23^rd May 2012

Facing Today's Pressures

Amid the positive happenings and stories of our time about the church becoming more technology-savvy and contemporary the Christian Research Association reports on church attendance projections. These projections show that from 2006 to 2026 all Christian denominations, with the exception of a few, will decline in numbers. Dr Hughes has said that over the past two decades churches have struggled to accommodate changes in society by trying to provide diverse forms of worship. Many Christian ministers and lay-people today are trying to faithfully serve in stressful situations.
As institutions decline or diversify, as finances and resources are reduced, as complexity and regulation increases, the structures and patterns that supported ministry in the past increasingly become liabilities that drain energy and stifle initiative. As a result those involved with the ministry of the church can become very tired, weary, depressed, even frantic, sweating it out every Sunday to keep "the show on the road."
Some time ago Major Ian Thomas pointed out that as the church has learned to appropriate the death of Christ as redeemer, so it needs to appropriate the life of the risen Christ that empowers action.

Facing Bankruptcy

Major Thomas recalled his own experience of being worn out, tired and discouraged. "When I decided to quit I thought God would be disappointed---in fact I found out He was overjoyed." For Thomas it was a matter of rediscovering that God moves into our bankruptcy to make perfect His strength in our weakness. The rediscovery changed his life and ministry and he points out that it is not until we have jettisoned the last vestige of self-confidence, the sinfulness of what we are, our own inherent destitution, that we see the significance of Christ's resurrection.

Encountering a Living Christ.

Instead of Easter Sunday being an academic exercise when we acknowledge the redemptive significance of the cross that pronounces our requital, (eg what Jesus did) we need to appropriate Jesus is now, that He is alive. "While what Jesus did because of what we have done is important, we need to see that what He is, is to take that place of what we are. That is the Gospel designed to restore us to our own humanity."

Seeking More.

"God cannot give us more than He has given us. When Christ comes to live in us, when we are restored to God by acknowledging Jesus death was for us and the Holy Spirit comes to indwell your human personality with the resurrection life of Jesus Christ, God gives us all He can afford. In Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. When God gives us Christ, He gives you and me, with Him, embraced by Him, all things. There is not one single person who is converted who does not have dwelling within their humanity all the illimitable resources of deity but the tragedy is that we can sit on it and never know it is there."

The Big Picture.

Paul writes in Ephesians 2.10, "For we are what Christ has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life." "Jesus did not come to do his best for God, to do his best to redeem humanity some how. Every step he took, he took triumphantly, every word he spoke, thing he did, every decision he made was a Divine fulfilment of a plan agreed as between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in eternal ages of the past. It was simply that the Father-had the yielded humanity of Jesus in which to tell the story until he could cry triumphantly, "It is Finished," and then the Father raised him from the dead and exalted him to his the right hand. That same Lord Jesus had his own programme to fulfil through you and me and all he is waiting for is for our humanity to be yielded to him today as his humanity was yielded to his Father. The moment we become available to Jesus Christ, to be who he is in action, we are caught up into that predetermined purpose for which we were first created, we have now been redeemed and we prove what is that good, perfect acceptable will of God." (Rom12.2

Living the Adventure Now

Thomas jolts us into rediscovering that we need to let the baggage go, it is not a matter of propping up the past, meeting the expectations of others or trying to prove ourselves.
We share a vital relationship with a risen Lord that allows Him to indwell our personalities and from there allows Him to express Himself in terms of our daily behaviour. The Lord Jesus who died for us also rose for us, rose to share his life with us. Every day can become a huge adventure of stepping out into his timeless plan. We may well say, "Lord we don't know who you are going to talk to today, what we are going to bump into but it's going to be our privilege to yield my humanity so you can be in me, where you please, doing what you want, how you want to do it and any time you like."

"Jesus died that that we might be caught up into this adventure of proving daily that good and acceptable, perfect will of God. God himself working in us that which is well pleasing in his sight, being himself the very dynamic of all his demands, the cause of his own effects, the source of his own activity and the origin in us of his own image in action."
That is the Christian life lived in the awareness of his risen presence now.

Rev E. A. (Ted) Curnow May 2012

Review of an address by Major W. Ian Thomas.

 

Discovering Daily

The Christian life fleshed out in the personal experience
of Bonney Haine, a forgiven person.

Discovering daily who God really is.
Discovering daily God's love for me,
such mercy, forgiveness, amazingly free.
Discovering daily He does answer prayer.
Discovering daily what grace really means,
unmerited favour beyond all my dreams.
Discovering daily God speaking to me,
(He speaks through the Bible)
Once blind now I can see.
Discovering daily every day that I live,
that all that I need He freely will give.
Discovering daily Christ working through me,
accomplishing daily what never could be.
Discovering daily I can't but He can,
thanking Him daily for my place in His plan.
Discovering daily how real life can be,
when living in Christ and He's living in me.
Discovering daily a song in my heart with,
anticipation for each day to start.
Delighting and basking in love so divine,
secure in the knowledge,
that I'm His and He's mine.
Besides mere contentment, excitement I see,
A daily adventure,
Christ alive and living in me.