The King’s English - 100 phrases in 3 minutes.
Renovation of the Heart: Chapter Six
Feelings - how on earth do we deal with them? That’s the subject Willard tackles in this chapter, which is as challenging as it is enlightening.
The subject of feelings pours salt into an open wound of misunderstanding. Primarily, Willard says, this is because culturally we are enslaved to our feelings - they have become the only and ultimate arbiter of our decision making process. We will decide to do what feels good, and that is justification enough to do something. Gone is the wisdom of much of human history that distrusts feeling and instead elevates self-control and rationality as running the rule over our feelings - now, to feel anything is better and more worthy (no matter what that feeling might be) than to feel nothing, or to work against the grain of feeling.
This puts our formation into the likeness of Christ in serious jeopardy, because we all have feelings that, should we act on them, lead only into sin and rebellion against God and consequently cause destruction and spiral into addiction. This is not an easy chapter to read, because living in the 21st Century West, we are inundated with the attitude that to act on our feelings is the only way to live. This is one of the biggest lies we are told by the world, and we have to face it square on. But that’s hard.
What’s the solution? Love. Joy. Peace. These three fruit of the Spirit enable us to rightly organise and prioritise our feelings (note: feelings are not inherently bad, but bad ordering and an insufficient filtering of feelings leads to destruction of ourselves and others). These things can only be produced in us by the Holy Spirit - our own will-power will not work.
Love is the active will-to-good. We love someone when we desire their good for their own sake. Confused with lust and desire far too much, the root of love is in God as exhibited in Christ. He first loved us, so that we could respond to him in love, which also enables us to love others and receive their love in return.
Joy is the pervasive sense of well-being. Again, we can too easily confuse this with pleasure, though it is often pleasant. We need to learn to fix our minds of God, and not on ourselves in order for us to understand and develop joy in all circumstances.
Peace is the rest that result from being assured of how things will turn out. In all circumstances we can have peace because we know that in Christ, we have our future secured, even if it is darkened today by pain and sorrow. Peace comes from accepting the gift of life in his son (see Romans 5:1-2). We no longer have to justify ourselves to God or to others, or even to ourselves - God has justified us in Christ.
These three cannot be separated, they are all the work of the same Holy Spirit. We need not to be passive in our desire to attain them, but knowing that it is by his strength that we are able to live in love, joy and peace. We need to have the right Vision, Motivation and Intention to change in the area of feeling, and with the power of the Spirit, it will be so. All of this is intimately connected to faith and hope in God, and through them we can eliminate destructive feelings.
I end with a neat summary from Willard, which we do well to spend some time dwelling upon:
‘Feelings have a crucial role in life, but they must not be taken as a basis for action or character change That role falls to insight, understanding and conviction of truth, which will always be appropriate accompanied by feeling. Feelings are not fundamental to moral decision-making, but can become so if we give them that role in response to the complexities of modern life.’ (106)
Renovation of the Heart: Chapter Five
Willard now gets into the nitty-gritty of what it looks like to be transformed into being more like Christ. He starts with transforming the mind - chapter five about the thought life, and chapter six about feelings.
He begins thus: ‘Our thoughts determine the orientation of the things we do, and shape the feelings that frame our responses to the world around us.’ We live our lives in a context full of ideas - ideas are our bread and butter in the world we live. If we’re to start talking about the things we think about, we need to grasp the things that the world around us thinks about - and the best place is in advertising. A car no longer functions purely to get us from A to B, but also as a status symbol, trading on the ideas we hold about ourselves. So, we must be aware of the ideas we swim in, and also, fundamentally, allow Christ to transform these ideas.
Images are closely related to ideas. We think in images, and the process of putting on the character of Christ will transform destructive images (think of how much is advertised with the promise of sexual satisfaction - when we begin to notice this, we begin to notice how utterly ridiculous it is), into images and ideas about Christ himself.
Willard also points to information and actual thinking as keys in transforming our thought life - we need to get the right facts, and in this he means that we need to know who God really is, not just some tradition/denomination/culturally skewed understanding. And we have to actually think. Which is harder and rarer than we might initially think.
We are, as Willard rightly points out, tragically under-developed in Western Christianity when it comes to thinking. Indeed, ‘Some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith.’ Yet thinking honours God, and means we are in a far better place to weigh up the incredible claims of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
He warns of some dangers to thinking: pride, ignorance, allowing desire to control what we think about, and being indiscriminate with the images we allow ourselves to think on. True as these are, I fear that my experience has been that within the church, these dangers are faced far less often than the dangers of a faux anti-intellectualism that revolts against thinking and instead relies on pop-Christianity that has developed through the amalgam of post-Victorian, uber-Enlightened, Great Britain.
Jesus: at the right hand of the father, not living in my heart
There is a popular misunderstanding in Christian circles: the Jesus is living in your heart, and my heart, and any heart that believes in him.
Why is this a misunderstanding? I hear you ask, slightly angrily as your unbiblical assumptions begin to crumble slightly. Well, because Jesus is now, currently, sitting at the right hand of the Father, interceding on our behalf. If you think this unscriptural, have a look at Romans 8:34 and Hebrews 1:3.
So why do song and hymn writers suggest that Jesus is in our hearts? Well, that’s because we’ve lost the physicality of Jesus the Christ of Nazareth. If we lose it, we become too spiritualist, and not in a positive way. We in the Enlightened age are not too keen with things we cannot attach a scientific hypothesis to (and, ironically, treat the hypothesis as gospel) - this is evidenced by the rise of the remarkably irrational New Atheist appeal to scientism and it’s faux “rationality”. We know that when Jesus ascended, he didn’t go to a heaven that is in the sky or in space, because we’ve been there, taken some astounding photos, and not found Jesus. So we reject the literal understanding of where Jesus is in favour of a silly hop, skip, and jump, over to a super spiritualist concept of where Jesus is.
Think about it: if Jesus was living in your heart and my heart , then he’d have to be a spirit, because we know we don’t have little Jesus’ in our hearts - that’s just silly. But, Scripture tells us that Jesus ascended as a man, physically, into the presence of God, just as God had originally created all humanity to do (and because of Jesus Christ, we will do once again). So let’s drop this whole idea that Jesus lives in our hearts, and grasp properly how we come to know and understand Jesus Christ: by his Holy Spirit.
It is the Spirit who lives in you and me - the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit who was in Jesus, is in us. He points us to Jesus, reveals to us who Jesus is, convicts us of sin, and through him are we regenerated and transformed. Have a look at what Paul says in Romans 8:9-11. It is the Spirit who lives in us, and is our guarantee of the promised resurrection from the dead, amongst many other things.
So, at the end of all this, here’s my plea: let’s stop singing songs with lyrics such as: ‘You ask me how I know he lives / he lives within my heart’. Nice sentiment, but clearly not what Scripture testifies to. He doesn’t live within my heart - and if he did, that would be a terrible basis for providing any sort of answer to the questions one might be asked about whether Jesus Christ lives or not.
Ascension Day: the forgotten festival
‘By bringing our human nature, once for all, into the presence of the Father, Christ liberates us for life in the Spirit.’ Douglas Farrow
Today is Ascension Day. The day the Christian church celebrates the ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven, to sit at the right hand of the Father, to send the Spirit and to intercede on our behalf.
Except that in the UK, and in many non-conformist/Free/Protestant churches it is almost completely forgotten. In much of mainland Europe it is a Holiday (or Holy Day, strictly speaking). Just one of the many things the Europeans get very right.
The Protestant churches, with the possible exception of parts of the Church of England, are worse off because of its forgetfulness, and ancient fear of the church calendar. Both of these things I understand very well, growing up in the Evangelical Free wing of Protestantism - so forgetful are we, that we often forget that we are, in fact, a wing of Protestantism, but that’s not for this blog-post.
But we are missing out. In ways more catastrophic than I had previously understood or expected. Why? Because if we ignore the Ascension - which I have done for the past 25 years until only last week - it impacts on how we understand our humanity, the goodness of creation, and the need for mystery regarding the strange absence of Christ yet his presence with us by his Holy Spirit.
We are in total confusion in the church about our humanity. This is reflected in our lack of any sort of Biblical understanding of the hope of resurrection from the dead and new life in new, resurrected bodies, when Christ returns and ushers in the complete reign of God. Ask any group of 10 Christians what we are hoping for after death, and you will receive 9 answers about going to heaven and only one (vaguely) about the resurrection. We think that our spirit will float up to heaven and we’ll be with God and all the frustration of being restricted by our bodies which age and decay will be done with. Now, this has a kernel of truth (which makes it so plausible) but is, in fact, wrong. Our hope is that we will be resurrected at the last day to be, bodily, with God as we were originally created to be - we don’t know what those bodies are going to be, but they will be physical.
How does the Ascension of Christ relate to this? Well, if we don’t have a biblical understanding of Jesus’ physical ascension, they we will fall into assuming that when Jesus floated up to heaven, it was as some sort of a ghost / spirit which has more to do with what pop-culture has to say about Jesus and the ascension that what Scripture does. The quote from Farrow at the top of the page is so important in validating God’s work in creating us because he points to God vindicating Jesus Christ of Nazareth as a complete human, who can as originally intended stand in the presence of God as a human. This gives us hope that we will one day follow him into the presence of God permanently.
Without the concrete reality of Jesus of Nazareth as present before God now as a complete human, we can slip unawares into the false place of assuming a ‘who-is-Jesus-for-me-today’ attitude. Jesus can too easily become a spiritual, floating, nebulous force for good inside each of us, and then instead of being confronted by Jesus the Christ, the God-man, from Nazareth, we are able to console ourselves by saying that Jesus wants me to be “happy” or Jesus wants me to “find myself”. The ascension, when understood biblically as a real, physical event does not give us that option, and forces us to deal with and be confronted by Jesus Christ as he is given to us in the gospels, anticipated by the Old Testament, and dwelt upon by Paul, Peter, James and John in the NT letters.
Bob Wright / Tom Dylan…. no, wait. The other way around.
Back from Colorado. Check out timanddavedoamerica.
Sixty-Two
I find my rest in God alone;
only he gives me hope.
He is my rock and my salvation.
He is my defender;
I will not be defeated.
My honour and salvation come from God.
He is my mighty rock and my protection.
People, trust God all the time.
Tell him all your problems,
because God is our protection.
Early Starts & Attempts at clearing the leaves
Friday’s mean being in church at 7am. It is always a challenge having the alarm go off an hour earlier, but constantly worthwhile joining with our Eldership to pray for the church.
The early start provides opportunities for some quiet reading and reflection in the early morning before manic Friday begins. At the moment the reading consists of Jim Belcher’s ‘Deep Church’. Half way through, and he is great. He does justice to the emerging movement, but also frames his concerns and questions in a correct and honouring way.
I resonate with a lot of what he says. There has got to be something more than the dead traditionalism, but something that holds on to the orthodox doctrinal positions that those who believe that Jesus Christ is Lord have held onto for the past 2000 years.
Trying to bring these insights into my own church context is where the real work begins. It is all very good gleaning the gems from reading, but unless there is an impact on the ground that points people towards Christ who can by his grace transform them, there really is very little point.
One thing is clear: it is difficult to clear away the leaves of what is already happening to try to see the concrete below in order to find out what the foundation of all we do is.
Jesus, reacting, and why I wasn’t fire-fighting
Sunday was a bit of a watershed day. The incidentals don’t particularly matter. What matters is what it has taught me about Jesus Christ, his church, and my role serving Him within it.
It was a day of the unexpected. Conversations with some I did not know, some I know very well. Situations that call for “a professional” in the world’s eyes, but in reality call for Jesus’ intervention; his mercy, grace, compassion and love.
My reaction was to use the term “firefighting”. But that is terrible term to describe what it looks, tastes and smells like to serve Christ by serving his church. It gives the impression that I can keep everything contained if I use the correct amount of water. It gives the impression that the Christian life is normally plain and predictable. As I reflect and think after having some distance from the events, I know this to be simply false.
Keeping a lid on it, putting the fire out - none of these are actually fixing problems. Lids come off, fires will always start again given the correct amount of heat, fuel and air. Point being, we need something more fundamental than replacing the lid, or throwing buckets of water. Jesus gives us that.
The questions surround whether there is success or not in Jesus’ action in our lives by his Spirit - which is more of a misnomer than anything else until we can get our categories of success right, and not build them on consumerist, business models.
No-one is promised a cosy, easy, nice, lack of boredom, type of life. The Kingdom of God is bigger than that, it’s got to be.
