Tag Archive for 'preaching'

New prophecy?

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Published
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bcg
on 10 August 2008
in Church
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We had an interesting comment by the preacher in church today.  He was saying that whenever he preaches, he tries to have something fresh, something new and prophetic to say.

Now I whole-heartedly agree that preaching should be prophetic.  It should challenge people, show them what God is saying to them through the Bible, feed them with truth, and encourage them in their day-to-day lives.  And above all, it should point to Jesus.

Now, my understanding of 'prophetic' is not that it is all about predicting the future (although it often does include that).  Much of the prophecy in the Old Testament consists of the the prophets reminding the people of God's promises, to bless them if they are faithful, and to punish them if they are not.  Granted, that included predicting the consequences of their disobedience, but essentially they were calling the people to remember God's word and his promises, and to be obedient.

Now that will sometimes include something 'new'.  That is, a fresh way of putting something, or teaching people something they didn't already know.  However, my reflections on the Old Testament prophets is that very often the people did know what they were being told, they were simply choosing to ignore it.  Or, they needed to be shown or told something they already knew in a different way.

I think that preachers should not be too worried about having something 'new' to say, but having something faithful to say - faithful to God's word.  The challenge comes not from what the preacher comes up with that is new or fresh, but from the word of God itself.

All this, the preacher tonight would agree with - his comment simply set me off on a train of thought!

Resurrection Life

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bcg
on 25 March 2008
in Church and Theology
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On Sunday I preached on the final day of the college mission to Larkhall, Bath.  The text of the sermon can be found here.

Rather than preach directly from a passage, I preached on the meaning of Jesus' bodily resurrection, both for life in the future, and life here and now.

Since working at A Rocha two years ago, I have become more and more aware of how important it is that a) Jesus was incarnated, b) he spent three years preaching and healing the sick, c) he was raised bodily from the dead.

All these things amount to a wholehearted affirmation of God's good creation.  Many evangelicals seem to be drifting to an almost gnostic position, hugely prioritising the 'spiritual' over the 'physical'.

We must remember that when God's kingdom comes, we will not be living in a vacuum, floating on clouds in the sky, but on this earth, transformed.  Heaven comes down to earth, not the other way round.

A further thing I have often wondered is if we should translate 'spiritual' in the New Testament as 'Spiritual', i.e., of the Holy Spirit.  I'm sure someone has thought this before!

Pissing against the wall

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Published
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bcg
on 10 March 2008
in Bible and Church
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I'm not sure if this is very funny or extremely sad, but I found a video of a Baptist preacher preaching talking about the phrase 'pisseth against the wall' from the King James.

Baptist preaches on KJV "him that pisseth against the wall"

This is the verse he preaches from:

Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam,
and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against
the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel, and will take
away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as a man taketh away dung, till
it be all gone.

1 Kings 14.10 (KJV)

From this verse the preacher's message is that real men (as opposed to 'males') urinate standing up.  The problems in America are caused, it seems, by men urinating sitting down.  How he manages to ignore the fact that in the context of this verse is that urinating standing up is not a good thing: doing it will get you 'cut off' from the people of God.  I don't claim to understand what's going on here, but I'm pretty sure it's not what this guy says!

He also uses manages to rant about how the King James is better than all other translations, for saying 'males', editing out 'Hell' and 'Jehovah' (which is the name of God).  From a bit of research on the internet it seems that this isn't the only strange thing this guy has said.

Clarity and understanding

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bcg
on 22 January 2008
in Random and Theology
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I am currently trying to learn how to use XSL for my website.  XSL stands for eXtensible Stylesheet Language, and allows an XML file to be displayed in a friendly format.

XML files look like HTML, and they are commonly used for holding data.  While slower than a database, they are much easier to read with the naked eye.  Because of this, they are very useful for sharing data across different systems.  For example, try opening a *.doc file in a text editor.  It is a load of gobbledegook.  Now find a *.docx file, change the extension to .zip, extract the files, and view them in a text editor.  You can read it with the naked eye.

However, all of that isn't my point.  A friend recently wrote a blog post complaining about overly complex language when explaining one's ideas.  It is of course not limited to academic circles, but all over the place.  I have been reading online guides to understanding XSL, and many of them are absolutely useless.  They use jargon.  They explain things using other concepts they haven't explained.  They use single sentences to describe complex things.  And so on.

I think that at the root of all this is a lack of understanding.  The path to clarity is nothing less than understanding.  If people do not understand fully what they are saying, then they will regurgitate complex language in an attempt to sound clever, to sound like they really understand what they are talking about.

After all, I should know: I did this at university.  When writing essays I 'copied' the language of the books I was reading, in order to sound clever, because I didn't really understand.  One of my first essays is a wonderfully dense description of 'nothingness', using language heavily derived from Moltmann's own dense analysis.  When you really do understand something, it is painfully obvious when people are doing this.

My plea is this: please don't write an instruction manual, or something explaining a concept, unless you understand at least most of it, if not all of it!

The wrath of God was satisfied

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bcg
on 18 December 2007
in Bible, Church and Theology
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I have been reading some of the minor prophets recently, and it hit me quite how angry God is with his people, and with the nations surrounding them. Of Ninevah God says, 'Behold, I am against you, declares the Lord of hosts...' followed by some fairly graphic and disgusting things (Nahum 2.13, 3.5-7 etc). Micah begins with the promise of destruction for Israel's idolatrous behaviour. Obadiah condemns Edom, Jacob's brother Esau, for gloating over Israel's misfortune. And so on.

This made me think. Most obviously I suppose, it highlights just how angry God gets with sin. A stereotype of Protestant preaching is 'fire and brimstone from the pulpit', which reflects God's anger and just wrath, while perhaps being a bit over the top. It is an uncomfortable message, and not one people want to hear - it doesn't sit easily with the general understanding of God as a benevolent father with a big white beard. More serious are Richard Dawkins' attacks on 'the God of the Old Testament' for such unpleasant displays of vengeance and anger; unpleasant, that is, to our modern 'tolerant' sensibilities.

There are two dangers here. The first, corresponding to the uncomfortableness that people feel, is to deny God's wrath. This underestimates sin, and reduces God's holiness. Even claiming it is part of the Old Testament understanding of 'territorial gods' is false, because it is in the New Testament too. It is simply not the case that the God of the Old Testament is vengeful and the God of the New Testament is peaceful.

If we are seeking to be faithful to the Bible we cannot avoid the fact that sin makes God angry. Therefore, just as sin is not confined to the Old Testament, so God's anger isn't confined to the Old Testament. If you want proof, look in a concordance under 'wrath' and 'anger' - not to mention Jesus' display of anger in the temple (Matthew 21 etc). God's righteous anger is a central part of the message of the whole Bible, perhaps at its clearest in the prophets.

The second danger, corresponding to Dawkins' attack, is to stop here, and simply emphasise how angry God is with us 'miserable offenders', effectively denying the message of grace clearest in the New Testament (though present also in the Old). For the Bible tells us that yes, God justly punishes sin, and therefore we sinners deserve death, but that he also loves us and wants to have mercy on us. The interchange in Hosea is particularly astonishing, as we read of God's love and justice wrestling with each other.

It is for precisely this reason that the cross is absolutely central, for on the cross God's love and justice meet - they are both defined entirely and exclusively by the cross. It is on the cross, as Jesus bears the penalty for our sins, their consequence, that God fulfils his justice, whilst at the same time fulfilling his love, as he sets us free from that penalty through Jesus.

If we take the Bible as a whole, we see the Old Testament preparing us for and pointing us to the cross. It is on the cross that the tension between God's love for his people and his righteous judgement of their sins is resolved. The curses of the Old Testament, the condemnation that God speaks over the nations, over his own people, all of that wrath is poured out on Jesus, and we are saved by his blood.

And so we return to the minor prophets. As I was reading Nahum I realised that on the cross, God spoke those curses to his own Son, who willingly and obediently put himself under those curses. And he did that because he loves us so much, and because we have disobeyed him so much, and because he is so holy and just and righteous and faithful.

So on the cross, God's wrath was indeed satisfied - and, in the frequent alternative words to In Christ Alone, God's love was glorified also. However, we need to make sure we strike the balance between God's wrath and his love, so we don't cheapen his love, and so we don't turn God into Dawkins' stereotype. This balance is struck by Paul in some important verses in his letter to the Romans, on which note we will finish.

6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person - though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die - 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.

Romans 5.6-9 (ESV)

Believing the Trinity

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Published
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bcg
on 8 December 2007
in Theology
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This was originally published as a comment on this blog on 13 June 2006.

Someone once asked me to explain the Trinity to her. I did the standard three-in-one, one-in-three stuff. Not particularly effectively perhaps, because she looked at me and asked, 'How can you believe something that doesn't make sense?'

It's a tricky one, and all the analogies in the world don't actually help someone who wants to understand what it means to say one-in-three, three-in-one. Because the point is that we are not the supreme arbiters of what makes sense and what doesn't. If we could understand God, if we could explain how it is that he is as he is, then he would be smaller than us, than our finite minds.

I wish I'd thought of it then, but my response should probably have been, 'How can you believe something that does make sense?' If I can fully understand something, why should I put my faith in it? I'm not talking petty faith, like I put in my chair, but real, life-faith, that relies on something greater than myself.

The fact that we can't understand God doesn't mean we shouldn't try. (Some of the greatest and most interesting theology I have read was written about the Trinity.) But it does act as a warning sign. Most congregations will probably not appreciate a sermon that's long enough to even begin to explain some of the ins and outs of the doctrine of the Trinity.

So what do you preach? Good question.

‘One single being’?

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Published
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bcg
on 19 November 2007
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God is not just one single being. He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit: he is Trinity, he is community. And so therefore God is mutual love.

Graham Tomlin, The Praise of Creation, Holy Trinity Brompton, Sunday 29 October 2006

I have a couple of sermon podcasts on my iPod and I was listening to this one on the train home yesterday afternoon. This sentence hit me square between the eyes.

The question is, how far should we reduce and simplify doctrine in our preaching? I think quite a lot - but not so what we say is misleading (at best) or wrong (at worst). The example above is a case in point. 'God is not just one single being' is an extremely misleading statement. What I think he means is this: to say God is 'one' is not all we can say about God. Because, God actually is a 'single being'. We do not believe in three gods, Christians are not tritheists. It is language like the sentences above that makes people think we are.

In our language about the Trinity I think we need to make three things clear: 1) God is one, 2) God is one-in-three and three-in-one, 3) God's unity is primary. Point (3) is the traditional way of Christian theology, and of course it has its dangers - which Moltmann emphasises - but it safeguards the divinity of Father, Son and Spirit, and the unity of their work in Creation. Given the clear demarcation in the New Testament between Father and Son especially, theologically the unity needs to be our starting point, and needs to be stressed. 'Community' is simply too weak a concept for the unity of God. This is one of Moltmann's biggest problems - if you stress the threeness of God first, how can you explain the unity of God in strong enough terms?

Graham Tomlin's point is that God did not need to create us because he needed someone to love him, to glorify him. In Godself, God is perfect love, because the one God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To that, I say, absolutely. I have no problem with that. However, you do not need to say 'God is not just one single being' in order to be able to say 'God is mutual love'.

It is here that the question I raised initially is important: how far should we reduce and simplify doctrine in our preaching? How can we explain that God is mutual love in Godself, in a couple of sentences? Sometimes we may only be able to say what God is not, to define boundaries, beyond which language fails miserably. Here's my attempt.

The Bible tells us that God is one, that there is no other God besides him. But the Bible also tells us that God reveals himself as Father, Son and Spirit. The Father did not need to create the world to be loved, because from all eternity he loves and is loved by the Son, who shares that love with the Spirit. The one God is perfect, mutual love.

I know it isn't perfect, and it is perhaps more complicated, but it does seek to emphasise both the oneness and threeness of God together.