Partakers Christian Podcasts

Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 35

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 35 - John 8:18
Two extraordinary statements

The reply of Jesus when he is challenged about what he is claiming when he says he is the Light of the World is quite extraordinary. He says, “I am the one who bears witness about myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness about me.” His accusers have just said that his witness is not valid because he needs two witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15) and he is not a good witness to himself. His reply is – yes, I do have two witnesses: one is myself, special because of who I am, and the other is God who, of course, you cannot see! No wonder his opponents weren’t exactly convinced by what he said.

But Jesus was far from stupid so he must have had good reasons for what he said and have expected his assertions to be accepted as true. There is a problem to unravel here.

It seems to me that the only possible explanation is that Jesus, and what he said and did, were the dominant features of the festival. His was not a minor voice speaking on the fringe of the festival. When he said ‘I am the light of the world’ his voice rang out above all the competing voices. Everyone except the chief priests and Pharisees was accepting him as the number one person in Jerusalem. He was a prophet, perhaps even more than a prophet.

In their culture the two most important things about a person were who their father was and where they came from. Jesus played on that. He said, I know where I came from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from or where I am going.” And “’the Father who sent me bears witness about me.’ They said to him therefore, ‘Where is your Father?’ Jesus answered, ‘You know neither me nor my Father.’” They didn’t know either where he came from or who his father was. So he had deliberately drawn attention to the puzzle. In a way that would make him all the more different, mysterious and exciting. What he said had only added to the mystery.

It was a major challenge to follow him; “Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” he said. Like Abraham – “Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.” He had to take a step into the unknown. He had to leave his comfortable city life and take to camels and tents and a journey with no maps or sat-nav to show him the way.

He had to take a major step of faith. He did so because “he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” We too have to take that step of faith into the mysterious unknown because we do not know what the Lord has in store for us. Be sure, however, that it will be rewarding and challenging and a great deal better than any alternative would be. Step out – boldly – and you too will have the light of life.

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Think Spot 13 June 2016

Think Spot - 13th June 2016

John 13:34-35 And now I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.If you have love for one another, then everyone will know that you are my disciples. (Good News Translation)

Romans 12:10 Love one another warmly as Christians, and be eager to show respect for one another. (Good News Translation)

I may forget a conversation after 5 minutes - and often do increasingly... I may come eventually to even forget my own thoughts after 30 seconds... But I haven't forgotten the feeling of being loved and knowing that I am loved by others - and I hope I never do... That feeling/memory is increasingly what I want others to know too - that I hope I have shown that person love in some way...
As Christians we are to show love to people - al people. It is to be a love which reflects the love that God has for people. This is a love which is gives the best to the other person. As we go into this week, show a giving love to those you meet. Ask God to show you how you can do this, particularly to those you wouldn't ordinarily spend time with...

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 34

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 34 - John 8:12
The light of the world

In one of his greatest and most loved passages the prophet Isaiah said: “he has made glorious … Galilee of the nations. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.”

With his divine gift for looking down through many centuries the great prophet saw that a light was coming and that it would have to do with Galilee. Of course, he thought he was talking about his own day but we can see that he was actually forecasting the appearance in the province of Galilee of Jesus some 800 years later. He thought of this person, unknown to him but known to us, as a light. It is no surprise to us that he went on to say: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” Jesus was not born in Galilee but circumstances meant that he grew up there. He will have thought of himself as a Galilean.

Given that background it is no surprise that John saw Jesus, and Jesus saw himself, as a light, the light.

Jesus was still at the Festival of Tabernacles that he went to when it was halfway through in 7: 14. It was a festival of both water and light. The light part had huge lamps burning in the Temple courts at night, bright enough to throw light over all the city of Jerusalem so that everyone was aware of them and could profit by them. It would have avoided painfully stubbed toes or branches lashing across the face if you had to walk past trees or bushes.

Jesus stood up at the festival. “I am the light of the world” he said. Not ‘a light in the world’ but the light of the world, so not just of Jerusalem but of the world, of lands they knew nothing about. They may just have heard of China but they will never have imagined there was a country called America far across the seas with no land connection to theirs. He is the only true light of all the countries of this world of ours.

There are many Old Testament references to light. A pillar of light guided the Israelites through the desert during the Exodus. Light was often a picture of the Word of God. Psalm 119: 105 says ‘Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path’, so the meaning of light is now guidance rather than anything physical.

All this may seem odd to us because there has been a distinct failure of much of the world to recognize him. He was the Prince of Peace according to Isaiah, who went on to say that ‘of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end.’ But wars continue to rage – more at the moment than there have been in much of the last half century. But we must not be short sighted. When Jesus was on this earth the most civilized country in the world had regular circus shows where man had to fight man, often to the death, for the entertainment of the common people; they strung people up, sometimes by the thousand, in crucifixion, the most awful form of execution man has ever devised; it was a dreadfully cruel world. Yes, we still have wars, but with only very few exceptions we do not see the barbarisms of those days repeated anywhere in this world of ours. The Kingdom is coming. It is not a noisy kingdom, bludgeoning its way into mankind. It is the quiet Kingdom of the one of whom Isaiah said ‘He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.

For yourself, think of it this way: think of one of those modern torches that does not need a battery because it produces light when you give a handle a turn or two. It never runs out and leaves you in the dark provided you do not neglect to give that handle a turn or two very frequently. So it is with the light of Jesus – provided you do not neglect to keep in contact with him through the Spirit at regular intervals through prayer, meditation, Bible reading and meeting in fellowship. Jesus may be the light of the world but he is also our light, your light, my light. John goes on to say we will not walk in darkness but have the light of life.

Walk in the light of Jesus; avoid the darkness.

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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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