Condiments, Columbian Ants and Tasting God

I've been spending a lot of time in Psalm 34 over the last few weeks so one chapter in A.W. Tozer's book 'The Pursuit of God' really jumped out to me this morning. The chapter was centred around the astounding verse eight: 'O taste and see.' In it, he starts by describing three notions that people have about God; it's massively insightful stuff:


The first notion

"To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate, but He remains personally unknown to the individual. 'He must be,' they say, 'therefore we believe He is.'"

The second notion

"Others' do not go even so far as this; they know of Him only by hearsay. They have never bothered to think the matter out for themselves, but have heard about Him from others, and have put belief in Him into the back of their minds along with various odds and ends that make up their total creed."

The third notion

"To many others, God is but an ideal, another name for goodness, or beauty, or truth; or He is law, or life, or the creative impulse behind the phenomena of existence.

These notions about God are many and varied, but they who hold them have one thing in common: they do not know God in personal experience. The possibility of intimate acquaintance with Him has not entered their minds."

He goes on to say that in Christianity, things are different. Throughout the Bible there is a consistent theme of the personality and fatherhood of God that carry with them the idea of the possibility of personal acquaintance. But Tozer doesn't pull any punches...

"...but for millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle."

This kind of situation completely stands against the regularity and clarity of verses in the Bible that tell us that God can be known in personal experience. I love it that we are encouraged to 'taste and see' God, but to be honest, just knowing that something can be tasted isn't usually enough to make me want to! I've eaten quite a lot of things at a dare; concoctions of condiments or Columbian warrior ants, but there are plenty of things that I know can be tasted that I would leave well alone.




The good news is there's more to Psalm 34:8 than I've quoted so far: 'O taste and see... that the Lord is good!' 


We're not dared to experience God (or warned that it might happen when we least expect it) we are encouraged to know Him tangibly, just because He is good.


My next post will be looking at how Tozer develops his point!

My Bobble

We all know the feeling. The gift that has been sat smugly under the tree, is finally in your hand. It knows that you don't have a clue what it is, and it knows that it's better than all the others. You open it a little quicker than your other presents and then pause as it takes a good few seconds for your brain to work out what you're holding. Suddenly the excitement kicks in as you realise that this little thing is going to change your life - it definitely would have been top of your Christmas list if you had known it existed!

Meet Bobble. Pictured here next to my Danger Mouse mug, this was that life-changing gift for me. Having watched me carry a big bottle of water to work for the last six months, my wife had spotted this strange invention that would filter the 300 year-old water of Cedar House as I drank it. My bag was suddenly a litre lighter when walking to work and I had a spring in my step. 

It's not really left my side since I first tore open the paper. It's perfect for sipping whilst lying in bed (not dissimilar to a hamster bottle in the way it doesn't drip much when held above the face) and also looks great on my office desk. 

I've taken a while to get to the point. Though I really like the product, how ridiculous would it be if I showed this bottle more affection and appreciation than I do the person who gave it to me? How foolish and despicable would I be to value my bobble more than I value my wife? 

How laughable to love the gift more than the giver?!

And yet this is what we do all the time. Families, jobs, health, gadgets... all good things and yet how often are they higher on our priority list than than the person who gave them to us? How often are they more on our minds? How much time and energy do we spend running after getting more of these things compared with seeking more of God Himself?

Last Sunday Andy Tilsley preached at Crown, highlighting the humility, persistence and boldness of Moses in Exodus 33. Even after God had promised His guidance and blessing, Moses continued to knock and wrestle; the gifts were good, but he wanted more of the Giver. "Show me Your glory!" 

After Terry Virgo's message last month, I felt a new passion to get to know God better. A few weeks later, Andy hits us with another beautiful challenge along the same lines. We have permission to fight for this; let's persist in seeking more of God's presence, individually and as a church. 

The Uncontainable Gospel

 25.09.11 | Life Group Discussion Notes | Crown Church

  

The Uncontainable Gospel

Acts chapter 10 is the account of the Apostle Peter being used to take the Gospel to the Gentiles (non-Jews). God needed to transform him and get rid of his prejudice so that he could do this.  Below are some points of application that we can take from these events.

1)     Simple steps of obedience:

Cornelius the centurion heard from God and instantly obeyed the simple command to send for Peter. Peter heard from God and instantly obeyed the simple command to go with the three men who had come to find him. It says that he was ‘inwardly perplexed’ and ‘pondering’ the vision of the sheet that God had given him; it is good for us to seek to understand the big picture in our lives, but we must not miss the subtle promptings to take the simple, but maybe uncomfortable, immediate steps.

2)    God speaks when we’re at prayer

It’s not the only time that God will speak to us, but this story gives us two models to follow, devout men of prayer who were always in the spirit of prayer and frequently in the act. Clearly God loves this kind of faith expressed in a willingness to spend time in conversation with Him. It is when we’re in this place of humble dependence that God finds our hearts most receptive to His promptings.

3)    Be full of the Spirit

This story culminates in the powerful scene of undeserving people being filled with God’s power, His Holy Spirit. Don’t worry about what’s happened in your past, the question isn’t, ‘Have you been filled with the Spirit?’ the right questions is, ‘Are you full?!’  It’s so clear from the Bible and the experience of millions of Christians over the years that it is God’s intention for us to live with His Spirit dwelling in us.

4)    Deal with prejudice

Peter was willing to mix with Cornelius even though he had previously looked down on non-Jews and was in danger of other Jews judging him. Looking down on another person before you get to know them, just because of their ethnicity or social status is utterly against God’s character. We are on level ground in front of the Cross, each of us as responsible as the other for the death that Jesus suffered and then conquered. The manner in which we treat or speak about others can be a way to demonstrate to the world what God is like! To deal with prejudice or other sins that have become entrenched in us, we need to repent, confess to others and then follow the Spirit’s prompting to take specific steps out of our comfort zone.

Questions:

1. Cornelius’ devotedness was contagious at home and at work; what habits do people pick up from you?
2. Are you growing in love for God and for others? How does your life reflect this?
3. Are there any specific steps that you know God is prompting you to take? (e.g. attempting to heal a relationship, dealing with prejudice, inviting someone to the Alpha Course, asking others to pray with you about being filled with the Spirit…)

How’s Your Heart? Have You Forgotten You Have A Father?

Here are this week's discussion notes for the Crown mid-week groups. I hope it helps you to arrive prepared for some open and honest conversation!

Read Acts 5: 1 – 13

The Sin

Satan was trying to jump on board and poison the early church from within. Ananias and Sapphira were believers but had not fully ‘put to death’ (Col 3:5) some sinful desires within them. Satan had used this to make them become obsessed with a love of money and a craving for man’s approval; this blinded them to see the extent of their deceit.   

The Surgery

God cares deeply about the integrity of the Church, and moves decisively to remove the tumour of hypocrisy and unbelief.

God’s Wrath

Our response to God’s righteous anger at sin is hugely important. The Bible is full of expressions of God’s holiness and justice, in prophetic warnings and awesome action. If we read of these past judgements and conclude that God has changed or that the writers are using ‘poetic license’ then we are in danger of underestimating and offending God in the same way that Ananias and Sapphira did. Here’s a helpful quote from Don Carson:

“We should conclude not that these were the worst of sinners around, rather that sin deserves death, and that it is because of God’s mercy that we are not each struck down whenever we sin.”[1]

A Grateful Response

Reading about displays of God’s wrath should make us reverently say, “Wow, that’s what I deserve!” The wages of sin is death, and everything I’ve earned was spent on Jesus! You need to be very careful about denying or ignoring the wrath-passages in the bible. Your view of God’s mercy is only as big as your view of His wrath. Your view of God’s grace is only as big as your view of His holiness (and your relative unworthiness).

So Hadn’t God Already Judged Ananias and Sapphira’s Sin On The Cross?

This isn’t the only display of God’s displeasure at sin in the New Testament; 1 Corinthians 11:29-32 tells us that some of the Christians in Corinth were weak, ill and even dead because they had abused the taking of bread and wine! It then goes on to explain that this judgement is discipline.

It is a glorious and mysterious truth that we have been made co-heirs with Christ! We’ve moved out of the law court and into the basketball court where our Father is lovingly training us.

The Causes Of Sickness And Suffering

It is possible, then, that our own specific sin is the cause of our own sickness or suffering; but there are other possible causes as well. Whatever the cause may be, we can take comfort in the fact that it is always either instigated or allowed by our Father; and He can use all of it for our good (Rom 8:28).

Father vs Karma

Hebrews 12: 5 asks its readers, “Have you forgotten that you have a Father?” We can very easily slip into the thinking of the world that impersonal forces are bringing a proportional consequence to all of our actions. Karma may offer an explanation for suffering but it offers no comfort or hope. Remembering that God is our Father leads us quickly to repentance of specific sin, and brings an incredible feeling of safety and comfort, even when we don’t understand. It also gives us a powerful hope for our future knowing that we are being trained and shaped for a purpose! Give me my Father over karma any day! This story should encourage us to ‘keep a short account’ with our Father.

Questions:

(Don’t let the discussion veer towards commenting on the possible causes of other people’s suffering. People did that with Jesus in Luke 13: 1-5 and He told them very strongly to just concentrate on their own situation.)

1)      Was there anything in Sunday’s message that particularly spoke to you or disagreed with you?

2)     What’s your honest, immediate reaction when you read about God’s wrath?

                       

3)     Have you ever thought that God has changed since Old Testament times? What do you think now?

4)     When you get ill or hit dark times, if you’re honest, do you explain it away as ‘karma’ or let it remind you of your loving Father?

5)     Read Luke 16: 13-15 below. How is your heart? Is it filled with love for God or hardened by a love of money?

Luke 16: 13-16

¹³ "No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money."

 ¹⁴ The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all these things, and they ridiculed him. ¹⁵And he said to them, "You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts.”

---

[1] How Long O Lord? Pg 101. 2006 Baker Academic

The Inevitable Consequence

I finished my last post by saying that the most important thing you can do today is enjoy God. Let's explore what it means to enjoy God and what we can expect:

Every Spiritual Blessing

Eph 1:3 tells us that in Christ we have ‘every spiritual blessing', this is a huge statement. There isn't a spiritual blessing in God's domain that isn't available to those who are in Christ! But what are 'spiritual blessings'?

In John 16:14 Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will glorify Him by taking what belongs to Him and ‘declaring it to us’. From this verse, I think we can define a spiritual blessing as the experience of having what belongs to Jesus. It's more than just our theology of what we have, it's the tangible feeling of knowing that's true. Romans 8:15-17 is a brilliant example of the two verses above as the Holy Spirit takes something that belongs to Jesus and declares that, by grace, we have it as well:

“…you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs – heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ”. 

Feeling adopted to the extent that you can't hold back a cry of, "Dad, loving Father!" is very different to just knowing that you're adopted. 


The Inevitable Consequence Of Enjoying God

Another example of what Jesus said in John 16:14, is when you're spending time with God and the Spirit starts to declare to you, animate within you, the truth that you have the same authority that Jesus has over sickness and darkness. One of the fruits of having a ‘time of refreshing’ is that it will increase your faith for miracles. In Matthew 17:20, Jesus tells us when we have faith we can tell a mountain to move and it will move. In the same way, Peter demonstrates in this account in Acts 3, that we can tell sickness to move in the name of Jesus.
So often I just 'humbly' ask God to heal the person that I'm praying for instead of using the authority that I have by grace. Perhaps this is a symptom of not having been recently refreshed! 


NB: This isn't like Harry Potter trying to recite the words to a complicated spell correctly... there's no formula here. It's just a big mysterious mush of God sometimes using us to heal people, sometimes healing without us, and sometimes receiving the glory in a different way. My point is that if you're having a bad day, and you haven't had a 'holy' time of refreshing in the morning, then you encounter someone who needs to be blessed, stop thinking about yourself and bless them.


A Quick Story To Illustrate
Yesterday, on Tuesday I woke up late and so didn't have a time of devotion and refreshing in the morning. After work I took some UHT milk to a guy who recently broke his leg and is really struggling. I asked if I could pray for him; he's not a Christian but he was more than happy for me to have a go. I put my hand on his cast and quickly told all the bones, ligaments and tissue to be made new in the name of Jesus. Nothing instant happened. 
Perhaps if I had made time to enjoy the blessing of God for myself yesterday, I might have had more faith, and that cast might have fallen off. Perhaps not. Perhaps God has more to show this guy in his debilitation, as the church cares for him in his need; and no matter how 'fired-up' and 'filled' I had been, he wouldn't have been healed there and then!

Conclusion
When our only aim is to enjoy God and we make time to enjoying thanking Him, praising Him and having the Spirit ignite things within us; then we can expect to bless others with what He has given us. Just think what a blessing the Crown Church can be to this community if people are regularly being healed and, as a result, enter into a lifetime of enjoying God for themselves! 
Let’s not restrict this to our meetings, let’s get out and about and expect to bring demonstrations and explanations of what it means to enjoy the living God!

Blotted and Refreshed

Continuing from the last post on 'Acts 3'...


Peter knows the crowd is cut to the heart by the demonstration and explanation of God's power and at the realisation of their separation from Him. Let's have another look at what he encourages them to do and what he promises will happen:

"Repent therefore and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord" (Acts 3:19)

All From His Own Experience 
Peter is only sharing what he himself has experienced:

1) Realising His Need To Repent

After denying Jesus three times and leaving Him to die alone, Peter didn't doubt that he was far from God. He must have felt dead inside as he realised that he didn't have what it takes to be with Jesus. In his two speeches in Acts 2 and 3, we see Peter helping others to realise what had already dawned on him; that we have all done wrong and that justice must prevail. After telling the crowd that they were responsible for Jesus' death, he tells them that they need to repent just as he did.

2) Receiving Forgiveness

1 Corinthians 15:3 tells us that Jesus met privately with Peter before the other disciples after his resurrection. In this encounter, Jesus must have explained forgiveness to Peter – perhaps even using the imagery that Peter uses in this speech; having our record of debt ‘blotted out’. This is powerful imagery, have a read of Colossians 2: 13-14…

"And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross."

Imagine the written record of everything you have done to offend God; an itemised list of all your acts of selfishness, and cruelty. Next to each point God has written the legal demand, the perfect judgement because He is perfectly just. Now imagine that this written record of debt being nailed to Jesus cross, and slowly you start to see His blood seeping through the paper until it is utterly indecipherable, completely stained red, the original ink washed away - your sin blotted out!

This is irreversible, forgiveness of God. This is the all-permeating forgiveness that Peter knew from Jesus; and now he was telling the crowd that they can know the exact same thing.

3) Regularly Refreshed

After describing this forgiveness he says that they can receive times of refreshing. In his speech at Pentecost he says that once they have received forgiveness they can receive the Holy Spirit. Here he phrases it slightly differently, because now he's a couple of months older,  and he's happy to tell everyone that this isn't a one-off thing, but a regular refreshing. This isn't a chore like re-filling the car, but a cool drink after some heavy work. 'Refreshing', what a great word!

"And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart" (Ephesians 5: 18-19)

From study of the language we know though this is a continuous encouragement, not a one-off, to go on being filled. Paul is saying to the Ephesian church, “You don’t need wine, you need the Holy Spirit to get you through life, and you need it regularly”.
How regularly? Jesus teaches us to ask the Father for our ‘daily bread’, but we must not let this make us feel guilty when we don’t. Jesus isn’t saying that there is a minimum amount of time we need to spend with God, He’s saying that there is no maximum!

Enjoy The Show 

God has chosen to use us to display His glory. As John Piper has powerfully advocated for many years, God it most glorified when we enjoy Him. When this gets into our hearts, it changes everything. The most important thing I can do with my time today is enjoy God. 

More on what it means to enjoy God in the next post!

Explanation Follows Demonstration In Years AD

There's a great story that spills out of Acts 3 into a bit of chapter 4. I think there's a lot we can learn from the events and the people involved. Let's have a look. 

Explanation Follows Demonstration

Peter and John arrive at the gate of the temple and Peter grabs a lame beggar by the hand and tells him to walk. The 40-year old has been lame from birth; his legs would never have properly formed, he would have been wasted away from the waist down. On the surface, then, this looks like a pretty malicious thing for Peter to do, but as he grabs his hand, the man's legs, ankles and feet are 'made strong'; bone, muscles, tissue, tendons, nerves and ligaments grown in a millisecond. There's no limit to God's power! He makes the lame from birth leap in an instant! 

Explanation follows demonstration of God's character, and here, just like he does at Pentecost, Peter tells the crowd what's happening. He starts by telling them that it is faith in Jesus' name that has made this man well (you can imagine many of the crowd to cringing with pangs of guilt as they remember getting caught up in the anti-Jesus rally that led to him being executed only months before). Peter doesn't go lightly on them but quickly throws a lifeline of hope by saying that Jesus is alive:

"15 But you denied the Holy and Righteous One...14 and you killed the Author of Life whom God raised from the dead"

 At a similar moment in his speech at Pentecost it says that the crowd were "cut to the heart" and asked him, "Brother, what can we do to be saved?". This time round, Peter knows that the power of this message and the kind of effect it has on listeners, so he moves straight on to the recommended response and what they can expect:

"19 Repent therefore and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord"

And just before he's interrupted by the temple police, he explains in verse 25 and 26 that Jesus has been raised up so that they can receive blessing, so that through them the whole world will be blessed. 


Here we have an example of healing as a demonstration of God's blessing being followed by an  explanation of the bigger picture of the good news of Jesus. This is the number-one type of evangelism in the years AD; here's how Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 2: 4-5:

"and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God."

I think I often forget that God wants to demonstrate his blessing and I just rush straight into explanations that sound rehearsed. If there's an 'AD' after today's date, then God still wants to demonstrate His blessing to people to turn them back to Him.