. We need God to lay the smack down on our cynicism, selfishness, dishonesty and fear. To give us supernatural wisdom, skill and stamina (this is turning into Robot Wars). To so saturate our country with himself that the meat becomes fresh again, and everyone gets a chance to experience the joy of knowing Jesus.

Faith. Healing.

Thank you for your messages of concern for my mum. Her operation went great - as far as they can tell, they got all the cancer out. Mum's back at work and still positive. Amazing. She's now deciding whether to have radiotherapy to reduce chances of a recurrence.

I can't point to a specific miraculous healing, but I can testify to answered prayer. As my friend Steph told me once, 'you never know how much worse it could have been.' Certainly this whole thing has made me trust my Father God more.

But in the way of miraculous healings, I think the hole in my eardrum, that has been there for nearly 12 months in spite of earplugs in the shower and plenty of prayer, may have healed over.

It's extremely hard to tell, because the only test I have is to hold my nose and blow - which until monday night led to me hearing a hiss in my left ear as air escaped. Ian prayed for me at small group, and when I blew there was a crackling in both ears as the pressure built up behind the eardrums... but no hiss. I tried again. Still no hiss. Um...

The word 'faith' gets slung about a lot in this area, but I've always struggled to understand what people are talking about. After a few years of consideration, I've come to the conclusion that those people don't really know what they're talking about either. I think they understand 'faith' to mean the same thing as atheists: 'clenching your fists, making a face like you're constipated, and asserting something you know to be complete rubbish.' So in that sense, I don't like 'faith' either.

98dechudce

On the other hand, I think the Bible uses the word 'faith' to mean 'taking action on the basis of reasonable evidence'. 'Saved by faith' describes a person judging Jesus' claims to be intellectually and experientially verifiable; and not just stopping there, but handing over direction of their life to him. Or to put it another way, it's deciding you've seen Jesus demonstrate that he's a good guy and does actually have some involvement in reality, and so trusting him enough to follow his instructions, his example. It's a calculated risk.

The Bible says, 'without faith it is impossible to please God'. No wonder. When someone trusts you and opens up; when a friend lets you help; when the fireman looks the petrified little girl in the eyes amid the burning building, says 'trust me', and she lets him carry her out to safety; don't you feel like cheering? I like this kind of faith.

So when we come to supernatural healing, what do we do with faith? Jesus seems to think its important. Simply having a go is faith - that's an action which could leave you feeling stupid, taken on trust. I didn't feel anything as Ian prayed and put his hand over my ear; just my usual self talk of 'this could actually happen right now; this time.' More often in life, I'm noticing a confident eagerness swell in my chest that makes me want to do impossible things. I think that might be faith as well. But I have to say, the only thing I contribute to bringing it on is to consider Jesus, and other things he's done in the world (especially my world).

gueqi

Which is all to say, I can't in any way claim credit for this. And that I'm not worried about realistically assessing whether I have actually been healed. A few minutes after, I blew my nose again- and felt the hiss. All very uncertain. I took these considerations home to my housemate Tim, and he said, 'let's pray again'. So we did a couple of times, and the hiss stopped again. Yesterday the same happened - I tried it, hiss, prayed, no hiss. So I guess I'll carry on like that until my ENT appointment at the end of the month. That'll be real confirmation, either way. I don't want to 'test' the ear drum too hard and make it holy again. Is that stupid?

I have to say, though; the moments when I thought, 'I'm not going to have to have an operation now. This is actually over', were quite something. I'd wish them on anyone.

I find it strange how little I feel or react when Jesus does something mental like this. I've got this idea in my head that I ought to scream, jump around, and act like an overweight middle aged american woman; but maybe that's not from the Bible. I do honestly feel like I'm missing out though. We've agonised over my emotions before, so let's not go that way; but it does occur to me that people will have bigger reactions to miracles when they don't actually believe they're going to happen. In a sense, apart from that feeling of,' woah, my future actually looks different', I only got what I might expect to from a living God who died for me.

Anyway, it's good to be loved. I haven't been in pain from the ear thing, and honestly I haven't been dragging Mum's illness round with me like a rough sleeper's pack. She's in southampton world, I'm in norwich world, and the worlds interact only about once a week. But Jesus still got involved. He must really love us.

Chavs

Here's what I wanted to write on August 20^th: there's no such thing as Chavs. In fact, that was the only line anyone remembers from the first talk I ever did. They were called townies back then, but the idea is the same: teenagers from council estates are all violent, soulless criminals. Council House And Violence. Or at least, all violent teenagers from council estates are just violent teenagers from council estates. Like they're not human the way we are.

So in August I got to help run a 'get on top of life' course for 16-18 year olds not in education, employment or training (i.e. nowhere). I started badly.

If you throw a bunch of teenagers who've never met before into a room together, you'll get some interesting results. They're desperate for the others to accept them; they're terrified they're going to become the runt of the litter. They might be the alpha female somewhere else, but that counts for nothing here. Everyone will probably think they're desperately uncool and ignore them from now until the end of the course. That's a fate worse than death.

So when they show up, day one, does anyone speak? Not on your life. One misjudged comment could shame them forever. And the longer the silence goes on, the more scared we get. The harder it is to break. Half these kids haven't been out of the house all week. And there's still five thick minutes before anything's going to start.

Over the room from me are two Connexions advisors. I discover from the girl next to me that one helped her get here. 'Great', I say. Silence. 4 minutes 45 seconds to go. Everyone stares somewhere they won't accidentally make eye contact. I turn to the girl again. 'Is she any good at her job?'

Ha ha ha. It seems I haven't learnt so much after all.

In fact, writing this, I realise how much we're still dragging round the world with teenage glasses on. I hear friends say, 'we need to show people that Christians are cool.' Really? I sit down at a conference planning meeting and worry how I'm going to show all these professionals I know what I'm talking about. At the end, I found out two of them are student volunteers – less 'professional' than me. My friend emailed me today she wonders when she's going to start feeling like a grown up. 'I'm 24, and I'm still waiting for life to begin.' Talking to Mum and Dad, it sounds like this feeling never goes away – you never feel any older, just start noticing how young your doctor is, or the England captain.

I kind of like the fact that for the first few seconds after waking up, I don't know how old I am. I'm just me. Actually, that's how I feel when I'm spending time with Jesus. Maybe that's how I'll feel with him forever in a new heaven and a new earth.

As the day went on, I got chatting with the young people; and I got less and less scared of them. Alex with the headphones became Alex listening to the Man in the Mirror. Jo the sarcastic northerner became Jo who drinks three cans of strawberry kick and giggles all afternoon. Sullen Karla became Karla who just lost a child. Wayne who's just come out of prison became Wayne who wanted walking to the Bus stop because he got beaten up there last time. Dan with the motor bike became Dan who struggled with school, can't get a mechanic's apprenticeship 'til he's 18, can't get a job at all; and Dan who ran round the block with me in 2 minutes before our session started again.

They were still sullen, didn't listen and impossible to control. They still smoked and swore and bragged about getting into fights last night. They still wore tracksuits and lived in "forn-'ill". They were still all the things we mock and fear them for. But I wasn't afraid of them anymore. I just felt pity.

I guess what I want to write is that you don't need to be afraid of chavs. Maybe if you stop being afraid of them, like me, you'll be able to realise you're actually the one holding all the cards. You're the one with the chance of a decent job, hobbies, safety from crime (most victims of crime live in the same area as the criminals). You're the one who can afford to travel the world, and still go out for Sunday lunch every week. You don't need to look behind you as you walk for fear of being jumped by a rival gang. You can answer your phone, because no one's threatening you with seven kinds of murder if you don't get them their drug money. You've never had to go to prison or decide if you should have an abortion.

I don't believe I would make better choices than anyone else if I was born in their shoes. I've done nothing to deserve the prosperous life I enjoy. It's a gift from my secret admirer. I cannot understand why he loves me so much.

I want to say that you don't need to worry about not being grown up, everything sewn up. I think you'd never do it if you tried. So maybe we were made to let someone else look after things for us, and to enjoy it like a child. And I want to say, 'put aside childish ways' – don't live in fear anymore, and so keep all your toys to yourself. I think you can understand that's not a contradiction. You can keep using the word 'chav' if you like. But I hope you can make some your friends.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbzMsIcp6fI