Partakers Christian Podcasts

WOW Tour USA 2016

WOW Tour USA 2016

We start a new series for these Sundays, whereupon I give some personal reflections on my recent 7 weeks in the USA...  During that time in the USA, I sought to enable and encourage others in their faith byteaching, training and most of all, WOWing for God! It is my prayer that I was able to do that for the glory and honour of God alone.

Today I look back at the Why I went, my accent or lack thereof, and I also share about a vision of me, that was given by God to a friend of mine, Jenny, about this WOWTour. Come and listen!

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 73

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 73 - John 18:4
Who is in control?

As we move into chapter 18 John changes his style of writing quite abruptly. Up to this point he has concentrated on major incidents, mostly not covered by the other gospel-writers, exploring them in some detail. From here on he gives us a much more straightforward account of what happened following very much the same pattern as the other writers, with only detail changes as he added items of knowledge of what had happened which he had but they clearly lacked.

We need to note one all important fact about these next three chapters - easily missed. Who was in charge? Who was in control of what happened? We read in 18: 4 “Jesus, knowing all that was going to happen to him, went out and asked them, “Who is it you want?” That is indicative of all that was to follow. The amazing fact is that he knew he was the one they wanted and all that was to follow. He was the one who asked who the arresting squad were after. He argued with Pilate as an equal even as the blood poured off his back and brow; He organised the future of his mother even as he hung on the cross; He directed events after his death and resurrection. Always it was Jesus who was in control even in the hour of his death and throughout the subsequent events.

Jesus did not just go knowingly to his death; he went deliberately; he went of set purpose; he went controlling what was happening when he might at any moment have changed his mind and called in squadrons of angels to the rescue. He had made himself of no reputation; he had taken on the form of a servant; he had humbled himself, he had become obedient to the wills and passions of other people – yet he was, in a strange way, still in control.

And why did he act in such a counter intuitive way? The answer is for you, for me. Isn’t that absolutely amazing!
“at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. … God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

John said in the introduction to his Gospel, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” It was very unclear then what John meant. Now we can see the full glory of it – the Glory. His glory was in his death, for us, for you, for me, which he carried out through every awful detail, in control, in command. The Lord of all the earth reigned in his death.

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Friday Prayers 28 October 2016

Partakers Friday Prayers!

28th October 2016

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!

Prayers for the Persecuted Church

Sovereign God, we worship you and acknowledge that you know all of those who suffer in your name because they follow you. We remember those who are imprisoned for their faith and ask that they would join with the Apostle Paul to see that even though they remain captive, their chains have furthered the gospel, not frustrated it. May they inspire and embolden their fellow believers to speak the word of God more courageously and fearlessly. Amen

God of all comfort, for those who are tortured both in body and mind, give them the grace to endure and to see their suffering as part of following in Christ’s footsteps. Merciful God, for those asked to pay the ultimate price; who are martyred because of their love for you, may they truly know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. Amen

Father God, for those who are widowed and orphaned may they know the comfort that comes from your promised presence even when they walk through the valley. May they be strengthened by your Spirit, enabling them to rejoice with the psalmist as they proclaim that the LORD will not abandon them in death. Amen

Heavenly Father, we ask that you would make us ever mindful of our brothers and sisters around the world who need us to stand with them as they suffer in your name. Teach us what it means to overcome by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of our testimony; we pray that we would not love our lives so much as to shrink from death.

We ask these things O Father, through the name of Your Son, Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit who lives within us. Amen

 

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Think Spot 24 October 2016

Think Spot 24 October 20116

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Have you ever wondered what constitutes a growing church? Do you know that it isn't just a list of names on the church roll or a social club. Neither is it a large number of people who have made "decisions for Christ". So, what constitutes a church which is living and growing in both spiritual quality as well as numbers? Here are 4 pointers for you as a Christian to go into the week thinking about how you can contribute to the church you attend:1. Full of 'Kingdom of People' - people who declare Jesus is Lord, reflecting His values in word thought and action.2. Full of people who are filled with the Holy Spirit, that is people who allow their lives to be totally controlled by the Spirit, and letting the Spirit flow through them.3. Full of people involved within their local community, utilizing their spiritual gifts for the glory of God.4. People whose lives are oriented around

• Commitment to Jesus Christ - following Jesus' commandments, and learning daily hww to be more like Him.
• Commitment to the Body of Christ, the Church; Loving the Body and Bride of Christ just as Jesus loves the Church.
• Commitment to working within the local community - utilizing the gifts God has given them (and everybody has them you know!) for the glory of God and exhortation of the other people.

There is no such thing as a full Christian life without those three things in the above set priority - Jesus, church, community. If the priority is shifted in any area then our priorities are wrong. Christians aren't to just to be Christians on a Sunday but 7 days a week. Not just to associate with other Christians, but to affect their local community throughout the week for the glory of Jesus Christ. To do this, this week, think about these questions:

• Am I fully committed to Jesus and His teachings?
• Am I fully committed to working within my Church?
• Do I want the Church to grow in quantity and quality?
• Am I fully committed to my local community and seeing Jesus glorified within it?

Go into the week, knowing God can use you to help extend His kingdom in your local community. Thank you.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 72

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 72 - John 17:21

Solidarity

Now, after praying for himself and his apostolic band Jesus prays for all those who will follow his teaching passed on to them from the apostles. That is – for you and me! Have you got that – Jesus prayed for you? It is so easy to overlook the enormity of that. But that is what he said: “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us”. That is hard to get your mind round properly. What did he mean when he used that simple little word ‘in’? It is not too hard to understand in that Jesus and God were ‘in’ each other but how can we possibly be ‘in’ Jesus and God. That kind of identity with some one else is particularly hard for Westerners with their culture’s great emphasis on individuality to get their minds round.

The only place in our culture where we get anything like that level of group solidarity seems to be in football team supporters (of whatever sort of football). It would not be at all surprising to hear one Manchester United (ManU) supporter say to another, “we have never been the same since Alex Ferguson retired!” but the big question in that statement is ‘who are ‘we’? Neither of the supporters will be likely to have ever played for ManU; neither of them may even be members of the supporters club, or have any significant connection to the team except for turning up at some of their home games – and maybe not even that. Yet the level of identification with ManU is such that ‘we’ is the appropriate pronoun. (And I am sure you can replace ManU with some other team identifier – at least if you are male!) Why? It is something to do with the sense of personal identification of the supporters. They are solid in support of ‘their’ club, hence the use of the word ‘solidarity’ to express this sense.

I am sure you will see where I am going. It is that sense of solidarity that Jesus is praying may be ours.

Unfortunately some Christians have seized on these verses and interpreted them as a command to bring churches together in an organisational sense, rather than a spiritual one. The result has been the World Council of Churches, which has had a very chequered career. Churches that give all authority to scripture tend to keep away from that organisation but, if you have ever been abroad and reliant on Christians from other churches, you will know that the label we bear is of little significance compared to our allegiance to the Lord.

There is one other important thing to note in these last few verses of his prayer. Jesus tells us what the glue is that makes this level of solidarity possible. It is love. The sort of love we looked at a few weeks ago. Love which starts with steady development as we move into the area of this sort of Jesus based love, and then moves on to action and great deepening. The love which comes down from him to us and that we must then allow to spill out sideways from us to other people, the rest of the world.

Finally, note the result: if there is even a small amount of this in our experience we shall see his glory, “the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.” (17: 24)<

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 71

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 71 - John 17:17

Set apart

At first in Chapter 17 Jesus prayed for himself. Now, in verses 16 – 19 he prays for the small apostolic band that had been with him for the 3 years of his ministry, faithfully, doggedly, sometimes not understanding at all, but still with him. So the detail of what he wanted to happen to them is not for us - but the principles are, and they are quite clear. For the very first time in John’s Gospel we get the word ‘holy’ and the words ‘sanctify’ which mean ‘make holy’ twice. The basic meaning of the word ‘holy’ is simply ‘set apart’. Unfortunately in common usage, in English anyway, it has come to mean being a bit lost in religiosity, a bit disconnected from reality, not quite with the rest of the world – which thought connects with the original meaning of ‘set apart’. But Jesus has just been talking about the way that although he was soon to leave the world, they were to remain in it. They were stuck in it. He was not talking about any possibility of them withdrawing to a special group for living and going into the world of ordinary people as little as possible.

What Jesus wanted his followers to be was set apart from the rest of the world but playing a full part in it. But there are right and wrong ways of being set apart. It is not about outward appearance; things like the clothes we wear. Paul told the women of the church in Corinth off because the way they did their hair and the things they wore, or didn’t wear, on their heads made them stand out from other women. They could be identified in the street. We used to drive to church in Glasgow some Sunday evenings and be passed by a car. Ooh look, we would say: there are the Christians going to church as we saw the car was full of women wearing hats such as no one else wore except to very special occasions. They were quite wrong to do that. In obeying the letter of scripture they were contradicting its principle completely.

No. we are to be set apart but not that way. It is about setting ourselves apart from language full of sexual innuendo, from groups wallowing in gossip, from the modern equivalent of idolatry such as the close worship of a sports team, from drinking parties or drug parties. Only if we set ourselves apart from these things can we have any hope of being fully accepted by the Lord as one of his. Yes, we shall have been saved but only as through fire and flood.

There is a big problem here. Different churches in different countries view this differently. Some think the follower-of-Jesus should try to be as much like the ordinary guy in the street as possible so as to remove any potential barrier to him visiting church. Other churches try to be closer to the view we see that Jesus took here, arguing that those were very different days and a very different culture.

The most important thing to do is to think about the situation you are in and not let a situation develop which is not appropriate because you have not thought and prayed about it. There are right and wrong ways of going about everything like this. I remember going to work in a small firm. One of my predecessors had been a declared Christian. I don’t know what he did but he succeeded in upsetting just about everybody he came into contact with. I have to confess that as a result I kept my head down seeking to avoid conflict. He was wrong; I was wrong. There must be a right middle way somewhere between those two extremes. Seek it; find it

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 70

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 70 - John 17:1

Strange glory

Chapter 17 is the final prayer of Jesus. It was the custom in those days to record a final prayer like this of notable people and John followed that practice, presumably gathering the recollections of the disciples of what Jesus actually said – they often prayed aloud in those days.

Jesus begins by praying for himself, saying “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you.”What a strange thing to say! He was expecting to die the next day the most excruciating and demeaning of deaths by crucifixion. We think of glory as receiving praise and honour, even adoration and worship. Jesus was asking God the Father to glorify him that rather different way. How amazing! What could he possibly have been thinking? The way he worded his request it certainly refers to that terrible next day. A very few verses later he does say, “now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began” and there he is looking forward to when he returns to heaven and sits down at the right hand of the Father, receiving the honour and glory of that position. But not here – here he sees glory in what was about to happen in his death in the next 24 hours and then 3 days later in his resurrection.

Jesus was taking the long view, which in view of the torture he knew he was about to have to endure is quite amazing. He knew, as the disciples didn’t, that his tomorrow, his hour as he called it, was going to be the most glorious day in the history of the world. He, God, was about to die for the salvation of mankind. His tomorrow would be the dividing point of history. Up to that day nobody had had anything more than hope that the Lord God would accept them. From that tomorrow onwards those who turned to him in humility and faith would begin to understand that they would be accepted in his name, on the basis of his sacrificial work on the Cross. Then a few days later they would learn that they had the Holy Spirit of God, his replacement, actively involved in their lives, directing their course through life, supporting them in all the many problems that the human condition brings, challenging and empowering them.

So there was glory ahead, even if it looked a rather strange glory at first sight. Indeed, it was because the followers he left behind recognized that glory that they started to worship him and it was because they found themselves irresistibly worshipping him that they began to realise that he was no less than God walking this earth as well as being a man.

That was his matchless glory. This is his matchless glory for us. We only need a small bit of that glory to come into our lives, to illuminate us, to be deeply blessed.

Thank you, Lord Jesus, for your prayer, for your constancy, your endurance of all the physical pain and spiritual pain that lay so closely ahead of you as you prayed. Thank you that your glory was for us.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 69

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 69 - John 16:13

The Spirit of Truth

I think we should pause for a moment to think of what all this must have looked like to the disciples. It is no surprise that they said to each other, “We don’t understand what he is saying.” About three years earlier they had agreed to join the new group forming around the person of Jesus. They thought he was a prophet and, very probably, the leader who would set up a rebellion against the hated Roman occupation, which might just succeed. It had been a considerable surprise to find that things were working out very differently from those early expectations. They had been flexible enough minded to cope with the change of orientation, probably because they had been carefully selected by Jesus as those who would be flexible in their thinking. They had learned over the three years they had been with him that when Jesus said something would happen – it happened. Now he was saying that he was going away. He had even said he would be killed by the Roman authorities. In view of what was happening in Jerusalem, the seething unrest, it seemed likely that would happen very soon. What then? Would their small group continue? And, if so, who would lead it? Peter had been the obvious spokesperson of the group but would he be capable of leading them forward as a spiritual force? It seemed doubtful. John was stronger spiritually but he was surely too young. James and John were labelled the sons of Boanerges, that is sons of thunder, and they were certainly two forceful characters but were they at all likely to be able to lead an effective group along the lines that Jesus had set up – lines that were so different from their previous experience and, indeed, all that had gone before.

Into this difficult and worrying situation Jesus seemed to be suggesting there would come nothing more obvious than a spiritual force which he labelled the Advocate, the Counsellor, the Comforter or, in the original Greek, the Paraclete (meaning a bit of all three). Really. Would that be sufficient? How would in work out in practice? Impossible to imagine.

Of course, it did work out because the person being talked about was the Holy Spirit himself. Part of the Triune God, though to say that is to jump ahead several years and even centuries. But their considerable immediate problem was to work out what would he actually do?

That we find Jesus told them in 16: 13 – 15, “when he, the Spirit of truth comes he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.” All of which reinforced what he had already said in 14: 26, “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” So we ought to add ‘teacher’ to the list of words translating ‘paraclete’.

Teaching is not an easy occupation. Some teachers will concentrate not on their students but on their material. At their worst they read out their notes expecting their students to copy them down word for word. That is poor teaching particularly in this age of many copying machines. The good alternative is to teach students how to think, so that what they learn will be of use to them even when they do not meet the exact situations the teacher envisaged, and that is not so easy for the teacher. But it is the sort of teaching the Holy Spirit expects us to transmit to others. It is called ‘discipling’! We tend to think of the Holy Spirit as the one who brings specific gifts to individuals: one to this guy, a different one to that girl and so on. But what Jesus is emphasising here, and John is making sure we see, is that the Spirit will be a teacher and a guide for the whole group. That meant the eleven apostles on this occasion, possibly a few more who were also present, and then the ongoing church down through the ages to the present day. Yes, to your church and to mine, imperfect though they may be. This guidance will come as we study the words of Jesus as enshrined in these four Gospels. So much of what we most probably hear and are taught in church actually does not come directly from Jesus but at second hand through the epistles and other scriptures. What Jesus is saying here is a potent reminder of the central importance of his ministry, his life, his death, his stories, his statements.

Of course we all know that the difficulties lie in knowing what exactly we should do to obey him - you think that, I think this. Being human we have the very human problem of working out how to hear the leading of the Spirit. Some churches do it through a strong central decision structure; others through a decentralised arrangement of church meetings and executive committees called elderships or diaconates. It is clear from the epistles that both sorts of approach to the problem were used from the very early days of the church and are recorded in scripture, so there is no clear right and wrong here. We have to fit our approach to our particular society and culture. Being human we will often have a tendency to want to retain structures which worked years previously but are not so good in our present day. We live in an age when all societies and cultures are changing continuously and often with a rapidity greater than ever before so that is not a good idea.

Let us all, you and I, be careful that we contribute positively to the fellowship we are in, good at hearing the promptings of the Holy Spirit of God, good at not hindering his work, good teachers of the Word of Truth, good at helping the church of the ages to progress towards that great day when He, Jesus, returns to say ‘well done good and faithful servant’.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 68

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 68 - John 5:26-27

Eyewitnesses

Jesus selected his closest disciples from those who had ‘been with him from the beginning’. They, with the all important help of the Holy Spirit, will be those who are to tell the world what has happened and would shortly lead the infant church on its first steps.

There is a fundamental and important difference here between what we, in the Western world anyway, would do and what they did. We think it is important that our witnesses to an important event should be dispassionate, uninvolved observers able to provide an unbiased assessment of what is going on. That was not what they looked for in their recorders of events. They, Jewish and Roman alike, wanted their reporters to be those who had been deeply involved in the events recorded. That was probably because they considered the meaning of the events more important than the actual events themselves and wanted a guide to that meaning such as we would resist. Thus, the prime historian of the Roman-Jewish war of AD 68-71, basically the only one we have access to, was a man called Josephus who was first a commander of Jewish forces involved in the war and then an assistant to the Roman general. He was not unbiased but he had seen what was going on first hand.

It is easy to see the point of the way they thought in those days and we must accept its value and not criticise it.

We can see these ideas worked out in the four Gospel-writers. Not one of these four names himself within his writing. They took to heart the modesty and humility that Jesus asked of his followers. We only know who they were from reports from the early church. We cannot be absolutely certain of the accuracy of these but there is no good reason to doubt them. Matthew, also known as Levi, was with Jesus from very near the beginning of his ministry (Mark 2: 13,14). We are told that Mark wrote at the direction of Peter, so his Gospel is Peter’s testimony to the events of the ministry of Jesus that he had observed from close to all the way through. Luke, very aware that he was not an eyewitness himself, emphasises in the first few verses of his Gospel (1: 1 - 4) that he had been very careful to refer to eyewitnesses of the events and had checked what they told him very thoroughly. John was clearly an eyewitness although exactly who he was, which John, is a matter of much argument and disagreement. He was the ‘beloved disciple’ of John 13:23 etc. but we don’t know who that was either. John was a very common name in those days. He is usually taken to be John, son of Zebedee, but he was a Galilean fisherman while the writer of the fourth Gospel seems more likely to have been a sophisticated man from Jerusalem. But he certainly was an eyewitness of at least much of the life of Jesus.

The result is that we have four accounts of the life of Jesus, which the very early leaders of the Christian church wisely refused to have combined into one, leaving them as true eyewitness accounts of what happened. No event of ancient history is anything like as well documented as the life of Jesus. We can rely on its truth and accuracy even where it seems to defy all natural possibilities, as in the resurrection. To believe in Jesus and all the events of his life is not one step down from knowledge, as many would say. We believe because we know.

We cannot testify because we are not eyewitnesses in a literal visible sense. We can testify because of our experiences of the Spirit and his work in our lives. Go! Testify!

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 67

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 67 - John 15:19

Hate!

In stark and obviously intentional contrast to the last section on love Jesus goes on to speak about hate. While love is to be the ruling principle of the followers-of-Jesus, hate is unfortunately a major part of the world’s reaction to those people. Open and direct hostility will be the experience of at least some of my hearers and readers. For many more the hostility will be much less obvious but nearly as potent. I refer to the sort of hidden hostility that is part of much modern Western culture which prides itself on being ‘liberal’ and secular and therefore puts all religions into one category, all regarded as backward and naive. It leads to much of the present tensions about refugees and immigration in Europe. Hidden behind many of the statements against, or for, the influx are attitudes to Islam and the centuries long Christian background of many of the European countries - but no one dares say so!

Why is there so much antagonism, or to use the shorter more direct word that Jesus used, ‘hate’, against Christian faith and people. Much of the reason is found in the next chapter at 16: 8 – 11, where we read, “When he [,the Holy Spirit,] comes, he will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because people do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.” Jesus blames the attitudes onto reactions to the actions of the Holy Spirit but, of course, in practical terms those actions are seen as coming from those who present the work of the Spirit to the outside world. We should be showing the world that it is wrong about sin because we are living, if not perfectly pure, lives at least some that are visibly and obviously better than those around us. We may not display perfect righteousness but at the very least we are visibly much closer to acceptance by the Lord than others. Our presence and living practices hold before all others the fact that there is more than one way of living and therefore there is the strong possibility of a judgement still to come. The ordinary non-Christian does not like being shown up in those ways.

We tend to see the situation from inside our own cocoons and miss the implications for those outside. Is it any wonder that we are not always all that popular?

Jesus traces the problem back to its source in 15: 16. It is all his fault! We have probably been encouraged from our beginning on the Christian Way to think that we took all the decisions. ‘Make your decision for Christ’ we were challenged, or ‘follow Jesus’, or ‘your parents are Christian so of course so are you.’. It all sounded as though it was up to us to become a Christian. But Jesus goes back to the true reality of what happened when we started to follow him: HE CHOSE US. He said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit —fruit that will last” (15: 16). Not only that, he began to call us his friends, “You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (15: 14, 15). He gave us this status. We are totally secure in him. We just have to be careful about how we present that fact to other people. If we brag about it we shall only intensify the hostility we encounter. On the other hand if we hide it too successfully we shall evade the hostility but deny the truth of who we are. It is a difficult balancing act. May all you, my hearers and readers all round the world, be good and faithful witnesses in your many and varied situations. Let us pray for each other in this.<

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