Napkin Discipleship
At the church where Alex Absalom is on staff, they have developed a simple diagram for discipleship and mission. It is contained in a free ebook : "One of - Beginning the missional journey" by Alex Absalom and Greg Nettle.
God is For Us (smiley face with halo represents God): For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, ... not to judge the world but to save the world through him (John 3:16-17). God is FOR people.
But it is better than that, God is With people. The experience of people in the bible from Abraham, to Moses, to Daniel and many others besides that God is WITH us - not distant and far away.
But it is even better than that, GOD becomes ONE of US. 'For in Christ lives all the fulness of God in a human body' (Colossians 2:9); 'The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood' (John 1:14, the message)
Then the best part is: 'When we understand the implications of God being FOR, WITH and ONE OF us, that often compels us to invite Jesus to be IN us. And that changes everything. God Himself passes the DNA of Jesus into our very lives, which empowers us to live as Jesus here on this earth.' (location 207 of Kindle version of 'One of')
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David Wanstall, 5/15/2012 |
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Invitation and Challenge - the valley of discouragement
In my last post, we looked at the two aspects of the discipling relationship - Invitation and Challenge. Depending on how much you are experiencing of each at any particular time, you may be bored, comfortable, discouraged or empowered.
The place we want to move to in various parts of our walk with Jesus, is the empowered quadrant by opening ourselves to increasing levels of invitation and challenge. When we seek to do that, we will almost always go through the discouraged quadrant.
That is OK. It is to be expected. Whenever there is an increase in challenge, there is an increase in stress and we can feel inadequate, scared, uncertain, or fearing failure.
When you find yourself in that space, it is important to be reminded of Psalm 23v4: Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil - FOR YOU ARE WITH ME, YOUR ROD AND YOUR STAFF THEY COMFORT ME.
We can fee inadequate, scared etc. but God IS with Us, and by HIS grace we WILL get through.
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David Wanstall, 5/8/2012 |
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Invitation and Challenge
When we read the gospels and observe how Jesus discipled his followers, we see he carefully calibrated two aspects of that relationship - Invitation and Challenge. A few examples include:
Invitation:
- Come follow me (the initial invitation to be close to Jesus)
- Come away to a quiet place (after a busy time of ministry),
- Being indoors with the disciples explaining the parables
Challenge:
- I will make you fishers of men (challenge of transformation at the initial call to discipleship),
- You give them something to eat (challenge to feed the 5000 rather than sending the crowd away)
- You can't be my disciple unless you take up your cross and follow me
As we seek to be disciples and disciple others, we need to be aware of these important dimensions of the discipling relationship. With different amounts of each you get different experiences:
We can experience invitation when we get encouragement from people, the chance to hang out together, have fun together, receive prayer, get to talk through issues etc.
We can experience challenge when a person asks us to step outside our comfort zone, a particular area of sinfulness is highlighted for the purpose of being changed, we face new or difficult circumstances.
You might like to think about:
Where are you on this matrix?
Where are the people you help disciple?
Where is our church on this matrix?
Then think about:
What could I do in the next two weeks to help move me, those I'm discipling, or wider church towards the empowered quadrant?
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David Wanstall, 5/1/2012 |
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Living the Jesus life
These two verses - one from Peter and one from Paul, both describe the same thing, living the Jesus life:
Col 3:17
And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
1 Peter 4:11
If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.
Dallas Willard described speaking and acting in the name of the Lord Jesus as doing it on his behalf and with his resources and this is what the verse from 1 Peter 4 makes clear.
Our natural inclination is to live our lives on our own behalf and consequently with our own resources. This can apply to what we have to do at work today, how we spend our family time tonight and even what we contribute to our church services.
But what to do?
You might like to try this experiment: whenever you are about to begin something new (get out of bed, arrive at work, meet someone for coffee...) simply pray and ask God to help you live the next period of time on Jesus behalf and with His resources. Then expect to receive what you need because the Kingdom of God works by asking and receiving (Matt 7:7). Don't worry if you find yourself forgetting to pray that way all the time, just keep chipping away at it and it will gradually become an ingrained habit.
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David Wanstall, 4/24/2012 |
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Interpreting the images of Revelation - more or less!
Revelation is a book full of images. As we mentioned previously, an important key to understanding them is to refer to the Old Testament (much more than a contemporary newspaper). However, they can also be confusing. For example, some images seeming to suggest that all Christians will be martyred while in other places, John writes as though there will be faithful Christians alive at the parousia (second coming) (eg Rev 16:15). Richard Baulkham says:
This suggests that, on this issue as on many others, Revelation has suffered from interpretation which takes images too literally. Even the most sophisticated interpreters all too easily slip into treating the images as codes which need only to be decoded to yield literal predictions. But this fails to take the images seriously as images. John depicts the future in images in order to be able to do both more and less than literal prediction could. Less, because Revelation does not offer a literal outline of the course of future events - as though prophecy were merely history written in advance. But more, because what it does provide is insight into the nature of God's purpose for the future, and does so in a way that shapes the readers' attitudes to the future and invites their active participation in the divine purpose. (The theology of the book of Revelation)
So when we read the images, we need to ask, what is the point that is trying to be conveyed (considering the Old Testament references and allusions) and how might God want us to respond. However, while we do that we must not lose sight of the powerful and vivid impact of the images.
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David Wanstall, 4/17/2012 |
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Revelation and the Old Testament
On Sunday we are continuing our series through the Book of Revelation looking at Chapters 8-11. In a previous post, I quoted from Richard Bauckham:
Its continuity with Old Testament prophecy is deliberate and impressively comprehensive.
...
John is steeped in it (the OT), not just as a medium in which he thinks, but as the Word of God which he is interpreting afresh for an age in which God's eschatological purpose has begun to be fulfilled.
As we consider Ch 8-11 it is important to refresh our memory of the various Old Testament passages that are strongly referred to in these chapters. You may like to read or skim through them before Sunday. They include:
Exodus 7-15
1 Kings 17-19, 2 Kings 1
Ezekiel 1:1-3:11
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David Wanstall, 4/11/2012 |
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Revelation and the 144,000
In Revelation, numbers have symbolic significance, but for years I have been unsure about the significance and meaning of the 144,000 from the tribes of Israel that were sealed in Revelation 7. The book on Revelation by Richard Bauckham and a commentary by NT Wright draw a useful distinction between hearing and seeing:
| Chapter |
Hear |
See |
| 5 |
The lion of the tribe of Judah
The Root of David who has
triumphed (v5) |
The lamb looking as if it had been
slain standing in the centre
of the throne (v6) |
7
|
The number sealed - 144,000
12,000 from each of the 12 tribes
of Israel (v4-8) |
A great multitude that couldn't be
counted from every nation, tribe,
people and language (v9) |
In each case what was heard was what people typically expected but what was seen was God's surprising outworking.
The Messiah of Chapter 5 didn't win through a bigger army but through dying and rising and he wasn't just a descendant of David he was God (in the centre of the throne).
The complete people of God (1000, 12 and 12 are numbers of completeness) isn't just ethnic Israel, but is now surprisingly expanded to include people from every nation, tribe, people and language.
What can seem like confusing pictures in Chapters 5 and 7 actually communicate in vivid ways key elements of the Good News of Jesus Christ!!
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David Wanstall, 3/27/2012 |
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Developing Missional Communities in the real world
Here is a short video by Sally Breen (wife of Mike Breen) about how you build a missional community, (also called oikos) which is an extended spiritual family on mission, in the midst of a busy life:
Here is the start of a recent blog by Alex Absalom which he addresses in the full post here.
A friend emailed me, saying how they and their team are spending time hanging out with non-Christian friends… ”but frankly I’m not sure it’s very missional: it just feels like, well, friends suggesting to other friends to go to the toy library together on a Saturday morning!
Our circle of non-Christian friends and contacts are all busy families so each time we meet it is a different set of people who tend to turn up… Our conversations tend to be regular ‘school/vacation/kids/work’ stuff… perhaps we are just no good at relating faith to these subjects and knowing how to talk fluently about God stuff? Or perhaps I just need to be patient.
I wonder still if we are being too discreet: we just invite people to hang out with us as friends and don’t make a big deal of it being a group of Christian friends at the core (some know this; others probably don’t). Or do we need add a more overtly ‘up’ activity that others can participate in to the mix?” |
David Wanstall, 3/23/2012 |
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The place and importance of Revelation
As I have been preparing the sermon series on Revelation, the book: 'The theology of the book of Revelation' by Richard Bauckham has been very helpful. Here is an excerpt from chapter 7 that underlines the point that I have been making that we need to read revelation with revelation in one hand and the old testament in the other (not a newspaper).
Revelation has a unique place in the Christian canon of Scripture. It is the only work of Christian prophecy that forms part of the canon. Moreover, it is a work of Christian prophecy which understands itself to be the culmination of the whole biblical prophetic tradition. Its continuity with Old Testament prophecy is deliberate and impressively comprehensive.
...
John is steeped in it (the OT), not just as a medium in which he thinks, but as the Word of God which he is interpreting afresh for an age in which God's eschatological purpose has begun to be fulfilled. He gathers up all those strands of Old Testament expectation which he understood to point to the eschatological future and focuses them in a fresh vision of the way they are to be fulfilled.
He sees the unity of Old Testament prophecy in its hope for the coming of God's universal kingdom on earth. He reads it in the light of the beginning of the fulfilment of that hope in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and in the consequent transformation of the people of God into a people drawn from all nations. He reads the Old Testament in the light of Jesus and his church, but he also interprets Jesus and his church by means of Old Testament prophecy. The latter gives him the expectation that God's universal kingdom must come. His Christian faith gives him the conviction that it is through Jesus' life, death and resurrection that it will come. But he is also a prophet himself, with a fresh revelation to communicate. This is that the church is called to participate in Jesus' victory over evil by following the same path that he trod; the path of faithful witness to the truth even to the point of death. This will be the final conflict of God's people against the powers of this world that oppose God's rule. By this means truth will prevail over the lies by which evil rules. In this way the nations may be won to the worship of the one true God. In this way Jesus will prove to be the one who fulfils all the promises of God. In this way the universal kingdom of God, to which the whole biblical prophetic tradition finally points, will come on earth.
....
Given its character and its relation to the rest of the Christian canon of Scripture, the place which Revelation now occupies at the close of the whole canon could not be more appropriate. No other biblical book gathers up so comprehensively the whole biblical tradition in its direction towards the eschatological future. It draws out the sense in which the biblical history, not least its climax in the Christ event, points towards the universal kingdom of God, and it gives the whole canon the character of the book whcih enables us to live towards that future.
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David Wanstall, 3/15/2012 |
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The High Christology of the book of Revelation
Last week we began an occasional sermon series on the book of Revelation (audio is here). We looked in particular at Chapters 4 and 5. John, the writer of revelation is attempting to put into words a revelation of God on a throne surrounded by worshiping creatures. Chapter 4 describes monotheistic worship in similar ways to Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1 - two great Old Testament visions of God. The amazing thing is that Chapter 5 puts the Lamb that was slain - ie Jesus - in the centre of this throne being worshiped by the same creatures and in fact all of creation. That is a very high view of who Jesus was.
This is especially the case when compared with the fact that elsewhere in Revelation, John was overwhelmed by the greatness of other angelic beings and was tempted to worship them - and yet he was specifically stopped from doing so.
But high Christology comes through in other ways as well:
God: I am the Alpha and the Omega (1:8)
Christ: I am the first and the last (1:17)
God: I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end (21:6)
Christ: I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. (22:13)
Jesus Christ is clearly identified with God.
There are even subtle references. The number seven is important in Revelation - seven churches, seven lampstands, seven stars, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls. In Revelation, seven can be understood as a number of completeness. It is significant therefore that there are precisely seven occasions where 'Lamb' referring to Christ is coupled with God (or the one who sits on the throne - another way of saying God). See 5:13, 6:16, 7:10, 14:4, 21:22, 22:1 and 22:3.
In these and many other ways, Christ is shown to be divine in the book of revelation - one of its major themes.
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David Wanstall, 3/6/2012 |
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