Selah2020: Pause and Reflect

[This is one in a series of devotional reflections prepared for Horley Baptist Church during June 2021]

A church where I was previously a member has recently published online a series of interviews with retired ministers, pastors and preachers who have been instrumental in furthering the work of the Holy Spirit, both locally and further afield^[1]. It has been interesting to listen to them recounting their experiences and sharing their wisdom.

What is wisdom? Just as data^[2] are not information until they are analysed so knowledge is not wisdom until it has been affirmed by experience. There is an old adage: “Knowledge is being aware that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing that it is not used in fruit salad”. Of course, it is not necessary for everyone to make their own tomato-flavoured fruit salad in order to verify this piece of wisdom; wisdom can be acquired via someone else’s experiences.

Surely most of us have gone through at least one stage of thinking: “I wish I’d known then what I know now”. Maybe we could have ‘known it then’ if we had had the wisdom and humility to listen. One translation of the book of Hebrews starts with these words: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in times past unto the fathers by the prophets …” but we know from the Old Testament account that the fathers did not listen. The words of the prophets were diluted, derided and discarded, in a way that seems not so different from today.

The Bible has a lot to say about wisdom. King Solomon wrote a book of proverbs based on his own experiences in the hope that his children would be wiser than him and not make the same mistakes. (It didn’t work, but that’s another story.)

Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching. They are a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck. [Proverbs 1 v8-9 NIVUK]

The same chapter tells us:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. [Proverbs 1 v7 NIVUK]

William Mountford, the nineteenth century English preacher and author wrote:

For knowledge to become wisdom, and for the soul to grow, the soul must be rooted in God: and it is through prayer that there comes to us that which is the strength of our strength, and the virtue of our virtue, the Holy Spirit.

James put the same thought rather more succinctly:

If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. [James 1 v5 NIVUK]

Are you facing a difficult situation or do you have decision to make? Remember how Joseph, Daniel and Nehemiah all paused to ask for God’s guidance before going on to achieve great things.

[1] For example: Interview with John Blanchard, author of ‘Essential Questions’.
 
[2] 01010111 01101001 01110011 01100100 01101111 01101101
‘Wisdom’ written in binary code as an illustration of the difference between data and information.

Bible quotations: Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the resources of Bible Gateway or Bible Hub, in accordance with the licencing conditions outlined on our Site Policies page.

Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.

[This reflection was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 30/May/2021]

The past year has certainly been like no other, both here and around the world. Living through a pandemic is something that most of us never considered would be our experience, and our hearts, thoughts and prayers continue to go out to those who have suffered with serious illness and lost dear loved ones. Finally, we are beginning to see the light at the end of a very long tunnel, with restrictions being lifted, and we’re even allowed to hug one another -yay!! I will never again take hugging for granted!

All of this hopefully means we can return to meeting in church soon too! It will be such a blessing to see and spend time with our church family again, to be community in every sense of the word. Community in a church setting is more than simply gathering together in the same building. It’s where we can bless each other, encourage and build up one another, grow our faith together, be Christ to our friends, show love and kindness, shine a light that says “welcome and come in”, where we can be candles that light up someone else, who lights up the next person, and the next person, and so on. A good friend shared the following piece written by Henri Nouwen, where he shares his thoughts on community, what it is and how it looks. It says it much better than I could:

Community is Heart Calling to Heart …
Friendship, marriage, family, religious life, and every other form of community is solitude greeting solitude, spirit speaking to spirit, and heart calling to heart. It is the grateful recognition of God’s call to share life together and the joyful offering of a hospitable space where the re-creating power of God’s Spirit can become manifest. Thus all forms of life together can become ways to reveal to each other the real presence of God in our midst.

Community has little to do with mutual compatibility. Similarities in educational background, psychological makeup, or social status can bring us together, but they can never be the basis for community. Community is grounded in God, who calls us together, and not in the attractiveness of people to each other. … The mystery of community is precisely that it embraces all people, whatever their individual differences may be, and allows them to live together as brothers and sisters of Christ and sons and daughters of his heavenly Father. (Henri J. M. Nouwen)

When we live in community in this way, we can’t help but be a light in our local community -we are blessed inside to become a blessing outside! We take that sense of community “out of the building” and bless our neighbours, friends, family, colleagues, and as we do so, we share Jesus with people and begin to build them up too.

“As you come to him, the living Stone – rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him – you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” [1 Peter 2:4-5]

“As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” [Proverbs 27:17]

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Bible quotations: Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the resources of Bible Gateway or Bible Hub, in accordance with the licencing conditions outlined on our Site Policies page.

Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.

[Transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube^[1], May 2021]

The world tells me that I need to be successful. I want to be successful. But what does that mean for a follower of Jesus. What are the dangers, and how can I be successful?

We live in a world that’s obsessed with success and fame and getting the most out of life. My question is, as a follower of Jesus what does it mean to be successful? Should I be successful? Are there dangers of trying to be successful? How can I be successful?

The other week I did a personality test. you’ve probably heard of the Myers Briggs test or stuff like that and this was called an Enneagram test, it’s quite big in America at the moment. The personality type that came up warned me that one of my biggest drives in life is to be successful. In fact one of my biggest fears in life is to not be successful.

I was thinking about it, It really concerned me and worried me a lot and it made me think. You know, if I’ve got that drive, if I’m living with that fear in my life, what are the possible repercussions? What’s the possible fruits of that drive for success. I guess there’s mental burnout, there’s moral failure, broken relationships, broken marriage and a poor inner life, a poor relationship with Jesus Christ.

To be perfectly honest, I’m my worst enemy. Often ministers are their own worst enemies and yet the church doesn’t particularly help the way we view church, the way we view success because the reality is, we want our churches to be successful, don’t we? We want to reach out to as many people as possible. After all, wasn’t that what Jesus commanded us, commissioned us to do?

So as churches we end up doing more stuff, we end up asking for more volunteers to work harder. Discipleship is around equipping people to work for the church and to work for Jesus. Then we try and measure success, and probably the easiest way to measure its success is to measure bums on seats. I am emotionally invested as a church leader in the number of people that come to church and at this current time of covid I’m emotionally invested in those viewing figures on YouTube. It affects me when I see those numbers drop, which they have been doing, so because how else am I supposed to measure my success?

See, when I look in the New Testament at Jesus’s life as told in the four gospels, we see that Jesus suffered from the same pressures in life. He had a busy successful ministry, he was followed by a crowd of people that were always demanding of him, he was hounded by Pharisees and teachers of the law that questioned his every move and motive, he had disciples – his closest friends – that tried to impose their idea of greatness and success upon him, and yet Jesus rejected all of those. In fact in earthly terms, he failed in the worst possible way – he was executed – and yet we know that actually Jesus was more successful than any other person because he lived up to the calling on his life. He followed his purposes exactly.

We can fall into the danger as people, as church leaders, as churches, to define success in earthly terms. Success is about doing more, being more, having more influence, more power being great. That’s not how Jesus viewed success. So how do I know that I am successful? how do I know that I am following the purposes, the calling that God has on my life? Well, just three things I want to leave with you.

Number one is, do not compare yourself to others. I do all the time. I compare myself to other church leaders, I compare Horley Baptist Church to other churches, and most of the time I find myself wanting so I push myself that little bit harder. Actually, we are incomparable because the calling and the purposes for our lives are completely based on us as an individual. God has designed us for an individual purpose that only you, only me, only a church can fulfil. Therefore, we’re not to compare ourselves with others or try and match their calling. We’re there to find out what God’s calling is on our lives.

Second thing is, are you learning to rest in Jesus? Are you spending time in prayer and quiet time in order to empower your success or to avoid failure, or are you spending time in prayer in order to build and deepen your relationship with Jesus Christ? As a church when we come to disciple people, are we discipling people to be more successful or are we discipling people to lean on Jesus and rest in his presence? I think we’d avoid a lot of those burnout issues, a lot of those moral failures if actually we spent time teaching people to spend time with Jesus.

Number three; learn to listen to your body and your friends. Ask questions, think about how your body is responding to the stresses and strains of life, and ask yourself and ask your friends “am I doing activities that actually my inner life and my health cannot cope with?” There is no point driving yourself into an early grave, either physically, spiritually or morally. Neil Young said in one of his song lyrics “I’d rather burn out than fade away” but do keep in mind that Kurt Cobain quoted those very lyrics in his suicide note. It’s a sobering thought. I think we are called to be successful as Christians. The problem is, the difficulty is that we can’t look to the world in order to define what those successes mean. Learn what your calling is, live your life for God’s purposes, learn to spend time with Jesus to deepen your relationship with him. Listen to your body and don’t push yourself beyond what it can bear.

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[1] YouTube link: How can I be successful?
Bible references: ~
 

Bible quotations: Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the resources of Bible Gateway or Bible Hub, in accordance with the licencing conditions outlined on our Site Policies page.

Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.

[This reflection was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 16/May/2021]

I was watching the Horley Baptist children’s Sunday ‘service’ (HB-K) on line and was quite struck by one of the sketches.

Suresh was sitting at his desk, working, and his daughter was making her way up to him. She looked like she needed help with something she was reading, but she wasn’t quite sure whether she could ask Suresh for help, as he looked like he was busy. After a bit of thinking aloud, she asked him for his help and he stopped what he was doing and said with a smile ‘of course I would be happy to help’.

Allow me to use some artistic license to describe alternative scenarios:
» His daughter does not realise that he can help, so she doesn’t ask him …
» His daughter knows he can help, but has always thought of him as a very important man and is scared to disturb him and so she doesn’t ask …
» His daughter knows he can help, but thinks he must have so much else to do and that there is no way he would be interested in her problem, so she doesn’t ask him …
» His daughter has heard someone say that God helps those who help themselves, so she might as well get on with sorting things out for herself and so she doesn’t ask …

There are probably a few more that you can think of, but let’s just look at these ones again:
» His daughter does not realise that he can help, so she doesn’t ask him.
This could be a picture of people who do not know about Christ. Especially in these challenging times we are living in, people need to know that there is someone who can help relieve their worries. Peter, the apostle, says “Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you”^[1]. It is a good reminder that those of us who do know Christ, need to let others know about Him. I am not very good at this, but by His grace, I will get better.

» His daughter knows he can help, but has heard that he is a very important man and is scared to disturb him and so she doesn’t ask.
This could be a picture of people who know of God, but don’t actually know him, so they have the wrong impression of who He is. That well-known poem ‘Footprints in the sand’ reminds us of the fact that God never leaves us, but carries us through our troubled times. He is happy to for us to disturb Him.

» His daughter knows he can help, but thinks he must have so much else to do, there is no way he would be interested in helping her, so she doesn’t ask him.
This could be a picture of us, when we feel that our problem is too trivial for God to deal with. We need reminding, as someone once said, that in fact, all our problems, are trivial to God. There is none too hard for him to deal with. He is interested in our problems. In Matthew 11 verse 28, Jesus said “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest…”^[2].

» His daughter has heard someone say that God helps those who help themselves, so she might as well get on with sorting things out for herself and so she doesn’t ask.

[1] Matthew 11 v28 NLT
[2] 1 Peter 5 v7 NLT
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Bible quotations: Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the resources of Bible Gateway or Bible Hub, in accordance with the licencing conditions outlined on our Site Policies page.

Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.

[Transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube^[1], May 2021]

If it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it! That’s how the saying goes, so is the church broken or are we changing for change’s sake?

On Sunday we were talking about making changes to the way that we do church, but the saying goes “if it ain’t broken then don’t fix it”. So are we saying that the church is broken or we’re just making changes for change’s sake? See, is the church broken? is Horley Baptist Church broken?

Well I guess that kind of depends on your perspective or really I mean, yeah, it’s a lovely church, full of lovely people; we’re growing slowly, people are attracted to us. But when you really get down to the nitty-gritty, can you say that we are seeing accelerated growth? Well no, not really. Are we seeing our Alpha courses full of participants? Well no, can’t really say that either. Are we seeing loads of baptisms? Well, we’re seeing a few but not as many as we would like.

You see, I think we’re a good church, we’re a relatively healthy church, we’re a blessed church, but we’re not as good as we would like; we’re not having the impact on our community as we would like. I was challenged the other night by one of our leaders who said: “You know when we go back to Sunday morning services, will there be a noticeable difference between what there was before and what we have now? Will people come in and there’ll be a different feel, a different atmosphere?”

I have to admit I’m not entirely sure, at least not how I had things planned because the tendency within myself, and probably the tendency within you as well, is to kind of steer ourselves back to those things that we are familiar with, those things which we find comfortable Even when I myself try and push the boundaries a bit, I still find when I stop and look back at my plans that they seem to be remarkably similar to what we had before. See, if we want to see real change then we need to change, if we really want to make a difference in our community then we have to do things differently. They say that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

I remember a while ago I was preaching at Horley Baptist and I challenged the congregation: “I said, you know, if we were to redo our services so they were more attractive to the young church, to the people within our community, would they look like what we have now?” The answer was “No, not really!” Little did I know that in just a year or two we have that opportunity to make those changes, to really stop and think about our Sunday morning services and how we view church overall, to bring about real positive change. there’s a couple of things that we need to remember when thinking about change:

Firstly, we need to keep the main thing as the main thing. See, our purpose as a church, our reason why, our foundation, our mission is to know Jesus and make Jesus known. Everything that we do, the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ should be based on that foundation. The problem is that over time we forget that. We become comfortable, we become inward focused and therefore we start to do things that suit ourselves rather than the mission field that we are supposed to be reaching out to. So we need to keep the main thing as the main thing; keep it simple, keep it focused. Share the good news about Jesus Christ.

The second thing we need to remember is that we need to do everything possible to make that happen. I believe, as the minister of Horley Baptist Church, and I believe for the UK church as well, that requires a massive rethink, a massive overhaul of what we need to do. If things when we go back look suspiciously like they did before then we have failed to take that calling seriously. We have forgotten what the main thing is, what our purpose is as a church, and instead we have just settled back into a comfortable sofa that everyone thinks is lovely but anyone on the outside looks at it and thinks “that’s really old and tatty and should go down the dump”, but it’s so comfortable. We need to take a serious look at who we are and what we do in line with the mission that God has given us – ‘to know Jesus and to make Jesus known’.

If we are honest with ourselves then we’d admit that things weren’t working before – well, they were working, the church like a was like a well-oiled machine, but in reference to our primary purpose, then things were not working as good as they should have been. We have an opportunity to rethink, to overhaul, to change and to start afresh.

That will be unsettling, that won’t be comfortable, it will require sacrifice, it will require change. It will inevitably create mistakes, maybe even a loss of congregation, but none of that matters really. What we need to do is seek God first, his purpose and follow his direction in our lives and in our church and allow God to do the rest. As I said the other week: it is Jesus who builds his church, it’s not us. We are called to do what God has designed us and called us to do.

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[1] YouTube link: Is the Church Broken?
Bible references: ~
 

Bible quotations: Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the resources of Bible Gateway or Bible Hub, in accordance with the licencing conditions outlined on our Site Policies page.

Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.