Partakers Christian Podcasts

Think Spot 30 May 2016

Think Spot - 30th May 2016

As we read the New Testament, we see that the early church had passion for God. For generally speaking, they had a pretty good idea of what it meant for God to become human, when the Almighty, holy & sinless God, became human, became sin and the clean became dirty.

Why? So that humans could choose to enter back into a living and dynamic relationship with God, where they are individually ransomed, healed, restored and forgiven. Is that not a WOW? That is the message of Paul and the early church which grew extraordinarily. As we read the Book of Acts and the letters & history of the very early Church, we see them getting their hands dirty and reflecting the God they claimed to follow - breaking down the barriers...

It is time we as the 21st century church did likewise if we are not already. We can do it - individually, as small groups and as churches together. Go this week and make your own life count for the God you follow and love. Amen.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 32

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 32 - John 7:37-38
Living Water

When I was in a youth group in Scotland (a long time ago) we use to sing in what we hoped was a broad Scots dialect ‘I’m as blithe as blithe can be, Ma bickers fu’ an’ skailin o’er’. If you can work out what that means you should get a prize! It is in fact ‘I’m as joyful as can be, My beaker (cup) is full and slopping over’. It was based on the line in Psalm 23 ‘my cup runs over’ rather than what Jesus says here “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me rivers of living water will flow from within them” but it expresses the idea behind what Jesus said perfectly.

It was the last day of the festival of Tabernacles, a kind of harvest festival celebrating the end of the growing season and the last of the harvests. It included both lights (of which more in the next gem but one) and water. Huge pans of water were taken through the city in processions – 5 times on this last day. This was a visual prayer for the rains to come. Their harvest was at the end of a very dry season with no rain at all. To someone living in the UK a very dry season sounds like a very good idea as we have too much of the wet stuff anyway. But many of you living in other parts of the world will have a much better appreciation of how important it is to get rain at the time of the year when you expect to get rain.

Jesus stands up and shouts out these words. There is some doubt about what exactly he meant, hence the alternative reading in a footnote of the NIV, but the overall message is clear - anyone who believes in him will become the source of great riches, both to himself or herself, and to other people. Those riches, John points out in the next verse, consist of the possession of the Holy Spirit, though not quite the Holy Spirit as he later became available to all those who believed in Jesus after Pentecost. But Jesus is part of the Triune God, as is the Holy Spirit, so participating in him by believing in him was not much different from having the Spirit.

Jesus is using another vivid metaphor to explain who he is and what he brought to the people who met him. They, like all of us, were spiritually thirsty. They wanted purpose to life; they wanted to know that there is a supreme God in control of this world; they wanted to know of a source of strength they could draw on when not everything was going right for them; they wanted to have the understanding that this life is not all there is – there is something good to come later. All that is thirst, so Jesus stands up and promises them living water, running water, spring water, clean water, the sort of water it is a delight to drink.

When people get this water, this Spirit, they will not be able to keep it to themselves. It will slop over, sometimes accidentally but also sometimes when we mean it to for someone else’s enjoyment.

The result of his words was chaos. Some thought he must be the prophet that Moses said would be ‘like me’ (Deuteronomy 18: 15); others thought he must be the long looked for Messiah; still others reckoned his background wasn’t good enough for either; the leading men wanted to put him safely behind bars but discovered they couldn’t get anyone to arrest him.

What a wonderful and amazing man he was. To all those who thirst – no other qualification required - he promised riches, the true riches of a fulfilling life, not gold – and we know that he fulfilled that promise - and what he got was chaos. So it is with us - we can choose – either a full and rich life following him or a world of chaos.

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Friday Prayers 27 May 2016

Partakers Friday Prayers!

27th May 2016

A prayer of For the Peoples of the World !

We pray together and when Christians pray together, from different nations, different churches and different denominations - that reveals Church unity! Come! Let us pray together!

O God,
who has made of one blood all nations
for to dwell on the face of the earth,
and did send Your blessed Son Jesus Christ
to preach peace to them that are afar off,
and to them that are near,
grant that all the peoples of the world
may feel after You and find You.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord
in the power of God the Holy Spirit.
Amen

(Based on a prayer Bishop Cotton of Calcutta)

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Think Spot 23 May 2016

Think Spot - 23rd May 2016

One of the key verses in the Apostle Paul's letter to the Philippian church is
 "For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain." (Philippians 1:21)

Indeed, as we read the life of Paul and his ministry and witness for Jesus Christ, those words could be said to be Paul's motto or maxim for his life of service to God. The Apostle Paul's view of God and of Jesus Christ was not too small. Over 50 times in this letter to the Philippians, Paul states the name of Jesus or of Christ and that doesn't include the pronouns such as he, his and him. Paul was besotted with God. Paul was besotted with Jesus Christ.

Are you, if you are a Christian, besotted with Jesus - the God you claim to follow? Go into this week, knowing that God loves you and safely knowing that He cares deeply for you. Put your cares and concerns in His hands and let Him lavish his care upon you.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 31

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 31 - John 7:24
Decision time

“Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly,” said Jesus. Or perhaps approximately ‘make up your mind - follow me or don’t follow me!’

Our acquaintance with decision-making will vary enormously according to where we live. I remember visiting our son and his family in a Central Asian city. They wanted to buy a small bicycle for their son. Eventually they found one after a long search. There was no decision to make – it was this or nothing. I also remember a grown woman who had been living in an African city telling us that she had come home to the UK, gone into a supermarket, burst into tears and rushed out. The degree of choice was too overwhelming for her to take.

You are going to have to listen to, or read, what follows very much according to your background. Jesus was telling his hearers to decide whether what he was saying and doing made sense, in which case they should follow him, or not, in which case they should not. That was, and is, the biggest decision anyone ever has to make for it determines the whole course of one’s life from there on forever.
Rather strangely this is most difficult for those of us who live in a part of the world where there is a huge choice in the supermarkets. We are too used to making decisions and then changing them for another one next week. We live in a consumer society so we too easily act as consumers over everything, including whether or not we should follow Jesus. Then, if it doesn’t suit us because the church meets at the time we want to play football – or something, next week we will give up on following Jesus and do something else.

It may well be that our life is a chaos of conflicting events. But then so is this chapter. It is easily the most chaotic chapter in this Gospel so far. Jesus starts off in Galilee, goes up to Jerusalem late for the festival, has to dodge the authorities, and then challenges his hearers over his latest miracle in Jerusalem. That is: when he healed the man at the pool of Bethesda on a Sabbath. It was that last event which lead to this direct challenge to decide whether what he did, and the way he justified what he did, meant that they should not judge him on the basis of the rules and regulations but on the basis of the effects of what he did. Effects which included not just an infringement of the rules but accepting that he stood above the rules because he was the Messiah, the chosen one of God.

In a way this seems a lot to base on this one incident, but no doubt they would have heard something of what he had been doing in Galilee, both the miracles that John has recorded and the many healings he had carried out that the other Gospels tell us more about.

Jesus tells us not to judge by mere appearances, but to think carefully what we are doing first so that we make good decisions. That is good advice for anything and everything we have to decide about. Unfortunately it is not the way we tend to act. The whole advertising industry relies on our inability to make wise choices, but to go by appearances.

What about you? And what about your decisions for or against Jesus? Those decisions are fundamentally different from all the others you can ever make in life because they are two-way decisions. The Holy Spirit comes into them as well. In his goodness and his graciousness the Lord God has allowed us to think that we make the decision to follow Jesus, in much the same way as we decide all the other things of life. But hidden behind our decision is the work of God the Holy Spirit calling us to follow Jesus. As we have noticed before those two things don’t logically add up but they are nonetheless real for that.

Have you decided to follow Jesus? Or, should I rather ask whether the Holy Spirit has called you to follow Jesus?

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Friday Prayers 20 May 2016

Partakers Friday Prayers!

20th May 2016

A prayer of Praise!

We pray together and when Christians pray together, from different nations, different churches and different denominations - that reveals Church unity! Come! Let us pray together!

O God, you are the most beautiful and most priceless One!
O God, you are the most glorious and uncreated One!
O God, you are the eternal and holy One!
O God, you are the infinite and blessed One!
O God, you are the immense and Living One!
O God, you are the Everlasting and wise One!
Accept these words of praise from our mouth and our hearts!

O ever-loved & ever-loving One;
Make us, O holy God, your treasured one;
Make us, O glorious Lord, your precious one;
Make us, O highest Good, your longing one;
Make us, O blessed Word, your chosen one;
Make us forevermore your loving ones.
Amen

(Based on a prayer of Cardinal Newman)

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Think Spot 16 May 2016

Think Spot - 16th May 2016

Charlotte Bronte once said “Life appears to me to be too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrong.”

Many people nurse a guilty conscience owing to holding onto animosity or wrongs done to them or having done wrong things to others. As a consequence, their life is filled with turmoil and bitterness. You may well be like that – I don’t know!

What I do know is that your conscience is the faculty which is sensitive to right and wrong, and judges your actions and attitudes. Everybody has a conscience and all are sensitive to spiritual truths, whether they are immediately aware of it or not.

According to the Bible, a clear conscience is essential for inner peace and joy, confidence in prayer, good health, effective service, .right relation-ships, effective witnessing, making right decisions, and victory in spiritual battle. A clear conscience is the inner joy and peace of spirit which results from having all personal wrongs made right with those whom a person had offended - either God or someone else.

However- many Christians carry around guilty consciences due mainly to unconfessed sins, affecting relationships with God, other people and themselves. If left unchecked, a conscience which is guilty, slowly grows 'dead', cold and silent. That is until such time that the guilt has been assuaged and put right.If at the moment you are burdened by a guilty conscience, ask the Holy Spirit to show you clearly what is affecting your conscience.

Then decide, at any cost, to clear it up in the power of the same Spirit. He will help you! Pray to the Father and ask forgiveness, (1 John 1:9), and fully accept His love and forgiveness. If there is anyone else involved, then you will also need to ask for their forgiveness (Matthew 5:23-24). Ask the Father to help you go, and the Spirit will help you, because one of the hardest things in the world to say is: “I was wrong! Please forgive me."

Your conscience can be cleansed because of what Jesus did on the cross! Hebrews 9:14 says “How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!”

Go into this week, ready to serve the living God, being confident that the Holy Spirit living within you, empowers you, is transforming you and desires that your conscience be clear. He will help you overcome if you ask!

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 30

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 30 - John 6:53
Food and drink

In the last few verses of this long statement of Jesus John suddenly adds the drinking of blood to the idea of eating the flesh of Jesus. We may well ask – why did he do that? We cannot be sure that all this is something Jesus said in one connected speech. In verse 25 he seems to be at the side of the sea, in verse 59 he is in the synagogue. So these verses from 53 to 58 may be something he said on a different occasion. The big question, over which the experts argue and differ, is whether these verses are about the Lord’s Supper (also called the Eucharist, Communion service or Breaking of Bread, etc.) or not. I think they are. John has chosen not to tell us about the last supper eaten in the upper room, but has put this short section of something Jesus said in instead. Which, of course, raises the very important question – why did he do that? What are the different things this section teaches us about the Lord’s Supper which we might not get from the more straightforward accounts in the other 3 gospels?

There are 2 in particular. They both relate very sharply to the practice of many churches as to how they do the Lord’s Supper. First is about what it means. Following the phrase ‘do this in remembrance of me’ in Luke’s gospel, repeated in Paul’s instruction to the church in Corinth, many churches, taking that very literally, insist that their celebration of the Lord’s Supper is just that and only that – a memorial feast. It is a good guess that this is what was happening in the church that John was associated with 50 plus years later. So, rather than repeating this well known instruction, he puts in these words. He is saying – no – there is more to it than that. When you partake of the bread and the cup you are coming much closer to Jesus. You are becoming part of him, as near as can be. We think of a good marriage as one where the phrase ‘the two become one flesh’ has become a reality. John is here saying that is the sort of way we are to relate to Jesus. We are to become ‘one flesh’, ‘one blood’. That is a hard metaphor, hard to live up to that is, but we need to realize that is the challenge that John puts before us.

Being a bookish person I think of it this way: as I can be excited, enthralled, enthused, changed by a really good book, or a passage in a book, so I should react to partaking in the Lord’s supper. And I find that difficult. The words in the book have challenged me, gone into my mind and my memory store. The flesh and the blood of Jesus are indeed a word, because he is the Word of God but it is still hard to lay hold of such simple things as bread and cup with the same intensity. Perhaps that is just me and you find it better and easier – I hope that is the case.

Second is about how the meal is to be carried out. One might think - many churches do - that because it was only the apostles that were present at that first meal the people involved in leading the service should be special. Rather sadly some denominations even call them priests. A priest is someone who stands between the ordinary worshipper and God. Therefore they are special. But there is no sign of any particular person leading the feast in this passage. There are no priests in the New Testament except ALL the Lord’s people. We all have immediate access to the Lord through the Spirit. Did John mean by the way he phrases it that it could be anyone of the Lord’s people who broke the bread and poured out the from the cup? I think he does and in doing so he was reflecting what Jesus meant. The other 3 gospel writers all say that when the 5000+ were fed it was the disciples who distributed the food. John says simply ‘Jesus distributed …’. No intermediaries are mentioned.

I was horrified when I heard a Christian woman, a missionary in a remote part of Africa, say they had been unable to Break Bread in their little meeting because there were no male converts. What rubbish! Nowhere does the New Testament even begin to hint that it is necessary to have a man, or an ordained man, or a priest to be able to partake of the body and blood of our Lord. Jesus set this feast up in the simplest possible way – we should not complicate matters.

Of course, very sadly, this service has been one of the main causes of disagreement in the worldwide church. Paul, who got so upset when Peter started to say some people can come to this table and these others cannot because of their ethnic background, would be horrified when churches today say some can come to our celebration because they share our particular viewpoint but others cannot because they belong to a church with a different name and different practices. Consequently there are as many individual views as churches on what is right and what is wrong. Hence the above comments must be said to be my view, heavily influenced by my particular background (Baptist/Christian Brethren/evangelical).

Think about all this – carefully. Accept these views or reject them as you think fit. What you do will very likely depend on your background. It is no good bringing the ‘leading of the Holy Spirit’ into your thoughts because he seems much less concerned than we are by all the differences!

This is a wonderful passage that should send us to our knees not to our debating chamber!

One modern song captures the most important things about this passage rather nicely. Here it is:

So we share in the bread of life / And we drink of his sacrifice /

As a sign of our bonds of love / Around the table of the King.

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Think Spot 9 May 2016

Think Spot 9 May 2016

For those of us who would call ourselves Christians, the Bible is very clear – you are called to lovingly and obediently serve in some capacity. A life of true Joy is seen in obedient service to the glory of God the Father, through God the Son Jesus Christ, in the power of God the Holy Spirit who lives in you. If you are engaging in either intentional or unintentional acts of disobedience, then you need to turn your life around to one of utter obedience to the God you profess to follow.

As a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit within you, as a seal of your salvation. Your body is the temple where God now resides. You can’t hide from Him, so you may as well choose to be obedient to Him in a life of joyful service, exhibiting that true Joy and the hope you have in Him. Just as joy followed Moses and Aaron’s obedience in Leviticus 9, so too can it be for those of us willing to lovingly serve obediently.

This is an extract from Glimpses into Leviticus available at Amazon

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 29

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 29 - John 6:51
Living Bread

Three times Jesus announces that he is the bread of life. This is a somewhat strange thing to do, particularly when he goes on to tell his disciples to ‘eat my flesh and drink my blood’. We will need to think about 1) why he does this, 2) what are the Old Testament ideas he is referring to, and 3) what does he mean by eating bread when he has just equated himself with bread.

First, why does he do this? This is the first of the 7 ‘I AM’s with a ‘something following’ with which John has so carefully structured his Gospel. We have already seen how there are 7 occasions on which he reports Jesus referring to himself as I AM and how that was the personal name of God given to Moses at the burning bush. These 7 I AMs with a ‘something following’, better known than the others perhaps, though possibly not as important, also declare the importance and divinity of Jesus in no uncertain fashion and that emphasis is the clear motive of John in including them in his Gospel. So this is the first in an enormously important sequence of statements.

Bread was more widely eaten in those days than it is now and formed the basic source of nourishment for most people. This was particularly true of the Biblical area, which does not get enough rain to grow rice. Bread is not eaten proportionately so much these days because of the wider diet of the more affluent countries, and the large areas of Asia that grow and eat rice. When Jesus said I am the bread of life he was laying claim to a complete and fundamental part of people’s intake using the image of the physical necessity to point to a spiritual need, often overlooked but just as necessary to live a truly full life.

Of course, what he said was misunderstood, which is quite understandable since it sounds as though he was suggesting cannibalism. That misunderstanding reverberated down through the history of the church. It was centuries before people stopped making that an excuse for persecuting Christians.

Secondly: there are at least 2 Old Testament ideas that are in the background in this chapter. The most obvious is when the Israelites were given manna as they travelled through the wilderness (Exodus 16). This, together with quail (a small game bird eaten for food), rescued them from starvation when they were running out of food 15 days after they left Egypt. The story includes a great deal of grumbling on their part, first about the lack of food, then the inadequacies of a quail and manna diet. That grumbling is repeated in this episode but now it is grumbling at Jesus because of what he said: “I came down from heaven” which did not square with what they knew about his background as the son of Joseph (so they thought) and Mary.

Because the miracle of Jesus feeding the 5000 did not clearly include a heavenly angle and only lasted for one day rather than the 40 years the manna came down they did not consider it as impressive. Jesus, however, pointed out that the manna came not from Moses but the Lord God. The bread they had just had came from him – implying that he was on the same level as God himself.

The other Old Testament passage they may have been thinking of was Isaiah 55: 1-2 which reads “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare” which then goes on to 55: 10-11 which say “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” Those verses give a clear linkage between ‘bread’ and the ‘word of God’, precisely what Jesus is connecting up in himself when he said, “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.”

Putting those thoughts together makes clear what he meant when he talked about eating bread and his flesh as bread. He came down from heaven as did the manna but he was vastly superior to the manna because he was the very Word of God. That in turn takes us right back to the very first verse of the Gospel. Jesus was the Word of God. We are to ‘eat’ that word taking him, his ideas, his thoughts, his teachings, into our very beings. And, because we are human beings, that means listening to words and hearing them and putting them into practice.

The repeated call of the New Testament that we should be in close identification with Jesus (‘I am with you always’; ‘united with him’; ‘transformed into his image’; ‘when Christ appears we shall be like him’) in practical terms means to be like him in what we say, our words, what we do, our actions, and what we are, our motives and attitudes. We will never completely succeed for we are human and he was and is both human and divine, but the path ahead of us is clear: walk in step with Jesus.<

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