Revelation

I love the way that Jesus reveals Himself to us. Isn’t it exciting that through His Spirit we can meet and encounter Him for real? We have a living God – a God who is still seeking after us today and yearning for a relationship with us.

Revelation – regular, fresh revelation – of God is vital to anyone wanting to live their life loving Him. There would be very little love in a relationship between friends if they never saw one another. A marriage where the husband and wife had no contact would be loveless. Paul, when writing to the church in Ephesus, writes the following:

I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. – Ephesians 1:17-21 (NIV).

Above all things, Paul prays for a Spirit of revelation for the church, because it only through revelation that we come to “know him better.” Indeed, revelation leads to salvation. It is as important for the non-believer and it is the ‘veteran’ Christian who has been following Jesus for more years than they care to remember.

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As it is Easter, I’d like to take a look at a couple of ways that Jesus revealed Himself after His resurrection to His followers. Perhaps we can learn from those early stories about how Jesus chooses to reveal Himself, and how that can help us to know Him better.

The first story is that of Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ tomb, found in John 20:

Mary was standing outside the tomb crying, and as she wept, she stooped and looked in.She saw two white-robed angels, one sitting at the head and the other at the foot of the place where the body of Jesus had been lying. “Dear woman, why are you crying?” the angels asked her.

“Because they have taken away my Lord,” she replied, “and I don’t know where they have put him.”

She turned to leave and saw someone standing there. It was Jesus, but she didn’t recognize him. “Dear woman, why are you crying?” Jesus asked her. “Who are you looking for?”

She thought he was the gardener. “Sir,” she said, “if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and get him.”

“Mary!” Jesus said.

She turned to him and cried out, “Rabboni!” (which is Hebrew for “Teacher”).

“Don’t cling to me,” Jesus said, “for I haven’t yet ascended to the Father. But go find my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Mary Magdalene found the disciples and told them, “I have seen the Lord!” Then she gave them his message. – John 20:11-18 (NLT).

At first, Mary didn’t recognise Jesus. Imagine what she must have been thinking – Jesus’ body had been stolen or destroyed and there was nothing she could do about it. Imagine the panic she must have felt at finding Him missing after only 3 days. No wonder she wept. Through her tears she turns to see a man standing nearby – “The gardener!” she thinks, “he will know what has happened to my Lord.“ Certain that this gardener will be able to help her, she even jumps ahead of herself, saying, “tell me where you have put him“! She didn’t even know if this guy had taken the body or not!

It is only when Mary’s brief outburst has finished that Jesus chooses to speak. With just one word He has shown Mary a little more of His glory.

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The second story is that of the two disciples travelling to Emmaus, found in Luke 24:

That same day two of Jesus’ followers were walking to the village of Emmaus, seven miles from Jerusalem. As they walked along they were talking about everything that had happened. As they talked and discussed these things, Jesus himself suddenly came and began walking with them. But God kept them from recognizing him.

He asked them, “What are you discussing so intently as you walk along?”

They stopped short, sadness written across their faces. Then one of them, Cleopas, replied, “You must be the only person in Jerusalem who hasn’t heard about all the things that have happened there the last few days.”

“What things?” Jesus asked.

“The things that happened to Jesus, the man from Nazareth,” they said. “He was a prophet who did powerful miracles, and he was a mighty teacher in the eyes of God and all the people. But our leading priests and other religious leaders handed him over to be condemned to death, and they crucified him. We had hoped he was the Messiah who had come to rescue Israel. This all happened three days ago.

“Then some women from our group of his followers were at his tomb early this morning, and they came back with an amazing report. They said his body was missing, and they had seen angels who told them Jesus is alive! Some of our men ran out to see, and sure enough, his body was gone, just as the women had said.”

Then Jesus said to them, “You foolish people! You find it so hard to believe all that the prophets wrote in the Scriptures. Wasn’t it clearly predicted that the Messiah would have to suffer all these things before entering his glory?” Then Jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

By this time they were nearing Emmaus and the end of their journey. Jesus acted as if he were going on, but they begged him, “Stay the night with us, since it is getting late.” So he went home with them. As they sat down to eat, he took the bread and blessed it. Then he broke it and gave it to them. Suddenly, their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And at that moment he disappeared! – Luke 24:13-31 (NLT).

Do you see any similarities here between Mary’s story and the Emmaus story? Both Mary and the two disciples had their mind made up about something. While Mary was convinced that Jesus’ body had been taken by the gardener, the two disciples were sure that the crazy stories they had heard about Jesus were dubious at best. How does Jesus respond to the disciples? “‘What things?’ Jesus asked.” As if Jesus didn’t know what they were talking about. But He met them on their level and gave them the opportunity to process their thoughts. Then Jesus explains in very great detail what they’ve missed, starting right from the beginning with Moses. But even at this point, even after the two disciples have had every last Messianic prophecy that Jesus fulfilled and explained to them, they still don’t see Him. Are they stupid?!

I refuse to make that judgement, on the grounds that I see myself doing that so much of the time. I get caught up in my agenda, my reasoning, my thoughts, my ponderings, my understandings… All too often, I want Jesus to listen to what I think, rather than letting Him tell me what He’s up to.

In both of these stories, the moment of revelation came at the moment of stillness. For Mary, it was when her words ran out. For the disciples, it was when they bowed their heads at the breaking of the bread and for the first time, were listening out for God.

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How important, then, is it for us to be still in our lives today? It would appear that Jesus tends to reveal Himself to those who will make space for Him rather than those who will leave Him outside because inside they’re too busy. The Psalmist writes:

“Be still, and know that I am God.” – Psalm 46:10 (NIV).

We have seen the importance that Paul places on revelation. We have seen a very rough model of the way that Jesus (often!) chooses to reveal Himself.  Maybe it’s time to be still and ask to know more about Him.

The Greatest Day

Today is Easter Sunday.

Today is the greatest day in all of history.

Today is more important than Remembrance Day, D-Day, VE Day…

On this day, what happened was more important than anything else on earth.

Before, or since.

On this day, the Son of God was raised to life again.

On this day, death and hell were defeated forever.

On this day, we were made free.

Jesus died that we might have life.

All Glory to Him, the King of the Universe.

Forever and ever,

Amen.

True Love

It’s been a long time since I posted anything on here, so since it’s a week until Good Friday I thought I’d share one of my absolute favourite songs with you.

True Love is by Phil Wickham, from his 2007 album Cannons. You can listen to it here on YouTube. What I think I’ll do is talk about each bit of the lyrics separately, what they mean and why they are so powerful.

Phil uses ‘true love’ as a name in the song – it refers to Jesus, the only perfect human being to have ever lived, who was ‘full of grace and truth.’ (John 1:14, NIV.) Jesus reveals the Father to us, and God is love. So Jesus reveals the love of God to us – Jesus is true love.

Come close, listen to the story
About a love more faithful than the morning
The Father gave his only Son just to save us

The first verse is pretty self-explanatory – it establishes the theme of the song and talks about the faithfulness of God’s love – ‘more faithful than the morning’. This reminds me of part of Lamentations:

…his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness. - Lamentations 3:22-23, NIV.

Musically, this part of the song is open and full of space – it’s reflective, and Phil’s voice has a tenderness about it that helps to get across the mercy that God has for all of us.

The chorus gives us a comprehensive understanding of what went on when Jesus died. I was thinking about this the other day and I was realising how much of a monumental event it is – we know that the death of Jesus probably the most important thing to have happened for the whole of history (as Tim Hughes’ song Happy Day describes it, ‘The greatest day in history’).

Trust

The word trust features heavily in our everyday lives. But what is it?

We place our trust in a huge number of people and things. For example, we trust bus drivers – to turn up at the right time, and to drive in such a way that we don’t get damaged. We put our faith in taxi drivers in the same way (excepting the taxi driver featured in BBC’s Sherlock), and we trust that they will take the most direct route to our destination. We have faith that the builders, plumbers & electricians who built our houses, workplaces or schools have completed their work to an acceptable standard, such that the buildings can function as necessary and not fall over. We trust supermarkets and the people that work in them to provide us with food that is safe to eat. We put our faith in our government to make decisions on our behalf that will be the best for our country. We also place our trust in people in different ways – we trust friends with secrets and problems. We trust girlfriends or boyfriends to remain faithful.

You may have noticed that I have used the words trust and faith almost interchangeably. This is because they mean exactly the same thing.

The words trust and faith describe the confidence that we have that someone will act in an honourable way. Think about the word entrust – by entrusting something to somebody, we are passing the responsibility of looking after that something to them. Trust is important in that situation – we need to have faith that they will be responsible and act in the correct way.

Very often, trust is not something we can just switch on. It takes time to develop trust in someone, as we get to know them better and begin to see them as honourable and responsible. Placing our trust in someone can be a difficult thing to do – the fear of betrayal or ‘breaking our trust’ keeps us wary.

So trust has a lot to do with confidence and responsibility. Why do we do it?

We place our trust in things that are trustworthy. We put our faith in those things that are faithful. How do we decide if something or someone is trustworthy or faithful? From experience and reputation. Supermarkets have a reputation for providing food that is not diseased. We use our experience with someone to determine if it is safe to tell them something personal. Trust and faith also relate to love – the more we come to love someone, the more we trust them and have faith in them.

It is pretty clear here that these things have everything to do with the future. The future is something that we definitely cannot see, so we must be reliant on trust to allow us to look past the present. Every example given above is related to something that could happen, that we trust will, or won’t. It could be that our boyfriend or girlfriend cheats on us, but we trust that they won’t. It could be that the bus driver crashes the bus and we are seriously hurt, but have faith that they won’t. It could be that my house falls down, but I trust that it will stay standing.

Nobody is perfect. Therefore nobody can be completely trustworthy. Trust is broken fairly often – pipes burst, cars crash, food is bad, people cheat. It might be the case occasionally that this is not due to human fault, but that majority of the time it is – and unfortunately we can’t help it. We are a messed up people, continually making mistakes and getting things wrong.

The trust that we place in our plumbers, for example, is different to that trust that is placed in our friends. A busted pipe or broken tap doesn’t bother us in the same way that a secret of ours making its way around our peer group does. There are things that are harder to trust people with – and these tend to be aspects of our lives, the things that make us, us.

I’ve come to realise that the trust that we place in people who we are in relationships with – our boyfriends, girlfriends, wives or husbands – is more that just the faith that they will remain exclusively ours – we have to place more trust in them that the trust that they won’t cheat. We trust them with increasingly more aspects of our lives the longer we are with them – until ultimately, (if we find a husband or wife) we trust those we are married to with the rest of our lives. For example, we trust them to be responsible in raising any children that we might have, or to look after the house we might own. Trusting someone in a relationship requires more than the confidence that they won’t cheat – and like all trust, it is built and developed over time. This deeper sense of trust is not simply switched on.

When someone breaks our trust in these areas, we hurt. We are upset, angry and resentful. There’s no way of changing things back to how they were once someone has dirtied your name to others. This is where we have two options – either we remain angry and resentful towards that person, or we choose forgiveness. Forgiveness is hard, but at most times, extremely necessary. There isn’t one person on earth who hasn’t struggled to forgive someone at some point.

You knew this was coming… Why should we place our trust and faith in God?

God asks us to trust Him with our lives.  God is the One who can deal with life & death, so He is the only One in whom we can entrust these things. By life I mean more than our time on earth – I’m talking about our eternal fate and destiny. Like it or not, we are eternal beings, and this life is but a speck on the time-line of eternity. There is no-one else available for us to put our trust in with these things.

God is good, and what He promises us in eternity is what Christians refer to as heaven. Heaven most probably isn’t sitting on clouds, or a never-ending harp recital, heaven is simply spending eternity in the presence of God (in the same way, hell simply describes spending eternity without God). And if God is who He says He is, then heaven is a pretty awesome way to spend our time.

But why?! Good question. If God is real and if God is God, then we don’t need too many reasons. By definition, God loves us more than we could imagine, knows what’s best for us in a way that we can’t imagine, and is bigger and more powerful than anything we could ever imagine. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to struggle to much to put my trust in Him, if all that is true! But how do we know that it is true?

You see, this trust in God is different to the trust we use on earth. I mentioned above that experience and reputation are what allow us to make decisions regarding what to place our trust in. But who has experience of death? Very few people. God certainly has a reputation, but we still can’t know from that what happens after we die.

Jesus has had experience of death. For He died by crucifixion, but on the third day rose again to life, and He’s still alive today. Jesus didn’t say after His resurrection, ‘hold on, all that stuff I said about heaven and God before I died was all wrong, I’ve just seen what death is really like and it’s completely different.’ He continued to teach what He had taught before He died – and that is where we can gain experience of what God is like. That is where we can see that God is trustworthy. It’s written down in something called the Bible, an amazing collection of 66 books from many different authors, spanning centuries. The words of Jesus are shown from four independent sources, each saying more or less the exact same thing as the others. That evidence shows us that we should trust that it tells the truth. (There is plenty more evidence, scientific/archaeological, but I won’t go into all of it here.)

Once we have made the step of placing our trust in God for our eternities, it becomes a little easier and lot more sensible to trust God with the smaller things, such as our money, or our future on earth. If we have entrusted our eternal selves to God, then it makes a lot of sense to give to Him the time we have here.

I’ve struggled a lot recently with the word belief. Having written this, it’s become a lot more clear to me what it’s all about. Belief has very little to do with God’s existence. God’s existence is not subjective to our belief in Him – He doesn’t exist just because we believe it. Whether we believe that He exists or not is irrelevant to whether or not it is true. Belief is almost synonymous with faith and trust – belief is all about the future. Belief is more about what God will do than what God is! In the same way, it’s less important to believe ‘in Jesus’, that He existed, than it is to believe that Jesus is the Son of God.

The Bible says this:

Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. – Hebrews 11:1 (NLT).

What ‘we cannot see’ is the future. It does not refer to what I can’t see on the other side of the opaque wall of my room.

We must trust that God is powerful enough, strong enough, and loving enough to give us the best future possible. As we begin to see that future come alive, our faith in God gets stronger. Faith in God isn’t switched on to its maximum immediately, we learn to trust Him with all that we have as we get older, wiser, and as we come to love Him more.

God is faithful, and God is trustworthy, because God is perfect, and there is no-one in whom we should place our trust more.

Why? It’s simple: He loves us.

You inhabit the praises of Your people…

…so the Psalmist says (Psalm 22:3).

Where is God?

It is my firm belief that God does not live in buildings. A church is not the house of God because God lives there when there is no-one else around.

Looking back into the Old Testament, God’s presence was in the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle. This seems to directly contradict what is stated above – God evidently lived in a place, even when there was no-one else around.

This all ties in with Christmas and the Incarnation, but more strongly with Easter, and specifically Communion.

Because Christ died, we can be with the Father. The New Covenant, sealed with Jesus’ blood made this so. This is what we remember, and symbolise at Communion.

Communion is something quite complex and therefore confusing – I read an interesting take on it in an extract from a book called God Still Matters by Herbert McCabe, given to me to prepare as part of one of my Cambridge interviews for Theology. McCabe states that Jesus is not in paradise, Jesus is paradise. This sets an interesting spin on the purpose of Communion – by symbolically eating the body and blood of Jesus, we are having paradise infused into us in some way. At first glance, this seemed like a fantastic exposition of the true purpose of Communion, a real ‘lightbulb moment’ for me. However I’ve come to decided that I’m not entirely satisfied with McCabe’s idea.

This is where I make a tenuous link with the question above: ‘Where is God?’

God does not move in buildings when there is no-one there – have you ever heard of God repairing the brickwork, or updating the interior design? Of course not, for God is a God who deals in relationships and love. When God moves, His Spirit is in people. This is why a building can never be called a church, because it is simply a shell.  A church is the group, or fellowship, of people who meet together in that shell to worship… God is in them, not the building. We see this idea repeatedly in scripture, most memorably where Paul talks of our bodies as the ‘temple of the Holy Spirit.’ (1 Corinthians 6:19, NIV).

Until this summer, at events like Soul Survivor, my visual imagination of the healing power of God was a streak of light from the sky, filling the tent and touching people wherever it went, not dissimilar from the scene toward the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Nazis open the Ark of the Covenant and are struck dead by this ‘light force’.

Now, I have come to realise what actually happens – the power of God does not come from the sky, but from the hearts of the people in the tent, who worship Him. God is not in buildings, He is in His people.

This is where Communion starts to make sense – it symbolises one’s acceptance of Jesus into their heart. By eating His body and drinking His blood, He becomes part of us.

The chorus of the song, ‘The Same Power’ illustrates this beautifully:

‘The same power that conquered the grave lives in me, lives in me…Your love that rescued the earth lives in me, lives in me.’

We can have the power of God within us, if we so desire.

‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.’ – Revelation 3:20, NIV.

This helps us to understand the concept of worship. We should worship the Lord our God with all of our being, our bodies, our minds, our hearts and our souls. If we can do this, then God will truly be inhabiting the praises of His people. He inhabits us, and our purpose is to praise Him. We are His praise.

I want my life to be pictured as a mirror – constantly reflecting something brighter and better than I, constantly showing others the way to be with the Father.

Jesus Christ is the Saving One.