Category Archives: Devotional

How big is my God?

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This is the question Tim Chesterton asks. He recommends getting out into the mountains to get something of the right perspective:

I tend to do my praying in small rooms, and I’ve discovered that if you do that, it’s very easy to think of God as a being who spends his time in small rooms. Then you climb the Edith Cavell Meadows trail and find yourself beside this simply enormous mountain, and you’re reminded that if creation is this big, then its Creator must be bigger yet.

Just from Tim’s photos of Jasper National Park in Canada I can start to get the idea of the wonder of God’s creation. Sadly we have nothing remotely like it here in Essex, but even here it can be good to get out into the green countryside to spend time with the Creator.

The Caleb Generation

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The title of this post is in some ways an odd one because there was no Caleb generation, apart from Joshua and Caleb himself.

Of course Caleb did have a whole lot of contemporaries among the Israelites. But, apart from the probably much younger Joshua, they were very different people from Caleb. They grumbled and rebelled against Moses, and they were afraid to go into the Promised Land when God told them to, but presumed to try to go when God told them not to. Only Caleb and Joshua had the faith to go when God said “Go”, and to wait when he did not. As a result, God punished the entire generation, apart from those two, with early death.

And so, when the time came for the conquest of the land, Caleb, aged nearly 80 (see Joshua 14:7,10), was twenty years older than any of the other surviving Israelites, apart from Joshua. Yet Caleb was by no means ready to retire; five years into the conquest, at age 85, he could still say

I am still as strong today as the day Moses sent me out; I’m just as vigorous to go out to battle now as I was then.

Joshua 14:11 (TNIV)

It seems that the God who had caused all the other Israelites to die by age 60 had miraculously preserved Caleb’s health and strength for 45 years.

So it was perhaps a little strange that at Soul Survivor, which I came home from just over a week ago, Mike Pilavachi preached about the Caleb generation, about how we should have faith like Caleb did. Continue reading →

Following God's leading in decisions big and small

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Dave Bish “the blue fish” writes The Spirit Says…, thanks to Adrian Warnock for the link. Now I know Dave mainly from his comments here and elsewhere on the atonement debate, on which he may think he is on the opposite side from me. But on this matter of the need to hear God’s voice in decision-making I can wholeheartedly recommend his post.

In a comment in response Adrian Reynolds asks

one big problem – how do you decide what is “big” as an issue or not? … E.g. is your choice of supermarket a big issue to seek guidance on – quite possibly! Where do you draw the line, unless you don’t draw the line…?

In principle I would go for not drawing the line, as does Luke Wood in his helpful comment in response. There are not some important or “religious” decisions we have to pray about and other trivial or “secular” ones for which we don’t need to bother with prayer. God may guide us to a particular supermarket so that we can meet and minister to someone there, or to keep us from a danger we might face at the alternative store. Even the colour of our socks can in principle affect our Christian witness. I don’t say that we should kneel down and ask God to tell us which socks to wear and then wait for an audible answer. But our whole lives should be lived prayerfully and in tune with God, so that we know when we are following his will, and feel a check in our spirits when we start to step outside them, even to the extent of choosing the wrong socks. Paul knew this call and this check on his missionary journeys, in the examples Dave quotes. As we learn to listen to God and follow his way in the small things of life (yes, even in which socks to wear), we find ourselves more and more able to keep in step with him in the bigger decisions.

That sounds good in theory, it’s another matter putting it into practice, especially when the going gets tough!

More on forgiveness

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There has been a brisk debate about my post on What it means to forgive, and about Dave Warnock’s related post, including helpful responses by Chris Brauns whose post got both of us writing.

Thanks to PamBG for pointing me on her own blog to an article on forgiveness by Rev. Dr. Myron S. Augsburger. I agree with Pam that this article helps to clarify some of the issues we have been discussing. Here are some extracts, with my comments:

Forgiveness is not easy; it is hard … The cost of this resolution is to the innocent one, to the one doing the forgiving. In forgiving you resolve the problem within yourself, and you don’t even make the other feel it. That is never easy for us, nor is it easy for God.

So, forgiveness is mostly an issue for the one who forgives, and does not depend on any response from the one forgiven.

Peter writes that Christ bore our sins in his own body on the tree. (1 Pet 2:24) That is to say, Jesus literally absorbed into himself all of our sin, all of our hostility, all of our negativism toward God. … He literally experienced the intensity of our sin, and in doing so he could resolve his own wrath on sin and let us go free. There is justice in forgiveness because he did not dodge the issue. Nor can we, for we must actually enter into the problem; we must look sin squarely in the face and recognize it for what it is.

Note that Peter does not say that Christ bore the guilt of our sins. This is not the same thing, as Andrew has clarified.

When Paul says in Romans that God set forth Jesus as the expression of mercy (of propitiation, the mercy seat), on behalf of our sins, that he might be just in being the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus (3:23–26), he does not say that God justifies the one who apologizes for his mistakes. Rather, he justifies the one who believes in Jesus!

So justification does not depend on repentance in the sense of accepting forgiveness with an apology, but on faith.

I will leave it for you my readers to read the last part of the article, in which Augsburger puts forward his own model of the atonement. It is not precisely PSA. Nor is it incompatible with PSA. By recommending Augsburger’s model to you I am not rejecting PSA, but simply suggesting that in this particular context of forgiveness this model is a more helpful one.

What it means to forgive

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I have recently discovered Chris Brauns’ blog A Brick in the Valley. Chris has been writing several interesting things on forgiveness. This is the practical and pastoral outworking of the doctrine of the atonement, on which there has been such controversy recently.

It was apparently an unbalanced doctrine of the atonement which led Richard Cunningham of UCCF to declare, in direct contradiction to explicit biblical teaching, that “God never forgives”. Chris Brauns, like Cunningham, is a supporter of the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement (PSA), but Chris realises that this doctrine if properly understood does not conflict with the biblical teaching that God forgives repentant sinners.

But I have a small disagreement with Chris: I believe that God forgives sinners whether they are repentant of not, and that similarly we should forgive those who sin against us whether they are repentant or not.

Continue reading →

Are you an ornamental orange Christian?

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Eric Jones just asked me to add his blog Transformed Daily to my blogroll. So I started looking through it and came across this wonderful illustration here:

I was what I call an ornamental orange Christian – I looked great on the outside, but when the shiny peel was removed it uncovered a spiritually dry and bitter inside. I did not passionately seek God’s face in sincere prayer and meditation on his Word. I was actually living for myself and not for God.

Are you an ornamental orange Christian? Am I? I certainly have been, and at times I still find myself drying up like this – although when this happens I don’t usually care too much about looking great outside. Read how God put things right for Eric, and how he can do the same for you and me. As we pursue an intimate relationship with God, we can become not ornamental oranges but tasty and juicy ones which, even if they don’t look quite so perfect, have a lasting attractiveness.

Eric, welcome to my blogroll!

Don't filter out God's messages as spam!

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I am very grateful for my spam filters, both the one for my e-mail which catches most of the 600 or so spam e-mails per month which are sent to me, and for Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam and Akismet which catch most of the spam comments sent to this blog. It is sad that some of these spam e-mails are now coming from apparently genuine Christian ministries such as Christian Music Updates (no, I won’t give a link to them).

In this busy world where more and more people seem to be trying to catch our attention, I’m sure most of us have equivalents to spam filters for our junk “snail mail”, telephone calls and callers at the door. I suppose we all throw away some mail unopened and politely put down the phone on some callers. We can even find ways of getting rid of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons on our doorsteps.

But there is a danger in all spam filters and equivalents, that if they are used without great care they can filter out genuine messages, that people who we really want to hear from are unable to contact us because their messages are being wrongly discarded as spam.

Dave Warnock makes the point in passing here (explained further in the comments) that even messages from God can get caught in our spam filters. Of course at least since the childhood of Samuel (1 Samuel 3:1-10) people have often mistaken the voice of God for a human message, but God in his persistence has managed to communicate in the end. But in these days when there are so many messages bombarding us, it is perhaps far too easy for us to filter out all messages which we don’t immediately recognise. In these circumstances, what chance has God of being able to communicate with us?

Well, of course if God really needs to communicate with us, he will find a way. We should be careful about pushing him this far, as his way may be through sickness or even death (compare 1 Corinthians 11:30). But in other cases, if we won’t listen to him he simply gives up on us, and perhaps looks for someone else to do his work.

So surely (and here I am preaching to myself as much as to others) each of us needs to find a place and a time where we can get away from the insistent voices of the world trying to grab our attention, let down our spam filters, and listen to what God has to say to us.