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Look at the Lamb (Intro & Day 1)

Introduction to Look at the Lamb

In John Stott’s The Incomparable Christ, Jesus was studied with reference to His four different portraits painted from the varying eye-witness accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Whereas some point questioningly to the differences of the gospel ‘portraits’, as ‘discrepancies’, Stott instead likens the rich variations captured by each portrait to the way that light is refracted beautifully through a diamond – i.e. we should be in awe of the variety, and grateful, not suspicious.Continue reading “Look at the Lamb (Intro & Day 1)”

New Series Look at the Lamb

Starting tomorrow for the next 21 days, why not track with Mairi and me through the 21 chapters of John’s 4K Ultra HD focus on Jesus?

Taking a chapter a day and briefly reflecting on what John saw and recorded of Jesus, “Look at the Lamb” will encourage love and desire for God.

It’ll be kind of like an online bible study for three weeks leaning in to what John the Baptist shouted in 1:29: to *behold* the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

Dip in and out or track with me for the full 21 days but let’s look again, a little bit harder, at our beautiful Jesus

Earthly Use

I’d like to debunk a myth that says, and even warns, that it’s possible to be ‘so heavenly minded to be of no earthly use’.

In Philippians 3:14 Paul smashes that notion by saying,

“I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus”

Called. Heavenwards.

The ineffective and unsatisfying way of ‘doing’ church/life/ministry is with an attempt of delicately balancing earth and heaven like a some kind of home-improvement project (a little bit of heaven, here; a little bit of earth, there), as though the ‘reasonable balance’ was something we map out for increasing our effectiveness or that’s simply left to our own personal preferences; or that perhaps too much thought of heaven, of Jesus, is going to render us imbalanced, irrelevant and bunkered away out of touch with a hurting world.

I don’t see that in Paul’s writings and I don’t think being ‘too heavenly minded’ is possible because a fixed gaze on heaven primes our faith in its King. (See Colossians 3:2 ).

What I do see is Paul longing for his prize, his goal, his home and his Saviour. The utter marvel and mystery of ‘following Christ’ at all, with any fruitfulness, with any closeness of proximity, is possible only because of the call towards heaven from God, not of a learned skill of balancing the two realities of heaven and earth towards approved ‘usefulness’.

Paul wrestled with where he wanted to be such was his love for God, (See Philippians 1: 22-24) but he wasn’t trying to decide where his mind lived like a schitzophrenic symptom with one foot in the grave. Above all he cherished his heavenly citizenship, yet he was extremely effective and ‘useful’ while he remained.

*This is not a call to monastic passivity or chilled bean-bag worship vibes…it’s a reorientation towards a mentality that fuels our missional effectiveness.*

Paul was ‘all in’, really ‘all in’ in a way that I’m certainly not familiar with either personally or corporately.

He had a goal and he had a Goal.

He loved people to the point of often writing and speaking through tears but, without question, he knew he was called to be with Jesus.

I think this is the personal/corporate key:

*The extent of Paul’s tears for people and the degree of his longing to fully be with God are directly linked – they correspond perfectly.*

As he pressed on to ‘win the prize’ he was focused in this one direction which only made him increasingly fruitful while he remained on earth.

Like Paul, let’s give ourselves to going fully hard after God, fully hard after the kingdom, fully hard after the King.

And then see how much earthly use we’ll be!

God’s Green Room UPDATE

Prevenient

This one word sums up the only impulse for our continuing prayer and love for God that sometimes may seem to flicker rather than blaze. Like a heart that only beats because it was created to be myogenic.

When you feel as though you don’t desire God as you should, as you want to, remember that you only have any desire in the first place because He first moved toward you! It’s His grip on you…

It’s this specific aspect of the nature of God, of Jesus, of Holy Spirit, that never ceases to amaze me or communicate deep comfort to my heart.

APART FROM THE SHEER, UNIMAGINABLE MERCY OF CALVARY, HAVING ANY *ONGOING* DESIRE FOR JESUS, WHATSOEVER, IS THE GREATEST GRACE AND MERCY I THINK I CAN IMAGINE

A W Tozer says it like this:

We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit. “No man can come to me,” said our Lord, “except the Father which hath sent me draw him,” and it is by this very prevenient drawing that God takes from us every vestige of credit for the act of coming. The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the out working of that impulse is our following hard after Him; and all the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand: “Thy right hand upholdeth me.”

Excerpt from The Pursuit of God

Praise Him!

Great Doors

If you look at the very end of 1 Corinthians 16, you’ll read Paul describing a spiritual reality that I believe is at the very heart of effective Christian ministry, fruitful discipleship and that is also one of the most difficult lessons to learn as we mature in faith as ‘ordinary’ men and women.

Grab a coffee or can of diet Coke or a Kit Kat or something; I think it deserves the spotlight for 5 minutes:Continue reading “Great Doors”

Recapture the Wonder

I’m reading this jolly good book in my lunch-times at the moment – Recapture the Wonder by Ravi Zacharias.

At the beginning, Ravi focuses on an ancient theory from Plato who believed that all philosophy began with wonder until it was replaced by knowledge – that there is a world of difference between belief and knowledge:

Plato said, ‘belief was the position of a child; knowledge was that of an adult.’

Zacharias replies to Plato’s theory with this:

Can it not be our hope as well that the shadows and beliefs of our childhood become only greater and more wonderful when dispelled by knowledge? Can there not be a reality where the mere world of fantasy is superceded by the fantastically true?

He’s pointing us of course to our daily waking reality as followers of Jesus which is meant to be thoroughly infused with wonder and knowledge together (imagine a diagonally ascending line from left to right where X is knowledge and Y is wonder).

Like me, you may have secretly wandered into a wardrobe as a child, shut the door quietly behind you and gently reached out to touch the back, longing for it not to be there. As your finger tips touched the thin splintered back, the crashing knowledge that the fern cones and snow weren’t really there felt genuinely gutting, only compounded by a brand new sense of your own ‘silliness’ as your childhood dreaming began to drift across Plato’s bridge to the cul-de-sac of adult knowledge.

But both little children and big adults can be reminded again of the truth that the Kingdom within really will be like a ‘magic’ Kingdom without – to touch and taste and see; that this suspension bridge of other-worldly, gospel hope is more than sufficient for the wonder of belief to thrive side by side the ‘knowledge’ of our enchanted here and now.

To Worship You I Live (tag)

To worship You I live, to worship You I live, I live to worship You

Jesus Come: Drums

The Father Never Lies

The world reminds you every day that

“The camera never lies”

But The Father reminds you every day that

“The Father never lies”