The John 21 Conversation

Photo by Kaushik Panchal on Unsplash

Failure is an integral part our future. Humiliation is a key step in growth. Embarrassment is necessary for a heart to steel itself for more. Disgrace is not the end, but the beginning.

A resounding biblical example: Peter. He denies his Lord three times. And what does the risen Lord immediately do on the other side of the cross? Three times He restores Peter. Even as it happens that Peter fails Jesus three times, three times Jesus restores Peter — ‘Feed my sheep.’ Interestingly, that restoration was not about checking Peter’s love. It was about giving Peter the opportunity to hear himself say those words in his own voice, ‘I love you, Lord’. Jesus wasn’t patronising Peter in making him repeat himself. He wanted to propound in Peter’s presence that not only was he forgiven, but he’s restored to what he’s called to do — to lead God’s early church.

In the restoration of Peter, Jesus empowers him immediately with leadership of the church.

There’s no holding Peter back. There’s no grudge borne. There’s no criticism for a lack of loyalty. There’s no punishment. There’s no consequences. There’s only empowering and release. There’s only intimacy.

God is seeking to hold
John 21 conversations with us all.

In this age, as in any age, the gospel imperative is not about holding people back. It’s not about holding people back to pay for their failures. They repent, and we relent. Anyone who would hold a person to their damaged reputation should rethink it. Certainly, any spiritual leader. There is nothing like a godly contrition to prepare a godly heart for the future.

There is a rebuilding God wants to do in us; it’s part of something bigger; it’s God’s equipping for an even greater purpose. And failure prompts it.

God cannot use us as generous instruments of His grace
unless we’ve first been scorned by, and forgiven of, failure.

On the other side of a castigating failure, Jesus is saying to us, ‘Okay, are you ready… you love Me, right?’ It’s a rhetorical question. Jesus knows the answer, that we love Him. And if we truly love him, and never deeper than through redemption after failure, He will give us something to do that is incredibly important to Him, and that thing will be something incredibly meaningful for us.

When failure causes us to cease our wrongdoing, where it brings us to closer to God, contrition manifests a blessed anointing. Such a beginning out of darkness’s end is bright like the sun of new-day dawn.

Biblical leaders will sense the quality of a person’s godly sorrow for failure and, like Jesus, they will resurrect their hope by releasing them into deeper nuances of the Kingdom work, which is the commendation a contrite heart enjoys.

Jesus did it and so should we. That is to deepen relationships for the work ahead through forgiveness.

The Joseph Moment

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Genesis tells of a moment in Joseph’s life when he provided a commentary on his life in one sentence:

Speaking to his brothers who had abused him, and having come into power enough to banish them, Joseph says, ‘You planned evil against me; God planned it for good to bring about the present result — the survival of many people.’ (Genesis 50:20 CSB)

Astonishing. That Joseph could comprehend the overall Kingdom purpose in his suffering. That Joseph could forgive his brothers for their betrayal. That Joseph seemed to have grown beyond his impetuous youth. That Joseph led as the godly prime minister of Egypt, the heathen nation, under Pharaoh. That Joseph, used of God, led in such a way as to interpret the times and institute decisive wisdom.

Psalm 37 is a wisdom psalm that promises the vindication of the faithful in verses 5-6:

“Commit your way to the Lord;
trust in him, and he will act,
making your righteousness shine like the dawn,
your justice like the noonday.”

Indeed…

The faithful will wait unto eternity for their vindication,
but how good is God when it comes about in this life!

This is what I term The Joseph Moment. So very many of us await our respective Joseph Moments. That time when vindication will come. In the tradition of Habakkuk 2:3, vindication as revelation does not tarry; the moment when justice as foreseen does directly come. If not here, it will come in the swiftest moment over the horizon.

But there’s a test, if it comes this side of eternity:

The Test

Joseph’s moment came. He could have vanquished his brothers but didn’t. He could have let the power of his prime-ministership go to his head, but it didn’t. He could have missed God’s plan and purpose for what he had suffered in his life, but he didn’t. The biblical account tells us that Joseph must have been tempted to respond through vengeance, but he didn’t. He continued doing the best he could despite the unjust and unjustifiable circumstances. He genuinely grew through betrayal, getting better not remaining bitter.

In his redemptive moment, Joseph was proven pure as refined gold and silver. All the dross of resentment had been burned off. He had prepared well for his redemptive moment, and thank God he had!

If our Joseph moment comes in the council of witnesses on this earth, when we’re still so sin-stained, will we respond as Joseph did?

You see, vindication is its own test; it’s not in and of itself the reprieve and justice we always imagined it to be. We must pray that our hearts receive the Joseph moment in humility enough to glorify God which is always the wisdom of God’s gift of grace expended to others through forgiveness.

While we wait for our vindication, let’s pray we have the spiritual fortitude to withstand the temptation of retribution when the moment comes.

Only the pure of heart deserve vindication, and so if we’re honest, we’ll honestly not hanker for a moment that could reveal the identity that falls short.

Just as we’re tested by the praise we receive, as much and more are we tested by the grace we bestow (or not) when God heralds justice.

Other Bible verses worthy of reflection in context:

“A crucible for silver, and a smelter for gold,

and the Lord is the tester of hearts.” (Proverbs 17:3 CSB)

“The fear of the Lord

is the beginning of knowledge;

fools despise wisdom and discipline.” (Proverbs 1:7 CSB)

Times like now call for discernment

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

It can be difficult to discern what God truly wants in this age or any age. There are disparate voices in the world and church, just as much as there seem to be conflicting Scriptures in the Bible. When leaders cherry-pick verses and passages to suit their angle of persuasion, and they oppose each other using the same holy instrument, the world of Jesus spirituality suddenly turns murky, even scary, especially when it comes to choosing the ‘right’ ethic to own and espouse.

I deliberately keep this non-specific, because I believe it’s true not just of this age, but of all eras.

The world is largely growing tired of organised religion — by that I mean, religion stands on a precipice just now; it is being reformed. But the divide between ideologies seems to be more evident than ever. No longer are people choosing to remain closeted, though such a choice was almost always an unconscious one. People are looking and seeking and moving more than ever, and, as people power gains ascendancy, the church is being radically reformed.

The trouble is the times are pleasing yet perilous.

Can people power be trusted when cults form through a charism of a solitary leader’s coaxing? It almost doesn’t matter. Movements will be violently organic. It is as it shall be.

Consciences are deciding, and the masses are forming, and those masses can seem either (or worryingly both) prophetic or dangerous to the person who knows their Bible. On the one hand, they can appear to be bringing the Kingdom, yet on the other hand, they can seem to be ushering in the end times, both long prophesied about in the Old Book itself.

Jesus spoke on both the bringing of the Kingdom and the end signs to watch for, as did the Hebrew Scriptures.

All we can do is discern the trajectory of true faith. All we can do is turn routinely back to God, knowing that repentance is both right and real for those who know their God, for the Kingdom is at hand, the Lord is near. All we can do is seek to discern truth as we pray for the Spirit to reveal it, then to trust our discernment of it, all-the-while applying a wise distrust of our capacity to discern for the long haul.

There is a darkness descending in an age of light,
the promise of an ending in the coming of night.

These times a war rages and only the spiritual discern it. Our only real defence is to continue to look to the Lord, to worship God alone, because a sign we’re close to the end times of our time is allegiance to prophets who say they’re for God, but aren’t, and are only in it for themselves. Those are along all positions of the religious and political spectrum. Those rites of passage into an evil realm exist for any of us, and any of us can prove to lead in such a way. None of us is beyond being used as an instrument of evil, and for leaders it’s doubly so. It’s time to be awake!

Faith in this day is allegiance to Jesus alone,
and only the surrendered heart can discern it.

How do we learn to trust our spiritual allegiance to community? We need to see the community we align with sold out to Jesus alone, yet we need to continue to monitor for it. We need to see the Shepherd in our midst. We need to see care and concern and consideration and compassion.

Times like these call for discernment.

Loss of life for gain of gospel

Photo by Fabienne FILIPPONE on Unsplash

The untapped riches of God’s glory and grace unfold for the one who surrenders what is vanquished for the voluminousness of God’s kingdom.

What does that mean?

It is entirely possible, as we let go of that which once defined our life, to forgive the fact that the worst possible thing has taken place, that we come to be compensated by a knowledge of God we always hoped might be possible but never, until now, experienced.

So, what I’m saying is two relatively impossible things occur in the same season — we are blindsided by loss and backwashed into grief AND we come to encounter the real and risen Lord Jesus in a way He can only be encountered — through loss and the grief that overwhelms us.

Loss and grief hasten us to the valley of decision. Will we fight for what is now gone — an utterly ridiculous concept — or will we let it go, for safe-keeping in the arms of God? As we let it go, forgiving the nature of life to take from us, God ministers to us through His risen Son via the Holy Spirit, through the vacating of our sorrow from a soul pregnant in anguish. And yet we will return again and again and again to the impoverishment of brokenness until all our grief has been consumed by the fire of God; a process of many months or years.

It is well for the pure fact that
through adversity we’re destined to grow.

What I’m suggesting is this: even as we share our sorrow with God, knowing He is present, God’s Spirit showers us with the kind of empathy impossible from human hands. It is important that we can share with humanity, vital for healing and recovery, but our chief sadness is saved for the God who knows us like no human being can.

This is the epitome of prayer, that, there in a beached emotionality, we encounter God in a kind of communication beyond words. And all because we’re enduring loss.

Not to empty the truth of its intensity, or to trivialise solemn matters, but to expound the imagery, loss is an access-all-areas ticket into the mosh pit of God’s Presence. Loss is the avenue through which we enter the streets of grief, where we finally have communion with the Presence of God, through surrender.

To a person of the world, life sucks because of loss, and through loss they enter any one or a number of perils, like addictions, because they cannot stand the grief.

But the person of God finds it is too much for them, the moment breaks them, and there, as they lie in a thousand pieces strewn through the crags of life, only God can instil the reformation of what loss has deformed.

Life’s deformation was the necessary prelude
to God’s reformation.

Only through the purposes of God, through surrender, do we rise, like the phoenix out of ashes.

The gospel is won into our hearts not through an external blessing but through inner privation.

What challenges us, changes and completes us

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Something has struck me as I’ve studied those who’ve grieved; a commonality that all seem to share. I know it personally, and it is indelibly real.

Those who are challenged at the depths in some ways master those depths. And, as a friend has only recently added, those who have been to such depths ‘discover that they can (now) minister to those depths in others.’[1]

Those who are challenged are changed and, of a sense, a lost part of who they are is completed; they ‘graduate’ from that person and walk on in a newness of person. To embrace it is healing.

What challenges us, changes and completes us.

Those who are challenged are changed because a completeness comes into their existential realm; they carry about themselves the losses they cannot quite let go of. This can seem rather like a weight, a burden, but really it’s better thought of as a testament of what was endured. It will never be forgotten. It does not need to continue to be painful, yet at times such pain is in itself an important requiem of a former part of our lives, and such pain ought to be honoured if that’s possible.

The secret way of suffering is
success in the succession stakes.

Suffering marks the end of something
and the beginning of something else.

Suffering is a portent that somehow
enriches our experience of time,
which is often experienced as pain.

Suffering takes us beyond where we are. It forces us to create a new normal. It commands the attention, and though we may resent it or be depressed or develop an anxiety disorder, it creates sufficient crisis that we cannot stay as we were.

This in itself can be seem to be such a massive loss; having to let go of an identity we were perfectly content with. But it isn’t always and doesn’t have to be.

It’s a blessing to have been challenged so much that we’ve been changed to completion. We don’t always see this early on though. It can take the passage of years before we more fully embrace the suffering that caused us to grow. And still there’s the remnant of regret, which is a depth we’ve learned to live with, but that goes on with us; a dear and unfortunate spiritual possession we carry for the remainder of our lives.

The normality of life never shifts us.

It’s only pain and pressure and challenge that changes us. God must get our attention somehow. Then we realise, once we’re over the resentment of hating what’s been done, that God is ever fashioning the good out of evil.

Something must die in us before new life can rise.

And new life only rises once death
gives way to the possibility of hope.

---

[1] Attribution to Pastor Peter Randell, senior pastor at Waratah Christian Community Church in Western Australia.

PLAN B CHURCH

Here below is a vision for the church in this day, or for any day. This is Plan B Church:

A church for a world that doesn’t work; for a people who lost hope in the vain promises of the world long ago; for a people who discern the lies but don’t want to fall into cynicism.

A church for a life without answers. A church committed to resting in questions that embrace mystery.

A church for those whose lives have arrived at the fact that Plan A doesn’t work.

A church for every person who craves true connection and God’s acceptance through the practiced though imperfect love of others; for persons seeking a deeper reality of connectedness.

A church for the person who is desperate to love and be loved with the safe love of Christ.

A church that is a safe place to come and to rest and to grow at the Holy Spirit’s pace; a place to be safely vulnerable.

A church where the Beatitudes of Jesus are the pinnacle of our vision and ministry.

A church where faith and repentance discussed, explored, lived, where believers bear fruit that leads to social action.

A church where all are genuinely welcome and find that their brokenness is embraced.

A church where church is not an institution but an anywhere place where the first are last and the last are genuinely first, and leaders continually embrace this and keep themselves accountable to this.

A church where leaders are marked by servant-heartedness, steward-mindedness, and love people with a shepherd-love.

This church is a Plan B church because it’s a church for those for whom church didn’t work.

This church is a Plan B church because it’s firmly rooted to God’s Plan B — the upside-down kingdom represented in the Beatitudes of Jesus.

This church is a Plan B church because it exists to proclaim hope for the oppressed, release for captives, good news for the poor, and recovery of spiritual sight for those who acknowledge they’re blind.

Being a tiny community, this church is committed to being a seed — to joining the extrapolation of the Plan B Church concept alive and well in more suchlike tiny communities all over the world.

Embracing vulnerability when you’re too weak for anything else

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The gold of the gospel is that it reigns over all systems of oppression indefinitely.

It takes within itself a consummate defeat, and yet, knows only victory. It refuses despair choosing to believe in the goodness beyond death.

Indeed, authentic belief transcends any notion of doubt, and sees only the action of God in the absence of God.

The gospel has a presence about it that turns the very moment of utter despair into a hope that successful people will never understand let alone experience.

It’s the style of the weak to know something in their brokenness that strong people have no idea about.

A weak person, having experienced the power in vulnerability, will never wish to be strong again.

They are shown an eternal power that blows apart all human power, leaving it hopelessly forlorn of answer. And only when there is no human power to draw from. Yes, the rock bottom stage is where vulnerability is driven from. Vulnerability can come from no other place.

Vulnerability only works when we’re too weak for anything else.
We must be smashed to smithereens to warrant and partake of it.

This gold of the gospel is so sensationally powerful we only need to experience it once, and we’re forever won to its universal and pressing truth. And as we embody this truth we’re destined to experience it more and more.

This truth is astounding: suddenly out of the jaws of death, as ashes comprehensively smother every remnant of visible hope, there is a rising that pushes past demise and breathes a life that one has never known before; a life that leaves the old experience of ‘life’ in its wake.

Resurrection converts darkness into light, day from night.
And all from a weakness intended to completely flummox us.

What is it that differentiates two opposite forms of despair? One that brokers an irrepressible hope from a despair that is tumbling, barrelling, traumatising? One drives us into the purpose of search that cannot ultimately give up even if it does momentarily. The other cannot get past the magnitude of it all. And yet, magnitude takes us deep enough to make us expansively weak.

This is the difference the way I see it. One despair refuses the logic of reality and is caught up in a vision of a different reality some time off. It’s prepared to be patient, to bear suffering well and occasionally not-so-well, to suffer indignity after humiliation, to have hopes dashed continually. It does this because there’s no logic in remaining in despair. It realises that hoping for a fantasy is better than the hellish despair of present. The other despair cannot get past the present reality and cannot see beyond it to the relief that’s coming. It cannot see the value in obedience as a power for attracting good. It finds it impossible to bear the state of pain that is thrust against it.

This other despair is nonsensical from the other side.
Despair bears no comparison to hope.
Hope is worth the cost.

Hope is worth losing the present for. It is worth the pain that blindsides hope. It is worth building upon. And only from weakness are we arranged in such a way to be forced into a choice. But blessed is the position and the choice, to remain weak, to accept it, to rally from weakness in a regaling vulnerability that resists denial, anger and bargaining.

What I speak of here is a real possession of the regenerate person. Indeed, it is the fruit of regeneration.

But regeneration comes from honestly letting ourselves fall into the hands of God; by refusing to rely on any semblance of our human strength.

The less we need to try to help God to help us,
the more we give up trying to overcome in our own strength.
And if we offer no resistance in our despair, but hope alone in God,
then we will discover from there, God can do all we need Him to do.

God speaks to you, don’t you know?

Photo by Diana Simumpande on Unsplash

One of the mysteries of faith in Jesus must be how God speaks to us through His Spirit. Especially for new believers the ‘aliveness’ of God must be a conundrum. And don’t many believers like to intellectualise how God speaks!

This article is about how God speaks to everyone through the everyday issues of life.

My object is to demystify the holy art of hearing God’s voice whilst showing the relevance of this part of the prayer conversation we ought to be engaged in constantly.

Prayer is not simply what we say to God,
but more what God says to us.

Do we listen? Are we attuned? And here is how that’s to be so.

We hear God’s voice primarily two ways, and this can be understood through the congruence of a balanced message. Any sermon should have sufficient challenge and encouragement in it. In other words, anointed sermons rebuke and convict and comfort and strengthen. And, I want to suggest that God talks to us all in these two ways.

We can imagine God speaks to us through TAP and its anagram PAT. Let me elaborate.

God speaks to us through the metaphors of tapping us on the shoulder and patting us on the back.

The Spirit of God challenges us by tapping us on the shoulder, to alert us to something to heed, like a warning, or to stop something, or to lead us to do something. This can be a rebuke for sin or equally God alerting us to the opportunity to glorify Him through a practical love or care or concern we can show.

The Spirit of God also encourages us via patting us on the back. All believers should know those moments where the Holy Spirit might be heard to say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’ particularly when we’ve acted in obedience to His leading and made nothing of it.

As Christians, we must try to actively resist over-spiritualising our faith. It is Christianese at best, and at worst it distances those who might be interested in following Jesus.

God speaks to all of us all the time if only we’ll hear Him within the issues of our lives.

That day a drunk homeless man changed my life

Photo by Tom Parsons on Unsplash

During the season of life where my life seemed interrupted, and I entered a time of recovery that I could neither foresee nor appreciate at the time, a random event occurred that changed my life.

I was walking a lot in those days. It was how I often connected with God; even as He had stripped me back where my life circumstance serially broke me.

I happened to be walking along the main street in the outlying city I lived in when I stumbled across a drunk man. Initially I had the thought to avoid him. But he seemed so defenceless, and not a physical threat at all. So I got closer to him.

He was keeled over next to a building, slightly concealed by the grade of the land adjacent to the structure itself, in a culvert. He seemed to be unconscious, so I began to try and rouse him to ascertain if he was okay.

I was surprised. The man was unexpectedly coherent even if he were inebriated. My instinct was awakened to the fact that this human being, an indigenous man of my home nation, was not so much just schnozzled, but grief-stricken!

As I fumbled with him in my confusion, trying to make some sense of the situation, like a fisherman I caught snippets of information, the big catch alluding me. It was clear he was hurt, not just psychologically and emotional, but he was physically hurting too. His grimaces and his sobbing were a melding of a throbbing existential pain, both situational and generational.

As he sobbed through his story I completely forgot where I was. It was as if God had transported me for those moments into the travesty of this other man’s life. I could see his family situation. I could feel the abnegation and abandonment. I could taste the paroxysm of injustice. I could touch how nonsensical his life had become. And I heard how desolate he was, of hope, of purpose, of reason to go on.

God took me beyond the stereotype and gave me spiritual insight into the soul of brokenness — perhaps because, for me, I was in a season myself of aberrant brokenness.

I tried to console the man, and astonishingly he comprehended my encouragement, peering into my eyes with a longing hesitation. Very quickly, however, I suffered a bout of flesh, and my courage to speak hope boldly begin to abruptly diminish, as I believed upon the reality of his plight.

I called an ambulance. This man needed hospital attention. He needed a range of healing services holistic in nature. I felt completely unable to tend to him as he needed, but at least for those eternal seconds he may have felt something of God’s profound empathy.

As soon as the ambulance arrived on scene I could see some new things emerge; things that comforted me but also things that disconcerted me. I was reminded of the wonderful services our western society has that we take for granted. Then I also saw the presumptive mindset that prevailed in the two men who attended us. Sound men, but with unsound biases. They must’ve been so conditioned by the typical drug-affected homeless people they come across daily. They weren’t unkind, but they could not see beyond this man’s appearance. They couldn’t see past the stereotype. They couldn’t see his soul. For a moment I wondered if in fact I’d done the right thing.

But then God reminded me of my limits; I’d done all I could have.

I rested in that even as I prayed for the man as the ambulance drove off.

In this, God taught me to look beyond the outward appearance into the unknowable heart and soul and created mystery of a unique person made in His image. It’s a lesson I have continually been reminded of. A lesson to see the sacred value of the person caught in a compromised position. And to see that we all fall, and but for God’s love, who are we?

Everyone has a story for where they’re at and why they’re there, no matter their external appearance.

Before this moment in my life I don’t think I’d seen such a demonstration of God’s power to show me how quickly I pre-judge situations. This power also showed me my capacity to help. I left changed.