Forgetting & Remembering

Forgetting & Remembering

Scripture has many injunctions about remembering. The people of Israel were constantly reminded by prophet and psalmist to recall their history and in particular the mighty deliverance of their release from slavery in Egypt and their eventful journey to the Promised Land. A lament of Jeremiah was that Israel had forgotten their God and that was the root of their troubles. The Psalmist exhorts us to bless the Lord and to forget not all His benefits. (Ps 103:2)

At my age, only two & a half years from ninety, there is much to remember, and one of the blessings I count is the encouragement that comes from reflecting on various manifestations of the grace of God experienced along the pilgrim way. I had a powerful experience of this a few days ago as I began my day by reading Psalm 71. Here are some passages from that Psalm which gripped my spirit;

“Thou O Lord art my hope, my trust from my youth. Upon thee have I leaned from my birth; Thou art he who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of Thee.”

“I will hope continually and will praise Thee yet more and more. My mouth will tell of Thy righteous acts, of Thy deeds of salvation all the day, for their number is past my knowledge.”

“O God, from my youth Thou hast taught me and I still proclaim Thy wondrous deeds. So even to old age and grey hairs, O God do not forsake me till I proclaim Thy might to all the generations to come.”

As I meditated on these things a veritable flood of memories crowded into my mind from my earliest days right up to the present, and I found myself overwhelmed by a fresh awareness of the love grace mercy and goodness of my Father. Thankfulness and joy overflowed my heart and praise filled my mouth. Blessed remembering!

Back on air.

My blogs have been held up by rather complicated changes made by Google, which were beyond my IT skills to deal with. Now, thanks to wonderful help from my friends Scott & Melody Nightingale, these problems have been sorted out and I can get back on air, or rather, cyberspace.

I have been using a book of daily readings compiled from the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and today the passage selected was from his wonderful little book, “Life Together”. I would like to share it because I believe it speaks to a problem many find who have left the institutional church regarding fellowship.

“Christians cannot take for granted that they will be allowed to live together with other Christians….. The degree to which God gives the gift of visible communion varies. Christians in the diaspora are comforted by a brief visit from a fellow Christian, a common prayer and a fraternal blessing. They gain strength from a letter written by the hand of a Christian. The handwritten greeting of Paul in his letter was indeed such a sign of fellowship. Others receive the gift of Sunday fellowship in community worship. Still others live a Christian life in the fellowship of their family. Among Christians today a desire has arisen together with other Christians during work breaks for a time to find life together under the Word.. Today Christians again understand life together as the grace that it is, as something unusual , as the ‘roses and lilies’ of the Christian life.”

We are so frequently told that it is impossible to survive and thrive without regularly gathering with others, and made to feel guilty that we are “not fellowshipping”, but the reality is that many who have stepped aside from the old ways of church find themselves relatively isolated and unable to enjoy frequently meeting with fellow-believers. Others are blessed by having taken the step outside in company with others and so are often able to be together. I have learned to accept the circumstances in which Father has placed me. I have known the joy of life together, rich experiences of sharing life with others, and now in these later years of my life I am immensely thankful to Father for those who visit me from time to time, for encouraging e-mails and contacts on Skype. Such gifts of grace keep me assured of my part in the Church which Jesus is building.

Prisoner of God

Prisoner of God

Some weeks ago, while browsing in our local library I noticed a book with the intriguing title “A Prisoner of God”. This proved to be a fascinating story with not a few things to learn about institutional religion and its ultimate nature.

The story is that of a brilliant young French biochemist, who gave up a highly promising career in that field to enter a monastery of the Benedictine order. His purpose was to find God and he was told that if he obeyed all the rules and observed all the rituals diligently he would finally find God.

In his own words, “The impressive monastic tradition tried and tested for centuries, could only lead to God. ‘Do all this,’ the rule said and you will arrive there…. In fact what I arrived at was mainly ‘doing all this’. But God where was He then?” And “I refused to see all the pretence that there was in our lives. A comfortable poverty, an anaemic chastity, a bulldozer of a prayer routine. To admit it, or just consider it would have been to call everything into question. ‘You will arrive.” I based my life on that promise in the Rule. … But what of God?”

He had discovered that relationship with God is not a matter of religious routines, obedience to human superiors and devoted performance. In fact these were the enemies of true intimacy with Father.

Later, when he was in Rome for further study shortly after Vatican 2, he encountered charismatic priests and had some experience the so called “Basic communities’ which were in many respects like House churches. However, he relates how, although they started in a way that was refreshing and alive a “clericalism of the laity” soon developed. Here is another quotation, “There was no escaping clericalism, which was now the clericalism of the laity…. There is only one truth and that is ours. If you don’t share it totally there are only two possibilities; either you are a bit stupid and we’ll enlighten you for your good or else you reject our line of thought and you become our enemy.”

The same danger exists in current House Church movements and even in what is supposed to be free from all clericalism, Organic Church. It is a constant that man will always seek to take control. We have the greatest difficulty in believing that God is able to organize His own work!! We do love to instituionalise!

Michel Benoit’s story continues until he was finally and quite brutally expelled from the vocation he had chosen at such cost. In the concluding part of the book he draws some conclusions. Here are a couple of observations he makes; “Jesus did not found a church (meaning an institution) and Christianity as it developed was a betrayal of Him.” (The parenthesis mine). Also, “How many years it took me to realize that the churches, all churches are power machines, that their unvoiced ambition is to win power and then cling to it at all costs.” And finally, “The Church brought me Christ, but I had to leave her in order to find the prophet of Nazareth.”

No doubt this man’s experience was in the most rigid of religious forms and the cruelty of his ultimate rejection has coloured his views, but I felt that there were salutary lessons in his story to which we do well to give heed.

For me this book was a real page-turner, well written, transparently sincere and full of many fascinating insights. The only regretful thing was that he seemed still short of a full and satisfying discovery of Father’s heart of love.

Fruit in its season

Fruit in its season.

Two days ago I completed 87 years of life, and looking back over the road I have travelled, I see, with great thankfulness to Father, abundant streams of grace and mercy from beginning to end. I can truly join the hymn writer Frances von Alstyne in singing,

“All the way my Saviour leads me:

What have I to ask beside?

Can I doubt His tender mercy,

Who through life has been my guide?

Heavenly peace, divinest comfort,

Here by faith in Him to dwell!

For I know whate’er befall me,

Jesus doeth all things well.

Also I have been thinking about the Scripture in Psalm 1 concerning the believer who is likened to “a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season.” The little phrase “Fruit in its season” particularly has gripped me.

For each season of our life with Jesus there is an appropriate fruit. There is one kind of fruit when we are young, full of vigour and zeal. Another kind of fruit in the season of the full maturity of manhood, when we have had experience and faith has been tested. Yet another different kind of fruit in old age when the vibrant energies of youth are no longer ours and and the years of maturity have passed. I must not envy or seek to reproduce the fruit of youth or even of my mature years, but be content with that fruit that Father chooses to produce in me which only comes with age and long experience of the pilgrim way. That thought has encouraged me. May it do likewise for you.

Christmas 2009

Christmas 2009

“She gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.” (Luke 2: 7)

Pilate “Granted the body to Joseph. And he bought a linen shroud and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud and laid him in a tomb.” “Mark 15:46

In these two passages I saw recently as I had never seen before just how fully Jesus had shared in our humanity. He came as we all did from his mother’s womb, helpless and dependent, was lovingly and warmly wrapped and laid in his crude cradle, the manger. And at the end a lifeless body was lifted from the cross, tenderly wrapped in a linen shroud and consigned to a tomb. In these two, and between the two, birth and the grave, he entered into the total experience of our humanness with all its emotions, temptations, tensions. As Charles Wesley has it:

“Let earth & heaven combine,

Angels & men agree,

To praise in songs divine

The incarnate Deity

Our God contracted to a span,

Incomprehensibly made man.

He laid His glory by,

He wrapped Him in our clay.

Unmarked by human eye,

The latent Godhead lay;

Infant of days He here became,

And bore the mild Immanuel’s name.”

Praise God, the tomb was not the end, but “He was designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.” (Romans 1:4)

And the suffering of death was “So that by the grace of God he might taste death for every one.” (Hebrews 2:9b) And through that death was that “He might destroy him who has the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage.”

Such is some of the meaning of the incarnation we celebrate at this time.

The Phantom Church

The Phantom Church

I recently read the article by Frank Viola on the subject of what he calls “The post-church phenomenon.”< http://www.ptmin.org/postchurch.pdf> in which he insists that only where believers are meeting regularly together in a locality is there true church. Those outside such fellowships are by his definition “The Phantom church.” This set me to reviewing once more where I stand in relation to Church and what it is, because I am one who has no such regular meeting together with fellow believers, as I am sure are a multitude of others.

I first went back to Scriptures which have been so crucial to my own story. In 1 Corinthians 12:13 Paul says, “We were all baptized by one Spirit into one body.” And in v. 27 of the same chapter, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” Thus I can be sure that, as a believer I am incorporated in the Body, the Church.

Then in Ephesians 2:19-22 I received fresh encouragement specially from The Message, “God is building a home. He’s using us all irrespective of how we got here in what He is building. He used the apostles and prophets for the foundation. Now He’s using you, fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together. We see it taking shape day after day, a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home.”

Again, in the same epistle 2:19-20, “So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in who you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”

In 1 Peter 2:4-5, an epistle interestingly enough written to “exiles”, the Apostle tells us that, having come to Jesus, we are being built (not we are building) into a spiritual house. Then in v.9 he says , “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.”

From these and a number of other Scriptures which I could quote, I am absolutely assured that I am in God’s Church, and I continue to be in it whether I am meeting regularly with others in a gathering or not. I have known the blessing of being built along with other believers in frequent meeting. Now, I do not have that particular joy, but I still meet together with others who visit me, or whom I encounter during the day or share a meal with. I talk with brothers in different parts of the world on Skype. In all of these situations I am experiencing Church.

I have said before that it is a small step from organism to institution, and when one starts to make rigid and exclusive definitions of what true Church is, the seeds of institutionalism are already present. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his little book “Living Together” has this to say in its first truth-filled chapter, “Life together under the Word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegiam pietetatas, but rather where it understands itself as being a part of one holy, catholic Christian Church.” And Thomas Kelly in “The Eternal Promise” writes, “It was a tragic day when the fellowship of the early church groups faded out into church membership.” And ,”From Fellowship to Membership is to cross a great and tragic divide.”

There is no “Phantom Church” but only one Church of the Lord Jesus Christ which He Himself is building and we who belong to Him are in it wherever and however we may meet.

God's Freedom Walker

God’s Freedom Walker

I have recently been revisiting with great profit some of the George MacDonald novels edited by Michael Phillips. MacDonald’s heroes are invariably dedicated followers of Jesus who seldom or never “Go to church”.

In “The Musicians Quest” The chief character is explaining to a friend how he, a doctor, and others serve the Lord among the poor in London. Here is their conversation:

“Are you a society?” I asked at length.

“No. At least we don’t use the word.”

“What are you then?”

“Why should we be anything as long as we do our work?”

“Do you lay claim to no designation of any sort?”

“We are a church if you like. There!”

“Who is you clergyman?”

“Nobody.”

“Where do you meet?”

“Nowhere.”

“What are your rules then?”

“We have none.”

“What makes you a church?”

“Divine service.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The sort of thing you have see tonight.”

“What is you creed?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“But what do you believe about him?”

“We believe in him. We consider belief in him, however small far better than any amount of belief about him.”

And later the same hero says, “You must not imagine the result depends on you, or me. The question is, are you having a hand in the work God is doing? It shows no faith in God to make frantic efforts or lamentations. God will do His work in His time in His way. Our responsibility is merely to stand ready and available to go where He sends and do what comes our way.”

Then, a few days ago, I received an e-mail from a friend, who had been a patient of mine in my early days in New Zealand, in which she described herself, in a phrase that I felt I had to share, as being “A freedom walker for God” for the last forty years. You can see her blogs at http://howiseethings-boo.blogspot.com/

George MacDonald himself, his heroes and my friend are examples of living in the truth of the word Jesus spoke, “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” Paul too urged the Galatians to walk in freedom telling them, ”For freedom Christ has set us free, stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”