Yet the question of discipline can divide Christians.  Some promote discipline as a lifestyle of true godly devotion; and others discover discipline in God’s love, as it may be needed.  Some make it an end in itself: the stuff of a strong faith.  Others see it as God’s initiative: his pruning shears that ensure more fruit in a growing faith.

The two camps have separate motives and outcomes—revealing two different types of faith and spirituality.  One relies on proper training and the self-moved will.  The other looks to love as the basis for all of life—it is a heart based lifestyle.

But before we say more we need to address a notion that may get in the way.  Some would hold that any elevation of love and heart over the mind and the will in our spiritual life is mistaken.  They argue that in a proper faith we need to be objective rather than subjective: a life of determination rather than a life of desire.

Yet this is an unwitting Stoicism being imposed on Christ.  And we need to remember that Zeno, Seneca and other Stoics were pagans rather than Christians; and their system is actually anti-gospel.  Paul faced Stoic philosophers in Athens (Acts 17:18) but did nothing to affirm their views.  Yet Christian Stoics—including many who don’t realize the Greek source of their views—still press ahead in the pursuit of spiritual “apatheia”: i.e. the self-disciplined life of Stoic tradition.  This sort of discipline comes by seeking proper knowledge (now assimilated in the church as rigorous Christian training) and proper disciplines (found in the church as Christian duties).

Sadly, the fruit of a Stoic faith is apathy towards Christ.  Why?  Because the Stoic gaze is self-focused and joyless rather than Christ-focused and captivated by his glory.  The proper gaze of spirituality is always to be towards our Triune God who “is love” and whose love is revealed in Christ.  That much is clear in Scriptures.

Now to our point.  The Spirit of Christ himself births a proper spirituality.  And with his abiding presence there will always be the fruit of self-control (Galatians 5:23).  The principle of new life in Christ is that he comes to us and dwells in us by his Spirit.  This union with Christ brings a new heart—a living affection for him in place of our old disaffected heart of stone.  Faith is moved by this new, lively love (Galatians 5:6).

The question we come to—raised in the Hebrews text, above—is what the author meant by asserting that “those who have been trained by [discipline]” are real children of God.  Is faith meant to be a training regime—something like our experience in preparing for an athletic competition?  In my memories of my high school track and field days, for instance, I recall running endless training laps with the awareness that the awards on the weekend would always go—if talents were nearly equal—to the fittest.  This was “training” for me.

Yet this is a bad analogy to the degree it treats faith as an independent lifestyle.  The proper picture of faith is one of a dependent lifestyle: of living now to please and enjoy the fellowship of the one I love because he first loved me and drew me out of my former self-love.  Now apart from him I do nothing that is truly spiritual.

Discipline, then, is not a self-directed lifestyle I bring to God in sheer obedience.  Rather it is the lifestyle of a child who loves his father—yet who still has a host of impulses to rush away after this and that while on a walk.  The father’s discipline is his call for the son or daughter to stay close.  And that may call for the occasional stern word, or more!  The point is that a loving father will be sure that we remain on the same pathway and in close relationship with him.

Faith, in sum, is our walk with God—our pleasure of learning to “walk by the Spirit” because we now live by the Spirit (Galatians 5:25).  Discipline speaks of God’s ongoing voice and actions that keep us walking in his way; and this is a discipline easy to enjoy.  We just need to keep our eyes on Jesus!

Parenting isn’t a “choose your own adventure” book where you can go back and see what would have happened if you chose differently.  So I don’t know what would have happened if we had gone with a negative suggestion approach.  But I can guess.  “Here, dear little daughter, try these gross green things: they’re peas, you probably won’t like them.”

And yet I have been pondering how we may inadvertently do that in the church.  Take, for instance, the language of disciplines.  Or specifically, the “discipline of Bible reading.”

I’ve been involved in an online discussion that I sparked by linking to my post on Bible read through plans (see here).  In a nutshell I suggested in that short post that reading plans requiring the reader to read from multiple Bible books at the same time are not a good idea.

The responses to my apparently radical suggestion seem to have fallen in two categories.  On the one side there are people who have resonated with my post and shared through their comments about their delight in reading God’s Word and finding such “bitty” approaches annoying and unhelpful.  On the other side there are people who strongly resist any questioning of the value of such a discipline and insist that the majority would read less Bible without such external duty structures.

Here’s where the vegetable bit comes in.  What are we saying to new Christians?

Option A – “The Bible is such a delight to me, I can’t get enough of it.  You should dive in too.  Go for it.  Read it aggressively and relationally with a passion to hear the heart of the God who reveals Himself there.  There will be bits you don’t understand yet, but don’t worry, enjoy the Word and through it, enjoy the Lord!”

Or

Option B – “Reading the Bible is an important discipline.  If you are not dutiful in this you will not grow as a Christian.  You won’t like it though.  It’s hard going and to be honest I haven’t got much of an appetite for it.  The only way to get it down is if you cut it into little pieces and force yourself to get it down every day – a bit like a combination of vegetables and Cod Liver Oil.  So good for you.  So hard to take.”

My fear is that we are discipling with an Option B approach.  Why?  Do we believe that is the most helpful approach to take?  Let’s pray that we will have the appetite ourselves, so that others will get infected too.  Bible reading.  Prayer.  Church.  Witnessing — Disciplines?  Duties?  Perhaps not the best language to use.

We need to begin by getting the right answer . . . or, more to the point, the right connection.  Jesus said as much to Nicodemus in John 3.  The Spirit, Jesus told him, brings eternal life as a new birth.  The Spirit is our bond with God and his eternal life.  Jesus is our means for gaining eternal life by his atoning death; the Spirit then brings us into that saving work.  His presence in us, Jesus said, is like a wind in a forest as he stirs us out of our former spiritual dormancy and alienation—our former death towards God—and brings about a conspicuous responsiveness of new life.

Christ’s incarnate ministry displayed his own bond with the Spirit.  The Spirit conceived Jesus in Mary’s womb and later ordained him to ministry by descending on him.  Jesus was then “full of the Holy Spirit . . . and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness” to be tempted by the devil (Luke 4:1).  After that he “returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee” (v. 14).  Next, in presenting himself to the synagogue in Nazareth, he read Isaiah 61:1,2 and applied it to himself (v. 18).  The text began, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me . . .”  Elsewhere in Isaiah (11:1,2) there is another litany of Spirit-centered promises linked to the Christ.

This sort of portrayal establishes what some have called Spirit-Christicism: the belief that Jesus in his humanity relied on the Spirit in all he did, even though he was fully divine himself.  Why this arrangement?  So that as a man he could experience real humanity—and not live as a divine-human superman.  And he then left us with his own spiritual capacity for life—the Spirit himself—so that we now live as God’s children although we are still only human.

In writing to the Corinthians Paul expanded on the truth of the Spirit-as-life-in-us.  In writing about immoral behaviors Paul referred to Genesis 2:24—a text that inaugurated marriage (“the two shall become one”)—and applied it to Christ and the church.  How so?  By treating believers as “one” with Jesus by union with the Spirit: “But he who is joined to the Lord become one spirit with him.  . . .  Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” (1 Cor 6:17,19).

The believer’s union with Christ, then, is both a product and a display of the same spiritual life Jesus experienced in his earthly ministry.  Just as the Father loved Jesus, we too are now given the intimate access in love to call the Father “Abba” at the Spirit’s urging (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6); and God also pours out his love in our hearts by the Spirit’s whispering presence (Romans 5:5).  So, too, we share the same qualities of the Spirit-life that Jesus has: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness” and more (Galatians 5:22).

What do we do with this sort of truth?  I fear that some of us try to treat the Spirit as our personal genie as in the tale of Aladdin.  But this self-serving version of the Spirit hardly fits the picture of the one who led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted, or filled Jesus as he taught and preached, cared for the needy, trashed the Temple trading exchange, and eventually died on the cross.

At a minimum, then, a proper grasp of the Spirit’s work in us is that he wants to change our hearts to be like the Son whose heart he now discloses to us.  Let me wrap up, then, by citing Paul: “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.  If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:24,25).  Amen!

On Sunday I preached a sermon entitled “Got Religion?” at a baptismal service.  I spoke from James – probably the most “religious” book of the New Testament.  James is apparently full of duty and expectation that is placed upon the follower of Christ.  It gives a definition of true religion.  It is like the Sermon on the Mount in epistle form.  Yet the sermon showed that even the book of James isn’t primarily about duty, but about relationship with God.

How relationship and duty intersect are so important.  To listen to some people, while Christianity “uses” the language of relationship, the core issue is really duty.

Then as soon as there is a sniff of a challenge in the air, the response is a swift restatement of the necessity of duty in the Christian life, as if to question that emphasis is to insist there are no duties at all.

The issue here is that of primary emphasis and driving motivation.  It is not about the mutual exclusivity of duty and relational delight, nor am I suggesting that healthy relationships are built on feelings alone.

Let me think out loud in terms of marriage (since that is God’s illustration of choice).  My wife is expecting any day now and when labour begins, I will be there.  Is that a duty?  Sort of, but that seems like a strange term to use.  It certainly isn’t a term I would use in describing it to my wife – “I’m here because it is the right thing to do!”  Somehow the language of duty seems to be a sure path to numbness in a relationship.  But when our relationship is healthy, then we feel, we’re not numb.

I suppose I could list many duties involved in being a husband.  But my wife would be encouraged to see me struggling to list the things I do under that label.

I wonder if we might be setting Christians up for difficulty when we talk of the Christian life primarily in terms of duties?  That is, duty is about externals, and even if they are a good idea, the danger is that if we emphasize externals we create dutiful but numb believers.  Sadly I fear that too many Christians could be described as dutiful but numb.  Maybe our relationship with God isn’t simply two obedience steps away from thriving.

I was listening to an audiobook recently that made a simple, yet profound observation.  When people met Jesus, they began to feel.  As I listened to the testimony at the baptism on Sunday, I saw evidence of the same.

_____________________________

I’ve added the sermon, “Got Religion” to the Resources page – click here to download, and here to listen.

If we fail to see God’s frame of reference we can develop spiritual myopia.  We have a faulty sense of control: that we can shape events around us.  We drive cars, fix meals, use the Internet, set schedules, build things, and so on.  The result is that we gain a sense of relative autonomy—a belief that we’re largely in charge of our lives.

Is this the life of faith?  No, not if it leaves God as a reference of last resort.  He wants our whole heart and refuses to be treated like a life-raft canister on a ship.

In the Proverbs text we find him to be the ultimate and unseen director of all our circumstances—even what we say!  Later in the same chapter the thought is restated lest we miss it or dismiss it: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD” (verse 33).  God insists that he, alone, is in charge.

My ambition here is not to try to explain how two motivating initiatives—call it dual moral agencies if you like—can be present in a single activity.  Instead I invite you to engage by faith what is implicit here: that God loves us.  The underlying “what is” is that God rules all things; but he also holds us responsible for our heart-based motives in all we do.  The answer to “why this” is that God loves us and wants what is best for us.  Not “best” as measured by our myopic sense of building our own security and stability, but in the overall purposes for good that God promises to all who love him.

Two classic Bible texts must be added here.  In the Genesis narrative Joseph reassured his nervous brothers—who had once discarded him as if he were trash but now faced him as their ruler—that their actions had been providentially directed: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good . . .” (Genesis 50:20).  Paul, too, in Romans 8:28 famously offered the premise of God’s providential care for all believers: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for all those who are called according to his purpose.”

Let me offer my personal note here.  I was given the Proverbs 16 text to preach this past weekend but I had to beg off.  Why?  Because my beloved stepfather, Russ, who has been caring for my seriously ill mother had a fracture of his femur on Tuesday.  Then, while in surgery, his heart stopped and he received CPR for more than 30 minutes before his heart restarted.  We were shattered as a surgeon came out and reported the tragic news during the CPR phase.  Then to the amazement of all he recovered in dramatic terms.  As the same surgeon who gave us the first report told us a day later, “This isn’t what they taught us to expect in medical school—it was the work of some much higher authority!”  I, of course, know that authority as one who loves us.

My point in sharing this personal story is not to focus on Russ’s recovery but to comment on how all this made me ponder the Proverbs 16:1 text.

My parents’ lives only have a certain number of days—as we all do—and God in his goodness will bring those of us who love him to his eternal place of care and communion in due course.  Maybe even in a week or so.  So in all this I haven’t prayed as much for the physical rescue of Russ and my mother as for spiritual benefits to come to our family and to others through the events.  Yet now we’ve been given the gift of extended life for a time.  I’m humbled and awed by God’s care.

What, then, is God’s perspective in all this?  He wants me and us to trust him—that he cares for us even more than we care for ourselves.  Everything is under control, even as we might scramble between, home, hospital, and (in my case) with preaching or not preaching about God’s providence.  “I love you,” he tells us, and “I invite your response.”

Let me end with a reading assignment.  Turn in your Bible to James 4:13-17 and hear another voice about the proper perspective for our plans this year.  And may you then have a rich and godly new year—no matter what comes along!

Did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod?

When you kiss your little Baby, you kissed the face of God?

All the hype in the world cannot overcome the genuine wonder of the incarnation.  All the magic of flying reindeer and a lightning fast large man getting down narrow or nonexistent chimneys is nothing compared to the reality of Christmas – the reality of the God over all, stooping down to become flesh and dwell amongst us.  Richard Sibbes wrote that

The Incarnation is a greater mystery than that of creation.  We cannot too often meditate of these things.  It is the life and soul of a Christian.  It is the marrow of the gospel.  It is the wonder of wonders.  We need not wonder at anything after this.     

Let’s be sure to not let the plastic version of Christmas offered by the world (enjoyable as some of it is!) make us lose our sense of the wonder of the incarnation.  It is the wonder of wonders.

Did you know that your baby boy is heaven’s perfect Lamb?

The sleeping child you’re holding, is the great, I AM!

Now if I could just find a good version of my favourite Christmas song, then we could go for another drive in the dark:

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail th’ incarnate Deity, 

pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel!

Christmas greetings from everyone associated with Cor Deo.  Thank you for praying for us.  We hope you have a great Christmas and a very encouraging New Year.

Hitchens was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman last year when he already had been diagnosed with cancer. Paxman asked if it might be worth taking Pascal’s wager – that is, why not be open to the possibility that there is a purpose and a God, since there is nothing to lose and everything to gain. I found Hitchens’ response interesting.  He considered this to be Pascal’s lowest point. It spoke of a very cynical God, and a rather stupid one. He noted that if God determines everything based on whether someone has made a self-motivated false profession of faith, then it is contemptible, as is the human who does it. He continued:

 “If I’m surprised to find when I pass on from this vale of tears, that I’m facing a tribunal – which you notice by the way, you’re not allowed to bring a lawyer, there’s no jury, there’s no appeal, it is altogether unattractive, why people want it to be believed that their God is this way I don’t know. But suppose that I am there, maybe a one person tribunal, depending on your view of the Trinity, I would say, ‘I hope you notice that I didn’t try and curry favour, that I was honestly unable to believe in the claims made by your human spokespersons. Now do I get any understanding?’ And if that doesn’t work, well then I don’t know what would. But I’m not going to try anything servile, I’m resolved on that point.”

I have to say that I agree with Hitchens on some of his logic here. If God were so shallow that he would judge everyone by looking for a pathetic self-motivated profession of faith, sort of a passcode for a positive eternity, then that God would be contemptible indeed. The God he describes here offers no real understanding, and the whole package is altogether unattractive. However, the truth of the gospel is so much richer than that.

I am fairly confident that Hitchens knew the Christian gospel is much more attractive than he described, and that it isn’t about passcodes and selfish pretense to curry favour with an aloof, arbitrary and cynical God. Actually, I should write that I’m fairly confident he at least heard a more accurate presentation of the gospel, even though he didn’t come to know its veracity (as far as we know). Yet, it certainly served his purposes to attack a straw-man version of Christianity.

But here is my lingering concern. Attacking a straw-man version of something will only be revered by the masses if the masses believe the straw-man to be an accurate representation of reality. Let me state this more directly. Too many of us Christians are offering explanations of the gospel that are understood as a bizarre “condition” on which all is based – “just believe this possibility and say these magic words and you’ll have your ticket to a first class forever.”

The gospel is not about covering all eventualities. It is also not about selfishly using a unique passcode for a better future. It is not about getting people to “pray a prayer,” or even to simply believe certain facts. It is about the compelling truth of who God is and what He has done in sending His Son to win our hearts back to His triune love. Let’s be sure that the gospel we proclaim is a gospel centred on encounter with the love of God in the person of Christ, rather than a supposed good news shorn of its compelling relational core.

If only Hitchens had met Christ, rather than just the transaction god of ill-thought through gospel presentations. Let’s pray that we can offer Christ in all His compelling wonder, and never settle for sharing a simplified shell of the genuinely good news.

____________________________________________

I wonder if you saw this. There was a powerful moment in a government press conference here this week, when the Italian Welfare Minister Elsa Fornero broke down in tears as she announced the latest raft of austerity measures. Whatever the complexities of the financial situation across Europe right now (and I don’t pretend to understand them all) at least one thing is clear – that there have been plenty of people making capital (whether it be financial or political) out of the suffering of millions people. Ms Fornero seems to stand alone as someone who announces what may well be necessary in a manner befitting her message

As disciples of Jesus, we carry a message of high-octane emotional content. It’s a message of our own moral failure, of our desperate need of salvation, of our own helplessness to help ourselves. It’s a message of all the brokenness and of all the lovelessness which is our life East of Eden. And yes, as unpopular as it may seem, the Bible is unambiguous in its message of coming judgement, which we do well both not to ignore, and also to proclaim with tears in our eyes. Paul for one certainly seems to think this an appropriate response -

“For many, as I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of Christ.” (Phil 3:18)

But the gospel is also a message of good news. Of the Father’s overwhelming love, initiative, saving work and gift of His Son as Saviour. Of the Son’s willing obedience and humility and death and resurrection. Of the Spirit’s love being poured into the hearts of all of God’s people. We have been studying Luke 1 in our Bible Studies here over the last few weeks, and we’ve been struck by how much joy there is in the chapter. I’d never noticed it so clearly before! Angels bring joyful messages while Mary, Elizabeth and Zechariah all speak of their great joy at what God is doing. And it continues into chapter 2, where the joy of heaven seems to overflow and spill into earth as those hillside shepherds get a musical performance to die for, from hosts of angels praising God for His incredibly lavish gift and favour to us here on earth.

There is nothing emotionally neutral about the gospel. Whether it is with tears of sorrow for the lost, or tears of joy at God’s unspeakable gift, let’s not give the impression that the good news of Jesus is a passive message. Let’s live and speak the gospel in a manner which befits the message.

That’s all fine . . . at least until we get to the Bible.  There we find that numbers are not quite so important.  I know, of course, that God promised an immeasurable number of offspring to Abram in Genesis 15 and has met that promise since then—so the concept of numbers has weight both as a metaphor and in tracing actual quantities.  Yet God never treats quantities of people, cattle, days, or cash as something that defines his decisions.  He is just not into polling.

We see this most clearly in the Bible book of Numbers.  It’s a book that starts with a population census and ends with another census taken forty years later.  The first numbering—a list of the men fit to go to war—is 603, 550 (Numbers 1:46) and its later repetition is 601,730 (in 26:51).  The point that the text underscores is that only two men from the first census are still around by the time the second census is taken.  Just two!

And why was that the case?  I’ll let the text speak for itself:  “For the LORD had said of them, ‘They shall die in the wilderness.’  Not one of them was left, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun” (26:65).

Bible readers will know the reason for this verdict.  The people had failed their faith exam: they refused to trust what God had told them and to rely on his providential care.  The main event in their failure came when the earlier generation of soldiers balked at entering the Promised Land.  They were frightened by the size of their opponents: “we seemed to ourselves as grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them” (13:33).  Joshua and Caleb, on the other hand, showed a remarkable confidence in God.  “If the LORD delights in us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us . . .” (14:8).

There it is: some people believed that God delighted in them and that was all they needed.  Two, to be exact.  And 603,547 did not.  I’m also excluding Moses who had a separate faith failure.  God, having shown grace after grace; miracle after miracle; and given promise after promise to this gang finally said, “Enough!  I’m ready to wipe out this generation!”  It was only when Moses spoke of God’s reputation among the pagans that God’s judgment was spread over a forty year period.  But no soldier who failed to trust God’s word and to follow his calling ever made it into the Promised Land.  Not even one.  Our lesson?  Numbers are not God’s measure of success.  Faith is.

As a tiny point of application this commitment to the quality of faith rather than the draw of numbers shaped our own decision to keep our Cor Deo ministry small and the focus strong.  If God is more interested in quality than in quantity, that’s where we want to operate too.  If it takes at least 20 weeks to offer a basic yet strong exposure to God’s Word in an enriched life-on-life setting, we’ll do that; and then trust God to bring us those with a faith strong enough to give up income and to forgo academic credentialing for an opportunity to seek God together with others.

It was a good decision.  We had eight participants last year—just beyond our target—and it was great.  Yet it seemed just a bit too large for the sort of heart-to-heart engagement we see in the New Testament disciples.  So this year we want to be even smaller.  Quality in ministry always trumps quantity.

In a separate measure—but still dealing with quality rather than quantity—Jesus taught about his kingdom in the Sermon on the Mount that “those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:14).  Numbers are not what matters.  A faith in the God who delights in loyal trust is what really counts.