Jesus and His Unbelieving Brothers

I found this article by Jon Bloom very encouraging.  Family members who don't share our faith is a source of great pain; it's not as if one person likes gardening and someone else likes golf - it's a whole different worldview the implications of which last for eternity.   What was Jesus' experience of this situation?   Before reading this it hadn't occurred to me that he'd had much involvement  with it but not so......

Do you, like me, have family members who do not believe in Jesus? If so, we are in good company. So did Jesus. And I think this is meant to give us hope.

According to the Apostle John, “not even his brothers believed in him” (John 7:5). That’s incredible. Those who had lived with Jesus for 30 years really did not know him. Not one of Jesus’ brothers is mentioned as a disciple during his pre-crucifixion ministry. But after his resurrection and ascension, there they are in the upper room worshiping him as God (Acts 1:14).

Why didn’t they believe? And what made them change?

The Bible doesn’t answer the first question. But I’ll bet it was difficult to have Jesus for a brother.
First, Jesus would have been without peer in intellect and wisdom. He was astounding temple rabbis by age 12 (Luke 2:42, 47). A sinful, fallen, gifted sibling can be a hard act to follow. Imagine a perfect, gifted sibling.

Second, Jesus’ consistent and extraordinary moral character must have made him odd and unnerving to be around. His siblings would have grown increasingly self-conscious around him, aware of their own sinful, self-obsessed motives and behavior, while noting that Jesus didn’t seem to exhibit any himself. For sinners, that could be hard to live with.

Third, Jesus was deeply and uniquely loved by Mary and Joseph. How could they not have treated him differently? They knew he was the Lord. Imagine their extraordinary trust in and deference to Jesus as he grew older. No doubt the siblings would have perceived a dimension to the relationship between the oldest child and their parents that was different from what they experienced.
And when swapping family stories it would have been hard to match a star appearing at your brother’s birth.
Jesus out-classed his siblings in every category. How could anyone with an active sin nature not resent being eclipsed by such a phenom-brother? Familiarity breeds contempt when pride rules the heart.
More pain than we know must have been behind Jesus’ words, “a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household” (Matthew 13:57).

So as we assess the role our weak, stumbling witness plays in our family members’ unbelief, let’s remember Jesus — not even a perfect witness guarantees that loved ones will see and embrace the gospel. We must humble ourselves and repent when we sin. But let’s remember that the god of this world and indwelling sin is what blinds the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4).

The story of Jesus’ brothers can actually give us hope for our loved ones. At the time his brothers claimed that Jesus was “out of his mind” (Mark 3:21), it must have appeared very unlikely that they would ever become his disciples. But eventually they did! And not only followers, but leaders and martyrs in the early church.

The God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” shone in their hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of their brother, Jesus (2 Corinthians 4:6).

So take heart! Don’t give up praying for unbelieving family members. Don’t take their resistance as the final word. They may yet believe, and be used significantly in the kingdom!
And while they resist, or if they have died apparently unbelieving, we can trust them to the Judge of all the earth who will be perfectly just (Genesis 18:25). Jesus does not promise that every parent, sibling, or child of a Christian will believe, but does painfully promise that some families will divide over him (Matthew 10:34-39). We can trust him when it happens.

It is moving to hear James refer to his brother as “our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory” (James 2:1). Can you imagine what this phrase meant for James? The Lord of glory had once slept beside him, ate at his dinner table, played with his friends, spoke to him like a brother, endured his unbelief, paid the debt of his sin, and then brought him to faith.

It may have taken 20-30 years of faithful, prayerful witness by the Son of God, but the miracle occurred: his brothers believed. May the Lord of glory grant the same grace to our beloved unbelievers.

The Explicit Gospel

What follows are a few quotes from Matt Chandler's book, The Explicit Gospel, (Crossway, 2012)  Highly recommended!:

“More often than not, we want him to have fairy wings and spread fairy dust and shine like a precious little star, dispensing nothing but good times on everyone, like some kind of hybrid of Tinker Bell and Aladdin’s Genie. But the God of the Bible, this God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, is a pillar of fire and a column of smoke.” (29)

“We carry an insidious prosperity gospel around in our dark, little, entitled hearts.” (31)

“The universe shudders in horror that we have this infinitely valuable, infinitely deep, infinitely rich, infinitely wise, infinitely loving God, and instead of pursuing him with steadfast passion and enthralled fury — instead of loving him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; instead of attributing to him glory and honor and praise and power and wisdom and strength — we just try to take his toys and run. It is still idolatry to want God for his benefits but not for himself.” (39–40)

“This avoidance of the difficult things of Scripture — of sinfulness and hell and God’s notable severity — is idolatrous and cowardly. If a man or a woman who teaches the Scriptures is afraid to explain to you the severity of God, they have betrayed you, and they love their ego more than they love you.” (41)

“Heaven is not a place for those who are afraid of hell; it’s a place for those who love God. You can scare people into coming to your church, you can scare people into trying to be good, you can scare people into giving money, you can even scare them into walking down an aisle and praying a certain prayer, but you cannot scare people into loving God. You just can’t do it.” (49)

“If we confuse the gospel with response to the gospel, we will drift from what keeps the gospel on the ground, what makes it clear and personal, and the next thing you know, we will be doing a bunch of different things that actually obscure the gospel, not reveal it.” (83)

“It is easy to see that you and I have been created to worship. We’re flat-out desperate for it. From sports fanaticism to celebrity tabloids to all the other strange sorts of voyeurisms now normative in our culture, we evidence that we were created to look at something beyond ourselves and marvel at it, desire it, like it with zeal, and love it with affection. Our thoughts, our desires, and our behaviors are always oriented around something, which means we are always worshiping — ascribing worth to — something. If it’s not God, we are engaging in idolatry. But either way, there is no way to turn the worship switch in our hearts off.” (103)

“The cross of Christ is first and centrally God’s means of reconciling sinful people to his sinless self. But it is bigger than that too. From the ground we see the cross as our bridge to God. From the air, the cross is our bridge to the restoration of all things. The cross of the battered Son of God is the battering ram through the blockade into Eden. It is our key into a better Eden, into the wonders of the new-covenant kingdom, of which the old was just a shadow. The cross is the linchpin in God’s plan to restore all creation. Is it any wonder, then, that the empty tomb opened out into a garden?” (142–143)

“No matter what our job is, we view it not as our purpose in life but rather as where God has sovereignly placed us for the purpose of making Christ known and his name great. If you are a teacher, if you are a politician, if you are a businessman, if you are in agriculture, if you are in construction, if you are in technology, if you are in the arts, then you should not be saying, ‘I need to find my life’s purpose in this work,’ but rather, ‘I need to bring God’s purpose to this work.’” (149)

“The reconciling gospel is always at the forefront of the church’s social action, because a full belly is not better than a reconciled soul.” (150)

“The marker of those who understand the gospel of Jesus Christ is that, when they stumble and fall, when they screw up, they run to God and not from him, because they clearly understand that their acceptance before God is not predicated upon their behavior but on the righteous life of Jesus Christ and his sacrificial death.” (211)

“Church of Jesus, let us please be men and women who understand the difference between moralism and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let’s be careful to preach the dos and don’ts of Scripture in the shadow of the cross’s ‘Done!’” (221)

Christians @ Work: Changing the Nation

This article was written by friend Mark Greene and is well worth a read.  The "workplace" or "Frontline" as we call it - that place where we connect our faith with others who don't share it - is a place that God wants to work through us but also in us.  We tend to get the former but forget the latter; God wants to use us where we are during the week to shape us and fashion us.   As we consciously join in with what God is doing, allowing Him to change us, we can, together, change the nation.   That's not hype,that's the Kingdom.   Read on....!

‘My name is Mark Greene and I used to work in advertising, so you can trust every word I say.’

That’s how I often introduce myself when I speak on work, but my testimony is this:
‘I used to work in advertising and I saw God do wondrous things. I saw him answer prayer. I saw him miraculously heal my boss’ secretary. I saw him draw people to himself. I saw him impact the work itself. I saw him protect me and guide me. I saw him mould my character, teach me about service and humility, mature me through spectacular character failure, career disappointment and success, disciple me – right there in the headquarters of the fourth largest ad agency in the world. 
Madison Avenue wasn’t just a context for mission, it was a context for growing in maturity. So is every workplace. So is every place.’

The point is not that I used to work in advertising so you can trust every word I say. The point is that that God worked in advertising and you can trust every word he says – whatever your work, paid or unpaid, wherever you do it. But it’s bigger than work. God can and does work in and through people in all kinds of daily contexts. 
One woman suffers from a degenerative disease and was wondering how to minister to people who don’t know Jesus since she’s become increasingly housebound. She prayed, and she now ministers to the Tesco drivers who deliver her weekly groceries. God told one retired man to pick up litter in his local nature reserve which has led to all kinds of opportunities to witness. There are many other disciples of Jesus who have realised that mission is not just pursued in church-based activities or in formal community outreach, but in their ordinary daily contexts and encounters. God can and does work through his people, wherever they are.

The key challenge for churches is to create communities that support each other in our mission – both the things we do together in our church and community in our leisure time, and the things we do when we are out in the world. We are all daily participants in God’s mission, so let’s commit ourselves to discipling one another. Let’s get to find out about each other’s daily lives: 
• Where are you? 
• What do you do?
• Who is with you? 
• What is God doing, and wanting to do, in and through you? 
• How can we, the Body of Christ, support you?

Work: The Great Mission Field

The workplace is a key arena for mission and discipleship. It is the context where God has placed many of his people in daily, purposeful and prolonged contact with millions of workers (and those they serve) who don’t know Jesus. It is a huge opportunity.

Sadly, however, over the last century, the Church has put very little time, energy, theological reflection, leadership training, prayer, or money behind this. It’s not that some of the Church’s key thinkers haven’t seen the issue. As early as 1945, the Church of England’s seminal document Towards the Conversion of England concluded: ‘England will never be converted until the laity use the opportunities for evangelism daily afforded by their various professions, crafts and occupations.’
Lesslie Newbigin put it this way: ‘The primary action of the Church in the world is the action of its members in their daily work.’

Despite that, no denomination or major stream anywhere in the world has integrated these perspectives into the way their local churches disciple their people or envision and equip them for mission. Ultimately, of course, this is a theological issue. Either Jesus died to reconcile all things to himself, or just some things; either we are new creations in Christ 24/7, or we are new creations in Christ some of the time; either the people of God are sent into all the world to make disciples, or into just some bits of it… At root, the Church’s attitude to work reveals its beliefs about God.

It is also a spiritual battle. With very high stakes. Right now, 98% of God’s people (those not in church-paid work) are not being envisioned and equipped for mission in 95% of their waking lives. This battle will not be won by argument alone but, as Tozer emphasised, writing in 1948, by ‘a great deal of reverent prayer’.

There have been a few initiatives, yes, and a modest flow of books and resources. But what we need is not a few sermons on work or the founding of a monthly workers’ breakfast, but a radical church-wide decision to recognise that we all have a duty to consistently support our brothers and sisters at work and elsewhere. To do this will take some profound, if simple, changes in the way we relate to one another.
Such a change is vital for all God’s people. The gospel is good news for work; good news for the actual work we do, for our fellowworkers, for the institutions we serve and the nation we are called to disciple.

Yes, the contemporary UK workplace is tougher, faster, more pressured, more beset by anxiety, more unstable than it was ten years ago. Yes, many Christians don’t feel very confident about ‘sharing their faith’. There is fear in many hearts; a sense, as Professor Trevor Cooling’s Transforming Lives research among teachers showed, that in the workplace our faith is not ‘an asset to be celebrated but a problem to be managed’.

Nevertheless, every workplace is a mission field and every one is a foreign country. Some are warm and open to gospel values and some are cold and closed, but God is Lord of all of them.
Furthermore, Christians not only have a role to play through godly work and humble prayer, we have biblical wisdom to offer for every sphere of work, every workplace and every worker. Indeed, our national experience of work and our nation’s economy are poorer for the lack of it. Just as we can be confident that the gospel addresses the big economic and organisational issues, so we can be confident that it addresses our personal challenges.

1. Be Confident: Work is central to God’s missional purposes

The call to follow Christ is not just a call to personal salvation and membership of the people of God. It is a call to participate in his kingdom purposes in the world. Human work is the instrument God uses to get things done he wants done: the planet cared for, people educated, housed, the mind expanded through study, the heart lifted through the manufacture and playing of musical instruments…the poor fed, the sick healed…Our charitable giving helps the poor, but creating a decent job helps them more. Building good hospitals and schools is vital, but you can only afford them if you have first created the wealth to fund them.

2. Be Confident: You can serve God through your daily work

‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart’ begins Colossians 3:23. And the Lord God would hardly ask us to do something with ‘all your heart’ if it weren’t significant to him, even if it often doesn’t feel very significant to us. Why is the so-called ‘ordinary’ significant to God? Because everything we do has an impact on his world and on the people created in his image. Because God thought of you before the creation of the world, knit you together in your mother’s womb and has had his eye on you ever since and he is interested in what you do. Just as he was interested to see what Adam would name the animals, so he is interested how you use your talents, your power, your resources, your opportunities.

3. Be Confident: There are many ways to be fruitful at work

Sadly, many Church communities give Christians the impression that the only thing that really counts for God at work is evangelism. But saved souls are not the only fruit.
‘Take your faith to work’ is popularly understood to mean, ‘Look for an opportunity to verbally proclaim your own belief in Christ.’ But it ought to mean something more like: ‘Go to work knowing that God is your Father, that you have been chosen, saved, sent, empowered by the Holy Spirit for good works where you are, supported by the people of God, trusting that God can work in and through your colleagues, and in and through you, to bring about his good purposes in time.’ Take that to work.

4. Be Confident: You are Christ’s son or daughter

Whether you are a company cleaner or a company director you are first and foremost a child of the king of the universe. Rest in that assurance. God doesn’t send his children to work alone. Yes, we work in a fallen world – there is pressure, futility, injustice, exploitation – but God is with us. Look to him. He is interested in it all.

5. Be Confident: Salvation is by grace not by works or performance

Many workplaces are dominated by increasing pressure on performance targets and short-term measures. In this context, there is a huge pressure to start believing that our essential worth is bound up with what we do, that we gain significance from success – salvation by works. In sharp contrast, the gospel message is that we are already significant, valuable and loved because we are created in the image of God and offered life by the sacrifice of his son. And it is that love-drenched significance that liberates us to take risks, to fail, to succeed. Grace abounds, grace liberates.

6. Be Confident: Work is a context to grow as a disciple of Jesus

God is committed to our sanctification, to helping us grow more like Jesus. So it is more than likely that he will use our work to teach us selfless love, obedience and reliance on him, to teach us to pray and to hear his voice, to help us grow in the fruit of the Spirit, and to exercise the gifts of the Spirit.
God with us in our work. God working through our work. God among our co-workers, in our workplaces, working out his good purposes in time and eternity to his glory. We may not see a bumper harvest now but, as Peter puts it in 1 Peter 2:12, ‘Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.’ And he is coming to visit us, to complete his work. And ours.

God’s Mercy in Messed Up Families

I love this post from Jon Bloom.  It's so encouraging to be reminded of the reality of family life portrayed in the Bible and the insight that this is the workshop within which God changes us for our joy and His eternal glory. 

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to find an example of what we would call a “healthy family” in the Bible? It’s a lot easier to find families with a lot of sin and a lot of pain than to find families with a lot of harmony. For example, here’s just a sampling from Genesis:

• ·         The first recorded husband and wife calamitously disobey God (Genesis 3).
• ·         Their firstborn commits fratricide (Genesis 4:8).
• ·         Sarah’s grief over infertility moves her to give her servant, Hagar, to Abraham as a concubine to bear a surrogate child (Genesis 16). When it happens, Sarah abuses Hagar in jealous anger. Abraham is passive in the whole affair.
• ·         Lot, reluctant to leave sexually perverse Sodom, his home, has to be dragged out by angels and then weeks later his daughters seduce him into drunken incest (Genesis 19).
• ·         Isaac and Rebecca play favorites with their twin boys, whose sibling rivalry becomes one of the worst in history (Genesis 25).
• ·         Esau has no discernment. He sells his birthright for soup (Genesis 25), grieves his parents by marrying Canaanite women (Genesis 26), and nurses a 20-year murderous grudge against his conniving younger brother.
• ·         Jacob (said conniver) manipulates and deceives his brother out of his birthright (Genesis 25) and blessing (Genesis 27).
• ·         Uncle Laban deceives nephew Jacob by somehow smuggling Leah in as Jacob’s bride instead of Rachel (Genesis 29). This results in Jacob marrying sisters — a horrible situation (see Leviticus 18:18). This births another nasty sibling rivalry where the sisters’ competition for children (including giving their servants to Jacob as concubines) produce the twelve patriarchs of Israel (Genesis 30).
• ·         Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, is raped by the pagan, Shechem, who then wants to marry her. Simeon and Levi respond by massacring all the men of Shechem’s town (Genesis 34).
• ·         Jacob’s oldest son, Reuben, can’t resist his incestuous desires and sleeps with one of his father’s concubines, the mother of some of his brothers (Genesis 35).
• ·         Ten of Jacob’s sons contemplate fratricide, but sell brother Joseph into slavery instead. Then they lie about it to their father for 22 years until Joseph exposes them (Genesis 37, 45).
• ·         Judah, as a widower, frequented prostitutes. This occurred frequently enough that his daughter-in-law, Tamar, whom he had dishonored, knew that if she disguised herself as one, he’d sleep with her. He did and got her pregnant (Genesis 38).

That’s just the beginning. Time would fail me to talk of:

• ·         Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu (Leviticus 10),
• ·         Gideon’s murderous son, Abimelech (Judges 9),
• ·         Samson’s un-Nazirite immorality (Judges 14–16),
• ·         Eli’s worthless sons (1 Samuel –2-4),
• ·         Samuel’s worthless sons (1 Samuel 8),
• ·         David’s sordid family (2 Samuel 11–18),
• ·         Wise Solomon who unwisely married 1,000 women, turned from God, and whose proverbial instruction went essentially unheeded by most of his heirs (1 Kings 11–12),
• ·         Etc., etc.

Why is the Bible loud on sinfully dysfunctional families and quiet on harmonious families?

Well, for one thing, most families aren’t harmonious. Humanity is not harmonious. We are alienated — alienated from God and each other. So put alienated, selfish sinners together in a home, sharing possessions and the most intimate aspects of life, having different personalities and interests, and a disparate distribution of power, abilities, and opportunities, and you have a recipe for a sin-mess.

But there’s a deeper purpose at work in this mess. 

The Bible’s main theme is God’s gracious plan to redeem needy sinners. It teaches us that what God wants most for us is that we 

1) become aware of our sinfulness and 

2) our powerlessness to save ourselves, as we 

3) believe and love his Son and the gospel he preached, and 

4) graciously love one another. 

And it turns out that the family is an ideal place for all of these to occur.

But what we often fail to remember is that the mess is usually required for these things to occur. Sin must be seen and powerlessness must be experienced before we really turn to Jesus and embrace his gospel. And offenses must be committed if gracious love is to be demonstrated. So if we’re praying for our family members to experience these things, we should expect trouble.

Family harmony is a good desire and something to work toward. But in God’s plan, it may not be what is most needed. What may be most needed is for our family to be a crucible of grace, a place where the heat of pressure forces sin to surface providing opportunities for the gospel to be understood and applied. And when this happens the messes become mercies.

My point is this:

If your family is not the epitome of harmony, take heart. 

God specializes in redeeming messes. 

See yours as an opportunity for God’s grace to become visible to your loved ones 

and pray hard that God will make it happen.

Is "Radical Christianity" the New Legalism?

I thought this article by Ed Stetzer was really interesting.

I hadn't thought through the issue of “radical Christianity” and the danger of legalism before so it was good food for thought. 

The  idea that the desire to “be radical” / change the world /make a difference can be idolatrous came up for me just last week through reading Keller’s “Every Good Endeavour” but nonetheless it's a new thought.   (Is it the product of an affluent 21^st century, narcissistic consumerism…..  100 years ago you just did what your dad did and got on with it – now if you're not “changing the world”, well, it's not worthwhile…..)

http://www.edstetzer.com/2013/05/radical-christianity-a-cause-to-live-or-a-call-to-legalism.html

Anyway – thought you'd be interested.

CrossTalk

Your friend just left his wife. Someone in your Life Group is depressed.  A relative has been diagnosed with an incurable disease.  How on earth can you offer real hope and help from God's Word?  How can you offer real, life giving water and not simply platitudes? 

I've just finished reading CrossTalk by Michael Emlet and I would highly recommend it.  The subtitle of the book is "Where Life and Scripture Meet" and it's all about how we can faithfully apply the bible to the lives of those people we're sometimes called to minister to.

You might meet a friend for coffee and they share stuff with you - a loss, anxiety, hurt, fear, grievance, sin..... What do you say?   How can you bring something from God's Word to bear with next to no time to look passages up?   Perhaps someone wants to meet with you and you've got advanced warning of the fact that they are going to ask for help with a problem but, again, how do you prepare for that in the scarce time you have?  And how do you avoid just resorting to only ever using a dozen "proof texts" whilst ignoring 98% of the rest of the bible?

CrossTalk shows in a practical and relevant way how you can use any passage, perhaps from your reading that morning or the message you heard in a sermon, to help bring gospel-oriented counsel to another person.  Emlet explains how to first "read the bible", looking for the original context and then the expanded context and then how to "read the person" as saint, sufferer and sinner.  He then shows, in carefully worked examples, how to apply the scripture legitimately to an individual whether you have a few minutes to prepare or longer.

Highly recommended for all those who want to speak God's Word in the power of the Spirit to others.

Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have made a foetus

The satirical Anglican blogger Archbishop Cranmer has made a point that about the royal baby that was nagging away at me like a splinter in my mind.....something just wasn't quite right about the whole thing but I couldn't put my finger on it....until I read his Grace's excellent post.   Yes, that's it - that's why all the hype is somewhat lodged in the throat.....



His Grace would like to congratulate the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the announcement that they are expecting their first baby. Girl or boy, he or she is destined to ascend the Throne and reign over the United Kingdom (should it remain united) and the Dominions overseas.


But His Grace is puzzled.

Everywhere he turns he reads about a Royal baby. Even The Guardian talks of the couple 'expecting their first child', despite the Duchess being in the 'very early stages' of pregnancy. We are told that the couple 'are to be parents', and that this 'will be the Queen's third great-grandchild', and 'a first grandchild for Prince Charles'.

And the child's birthright is acknowledged: yes, he or she is 'destined to wear the crown one day'; he or she 'will become third in line to the throne', which the Prime Minister described it as 'absolutely wonderful news'. Even Ed Miliband tweeted: 'Fantastic news for Kate, William and the country. A royal baby is something the whole nation will celebrate.'

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said: "The whole nation will want to join in celebrating this wonderful news. We wish the Duchess the best of health and happiness in the months ahead."

And speculation abounds about the name: Charles? Diana? With The Guardian freely referring to 'their baby' and already anticipating his or her 'first day at school'.


Baby? Destiny? Parents? Great-grandchild? School? Even the Twitter hashtag is #RoyalBaby.

Surely such 'pro-choice' newspapers and journals (and people) should be talking about a bunch of pluripotent stem cells, an embryo or a foetus? For reports suggest that the Duchess is still in her first trimester, so this is not yet a baby; and certainly nothing with any kind of destiny. At this stage, surely, it is a non-person, just like the other 201,931 non-persons who last year were evacuated from wombs in England, Scotland and Wales.


Or are royal foetuses endowed with full humanity from the point of conception?