Partakers Christian Podcasts

Think Spot 6 june 2016

Think Spot - 6th June 2016

John 3:16 tells us this: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."

That is perhaps the best known Bible verse in the world! But how many of us, particularly those who would call ourselves Christian, know 1 John 3:16 "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters."

So as we go into this new week, consider how you can love others sacrificially, generously and graciously this week - then reflecting the very love of God to people.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 33

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 33 - John 8:7
Throwing stones

There are problems with the first 11 verses of chapter 8 indicated in most Bibles by using a different print. The experts reckon that it was not written by John, mainly because some of the words used are quite different from the rest of this Gospel, but common in the others, and many of the oldest manuscripts have put it somewhere else, either in this gospel or even one of the others.

But it has all the marks of being a genuine fragment about an episode in the life of Jesus, and it is part of the New Testament we have been given so we should treat it as scripture. It is one of the best known events in the life of Jesus. So much so that there are many popular sayings about ‘throwing the first stone’. Unfortunately most of the comments on it mistake the true focus of the account which is neither that sexual sin is not as important as many people think nor that the guardians of morality can be very hypocritical, and that the pursuit of a self-righteous judgement is wrong. The true focus is on Jesus – as usual in the Gospels – his attitudes, his actions and his words.

The local guardians of morality had set up the whole scene but there were several mistakes in what they did. The woman and her partner should have been warned that their action was wrong, not acceptable, and could lead to death sentences. We are not told that this had happened. There should have been witnesses, at least two of them, to verify that she had been caught in the act of intercourse. Circumstantial evidence, such as that she had been seen coming out of a small room with a man, was not enough. Also, perhaps most important, where was the man? Under the Judaic law both partners had to be produced and punished equally (Leviticus 20: 10).

The clear intention was to trap Jesus into doing or saying something that would enable them to accuse him of blasphemy. Even the fact that this what they were trying to do this way is interesting. Jesus must have had a reputation of being a ‘soft touch’ who would prefer to treat the woman lightly rather than apply the full rigor of the law to her.

The way that Jesus dealt with this very difficult situation is almost unbelievably clever. He said nothing. He wrote in the sand on the ground. What he wrote we have no way of knowing. There have been many guesses down through the ages but none of them are any more than that – guesses. Very possibly it was a significant act in their culture that was saying something like ‘I do not agree with your actions and I am deliberately not going to answer because what you have done is wrong’.

When they attempted to get him to say something he looks up and says the famous words “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Then he stoops down again to write, perhaps so that the accusers knew he was not watching them and accusing them individually.

A new world had come, a new world had broken in, and the ways of this new world, the Kingdom of God, were crucially different. This new world was focused on people’s futures, not their pasts. Jesus does no more than recognize that she had been living a life of sin before saying the positive thing “go now and leave your life of sin”. That was his usual habit. He would acknowledge that someone had sinned – haven’t we all – but then move them on with a positive action or exhortation to live differently in the future. He did that for the woman at the well by telling her who he was, and that propelled her into a life of witness and a future we can only imagine. When Jesus met up again with the man he had cured by the pool of Bethesda he tells him to stop sinning so that his future would be brighter. Zacchaeus might seem to be the exception but he decided to make restitution, it was not anything Jesus told him to do.

Of course, when you stop and think about it this had to be the way it happened. Jesus brought a message of forgiveness and grace. What he offered was always free grace, wonderful grace, grace demanding only belief and consecration. So there was never any place for spending time working out, puzzling, agonizing, over what anyone, including you and me, have to do by way of restitution before entering the Kingdom. No, the past is the past. The Lord has forgiven and forgotten our pasts. We may find it hard to forget our own pasts. Even those of us with normally bad memories may find there are things in our pasts we cannot forget! But we are to try to do so.

We start the Christian life with a clean sheet of paper and a book with nothing written in it. That is the wonderful way of the Kingdom. We, with the help of the Holy Spirit, are given the responsibility to write only good things in our book of life. It is as if the old pages, recording what we did before we decided to follow Jesus, have been stuck together so no one can read them any more. Even when the Lord himself picks up the book of our life on the great final day those pages will be stuck together; he will only read the unstuck pages. Isn’t that wonderful!

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Friday Prayers 3 June 2016

Partakers Friday Prayers!

27th May 2016

A prayer for the work of the Holy Spirit!

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 Holy Spirit,
soul of my soul,
I adore You.
Enlighten, guide,
strengthen and console me.
Tell me what I ought to do
and command me to do it.
I promise to be submissive in everything
that You permit to happen to me.
Only show me what is Your will.

Amen

(Based on a prayer of Cardinal Mercier)

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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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