I was doing some teaching on apologetics recently on Campus, and as we milled around outside afterwards, one of the students asked a thoughtful question.Why is it that contemporary apologetics mostly focuses on the two approaches that enjoy the least biblical support and have the most risks attached?To understand the question, some background.My presentation had been based on the ‘Seven types of apologetics’ essay that I rolled out on The Payneful Truth last year (pt 1, pt 2). As a refresher (or to save you reading from scratch), I argued that in the varied world of contemporary apologetics and evangelistic persuasion, the word ‘apologetics’ gets thrown around pretty loosely—so much so that it’s possible to identify seven different kinds of persuasion or argument that might have the label ‘apologetics’ slapped on them these days.  They were:Gospel persuasion: the arguments and evidence and reasoning that we employ when actually explaining the gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection (e.g. evidence that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead).Gospel objections: having explained the gospel, we answer the various questions and objections that people raise against it (e.g. “Did Jesus really rise from the dead?”; “I don’t believe that we are all sinners and rebels”; and so on).Pre-emptive objections: before we get to talking about the gospel itself, we might address the general objections people have to God and Christianity (e.g. “Why does God allow suffering?”; “Hasn’t science disproved Christianity?”; “Why is Christianity so anti-women and anti-gay?” etc.)  Building Christian confidence: one function or type of apologetics is bolstering the confidence of Christians by providing answers and reasons for their doubts, and for the common objections that society throws at us.God talk and life: way back at the ‘engage’ or pre-evangelistic end of the spectrum, the way we talk and behave in everyday life can open up and commend the subject of the gospel, in a Colossians 4:5-6 kind of way.Positive reasons: These are positive arguments we put forward for the truth or attractiveness of the Christian faith. They might be some version of the classic proofs of the existence of God; they might be arguments that start with the people’s inherent desires and aspirations and show that Christianity fulfills them; they might seek to present the positive goodness of Christianity in the most reasonable and attractive way, to get some traction with the modern, secular person.Critique (kategoria): Rather than provide a defense or ‘apologia’, this form of persuasion points out the inconsistencies and dysfunctions in the non-Christian worldview. It critiques the world, rather than answering the critiques of the world. (Paul’s speech in Acts 17 is a classic case in point.)I argued that we find types 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7 in the example and instructions of the apostles, and suggested that these were the ones we should also focus on in our own evangelism and persuasion. Types 3 and 6—‘Pre-emptive objections’ and ‘Positive reasons’—are not only difficult to find in the New Testament but have considerable risks attached. The ‘pre-emptive objections’ approach puts us on the backfoot, and often gives too much credence to the validity or genuineness of the objection; the ‘positive reasons’ strategy often seeks to frame Christianity in terms that are attractive to the prevailing secular mind, thereby risking a distortion of the counter-intuitive, offensive nature of the gospel.Unfortunately, it is precisely these two latter types (3 and 6) that tend to dominate the field of contemporary apologetics and persuasion.Hence the question I was asked: How has this come to be the case? Why do we end up focusing on the two apologetic approaches that have least to commend them?In answer, I made a few vague, stuttering remarks about the trends of modern thought, and our temptation to give the world too much credit, and our lack of belief in the power of the gospel itself, and how everything had gone to pot since the Enlightenment, and so on. All no doubt true, but a bit incoherent.But then a few days later, in the slow process of moving some books around at home—slow because I keep stopping to browse through old favourites—I came across Graeme Goldsworthy’s underappreciated Gospel-centred Hermeneutics. Not a light read but full of gold. And I remembered and found again this section on page 60:Sinful thinking is ‘snake-think’, the kind of noetic rebellion proposed by the serpent in Eden. It is diametrically opposed to the mind renewed by the gospel … At this point we can say that the godless presuppositions underlying the temptation and fall in Genesis 3 include the following:If God is there, he does not communicate the truth.We do not need God to reveal the rational framework for understanding reality;Human reason is autonomous, and the ultimate arbiter of truth and falsity, right and wrong.In essence, these presuppositions are those of the secular mind that were given such sophisticated expression in the philosophies of the Enlightenment.‘Noetic rebellion’—there’s a phrase you would only hear spoken in the halls of academe. ‘Noetic’ means ‘to do with the mind’ (from the Greek word nous, ‘mind’, ‘understanding’, ‘intellectual perception’). Why we can’t just say ‘mental rebellion’ I’m not sure, but I digress.At one level, Goldsworthy’s point is one that you’ve heard in a thousand sermons on Genesis 3—that the fall involved a false set of assumptions and beliefs about God: that even if he is there, we can’t trust him and don’t need him; that we can gain wisdom and truth on our own terms; that we can become like God ourselves, as self-legislating judges of what is true and good.Goldsworthy’s insight, however, is that this primal ‘snake-think’ is precisely the program of the Enlightenment, and the foundation of modern thought. The Enlightenment was the humanistic project beginning in the late 17th century that sought to cast off the dark, dim understanding of our forebears, who relied on God and his revelation to understand the world. The Enlightenment thinkers wanted to see if we could figure it all out for ourselves, without an answer coming to us ‘from outside’. Could knowledge and truth and morality be found by following our own reason and instincts and experience? Surely yes, said the Enlightenment, and tried to do so.Fast forward to today, and we are the inheritors of several centuries of what amounts to very sophisticated snake-think. The progress of the Enlightenment has been anything but smooth. In fact, the ‘post-modern’ movement was basically the realization that the assumptions of the Enlightenment were overly optimistic and self-defeating.All the same, even if post-modern thinkers are a tad less confident about our ability to figure it all out ourselves, the basic serpentine assumption remains. It’s as old as Adam. If there is any rationality or truth or goodness or morality to be found, it will only be discovered or created by us, on our own terms, through our own reason and experience.Any proposal, therefore, that is put forward—whether Christian or otherwise—needs to accept these ground rules. The truth or falsity of something, its rightness or wrongness, its goodness or badness, its usefulness or otherwise, can only be established on terms decided by us.In our noetically rebellious world, human reason and experience occupy the bench as Judge. If Christianity wishes to argue for itself, it needs to take its place in the dock, like everything else, and defend itself. It needs to answer the Judge’s objections and questions. It needs to show itself good and reasonable according to our current, autonomous standards of reason and experience.This is where Goldsworthy’s insight helps answer my student’s question about the focus of much contemporary apologetics.We find it very easy to focus on apologetic strategy number 3 (pre-emptive objections) and number 6 (positive reasons) because they fit within the dominant thought-patterns of our whole culture, the gravitational pull of which is hard to escape. We’ve grown up with snake-think. It’s the air we breathe. We find it almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which human reason and experience are not the judge and arbiter of everything. By long habit, we assume that Christianity’s normal place is in the dock, cap in hand, seeking to fend off the secular world’s objections and allegations, and hoping to provide attractive, compelling reasons that might satisfy the Judge, or at least make him regard us less negatively.But you can see the problem. By adopting these apologetic strategies, we choose to work within the framework of the noetic rebellion of our culture. We implicitly accept the ground rules of snake-think, and hope that we can somehow persuade the Judge to think better of us and the gospel, or even to accept the truth of our claim.This has two real downsides.Firstly, it doesn’t and can’t work. The Judge of human reason will never be satisfied by the arguments and claims of the genuine gospel, because to do so would require a total reversal of positions. To accept the gospel claim would require the Judge to lay down his gavel, take off his robe, humbly enter the dock, and plead guilty to rebelling against the true creator, lord and judge of the world. What human judge is going to do that?Secondly, it leads us to change the message. We craft our arguments and persuasion to appeal to snake-think; that is, to a set of human standards, rationalities, aspirations and tastes that are shot-through with rebellion against God. The gospel is the opposite of this—it shames worldly wisdom and refuses to be known by it (see 1 Cor 1-2). It’s hard to see how we could dabble in approaches 3 and 6 at any depth, without it changing our gospel proclamation for the worse.The great news, though, is that the gospel provides a profound critique of snake-think and a wonderful redemption from it. The simple old gospel is powerfully effective because it addresses the simple old problem—which also happens to be the simple modern problem: rebellion against God. Gospel persuasion is accusatory and liberating rather than defensive or apologetic, because it calls on all people everywhere to leave behind their noetic rebellion and turn back to the only wise God.That’s how Paul approached the Athenian sophisticates in Acts 17. Rather than adopting a defensive stance—as if he and his message were on trial, and needing to be justified—he gives a quite devastating critique of their foolish idolatry and ignorance, and puts them in the dock before the God and judge of the world. “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:30-31).Surely it can’t be as simple as that? Won’t people laugh at such a message?Some will, as they did in Athens.But by the grace and power of God, others will say “We will hear you again about this” (Acts 17:32).PSGoldsworthy’s point (in the passage quoted above) has relevance for so much else. He makes it in the context of how we read, interpret and apply the Bible today (‘hermeneutics’), arguing that Christ as the centre and key of the Scriptures is thus the centre and key for all human knowledge and interpretation.This is in fact why his argument has relevance for how we think about nearly everything, because it diagnoses the problem that besets all human knowledge in every human culture of every age. The Christ-centred message of the Bible explains us to ourselves, no matter who we are or when or where we live. We don’t need sophisticated cultural analysis to understand the truly important problems of humanity and their solution. In fact, our cultural analysis is so compromised by snake-think that it always misunderstands the true nature of ourselves and the world (because it is predicated on a rejection of the God who created the world).As I said, Gospel-centred Hermeneutics is no light read, but it’s very much worth it.A reminder about The Centre for Christian Living event on ‘Deception’ that I’m speaking at on August 24. These events are great for small groups to take a week’s break from their normal Bible study and consider a topic—you can attend as a group in person, or watch it together on livestream. All the details are at the CCL website. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

I was doing some teaching on apologetics recently on Campus, and as we milled around outside afterwards, one of the students asked a thoughtful question. Why is it that contemporary apologetics mostly focuses on the two approaches that enjoy the least biblical support and have the most risks attached? To understand the question, some background. My presentation had been based on the ‘Seven types of apologetics’ essay that I rolled out on The Payneful Truth last year (<a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/p/seven-types-of-apologetics#details" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">pt 1</a>, <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/p/seven-types-of-apologetics-part-2#details" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">pt 2</a>). As a refresher (or to save you reading from scratch), I argued that in the varied world of contemporary apologetics and evangelistic persuasion, the word ‘apologetics’ gets thrown around pretty loosely—so much so that it’s possible to identify seven different kinds of persuasion or argument that might have the label ‘apologetics’ slapped on them these days.  They were: Gospel persuasion: the arguments and evidence and reasoning that we employ when actually explaining the gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection (e.g. evidence that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead). Gospel objections: having explained the gospel, we answer the various questions and objections that people raise against it (e.g. “Did Jesus really rise from the dead?”; “I don’t believe that we are all sinners and rebels”; and so on). Pre-emptive objections: before we get to talking about the gospel itself, we might address the general objections people have to God and Christianity (e.g. “Why does God allow suffering?”; “Hasn’t science disproved Christianity?”; “Why is Christianity so anti-women and anti-gay?” etc.)   Building Christian confidence: one function or type of apologetics is bolstering the confidence of Christians by providing answers and reasons for their doubts, and for the common objections that society throws at us. God talk and life: way back at the ‘engage’ or pre-evangelistic end of the spectrum, the way we talk and behave in everyday life can open up and commend the subject of the gospel, in a Colossians 4:5-6 kind of way. Positive reasons: These are positive arguments we put forward for the truth or attractiveness of the Christian faith. They might be some version of the classic proofs of the existence of God; they might be arguments that start with the people’s inherent desires and aspirations and show that Christianity fulfills them; they might seek to present the positive goodness of Christianity in the most reasonable and attractive way, to get some traction with the modern, secular person. Critique (kategoria): Rather than provide a defense or ‘apologia’, this form of persuasion points out the inconsistencies and dysfunctions in the non-Christian worldview. It critiques the world, rather than answering the critiques of the world. (Paul’s speech in Acts 17 is a classic case in point.) I argued that we find types 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7 in the example and instructions of the apostles, and suggested that these were the ones we should also focus on in our own evangelism and persuasion. Types 3 and 6—‘Pre-emptive objections’ and ‘Positive reasons’—are not only difficult to find in the New Testament but have considerable risks attached. The ‘pre-emptive objections’ approach puts us on the backfoot, and often gives too much credence to the validity or genuineness of the objection; the ‘positive reasons’ strategy often seeks to frame Christianity in terms that are attractive to the prevailing secular mind, thereby risking a distortion of the counter-intuitive, offensive nature of the gospel. Unfortunately, it is precisely these two latter types (3 and 6) that tend to dominate the field of contemporary apologetics and persuasion. Hence the question I was asked: How has this come to be the case? Why do we end up focusing on the two apologetic approaches that have least to commend them? In answer, I made a few vague, stuttering remarks about the trends of modern thought, and our temptation to give the world too much credit, and our lack of belief in the power of the gospel itself, and how everything had gone to pot since the Enlightenment, and so on. All no doubt true, but a bit incoherent. But then a few days later, in the slow process of moving some books around at home—slow because I keep stopping to browse through old favourites—I came across Graeme Goldsworthy’s underappreciated <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Gospel-centred-Hermeneutics/9781844741458" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Gospel-centred Hermeneutics</a>. Not a light read but full of gold. And I remembered and found again this section on page 60: Sinful thinking is ‘snake-think’, the kind of noetic rebellion proposed by the serpent in Eden. It is diametrically opposed to the mind renewed by the gospel … At this point we can say that the godless presuppositions underlying the temptation and fall in Genesis 3 include the following: If God is there, he does not communicate the truth. We do not need God to reveal the rational framework for understanding reality; Human reason is autonomous, and the ultimate arbiter of truth and falsity, right and wrong. In essence, these presuppositions are those of the secular mind that were given such sophisticated expression in the philosophies of the Enlightenment. ‘Noetic rebellion’—there’s a phrase you would only hear spoken in the halls of academe. ‘Noetic’ means ‘to do with the mind’ (from the Greek word nous, ‘mind’, ‘understanding’, ‘intellectual perception’). Why we can’t just say ‘mental rebellion’ I’m not sure, but I digress. At one level, Goldsworthy’s point is one that you’ve heard in a thousand sermons on Genesis 3—that the fall involved a false set of assumptions and beliefs about God: that even if he is there, we can’t trust him and don’t need him; that we can gain wisdom and truth on our own terms; that we can become like God ourselves, as self-legislating judges of what is true and good. Goldsworthy’s insight, however, is that this primal ‘snake-think’ is precisely the program of the Enlightenment, and the foundation of modern thought. The Enlightenment was the humanistic project beginning in the late 17th century that sought to cast off the dark, dim understanding of our forebears, who relied on God and his revelation to understand the world. The Enlightenment thinkers wanted to see if we could figure it all out for ourselves, without an answer coming to us ‘from outside’. Could knowledge and truth and morality be found by following our own reason and instincts and experience? Surely yes, said the Enlightenment, and tried to do so. Fast forward to today, and we are the inheritors of several centuries of what amounts to very sophisticated snake-think. The progress of the Enlightenment has been anything but smooth. In fact, the ‘post-modern’ movement was basically the realization that the assumptions of the Enlightenment were overly optimistic and self-defeating. All the same, even if post-modern thinkers are a tad less confident about our ability to figure it all out ourselves, the basic serpentine assumption remains. It’s as old as Adam. If there is any rationality or truth or goodness or morality to be found, it will only be discovered or created by us, on our own terms, through our own reason and experience. Any proposal, therefore, that is put forward—whether Christian or otherwise—needs to accept these ground rules. The truth or falsity of something, its rightness or wrongness, its goodness or badness, its usefulness or otherwise, can only be established on terms decided by us. In our noetically rebellious world, human reason and experience occupy the bench as Judge. If Christianity wishes to argue for itself, it needs to take its place in the dock, like everything else, and defend itself. It needs to answer the Judge’s objections and questions. It needs to show itself good and reasonable according to our current, autonomous standards of reason and experience. This is where Goldsworthy’s insight helps answer my student’s question about the focus of much contemporary apologetics. We find it very easy to focus on apologetic strategy number 3 (pre-emptive objections) and number 6 (positive reasons) because they fit within the dominant thought-patterns of our whole culture, the gravitational pull of which is hard to escape. We’ve grown up with snake-think. It’s the air we breathe. We find it almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which human reason and experience are not the judge and arbiter of everything. By long habit, we assume that Christianity’s normal place is in the dock, cap in hand, seeking to fend off the secular world’s objections and allegations, and hoping to provide attractive, compelling reasons that might satisfy the Judge, or at least make him regard us less negatively. But you can see the problem. By adopting these apologetic strategies, we choose to work within the framework of the noetic rebellion of our culture. We implicitly accept the ground rules of snake-think, and hope that we can somehow persuade the Judge to think better of us and the gospel, or even to accept the truth of our claim. This has two real downsides. Firstly, it doesn’t and can’t work. The Judge of human reason will never be satisfied by the arguments and claims of the genuine gospel, because to do so would require a total reversal of positions. To accept the gospel claim would require the Judge to lay down his gavel, take off his robe, humbly enter the dock, and plead guilty to rebelling against the true creator, lord and judge of the world. What human judge is going to do that? Secondly, it leads us to change the message. We craft our arguments and persuasion to appeal to snake-think; that is, to a set of human standards, rationalities, aspirations and tastes that are shot-through with rebellion against God. The gospel is the opposite of this—it shames worldly wisdom and refuses to be known by it (see 1 Cor 1-2). It’s hard to see how we could dabble in approaches 3 and 6 at any depth, without it changing our gospel proclamation for the worse. The great news, though, is that the gospel provides a profound critique of snake-think and a wonderful redemption from it. The simple old gospel is powerfully effective because it addresses the simple old problem—which also happens to be the simple modern problem: rebellion against God. Gospel persuasion is accusatory and liberating rather than defensive or apologetic, because it calls on all people everywhere to leave behind their noetic rebellion and turn back to the only wise God. That’s how Paul approached the Athenian sophisticates in Acts 17. Rather than adopting a defensive stance—as if he and his message were on trial, and needing to be justified—he gives a quite devastating critique of their foolish idolatry and ignorance, and puts them in the dock before the God and judge of the world. “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:30-31). Surely it can’t be as simple as that? Won’t people laugh at such a message? Some will, as they did in Athens. But by the grace and power of God, others will say “We will hear you again about this” (Acts 17:32). PS Goldsworthy’s point (in the passage quoted above) has relevance for so much else. He makes it in the context of how we read, interpret and apply the Bible today (‘hermeneutics’), arguing that Christ as the centre and key of the Scriptures is thus the centre and key for all human knowledge and interpretation. This is in fact why his argument has relevance for how we think about nearly everything, because it diagnoses the problem that besets all human knowledge in every human culture of every age. The Christ-centred message of the Bible explains us to ourselves, no matter who we are or when or where we live. We don’t need sophisticated cultural analysis to understand the truly important problems of humanity and their solution. In fact, our cultural analysis is so compromised by snake-think that it always misunderstands the true nature of ourselves and the world (because it is predicated on a rejection of the God who created the world). As I said, <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Gospel-centred-Hermeneutics/9781844741458" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Gospel-centred Hermeneutics</a> is no light read, but it’s very much worth it. A reminder about The Centre for Christian Living event on ‘Deception’ that I’m speaking at on August 24. These events are great for small groups to take a week’s break from their normal Bible study and consider a topic—you can attend as a group in person, or watch it together on livestream. <a href="https://ccl.moore.edu.au/events/2022-08-24/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">All the details are at the CCL website.</a> This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

Snake-think

Hi everyoneBefore getting onto this week’s topic, another ‘uncommonly good’ prayer to share with you from The Book of Common Prayer. James wrote in to mention two of his favourites:I do quite like the collect for peace, and especially the phrase ‘whose service is perfect freedom’. It’s a refreshing reminder of how God’s call to freedom and our world’s modern conception of freedom aren’t the same thing. Another favourite is the Collect for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity, and especially the line: ‘… God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray’. What a wonderful reminder, and rebuke, about our heavenly Father’s willingness to hear from his children! Here’s the full prayer of which that line is part: Almighty and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve: Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. AmenWonderful stuff. Gospel clarityThere are many possible reasons for a lack of vitality in a church, which of course gives plenty of scope for experts to provide solutions. It could be your structures or programs or staffing mix or welcoming or preaching or lack of discipline or prayerlessness or who knows what combination of these things and many others. Plus there’s the small matter of God’s sovereign hand.But being a so-called expert myself—on the basis of having helped Col Marshall write a little book about trellises and vines a few years ago—I’ve got another factor to throw into the mix.It may sound ridiculous, but one simple reason that churches and ministries languish is that they don’t teach the gospel with clarity.‘Well of course,’ I hear you say, ‘those liberal and heretical and other sub-orthodox kind of places don’t teach the gospel. That’s why most of them are declining and dying.’True enough, but I’m talking about good solid Bible-teaching evangelical churches. Quite possibly your church.‘Really?’ you respond. ‘That’s hard to believe. Every second sermon at our church mentions that Jesus died for our sins, that justification is by faith alone, and that salvation comes from God’s free grace not our works. We sing about it; we remember it in the Lord’s Supper. Surely if there’s one thing we all know back to front, it’s that!’Like I said, a lack of gospel clarity.It’s certainly true and of prime importance that Jesus died a substitutionary death for our sins, and that forgiveness and salvation and justification flow directly from that fount of every blessing. But to know these truths is not yet to know the gospel with clarity. Not the New Testament gospel anyway.The big newsflash announcement (or ‘gospel’) of the New Testament is not that Jesus died on the cross for your sins. It’s that the Jesus who died on the cross for sins rose again as the Lord and Christ of the world, and now offers forgiveness and salvation and eternal life to all those who repent and submit to his rule in faith.That’s what the apostles went around proclaiming. (Have a read of Acts and see for yourself.)Their big announcement was that the crucified Jesus had been raised by God and thus proven and declared to be the ‘Christ’—God’s promised worldwide ruler and judge in the line of David, whom death could not defeat and who would reign forever over God’s kingdom. When we see the title ‘Christ’ given to Jesus, this is what is being claimed about him.The gospel, then, is not ‘Jesus crucified’, but ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Cor 2:2). The One who was crucified has now risen as God’s worldwide-king-and-judge (‘Christ’). He now calls on everyone in the world to turn back to him in repentance and to receive forgiveness of sins on the basis of his atoning death.Would you say that the members of your church have this understanding of the gospel clearly in their heads? That they could explain to you without hesitation how the death of Jesus for sins and the resurrection of Jesus as the Lord Christ fit together, and how this ‘gospel’ calls not just for faith but for repentance leading to obedience?In my fairly long and wide experience of church life and ministry in evangelical churches in Australia and the US, I would say that disturbingly few everyday Christians grasp these truths with clarity. Whenever I run Two Ways to Live training or workshops, and ask people at the beginning to trot out their existing nutshell gospel, it hardly ever mentions the resurrection—and if it does, it’s with very little understanding of its significance in establishing Jesus as the living Lord and Christ of the world.We need to teach our people this gospel, and clearly. We need to teach it and remind them of it because, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:1-5, this Scripture-fulfilling message about the atoning death and resurrection of the Christ is the word of first importance; it’s the word in which we stand and by which we are being saved. It’s the basis of everything.When we grasp this gospel clearly, and it penetrates our hearts and wills and lives, the effects are life-changing. This gospel has a power to save and to transform, because it speaks not just of a forgiven past through an atoning death, but also of a new, joyous, constantly repentant future, lived under the lordship of the living Christ.This gospel drives us to pursue holiness—we now live a completely new life under the lordship of the risen Christ. We are now raised with him, and so put off everything that belongs to our old earthly selves and put on the new life of the resurrection age (Col 3:1-17).This gospel gives assurance and hope, because we know that the one who died to justify us by his blood now lives and reigns as God’s Christ, and will surely save us from God’s wrath on that last day (Rom 5:6-11).This gospel motivates evangelism—because if the risen Christ is the lord and judge of every person in the world (Acts 17:30-31), then every person in the world needs to hear his offer of salvation and turn back to him in repentance and faith to live under his lordship.This gospel changes our hearts to serve one another gladly in love. It brings us into fellowship and communion with all those others who have been saved by the living Christ and now serve and obey him. Our new life in him is one that follows his example—that lays down its life for others, knowing that this is the path to glory.The gospel of the crucified Christ lights a fire under the Christian life. It ignites and fans into flame the various marks of a flourishing Christian disciple and of a healthy church—that we grow in godliness and holiness, that we persevere in joy and assurance, that we are driven to reach out to the world in mission and evangelism, and that we love and serve one another and all people, as God has served us in his Son.Could it be true? Could the significant factor in the lack of spiritual heat in our lives and churches be a lack of clarity about this gospel?I strongly suspect so.It seems beyond obvious to me that we should be clearly and intentionally teaching this New Testament gospel to everyone in our churches.I’m not saying this, I should add, because I’ve recently written a resource to help churches do just that. It’s the other way round—I wrote Learn the Gospel (and am excited about its potential) because I’m convinced of the power of gospel in all its clarity to penetrate and change and save human hearts.But in whatever way we do it—through sermons, seminars, weekend conferences, books, small group material, training material, and so on—we need to teach the powerful New Testament gospel—with clarity.PSLike me, I know a number of you have been waiting patiently for the release of the new Two ways to live training material that I’ve mentioned often over the past eighteen months or so. The first part of it—Learn the Gospel—is now tantalizingly close. The books have been printed and are currently being shipped back to Matthias Media; the videos are undergoing final checks; as of this moment the official release date is August 1, but stock may be available sooner than that. I’ll let you know soon as I know! (You can pre-order here.)I’m excited to see it finally coming to fruition, not just for the natural reasons (of seeing a long-running project approaching the finish line), but because of the topic explored in this week’s post. The more clearly and deeply the gospel is lodged in our hearts, the healthier and more productive is our discipleship and our church life. I’m praying that God will use this new resource to help with that! As many of you know, I used to work at The Centre for Christian Living at Moore College, and I am still a keen supporter of their work. In fact, I’m speaking at the CCL event on August 24 on the topic of ‘Deception’. Come along to Moore College in person, or tune in to the livestream. Click here for all the details and to register online. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

Hi everyone Before getting onto this week’s topic, another <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/p/uncommonly-good-prayers#details" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">‘uncommonly good’ prayer</a> to share with you from The Book of Common Prayer. James wrote in to mention two of his favourites: I do quite like the collect for peace, and especially the phrase ‘whose service is perfect freedom’. It’s a refreshing reminder of how God’s call to freedom and our world’s modern conception of freedom aren’t the same thing. Another favourite is the Collect for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity, and especially the line: ‘… God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray’. What a wonderful reminder, and rebuke, about our heavenly Father’s willingness to hear from his children!  Here’s the full prayer of which that line is part: Almighty and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve: Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen Wonderful stuff. Gospel clarity There are many possible reasons for a lack of vitality in a church, which of course gives plenty of scope for experts to provide solutions. It could be your structures or programs or staffing mix or welcoming or preaching or lack of discipline or prayerlessness or who knows what combination of these things and many others. Plus there’s the small matter of God’s sovereign hand. But being a so-called expert myself—on the basis of having helped Col Marshall write a little book about trellises and vines a few years ago—I’ve got another factor to throw into the mix. It may sound ridiculous, but one simple reason that churches and ministries languish is that they don’t teach the gospel with clarity. ‘Well of course,’ I hear you say, ‘those liberal and heretical and other sub-orthodox kind of places don’t teach the gospel. That’s why most of them are declining and dying.’ True enough, but I’m talking about good solid Bible-teaching evangelical churches. Quite possibly your church. ‘Really?’ you respond. ‘That’s hard to believe. Every second sermon at our church mentions that Jesus died for our sins, that justification is by faith alone, and that salvation comes from God’s free grace not our works. We sing about it; we remember it in the Lord’s Supper. Surely if there’s one thing we all know back to front, it’s that!’ Like I said, a lack of gospel clarity. It’s certainly true and of prime importance that Jesus died a substitutionary death for our sins, and that forgiveness and salvation and justification flow directly from that fount of every blessing. But to know these truths is not yet to know the gospel with clarity. Not the New Testament gospel anyway. The big newsflash announcement (or ‘gospel’) of the New Testament is not that Jesus died on the cross for your sins. It’s that the Jesus who died on the cross for sins rose again as the Lord and Christ of the world, and now offers forgiveness and salvation and eternal life to all those who repent and submit to his rule in faith. That’s what the apostles went around proclaiming. (Have a read of Acts and see for yourself.) Their big announcement was that the crucified Jesus had been raised by God and thus proven and declared to be the ‘Christ’—God’s promised worldwide ruler and judge in the line of David, whom death could not defeat and who would reign forever over God’s kingdom. When we see the title ‘Christ’ given to Jesus, this is what is being claimed about him. The gospel, then, is not ‘Jesus crucified’, but ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Cor 2:2). The One who was crucified has now risen as God’s worldwide-king-and-judge (‘Christ’). He now calls on everyone in the world to turn back to him in repentance and to receive forgiveness of sins on the basis of his atoning death. Would you say that the members of your church have this understanding of the gospel clearly in their heads? That they could explain to you without hesitation how the death of Jesus for sins and the resurrection of Jesus as the Lord Christ fit together, and how this ‘gospel’ calls not just for faith but for repentance leading to obedience? In my fairly long and wide experience of church life and ministry in evangelical churches in Australia and the US, I would say that disturbingly few everyday Christians grasp these truths with clarity. Whenever I run Two Ways to Live training or workshops, and ask people at the beginning to trot out their existing nutshell gospel, it hardly ever mentions the resurrection—and if it does, it’s with very little understanding of its significance in establishing Jesus as the living Lord and Christ of the world. We need to teach our people this gospel, and clearly. We need to teach it and remind them of it because, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:1-5, this Scripture-fulfilling message about the atoning death and resurrection of the Christ is the word of first importance; it’s the word in which we stand and by which we are being saved. It’s the basis of everything. When we grasp this gospel clearly, and it penetrates our hearts and wills and lives, the effects are life-changing. This gospel has a power to save and to transform, because it speaks not just of a forgiven past through an atoning death, but also of a new, joyous, constantly repentant future, lived under the lordship of the living Christ. This gospel drives us to pursue holiness—we now live a completely new life under the lordship of the risen Christ. We are now raised with him, and so put off everything that belongs to our old earthly selves and put on the new life of the resurrection age (Col 3:1-17). This gospel gives assurance and hope, because we know that the one who died to justify us by his blood now lives and reigns as God’s Christ, and will surely save us from God’s wrath on that last day (Rom 5:6-11). This gospel motivates evangelism—because if the risen Christ is the lord and judge of every person in the world (Acts 17:30-31), then every person in the world needs to hear his offer of salvation and turn back to him in repentance and faith to live under his lordship. This gospel changes our hearts to serve one another gladly in love. It brings us into fellowship and communion with all those others who have been saved by the living Christ and now serve and obey him. Our new life in him is one that follows his example—that lays down its life for others, knowing that this is the path to glory. The gospel of the crucified Christ lights a fire under the Christian life. It ignites and fans into flame the various marks of a flourishing Christian disciple and of a healthy church—that we grow in godliness and holiness, that we persevere in joy and assurance, that we are driven to reach out to the world in mission and evangelism, and that we love and serve one another and all people, as God has served us in his Son. Could it be true? Could the significant factor in the lack of spiritual heat in our lives and churches be a lack of clarity about this gospel? I strongly suspect so. It seems beyond obvious to me that we should be clearly and intentionally teaching this New Testament gospel to everyone in our churches. I’m not saying this, I should add, because I’ve recently written a resource to help churches do just that. It’s the other way round—I wrote <a href="https://matthiasmedia.com.au/products/learn-the-gospel?utm_campaign=28%2F6%2F22%20Payneful%20gospel%20clarity%20%28W3rzqa%29&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=Accepts%20marketing&amp;_kx=EwFa75_qiTN15irnFN9yJ9X2qY-pNdwc85uzpmnvtao%3D.R3WNGx" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Learn the Gospel</a> (and am excited about its potential) because I’m convinced of the power of gospel in all its clarity to penetrate and change and save human hearts. But in whatever way we do it—through sermons, seminars, weekend conferences, books, small group material, training material, and so on—we need to teach the powerful New Testament gospel—with clarity. PS Like me, I know a number of you have been waiting patiently for the release of the new Two ways to live training material that I’ve mentioned often over the past eighteen months or so. The first part of it—Learn the Gospel—is now tantalizingly close. The books have been printed and are currently being shipped back to Matthias Media; the videos are undergoing final checks; as of this moment the official release date is August 1, but stock may be available sooner than that. I’ll let you know soon as I know! (<a href="https://matthiasmedia.com.au/products/learn-the-gospel?utm_campaign=28%2F6%2F22%20Payneful%20gospel%20clarity%20%28W3rzqa%29&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=Accepts%20marketing&amp;_kx=EwFa75_qiTN15irnFN9yJ9X2qY-pNdwc85uzpmnvtao%3D.R3WNGx" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">You can pre-order here</a>.) I’m excited to see it finally coming to fruition, not just for the natural reasons (of seeing a long-running project approaching the finish line), but because of the topic explored in this week’s post. The more clearly and deeply the gospel is lodged in our hearts, the healthier and more productive is our discipleship and our church life. I’m praying that God will use this new resource to help with that! As many of you know, I used to work at The Centre for Christian Living at Moore College, and I am still a keen supporter of their work. In fact, I’m speaking at the CCL event on August 24 on the topic of ‘Deception’. Come along to Moore College in person, or tune in to the livestream. <a href="https://ccl.moore.edu.au/events/2022-08-24/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Click here for all the details and to register online</a>. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

The fire of gospel clarity

I suppose I should have expected it, but quite a few of you got in touch after my recent brief comments about singing and music, and some foolishly asked for more on this subject.  There’s certainly plenty to discuss, but I’ve been pondering what I could say in this brief space that would be encouraging, constructive, non-ranty and generally sensitive to the fact that if there’s a subject that otherwise united people tend to disagree about it is this one.Here are three thoughts that I hope meet these requirements.1. A reason to singMuch of our discussion about church-singing in recent decades has revolved around the subjects of ‘praise’ and ‘worship’. It’s almost a cliché now to insist that worship and praise are much bigger categories than ‘singing’ (as all-of-life responses to God), and that ‘singing’ is much more than ‘praise’ and ‘worship’ (it’s a form of mutual encouragement as well).These debates have been helpful in some ways and frustrating in others. Let’s not rehash them here.It occurs to me, however, that there’s a prominent theological category for talking about singing that we rarely discuss, and which might help us think more clearly about it.It’s very striking how often the Bible links singing with joy. The famous opening of Psalm 95 is one good example among many. Here it is in the Book of Common Prayer version I’ve been using recently:O come let us sing unto the Lord: let us heartily rejoice in the rock of our salvation;Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving: and show ourselves glad in him with psalms.In the Hebrew poetry of these verses, singing is paralleled with rejoicing. Singing is how we demonstrate and express our gladness, our thanksgiving, our joy in the Lord who is the rock of our salvation (also see Ps 5:1; 9:2; 27:6; 47:1; 63:7; 65:13; 67:4; 71:23; 81:1; 84:2; 92:4; 100:2; and many others.)One of the very few references to singing in the New Testament also makes this connection:Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing. (Jas 5:13). Now, it’s not as if joy is the only mode of singing that exists, in the world or in the Bible. There are love songs and laments and ballads that tell a story.But if we want to rejoice—and we are commanded to rejoice again and again, in all circumstances—one of the most significant ways to do it is to sing. When we sing, we ‘show ourselves glad’. We employ our whole body and soul not just to declare our gladness and joy, but to demonstrate and enact and celebrate it.Joy is an affection—a sense of delight and gladness and happiness in what is good—but rejoicing is an action that springs from, expresses and stirs that affection.Sometimes we feel very much like rejoicing, such as when the Swans come from behind to defeat the Magpies with a last-minute goal.  (For me, the best part of winning is joining 30,000 other fans in the stadium belting out, “Cheer, cheer, the red and the white!”) Sometimes we only start to feel the joy as we rejoice—perhaps as we stand together and sing a stirring song with our brothers and sisters. And at other times, we rejoice and show ourselves glad in the Lord even though our hearts are heavy with the troubles and hardships—because we know that we can and should give thanks and rejoice in him in all circumstances.If we are looking for a biblical category to describe the ‘affective’ nature of singing in church, ‘rejoicing’ is an excellent biblical candidate. It’s our heartfelt response to what the ‘rock of our salvation’ has done for us. It’s something we actively do (by singing heartily together) that expresses our glad response to God’s grace.And if we are looking for ways to diagnose what is lacking in church when the whole vibe of our meeting is stiff or listless or flat, the simplest biblical conclusion might  be that we are not rejoicing as we could and should. This is a diagnosis I could get behind.In other words, the thing that is sometimes missing is not an experience of God’s presence, or an exalted state of consciousness that brings me closer to him, or any of the other quasi-mystical foundations for the ‘praise-and-worship experience’ that the charismatic movement has pioneered and exported to so many of our churches.Perhaps the ‘affect’ we’re missing is all-in, foot-stamping, fist-pumping joy.2. Rejoicing is a spiritual responseLike all fruits of the Spirit, joy is both a divine and a human action. It can only come as the Spirit brings life. And yet we are called to keep in step with the Spirit, and commanded to rejoice. It’s something we do, as God works in us by his Spirit through his word.We can’t artificially create or manufacture real joy—say, with a driving bass line or a key change. But we can grow in joy, and grow in our obedience to the command to rejoice. We do this in the usual way—that is, in the way that all spiritual growth happens:By preaching and teaching the gospel of God’s grace; by holding up Jesus before people’s eyes, and praying that the wonders of who he is and what he has done for us will ignite love and peace and joy and all the fruits of the Spirit in their hearts;By prayerfully teaching and reminding people about this particular subject (as the apostles often did)—teaching and urging them to rejoice and give thanks always, and how singing together is an important means of doing this;By the mature in the congregation exemplifying this joy (such as in their singing);By creating contexts and opportunities within which singing-for-joy can be practised, and can flourish.This last point brings us to the practicalities of how thinking about singing as rejoicing might change the practice of singing in our churches. There is much to be said here, and of all the points I want to make in this brief article, this is the most contextual, the most subject to wisdom and genuine difference, and therefore the one most likely to get up your nose, dear reader! So with those caveats, let me suggest …3. Don’t crowd out genuine rejoicing with too much soundRejoicing in song—to state the obvious—is verbal. It’s joyful speech, set to music. It expresses in words how glad we are; and it recounts what we’re so glad about. It communicates to God our joy in him and his works, and it communicates the same to each other. This is why our singing is simultaneously an act of responsive joy, a declaration of all the ways that God is great and for which we rejoice (i.e. ‘praise’), and an exercise in mutual teaching and encouragement.The usual conclusion we draw from this is that our songs must have ‘good words’. This is certainly true, but three other equally important conclusions also follow.The first is that the words of our songs must be heard on each others’ lips. The predominant sound we should hear is the sound of joyful voices—of God’s people singing out their joy in all God is and has done, and teaching each other as we do so.This is where I fear that the rise of the ‘worship band’ has done us no favours, and I speak as one who has enjoyed playing in such bands for years. I’m not quite sure how we got here, but it’s now pretty standard in our churches for a congregation of (say) 150 or 200 to be led by a music team consisting of keys, drums, bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and three singers, all amplified. This seems vastly more than is necessary to accompany that size group in song. In fact, the effect of the sheer scale and volume of this sort of band is that the ‘accompaniment’ is reversed. The dominant sound in the room is the sound of the band, with the congregation accompanying them—like the faint echo in a live rock concert, where you can just hear the crowd singing along in the chorus. Is this enjoyable and great to listen to and sing along with? If it’s done well, yes! But is it the sound of the congregation rejoicing? Well … I don’t think so, because the congregation can’t be heard. I can hear a few voices near me perhaps, but I can’t hear and be stirred by the wonderful sound of God’s people shouting for joy. The high-volume band that dominates the room makes the sound of voices secondary.We need to create a singing culture in which the accompaniment is just that—a secondary, supportive sound that exists to enable the singing, and nothing more. Likewise, we need a song-leader (and perhaps just one) who shows us when to come in, and exemplifies what we’re all doing together (singing with joy), but whose voice isn’t dominant in the room. In fact, apart perhaps from the first words of each verse, I don’t really see why the song-leader’s voice should be amplified at all. The voices we want to hear are each others’.Ah, you say, but we need to hear the leader loudly so that we can follow the tune.This leads to a second point—we need songs that big groups of people can sing easily together. This is a genre issue. Many of the songs our ‘worship bands’ play are remarkably similar in genre to the songs that popular bands generally play in our culture (perhaps not surprisingly). These are songs designed more for performance and listening than for mass-group singing, because (for better or worse) that’s modern Western musical culture. We mainly listen to music; we don’t sing.But this means that the songs we instinctively write (and play in our worship bands) are often poorly adapted for singing in unison—and so we need drums to establish the rhythm because otherwise it doesn’t hold together, and we need amplified singers because otherwise we can’t follow the complex, syncopated tune. This seems backwards. We’ve created a musical culture built on the performative genre of rock bands, and then feel that we need rock bands in order for our church musical culture to work.I strongly suspect we need to do something very counter-cultural at this point—write and sing songs as people who love to sing together in large groups. This may mean developing our own genre, since community singing is no longer much of a thing in Western culture.The third and final point is simply that all of this takes time. Building a culture of joyful singing dominated by voices will take patience, because it is very likely a shift from what we are currently doing. We’ll need to teach and preach and pray about it. We’ll need to model and practise it. We’ll need to create the audio-space for it to happen (in many cases by drastically reducing the scale and volume of the accompaniment). And we’ll need to prioritize songs that a big group of people can latch onto and sing heartily and joyfully together.If those last paragraphs were starting to stray close to the rant-zone, please forgive me. And (as I know you will!), please send in your own thoughts and experiences about creating this kind of authentic, joyful culture of the word in song.PSThere’s much else to say, but here’s one point that didn’t quite fit in anywhere above. As I visit different churches, and I do so reasonably often, I’m struck by how the architecture of the room and the space communicates culture, and expresses underlying assumptions. Our Reformed forebears knew this of course, and deliberately designed (or re-designed) buildings and spaces for a ‘word-centred church’—as opposed to the architecture of medieval Roman Catholicism and all that it stood for.I sometimes think that if we were wanting to communicate to the congregation that they were attending a rock concert as listeners and consumers, we would design our church spaces exactly like a lot of churches I enter. Everything is centred around a raised stage, which is covered in musical instruments, amplifiers, a drum kit, leads, mic stands, and all the normal paraphernalia. The stage might be lit with banks of coloured spotlights, perhaps also with video screens to further convey all that’s happening. There may or may not be an unobtrusive lectern centre stage. Sometimes the house lights are dimmed (especially during the singing).I don’t think any of this is intentional, or signifies a sinister drift towards mystical doctrine. All the same, as an architectural statement, it does seem very un-evangelical—almost as if we’re trying to create a modern cathedral in which all the colour and movement and theatre happens up the front in the special zone, where the mediators of God’s presence do their thing.If we were designing a space in which the Scriptural word of Jesus was at the centre, and we were gathered around the word to hear him, and to respond to him and each other (including rejoicing together in song), would it look like this?I’m sure you’ll get in touch and let me know!Want to get every edition of The Payneful Truth every week, and support me in the writing work that I do? Then you can become a partner or subscriber. Here’s something to click… This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

I suppose I should have expected it, but quite a few of you got in touch after <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/p/postcard-from-australia?s=w#details" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">my recent brief comments about singing and music</a>, and some foolishly asked for more on this subject.  There’s certainly plenty to discuss, but I’ve been pondering what I could say in this brief space that would be encouraging, constructive, non-ranty and generally sensitive to the fact that if there’s a subject that otherwise united people tend to disagree about it is this one. Here are three thoughts that I hope meet these requirements. 1. A reason to sing Much of our discussion about church-singing in recent decades has revolved around the subjects of ‘praise’ and ‘worship’. It’s almost a cliché now to insist that worship and praise are much bigger categories than ‘singing’ (as all-of-life responses to God), and that ‘singing’ is much more than ‘praise’ and ‘worship’ (it’s a form of mutual encouragement as well). These debates have been helpful in some ways and frustrating in others. Let’s not rehash them here. It occurs to me, however, that there’s a prominent theological category for talking about singing that we rarely discuss, and which might help us think more clearly about it. It’s very striking how often the Bible links singing with joy. The famous opening of Psalm 95 is one good example among many. Here it is in the Book of Common Prayer version I’ve been using recently: O come let us sing unto the Lord: let us heartily rejoice in the rock of our salvation; Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving: and show ourselves glad in him with psalms. In the Hebrew poetry of these verses, singing is paralleled with rejoicing. Singing is how we demonstrate and express our gladness, our thanksgiving, our joy in the Lord who is the rock of our salvation (also see Ps 5:1; 9:2; 27:6; 47:1; 63:7; 65:13; 67:4; 71:23; 81:1; 84:2; 92:4; 100:2; and many others.) One of the very few references to singing in the New Testament also makes this connection: Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing. (Jas 5:13).  Now, it’s not as if joy is the only mode of singing that exists, in the world or in the Bible. There are love songs and laments and ballads that tell a story. But if we want to rejoice—and we are commanded to rejoice again and again, in all circumstances—one of the most significant ways to do it is to sing. When we sing, we ‘show ourselves glad’. We employ our whole body and soul not just to declare our gladness and joy, but to demonstrate and enact and celebrate it. Joy is an affection—a sense of delight and gladness and happiness in what is good—but rejoicing is an action that springs from, expresses and stirs that affection. Sometimes we feel very much like rejoicing, such as when the Swans come from behind to defeat the Magpies with a last-minute goal.  (For me, the best part of winning is joining 30,000 other fans in the stadium belting out, “Cheer, cheer, the red and the white!”) Sometimes we only start to feel the joy as we rejoice—perhaps as we stand together and sing a stirring song with our brothers and sisters. And at other times, we rejoice and show ourselves glad in the Lord even though our hearts are heavy with the troubles and hardships—because we know that we can and should give thanks and rejoice in him in all circumstances. If we are looking for a biblical category to describe the ‘affective’ nature of singing in church, ‘rejoicing’ is an excellent biblical candidate. It’s our heartfelt response to what the ‘rock of our salvation’ has done for us. It’s something we actively do (by singing heartily together) that expresses our glad response to God’s grace. And if we are looking for ways to diagnose what is lacking in church when the whole vibe of our meeting is stiff or listless or flat, the simplest biblical conclusion might be that we are not rejoicing as we could and should. This is a diagnosis I could get behind. In other words, the thing that is sometimes missing is not an experience of God’s presence, or an exalted state of consciousness that brings me closer to him, or any of the other quasi-mystical foundations for the ‘praise-and-worship experience’ that the charismatic movement has pioneered and exported to so many of our churches. Perhaps the ‘affect’ we’re missing is all-in, foot-stamping, fist-pumping joy. 2. Rejoicing is a spiritual response Like all fruits of the Spirit, joy is both a divine and a human action. It can only come as the Spirit brings life. And yet we are called to keep in step with the Spirit, and commanded to rejoice. It’s something we do, as God works in us by his Spirit through his word. We can’t artificially create or manufacture real joy—say, with a driving bass line or a key change. But we can grow in joy, and grow in our obedience to the command to rejoice. We do this in the usual way—that is, in the way that all spiritual growth happens: By preaching and teaching the gospel of God’s grace; by holding up Jesus before people’s eyes, and praying that the wonders of who he is and what he has done for us will ignite love and peace and joy and all the fruits of the Spirit in their hearts; By prayerfully teaching and reminding people about this particular subject (as the apostles often did)—teaching and urging them to rejoice and give thanks always, and how singing together is an important means of doing this; By the mature in the congregation exemplifying this joy (such as in their singing); By creating contexts and opportunities within which singing-for-joy can be practised, and can flourish. This last point brings us to the practicalities of how thinking about singing as rejoicing might change the practice of singing in our churches. There is much to be said here, and of all the points I want to make in this brief article, this is the most contextual, the most subject to wisdom and genuine difference, and therefore the one most likely to get up your nose, dear reader! So with those caveats, let me suggest … 3. Don’t crowd out genuine rejoicing with too much sound Rejoicing in song—to state the obvious—is verbal. It’s joyful speech, set to music. It expresses in words how glad we are; and it recounts what we’re so glad about. It communicates to God our joy in him and his works, and it communicates the same to each other. This is why our singing is simultaneously an act of responsive joy, a declaration of all the ways that God is great and for which we rejoice (i.e. ‘praise’), and an exercise in mutual teaching and encouragement. The usual conclusion we draw from this is that our songs must have ‘good words’. This is certainly true, but three other equally important conclusions also follow. The first is that the words of our songs must be heard on each others’ lips. The predominant sound we should hear is the sound of joyful voices—of God’s people singing out their joy in all God is and has done, and teaching each other as we do so. This is where I fear that the rise of the ‘worship band’ has done us no favours, and I speak as one who has enjoyed playing in such bands for years. I’m not quite sure how we got here, but it’s now pretty standard in our churches for a congregation of (say) 150 or 200 to be led by a music team consisting of keys, drums, bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and three singers, all amplified. This seems vastly more than is necessary to accompany that size group in song. In fact, the effect of the sheer scale and volume of this sort of band is that the ‘accompaniment’ is reversed. The dominant sound in the room is the sound of the band, with the congregation accompanying them—like the faint echo in a live rock concert, where you can just hear the crowd singing along in the chorus.  Is this enjoyable and great to listen to and sing along with? If it’s done well, yes! But is it the sound of the congregation rejoicing? Well … I don’t think so, because the congregation can’t be heard. I can hear a few voices near me perhaps, but I can’t hear and be stirred by the wonderful sound of God’s people shouting for joy. The high-volume band that dominates the room makes the sound of voices secondary. We need to create a singing culture in which the accompaniment is just that—a secondary, supportive sound that exists to enable the singing, and nothing more. Likewise, we need a song-leader (and perhaps just one) who shows us when to come in, and exemplifies what we’re all doing together (singing with joy), but whose voice isn’t dominant in the room. In fact, apart perhaps from the first words of each verse, I don’t really see why the song-leader’s voice should be amplified at all. The voices we want to hear are each others’. Ah, you say, but we need to hear the leader loudly so that we can follow the tune. This leads to a second point—we need songs that big groups of people can sing easily together. This is a genre issue. Many of the songs our ‘worship bands’ play are remarkably similar in genre to the songs that popular bands generally play in our culture (perhaps not surprisingly). These are songs designed more for performance and listening than for mass-group singing, because (for better or worse) that’s modern Western musical culture. We mainly listen to music; we don’t sing. But this means that the songs we instinctively write (and play in our worship bands) are often poorly adapted for singing in unison—and so we need drums to establish the rhythm because otherwise it doesn’t hold together, and we need amplified singers because otherwise we can’t follow the complex, syncopated tune. This seems backwards. We’ve created a musical culture built on the performative genre of rock bands, and then feel that we need rock bands in order for our church musical culture to work. I strongly suspect we need to do something very counter-cultural at this point—write and sing songs as people who love to sing together in large groups. This may mean developing our own genre, since community singing is no longer much of a thing in Western culture. The third and final point is simply that all of this takes time. Building a culture of joyful singing dominated by voices will take patience, because it is very likely a shift from what we are currently doing. We’ll need to teach and preach and pray about it. We’ll need to model and practise it. We’ll need to create the audio-space for it to happen (in many cases by drastically reducing the scale and volume of the accompaniment). And we’ll need to prioritize songs that a big group of people can latch onto and sing heartily and joyfully together. If those last paragraphs were starting to stray close to the rant-zone, please forgive me. And (as I know you will!), please send in your own thoughts and experiences about creating this kind of authentic, joyful culture of the word in song. PS There’s much else to say, but here’s one point that didn’t quite fit in anywhere above. As I visit different churches, and I do so reasonably often, I’m struck by how the architecture of the room and the space communicates culture, and expresses underlying assumptions. Our Reformed forebears knew this of course, and deliberately designed (or re-designed) buildings and spaces for a ‘word-centred church’—as opposed to the architecture of medieval Roman Catholicism and all that it stood for. I sometimes think that if we were wanting to communicate to the congregation that they were attending a rock concert as listeners and consumers, we would design our church spaces exactly like a lot of churches I enter. Everything is centred around a raised stage, which is covered in musical instruments, amplifiers, a drum kit, leads, mic stands, and all the normal paraphernalia. The stage might be lit with banks of coloured spotlights, perhaps also with video screens to further convey all that’s happening. There may or may not be an unobtrusive lectern centre stage. Sometimes the house lights are dimmed (especially during the singing). I don’t think any of this is intentional, or signifies a sinister drift towards mystical doctrine. All the same, as an architectural statement, it does seem very un-evangelical—almost as if we’re trying to create a modern cathedral in which all the colour and movement and theatre happens up the front in the special zone, where the mediators of God’s presence do their thing. If we were designing a space in which the Scriptural word of Jesus was at the centre, and we were gathered around the word to hear him, and to respond to him and each other (including rejoicing together in song), would it look like this? I’m sure you’ll get in touch and let me know! Want to get every edition of The Payneful Truth every week, and support me in the writing work that I do? Then you can become a partner or subscriber. Here’s something to click… This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

Sing for joy

“I think you are a purist”, a friend said to me after I’d just given a presentation on ‘community and belonging’ at last week’s Reach Australia conference.“Who me?” I lamely chuckled, but then immediately wished I’d said something more witty, like: “What would you prefer? An impurist?”My talk at Reach was an expanded version of last week’s post, and majored on the same point—that Christian ‘community’ and ‘membership’ and ‘belonging’ is created and built by one thing only: the presence of Jesus Christ in our midst through his word.It was a fun seminar, filled out very ably by Tim Clemens’s practical wisdom on what those theological themes mean for how churches can welcome and integrate new members, and disciple them to be part of a rich Christ-centred community.When my friend expanded on his ‘purist’ comment, it was really to explore a question that had been raised in the seminar, as follows: granted that Jesus is the centre of our community, and the head of the body of which we’re members; granted also that this makes the word of Christ ‘dwelling richly amongst us’ the vital factor—how then do we think about the place of our actions in building Christian community? What about just going out to dinner with people, or playing board games, or painting the front room together? Don’t these sorts of things do anything for our ‘sense of community’? Would it be okay with the purist if we just hung out?The first thing the purist would say is that human friendship, togetherness and relationship are good things in themselves. They don’t need any further justification or purpose. There’s no need to question our consciences about whether ‘hanging out’ is really okay if there are no Bible verses present.This is especially so because many people today, sadly, are starved of the joys of human friendship and togetherness, particularly in the dislocated, isolating life of the modern city. To provide those simple pleasures (by hosting that dinner party or games night) is an act of real kindness—on the same level as helping an elderly neighbour with their lawns. In itself, it doesn’t create Christian community as such or build the body of Christ (as we’ve defined it), but it’s still an act of goodness and love.However secondly, hanging out together in smaller informal settings creates a context in which Christian community can flourish. Tim Clemens fleshed this out very helpfully during our seminar. He pointed us to research that showed how people relate differently (and gain different things) in groupings of different size:In ‘public’ contexts (100+) we normally gather to engage together with something outside ourselves, like at a sports game or a concert or a church meeting;In ‘social’ contexts (20-70), we interact with an affinity group of some kind, sharing snapshots of ourselves—like at a party or at morning tea after church;In ‘personal’ contexts (4-12), we reveal more of ourselves, and likewise get to know others at a deeper level—as at a dinner party or a small Bible study group;In ‘transparent’ contexts (2-4), we can be open and vulnerable, and share our innermost thoughts and experiences—usually with our marriage partner or a close friend.We can build the community of Jesus Christ in different ways in each of these contexts or social spaces, because we can share his word in various ways with different benefits at each level—from the sermon that challenges us all, to the series of conversations afterwards which teases it out, to the more personal conversations where we grapple with our own personal weaknesses.So it’s not that hanging out with ten people automatically creates Christian community, and we shouldn’t confuse the joys of just being with other people with the unique thing that is Christian community. But unless we hang out with ten people, and create the trusting social space in which we can talk to each other, how can we have the opportunity to fellowship around the word of Jesus Christ at that more personal level? How can we have all the different kinds of conversations we need to have about understanding and believing the word, and living it out?As I mentioned in last week’s post, we can facilitate community-in-Christ by creating “the optimum number and variety of contexts where people can be together as those who share Jesus Christ”.Including just hanging out.This leads to a second insightful question that was asked at the seminar about our actions in community: What are the benefits of people actually serving each other for building Christian community? Surely loving service and action for the sake of others is a genuine expression of our ‘community’ and ‘membership’, and increases our personal experience of it?Hard to argue with that. In fact, on this basis, many churches work hard at getting as many people as possible involved in serving each other. The more people start to exercise the muscles of practical service, and take an active part in community life, the more they tend to experience a genuine sense of being part of that community. And this includes newcomers who are seeking to join that community.However, there’s an important caveat. If my practical service is not framed, motivated and directed towards the word of Jesus Christ—if it is just doing a job that needs to be done, and which makes me feel good because I’m useful—then it won’t express or build genuine Christian community. In fact, it might even lead to false or ‘fleshly’ community (to use Bonhoeffer’s term), which is based on my longing to be needed and recognized.Bonhoeffer explains this well in Life Together. He is very sharp about the poisonous possibilities of those who long for community but don’t long for Jesus Christ, including those who act from the need for self-justification rather than from the freedom of justification by faith.However, he also says that while the mutual ministry of the word is the ‘highest’ form of Christian service, and the one to which the others lead and are directed, it is not the only form of mutual love in a Christian community. He identifies three other forms of service: ‘listening’ to each other, ‘forbearing’ with each other, and what he calls ‘active helpfulness’. This last form is what we are usually speaking of when we talk about ‘practical service’.We mustn’t despise this form of service, he says, as if it is beneath us, or in some ways less worthy:Nobody is too good for the lowest service. Those who worry about the loss of time entailed by such small, external acts of helpfulness are usually taking their own work too seriously. We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our more important daily tasks, just as the priest—perhaps reading the Bible—passed by the man who had fallen among robbers.The one who is focused on the ministry of the word shouldn’t despise the opportunity to help others practically. Nor should the one who feels comfortable in practical service rest content in doing something ‘useful’, and leave the sharing of the word to others.All Christian practical service is motivated by the word, directed by the word and has the speaking of the word in prospect. As the morning tea team serves coffee and washes dishes, those involved are not only motivated by the gospel, but are helping to create one of those social contexts in which the congregation can speak with each other. It’s a word-motivated and word-directed service, even though it is hands-on and menial in nature.This leads to a final point. How can we ensure that this ‘practical service’ is indeed motivated by and directed towards the word of Jesus Christ?By teaching and training. This was my mantra in answer to many of the questions that were raised during the seminar.If we want our people to understand what Christian community and membership really is, and to live it and practise it, we need to teach them about it, just as the apostles themselves did on numerous occasions to their hearers in the New Testament (such as in Rom 12 and 1 Cor 12-14 and Eph 4-5).This is a statement of the bleedin’ obvious if ever there was one, but I am often struck by how meagrely and haphazardly we teach about such subjects in our churches. We do the essential work of expounding the Scriptures week by week, and we also study Bible passages in our small groups (often the same ones). But the integrative work of applied theology—that is, the task of drawing the Bible’s teaching on a subject together, and showing what it means for our lives … this is something we do much less often, and less effectively.How could we do it better?I have thoughts. But given that this post is already quite long enough already, I’ll return to those thoughts next time.PSAs always, please get in touch with your thoughts, observations and questions. Just hit reply to this email, or make a comment on the website. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

“I think you are a purist”, a friend said to me after I’d just given a presentation on ‘community and belonging’ at last week’s Reach Australia conference. “Who me?” I lamely chuckled, but then immediately wished I’d said something more witty, like: “What would you prefer? An impurist?” My talk at Reach was an expanded version of last week’s post, and majored on the same point—that Christian ‘community’ and ‘membership’ and ‘belonging’ is created and built by one thing only: the presence of Jesus Christ in our midst through his word. It was a fun seminar, filled out very ably by Tim Clemens’s practical wisdom on what those theological themes mean for how churches can welcome and integrate new members, and disciple them to be part of a rich Christ-centred community. When my friend expanded on his ‘purist’ comment, it was really to explore a question that had been raised in the seminar, as follows: granted that Jesus is the centre of our community, and the head of the body of which we’re members; granted also that this makes the word of Christ ‘dwelling richly amongst us’ the vital factor—how then do we think about the place of our actions in building Christian community? What about just going out to dinner with people, or playing board games, or painting the front room together? Don’t these sorts of things do anything for our ‘sense of community’? Would it be okay with the purist if we just hung out? The first thing the purist would say is that human friendship, togetherness and relationship are good things in themselves. They don’t need any further justification or purpose. There’s no need to question our consciences about whether ‘hanging out’ is really okay if there are no Bible verses present. This is especially so because many people today, sadly, are starved of the joys of human friendship and togetherness, particularly in the dislocated, isolating life of the modern city. To provide those simple pleasures (by hosting that dinner party or games night) is an act of real kindness—on the same level as helping an elderly neighbour with their lawns. In itself, it doesn’t create Christian community as such or build the body of Christ (as we’ve defined it), but it’s still an act of goodness and love. However secondly, hanging out together in smaller informal settings creates a context in which Christian community can flourish. Tim Clemens fleshed this out very helpfully during our seminar. He pointed us to research that showed how people relate differently (and gain different things) in groupings of different size: In ‘public’ contexts (100+) we normally gather to engage together with something outside ourselves, like at a sports game or a concert or a church meeting; In ‘social’ contexts (20-70), we interact with an affinity group of some kind, sharing snapshots of ourselves—like at a party or at morning tea after church; In ‘personal’ contexts (4-12), we reveal more of ourselves, and likewise get to know others at a deeper level—as at a dinner party or a small Bible study group; In ‘transparent’ contexts (2-4), we can be open and vulnerable, and share our innermost thoughts and experiences—usually with our marriage partner or a close friend. We can build the community of Jesus Christ in different ways in each of these contexts or social spaces, because we can share his word in various ways with different benefits at each level—from the sermon that challenges us all, to the series of conversations afterwards which teases it out, to the more personal conversations where we grapple with our own personal weaknesses. So it’s not that hanging out with ten people automatically creates Christian community, and we shouldn’t confuse the joys of just being with other people with the unique thing that is Christian community. But unless we hang out with ten people, and create the trusting social space in which we can talk to each other, how can we have the opportunity to fellowship around the word of Jesus Christ at that more personal level? How can we have all the different kinds of conversations we need to have about understanding and believing the word, and living it out? As I mentioned in last week’s post, we can facilitate community-in-Christ by creating “the optimum number and variety of contexts where people can be together as those who share Jesus Christ”. Including just hanging out. This leads to a second insightful question that was asked at the seminar about our actions in community: What are the benefits of people actually serving each other for building Christian community? Surely loving service and action for the sake of others is a genuine expression of our ‘community’ and ‘membership’, and increases our personal experience of it? Hard to argue with that. In fact, on this basis, many churches work hard at getting as many people as possible involved in serving each other. The more people start to exercise the muscles of practical service, and take an active part in community life, the more they tend to experience a genuine sense of being part of that community. And this includes newcomers who are seeking to join that community. However, there’s an important caveat. If my practical service is not framed, motivated and directed towards the word of Jesus Christ—if it is just doing a job that needs to be done, and which makes me feel good because I’m useful—then it won’t express or build genuine Christian community. In fact, it might even lead to false or ‘fleshly’ community (to use Bonhoeffer’s term), which is based on my longing to be needed and recognized. Bonhoeffer explains this well in Life Together. He is very sharp about the poisonous possibilities of those who long for community but don’t long for Jesus Christ, including those who act from the need for self-justification rather than from the freedom of justification by faith. However, he also says that while the mutual ministry of the word is the ‘highest’ form of Christian service, and the one to which the others lead and are directed, it is not the only form of mutual love in a Christian community. He identifies three other forms of service: ‘listening’ to each other, ‘forbearing’ with each other, and what he calls ‘active helpfulness’. This last form is what we are usually speaking of when we talk about ‘practical service’. We mustn’t despise this form of service, he says, as if it is beneath us, or in some ways less worthy: Nobody is too good for the lowest service. Those who worry about the loss of time entailed by such small, external acts of helpfulness are usually taking their own work too seriously. We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our more important daily tasks, just as the priest—perhaps reading the Bible—passed by the man who had fallen among robbers. The one who is focused on the ministry of the word shouldn’t despise the opportunity to help others practically. Nor should the one who feels comfortable in practical service rest content in doing something ‘useful’, and leave the sharing of the word to others. All Christian practical service is motivated by the word, directed by the word and has the speaking of the word in prospect. As the morning tea team serves coffee and washes dishes, those involved are not only motivated by the gospel, but are helping to create one of those social contexts in which the congregation can speak with each other. It’s a word-motivated and word-directed service, even though it is hands-on and menial in nature. This leads to a final point. How can we ensure that this ‘practical service’ is indeed motivated by and directed towards the word of Jesus Christ? By teaching and training. This was my mantra in answer to many of the questions that were raised during the seminar. If we want our people to understand what Christian community and membership really is, and to live it and practise it, we need to teach them about it, just as the apostles themselves did on numerous occasions to their hearers in the New Testament (such as in Rom 12 and 1 Cor 12-14 and Eph 4-5). This is a statement of the bleedin’ obvious if ever there was one, but I am often struck by how meagrely and haphazardly we teach about such subjects in our churches. We do the essential work of expounding the Scriptures week by week, and we also study Bible passages in our small groups (often the same ones). But the integrative work of applied theology—that is, the task of drawing the Bible’s teaching on a subject together, and showing what it means for our lives … this is something we do much less often, and less effectively. How could we do it better? I have thoughts. But given that this post is already quite long enough already, I’ll return to those thoughts next time. PS As always, please get in touch with your thoughts, observations and questions. Just hit reply to this email, or make a comment on the website. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

Can we just hang out? 

Do you want your church to be a place where people feel like they belong? Where there is a close sense of mutual dependence and love, and where there is a genuine experience of Christian community?Who doesn’t?(Well, there are times when I don’t, and wish that everyone on the planet would just leave me alone, but let’s not get into my problems.)How could we pursue or promote this kind of community?The small contribution I want to make in this week’s post is to pause and ponder what we mean by ‘belonging’, ‘membership’ and ‘community’.Like me, you probably have a range of different memberships. There are overlapping families I belong to (immediate and extended, on my side and Ali’s side). I belong to the Christian communities at St Paul’s Carlingford and at Campus Bible Study. But I’d also say that some part of my heart will always belong to Matthias Media, and the team that still pursues that vision. I’m a member of Concord Golf Club and of the Qantas Frequent Flyer program—one of them of far more importance than the other. I guess I’d also say that I’m part of the little community in my street here in West Ryde, and of the broader communities of Sydney, New South Wales and Australia.So far I’ve been using the words ‘belong’ and ‘member’ and ‘community’ pretty much interchangeably, and in everyday speech we often do.But these three words are also subtly different. They describe the same kind of thing from different angles, with different metaphors. It’s worth teasing out their nuances, even if we have room to do so only briefly.MemberTo be a ‘member’ of something is to be a part of a body; to be an arm or a nose or a spleen that derives its identity and function from the interconnected organism of which it is a part. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12, being baptized into Christ means becoming one of his body parts, which should put an end to all arrogance, divisions, jealousy, partiality and selfishness in general. You make no sense and you’re of no use as a member of this body unless you realise that you’re part of an interconnected whole, with Christ as the head. Being a ‘member’ is about seeking the well-being and benefit of the whole body, according to the direction and rule of its head. The body strengthens and builds itself as all the individual parts speak the truth of Christ to one another in love (Eph 4:14-16).I guess being a member of the body of Christ looks kind of like this … CommunityTo be in a ‘community’ is a different metaphor. A community is a group of people who  love or participate in a common object or person. A community is not one organic whole, like a body. It’s a group of people who share something, who are united by their ‘fellowship’ or ‘partnership’ in something. As Oliver O’Donovan puts it, a community has a “common object of love”. (He gets this from Augustine, who distinguished the City of God from the Earthly City by their different objects of love.)Now for Christians, that centre or common object of love is Jesus Christ. Our fellowship or communion is with God through Jesus Christ (1 John 1:1-4). Because we know him and love him and have him in common, we are a community or fellowship of Christ. This means that whatever else we might share—common demographics, language, interests, or even just a common desire for friendship and mutuality—Christian community is not about any of these. It is fellowship in Jesus Christ. He is what we have in common, and through him we love one another. To build our community, therefore, we need to encounter each other more often and more deeply through him (that is, through his word, which is how he is present with us).We might picture it like this …BelongingWhat about ‘belonging’? To belong to something means that we fit there, most often because some person or organization has a claim on us. My iPhone belongs in my pocket because I own it and it is mine—although I often absent-mindedly leave it on the kitchen counter on silent (so good luck trying to get through to me).In saying I belong to a family, I mean that I have responsibilities and ties of blood and affection that bind me to that group of people. It’s not just that they are mine; I am theirs. I can’t ever stop belonging to them.I belong to something because I am of it—in the sense of it being my source or origin or master or place. My belonging is defined not by me but by that Other person or group who identifies me and claims me as theirs.We see this in our English Bibles where they speak of us belonging to God or to Jesus Christ. There isn’t actually a word ‘belong’ in the Greek text. Instead, there’s a kind of relation set up in the grammar that is ‘of’ or ‘from’ or ‘unto’ God or Christ. For example, here are two verses that are often translated with ‘belong’, rendered very literally:And those who are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Galatians 5:24)For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are of the Lord. (Romans 14:8)We belong to God in Christ because he claims us as our creator and redeemer. We are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. I can’t really choose to belong to him any more than my iPhone can choose to belong to me.I’m not sure if the New Testament ever says that we belong to each other. We are certainly members of one another (Rom 12:5; Eph 4:25), and we are in communion or fellowship with one another (1 John 1:7). Perhaps it is better to say that we belong to Jesus Christ, and therefore we belong with each other in that space where he keeps his belongings—that is, in the congregation of people that he purchased for himself with his own blood (Acts 20:28).Perhaps we could visualise it like this … Some conclusionsIt needs saying that in each of the three metaphors—member, community, belonging—God is the initiator by his grace through the gospel. He grafts us into Christ to be members of his body; he calls us into fellowship and communion with himself through Christ, and thus with each other; he claims us as his own, and thus gives us a place where we profoundly belong because we belong to him.In each case, it is something that we gratefully receive, and joyfully participate in by faith. We need to recognize that these realities can’t be manufactured or massaged into existence through any human initiative or technique. Belonging and membership and community are spiritual joys, created by God through his Son by his Spirit.All the same, God’s action incorporates our action—both as we preach the gospel and as the Spirit calls forth our response. As we hear the gospel, and the Spirit works, we leave behind our old master in the dominion of darkness to begin a new life belonging to our Lord; we repent of the inwardly-curved independence that shuts us off from others and joyfully become members of a new body in Christ; we blaspheme and reject the false gods and powers that we used to love and unite around, and instead share together in our love for the Christ who first loved us.What does all this mean for our experience of belonging and membership and community in our congregations? If belonging-membership-community is something God creates by the gospel, what we can do to participate in it? To experience it and help others experience it?First, some things we can do as a congregation:We can clearly and regularly teach and urge one another on (through sermons and other congregational teaching) in what it means to belong together, to fellowship together, to be members of one another.We can follow Paul’s advice in 1 Corinthians 12 and honour all parts of the body, not just the strongest or most spectacular. We should keep celebrating and honouring the weakest members—all are needed and valuable—because this is how God has composed and ordered the body. This also means teaching and training and helping everyone to become active in making their own contribution to the body.We can create the optimum number and variety of contexts where people can be together as those who share, belong to and are members together of Jesus Christ. These ‘contexts’ are different opportunities or spaces (large, medium, small and personal) where we can build each other as members according to the different parts of the body that we are, or where we can meet in community around Jesus himself (as we speak his word to each other).And as individuals who want to contribute to this community-belonging-membership, and experience it more ourselves, what should we do?We should make sure we keep turning up to those gatherings where the people who belong to Jesus get together.We should take every opportunity we can (formal or informal) to love others through Jesus Christ: to serve them, speak to them, encourage them, suffer with them, comfort them, rejoice with them, pray for them, practically care for them. This is what it means to be a ‘fellowship’ of Jesus Christ—to share a love of him together, and to love each other through him and by his word.Likewise, we should take every opportunity open to us to make our particular contribution to the body, whether as an arm, a nose or a spleen.In other words, when we feel a lack of community-membership-belonging—perhaps as someone who feels a bit on the outer at church—there are things that the congregation as a whole can do to facilitate our inclusion, but it will also unavoidably depend on how we ourselves respond and keep in step with the Spirit’s work within us.We can only experience what it is like to really be a member of a body when we are active as contributing members of that body. We can only experience the ‘community’ of Christ when we put into practice the only thing that truly matters in our fellowship: faith in Jesus Christ that is active in love.PSAs always, I’m keen to hear from you and your thoughts about all of this. You can just reply to the email you’re received, or leave a comment on the website. Also feel very free to … … this post with others, and have a conversation with them about it. And while you’re at it, you could encourage them to … … so that they can receive these free posts for themselves, or even sign up as a paying partner.And for today’s mystery image, anyone know who these two are and what it has to do with this week’s post? This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

Do you want your church to be a place where people feel like they belong? Where there is a close sense of mutual dependence and love, and where there is a genuine experience of Christian community? Who doesn’t? (Well, there are times when I don’t, and wish that everyone on the planet would just leave me alone, but let’s not get into my problems.) How could we pursue or promote this kind of community? The small contribution I want to make in this week’s post is to pause and ponder what we mean by ‘belonging’, ‘membership’ and ‘community’. Like me, you probably have a range of different memberships. There are overlapping families I belong to (immediate and extended, on my side and Ali’s side). I belong to the Christian communities at St Paul’s Carlingford and at Campus Bible Study. But I’d also say that some part of my heart will always belong to Matthias Media, and the team that still pursues that vision. I’m a member of Concord Golf Club and of the Qantas Frequent Flyer program—one of them of far more importance than the other. I guess I’d also say that I’m part of the little community in my street here in West Ryde, and of the broader communities of Sydney, New South Wales and Australia. So far I’ve been using the words ‘belong’ and ‘member’ and ‘community’ pretty much interchangeably, and in everyday speech we often do. But these three words are also subtly different. They describe the same kind of thing from different angles, with different metaphors. It’s worth teasing out their nuances, even if we have room to do so only briefly. Member To be a ‘member’ of something is to be a part of a body; to be an arm or a nose or a spleen that derives its identity and function from the interconnected organism of which it is a part. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12, being baptized into Christ means becoming one of his body parts, which should put an end to all arrogance, divisions, jealousy, partiality and selfishness in general. You make no sense and you’re of no use as a member of this body unless you realise that you’re part of an interconnected whole, with Christ as the head. Being a ‘member’ is about seeking the well-being and benefit of the whole body, according to the direction and rule of its head. The body strengthens and builds itself as all the individual parts speak the truth of Christ to one another in love (Eph 4:14-16). I guess being a member of the body of Christ looks kind of like this …  Community To be in a ‘community’ is a different metaphor. A community is a group of people who love or participate in a common object or person. A community is not one organic whole, like a body. It’s a group of people who share something, who are united by their ‘fellowship’ or ‘partnership’ in something. As Oliver O’Donovan puts it, a community has a “common object of love”. (He gets this from Augustine, who distinguished the City of God from the Earthly City by their different objects of love.) Now for Christians, that centre or common object of love is Jesus Christ. Our fellowship or communion is with God through Jesus Christ (1 John 1:1-4). Because we know him and love him and have him in common, we are a community or fellowship of Christ. This means that whatever else we might share—common demographics, language, interests, or even just a common desire for friendship and mutuality—Christian community is not about any of these. It is fellowship in Jesus Christ. He is what we have in common, and through him we love one another. To build our community, therefore, we need to encounter each other more often and more deeply through him (that is, through his word, which is how he is present with us). We might picture it like this … Belonging What about ‘belonging’? To belong to something means that we fit there, most often because some person or organization has a claim on us. My iPhone belongs in my pocket because I own it and it is mine—although I often absent-mindedly leave it on the kitchen counter on silent (so good luck trying to get through to me). In saying I belong to a family, I mean that I have responsibilities and ties of blood and affection that bind me to that group of people. It’s not just that they are mine; I am theirs. I can’t ever stop belonging to them. I belong to something because I am of it—in the sense of it being my source or origin or master or place. My belonging is defined not by me but by that Other person or group who identifies me and claims me as theirs. We see this in our English Bibles where they speak of us belonging to God or to Jesus Christ. There isn’t actually a word ‘belong’ in the Greek text. Instead, there’s a kind of relation set up in the grammar that is ‘of’ or ‘from’ or ‘unto’ God or Christ. For example, here are two verses that are often translated with ‘belong’, rendered very literally: And those who are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Galatians 5:24) For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are of the Lord. (Romans 14:8) We belong to God in Christ because he claims us as our creator and redeemer. We are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. I can’t really choose to belong to him any more than my iPhone can choose to belong to me. I’m not sure if the New Testament ever says that we belong to each other. We are certainly members of one another (Rom 12:5; Eph 4:25), and we are in communion or fellowship with one another (1 John 1:7). Perhaps it is better to say that we belong to Jesus Christ, and therefore we belong with each other in that space where he keeps his belongings—that is, in the congregation of people that he purchased for himself with his own blood (Acts 20:28). Perhaps we could visualise it like this …  Some conclusions It needs saying that in each of the three metaphors—member, community, belonging—God is the initiator by his grace through the gospel. He grafts us into Christ to be members of his body; he calls us into fellowship and communion with himself through Christ, and thus with each other; he claims us as his own, and thus gives us a place where we profoundly belong because we belong to him. In each case, it is something that we gratefully receive, and joyfully participate in by faith. We need to recognize that these realities can’t be manufactured or massaged into existence through any human initiative or technique. Belonging and membership and community are spiritual joys, created by God through his Son by his Spirit. All the same, God’s action incorporates our action—both as we preach the gospel and as the Spirit calls forth our response. As we hear the gospel, and the Spirit works, we leave behind our old master in the dominion of darkness to begin a new life belonging to our Lord; we repent of the inwardly-curved independence that shuts us off from others and joyfully become members of a new body in Christ; we blaspheme and reject the false gods and powers that we used to love and unite around, and instead share together in our love for the Christ who first loved us. What does all this mean for our experience of belonging and membership and community in our congregations? If belonging-membership-community is something God creates by the gospel, what we can do to participate in it? To experience it and help others experience it? First, some things we can do as a congregation: We can clearly and regularly teach and urge one another on (through sermons and other congregational teaching) in what it means to belong together, to fellowship together, to be members of one another. We can follow Paul’s advice in 1 Corinthians 12 and honour all parts of the body, not just the strongest or most spectacular. We should keep celebrating and honouring the weakest members—all are needed and valuable—because this is how God has composed and ordered the body. This also means teaching and training and helping everyone to become active in making their own contribution to the body. We can create the optimum number and variety of contexts where people can be together as those who share, belong to and are members together of Jesus Christ. These ‘contexts’ are different opportunities or spaces (large, medium, small and personal) where we can build each other as members according to the different parts of the body that we are, or where we can meet in community around Jesus himself (as we speak his word to each other). And as individuals who want to contribute to this community-belonging-membership, and experience it more ourselves, what should we do? We should make sure we keep turning up to those gatherings where the people who belong to Jesus get together. We should take every opportunity we can (formal or informal) to love others through Jesus Christ: to serve them, speak to them, encourage them, suffer with them, comfort them, rejoice with them, pray for them, practically care for them. This is what it means to be a ‘fellowship’ of Jesus Christ—to share a love of him together, and to love each other through him and by his word. Likewise, we should take every opportunity open to us to make our particular contribution to the body, whether as an arm, a nose or a spleen. In other words, when we feel a lack of community-membership-belonging—perhaps as someone who feels a bit on the outer at church—there are things that the congregation as a whole can do to facilitate our inclusion, but it will also unavoidably depend on how we ourselves respond and keep in step with the Spirit’s work within us. We can only experience what it is like to really be a member of a body when we are active as contributing members of that body. We can only experience the ‘community’ of Christ when we put into practice the only thing that truly matters in our fellowship: faith in Jesus Christ that is active in love. PS As always, I’m keen to hear from you and your thoughts about all of this. You can just reply to the email you’re received, or leave a comment on the website. Also feel very free to … … this post with others, and have a conversation with them about it. And while you’re at it, you could encourage them to … … so that they can receive these free posts for themselves, or even sign up as a paying partner. And for today’s mystery image, anyone know who these two are and what it has to do with this week’s post? This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

The essence of belonging

Well, I’m back in the land of vegemite, budgie-smugglers and drop-bears, after two busy but invigorating weeks in the US.I never quite managed that second ‘Postcard from America’, reality having collided viciously with my optimism. This week’s post is the next best thing: a postcard from a weary but happy returned traveller, with some brief reflections on his sojourn in a strange land.I don’t say ‘strange land’ in any pejorative sense. It’s just that America is different in so many ways, and sometimes disorienting for an Australian evangelical Christian. At one level, there’s so much that seems familiar and immediately recognizable—perhaps because of our shared British heritage or simply because we consume so much American culture (in its popular and Christian forms).And yet the differences also keep slapping you in the face.Some of them are negatives. They put sweet jam on chicken-and-salad sandwiches. The coffee is mostly terrible. They never put the handbrake on when they park the car. But let’s try to be American about this, which is to say grateful and positive.That’s the first thing that strikes me, every time I visit the US (which I’ve done perhaps 15 times over the past two decades). The positivity. American evangelical Christians have an easy thankfulness about them that I don’t tire of experiencing. There’s no embarrassment in thanking you for the good or helpful things you’ve done, nor any awkwardness about receiving such praise or affirmation with humility.In fact, my US colleague Marty Sweeney is sure that I keep coming back to the States each year just so as I can get my annual dose of positive affirmation, to keep me going for the next 12 months. He’s probably right. I think I get nearly as much warm and genuine thanks, encouragement and general affirmation during my two-week American trips than in the other 11½ Australian months.Now, any kind of thankful positivity (including the American variety) can become cloying or fake or unrealistic or even manipulative. But I think my Australian instinct is therefore to dial it down just in case.Insofar as walking and growing in the truth of Christ Jesus the Lord means ‘abounding in thanksgiving’ (Col 2:6-7), I’m always rebuked and encouraged by my American brothers to abound a bit more.The flipside of thankfulness is generosity. I’m grateful to have received; I’m glad to be able to give. Perhaps Americans and American churches are wealthier or better resourced than their Australian counterparts. I’m sure that’s true in some cases. But I’m always bowled over by the graciousness of their hosting, the thoughtful way they provide for guests, and the generosity of the honoraria that they give to visiting speakers. We’re not talking chocolates and $50 Coles vouchers. It has been common for me to have been given a thank you note with US$1000 enclosed, just for preaching one Sunday at a church, or for delivering a single talk at a conference. (And in case you think that’s the reason I keep going back to the US each year, the money all goes to defraying the costs of the trip!)It’s interesting to think why cultures are different; how they get to be the way they are — whether we’re thinking of churches, families, communities, or even nations. Culture is ‘the whole way we do things around here’, and it’s formed over time by a thousand words, habits, decisions, actions, structures, traditions, and so on. How did American Christian culture get to be (in general) more thankful and generous than our culture? Why for that matter did the culture of Sydney-based evangelicalism develop in the way that it did, such that a book that fairly plainly described its ministry culture (The Trellis and the Vine) should become such a fresh and powerful statement for American evangelicalism about some of its shortcomings? Who can say?But I’m sure that the gospel and the work of God’s Spirit over time in a particular place has a great deal to do with it. And so when I notice the strengths of other Christian cultures (as well as their weaknesses), it challenges me all over again to keep shifting our culture in a godly direction, through trusting and applying that same Word by that same Spirit.I guess that’s why God gives us each other.One final observation from this recent trip. One of the conference gatherings I attended met in a hotel. There was no overhead projection in the room; no piano or musical instruments; just a very plain, large, hotel conference room. On the basis of this, I assumed that there wouldn’t be any singing during our meetings.How wrong I was. What ensued was in fact the most edifying and heart-warming Christian singing I’ve experienced in a very long time.We pulled out some printed sheets containing music and words, and turned to a particular song. Someone at the front sang a note for us to start on and then off we went. Just voices, about 180 of us, raised together, singing to each other, singing with thankfulness and rejoicing to God.We sang some classic old hymns (Jesus paid it all; What a friend we have in Jesus). We sang some more modern songs (All glory be to Christ; Christ is mine forevermore). We clapped our way through some traditional African-American songs (Gloryland; I cannot tell it all). All of it was unaccompanied, with some clever people singing harmonies at various points.It was certainly minimalist. And yet it was maximally powerful and encouraging, because the sound was the sound of Christian voices addressing one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.I couldn’t help thinking about how different this was from the singing I usually experience in Australian churches, where the sound is usually the sound of a well-amplified band, with 4-5 instruments and 2-3 singers. Underneath or above the wall of sound coming from the stage can be heard the echo of the congregation’s voices, like a live recording at a rock concert where you can hear the audience singing along in the chorus.I have some theories about how we’ve ended up at this point (another time!), but the contrast between the two kinds of singing is striking. Have we been sleep-walking towards a style of church singing where the dominant sound in the room is the sound of the band? Has our singing culture become one where the congregation is swept along and emotionally moved by the power and volume of the music itself, rather than spoken to, edified and uplifted by the sound of brothers and sisters singing?To be quite clear, the majority of American evangelical church singing is also at the loud, amplified-band end of the spectrum (as far as I have observed). But this recent experience of a very different kind of singing—one where the voices of the congregation actually dominated—was both electrifying and unsettling.Even as the hairs on the back of my neck started to resume their normal position, I couldn’t help thinking, “Is there any church I know back home that sings like this? And why not?”PSWho would have imagined that Americans had Australian jokes? My friend Marty has two good ones:Q. What do you call an Australian in a suit and tie? A. The defendant.Q. What’s the difference between Australia and a tub of yoghurt? A. If you leave them out in the sun for 200 years, only one will develop its own culture.Ouch!It’s also nice to come back to Australia and discover what’s being going on while you’re away—because unless you go out of your way to find out, you won’t hear much about Australian politics or sport or life in general while you’re travelling in the US.The federal election campaign has ground on, and I was mercifully spared any mention of it for two weeks.I also came back to media reports that the evil arch-conservatives of the Sydney Diocese are preparing to do their worst at the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia this week. Something to do with affirming what Christians have believed for 2000 years about marriage and sexuality.If you’d like to pray for that General Synod gathering this week, you could do worse than use the collect that is set down for this week in the Book of Common Prayer (the third Sunday after Easter):Almighty God, who shewest to them that be in error the light of thy truth, to the intent that they may return into the way of righteousness: Grant unto all them that are admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, that they may eschew those things that are contrary to their profession, and follow such things as are agreeable to the same; through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.  This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

Well, I’m back in the land of vegemite, budgie-smugglers and drop-bears, after two busy but invigorating weeks in the US. I never quite managed that second ‘Postcard from America’, reality having collided viciously with my optimism. This week’s post is the next best thing: a postcard from a weary but happy returned traveller, with some brief reflections on his sojourn in a strange land. I don’t say ‘strange land’ in any pejorative sense. It’s just that America is different in so many ways, and sometimes disorienting for an Australian evangelical Christian. At one level, there’s so much that seems familiar and immediately recognizable—perhaps because of our shared British heritage or simply because we consume so much American culture (in its popular and Christian forms). And yet the differences also keep slapping you in the face. Some of them are negatives. They put sweet jam on chicken-and-salad sandwiches. The coffee is mostly terrible. They never put the handbrake on when they park the car. But let’s try to be American about this, which is to say grateful and positive. That’s the first thing that strikes me, every time I visit the US (which I’ve done perhaps 15 times over the past two decades). The positivity. American evangelical Christians have an easy thankfulness about them that I don’t tire of experiencing. There’s no embarrassment in thanking you for the good or helpful things you’ve done, nor any awkwardness about receiving such praise or affirmation with humility. In fact, my US colleague Marty Sweeney is sure that I keep coming back to the States each year just so as I can get my annual dose of positive affirmation, to keep me going for the next 12 months. He’s probably right. I think I get nearly as much warm and genuine thanks, encouragement and general affirmation during my two-week American trips than in the other 11½ Australian months. Now, any kind of thankful positivity (including the American variety) can become cloying or fake or unrealistic or even manipulative. But I think my Australian instinct is therefore to dial it down just in case. Insofar as walking and growing in the truth of Christ Jesus the Lord means ‘abounding in thanksgiving’ (Col 2:6-7), I’m always rebuked and encouraged by my American brothers to abound a bit more. The flipside of thankfulness is generosity. I’m grateful to have received; I’m glad to be able to give. Perhaps Americans and American churches are wealthier or better resourced than their Australian counterparts. I’m sure that’s true in some cases. But I’m always bowled over by the graciousness of their hosting, the thoughtful way they provide for guests, and the generosity of the honoraria that they give to visiting speakers. We’re not talking chocolates and $50 Coles vouchers. It has been common for me to have been given a thank you note with US$1000 enclosed, just for preaching one Sunday at a church, or for delivering a single talk at a conference. (And in case you think that’s the reason I keep going back to the US each year, the money all goes to defraying the costs of the trip!) It’s interesting to think why cultures are different; how they get to be the way they are — whether we’re thinking of churches, families, communities, or even nations. Culture is ‘the whole way we do things around here’, and it’s formed over time by a thousand words, habits, decisions, actions, structures, traditions, and so on. How did American Christian culture get to be (in general) more thankful and generous than our culture? Why for that matter did the culture of Sydney-based evangelicalism develop in the way that it did, such that a book that fairly plainly described its ministry culture (The Trellis and the Vine) should become such a fresh and powerful statement for American evangelicalism about some of its shortcomings? Who can say? But I’m sure that the gospel and the work of God’s Spirit over time in a particular place has a great deal to do with it. And so when I notice the strengths of other Christian cultures (as well as their weaknesses), it challenges me all over again to keep shifting our culture in a godly direction, through trusting and applying that same Word by that same Spirit. I guess that’s why God gives us each other. One final observation from this recent trip. One of the conference gatherings I attended met in a hotel. There was no overhead projection in the room; no piano or musical instruments; just a very plain, large, hotel conference room. On the basis of this, I assumed that there wouldn’t be any singing during our meetings. How wrong I was. What ensued was in fact the most edifying and heart-warming Christian singing I’ve experienced in a very long time. We pulled out some printed sheets containing music and words, and turned to a particular song. Someone at the front sang a note for us to start on and then off we went. Just voices, about 180 of us, raised together, singing to each other, singing with thankfulness and rejoicing to God. We sang some classic old hymns (Jesus paid it all; What a friend we have in Jesus). We sang some more modern songs (All glory be to Christ; Christ is mine forevermore). We clapped our way through some traditional African-American songs (Gloryland; I cannot tell it all). All of it was unaccompanied, with some clever people singing harmonies at various points. It was certainly minimalist. And yet it was maximally powerful and encouraging, because the sound was the sound of Christian voices addressing one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. I couldn’t help thinking about how different this was from the singing I usually experience in Australian churches, where the sound is usually the sound of a well-amplified band, with 4-5 instruments and 2-3 singers. Underneath or above the wall of sound coming from the stage can be heard the echo of the congregation’s voices, like a live recording at a rock concert where you can hear the audience singing along in the chorus. I have some theories about how we’ve ended up at this point (another time!), but the contrast between the two kinds of singing is striking. Have we been sleep-walking towards a style of church singing where the dominant sound in the room is the sound of the band? Has our singing culture become one where the congregation is swept along and emotionally moved by the power and volume of the music itself, rather than spoken to, edified and uplifted by the sound of brothers and sisters singing? To be quite clear, the majority of American evangelical church singing is also at the loud, amplified-band end of the spectrum (as far as I have observed). But this recent experience of a very different kind of singing—one where the voices of the congregation actually dominated—was both electrifying and unsettling. Even as the hairs on the back of my neck started to resume their normal position, I couldn’t help thinking, “Is there any church I know back home that sings like this? And why not?” PS Who would have imagined that Americans had Australian jokes? My friend Marty has two good ones: Q. What do you call an Australian in a suit and tie? A. The defendant. Q. What’s the difference between Australia and a tub of yoghurt? A. If you leave them out in the sun for 200 years, only one will develop its own culture. Ouch! It’s also nice to come back to Australia and discover what’s being going on while you’re away—because unless you go out of your way to find out, you won’t hear much about Australian politics or sport or life in general while you’re travelling in the US. The federal election campaign has ground on, and I was mercifully spared any mention of it for two weeks. I also came back to media reports that the evil arch-conservatives of the Sydney Diocese are preparing to do their worst at the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia this week. Something to do with affirming what Christians have believed for 2000 years about marriage and sexuality. If you’d like to pray for that General Synod gathering this week, you could do worse than use the collect that is set down for this week in the Book of Common Prayer (the third Sunday after Easter): Almighty God, who shewest to them that be in error the light of thy truth, to the intent that they may return into the way of righteousness: Grant unto all them that are admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, that they may eschew those things that are contrary to their profession, and follow such things as are agreeable to the same; through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.  This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

Postcard from Australia

Before we get started, some news to share: you can now read The Payneful Truth in the new Substack app for iPhone.With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my newsletter and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never be cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s an upgrade to the reading experience I think. The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.Anyway, on to this week’s subject.Facilitators or teachers?Is a small group leader a facilitator? Or more of a teacher?It’s funny how the answer to that question seems to go in cycles.In the 1980s, most people in my part of the world would have leaned towards ‘facilitator’. The job of the small group leader was not to deliver a mini-sermon or be a ‘teacher’, but to stimulate some discussion around a Bible passage. Get things moving, try to keep it vaguely on track, but don’t feel it’s your responsibility to impose a conclusion or ‘lesson’ on the group.In the 90s, there was a pendulum swing away from this thinking, as captured in Col Marshall’s classic book Growth Groups. Col argued explicitly against the concept of ‘facilitator’, and trained a generation of small group leaders to think of themselves more as teachers and leaders—as small-p ‘pastors’ who took a measure of responsibility for the spiritual health of the group members. The leader’s job was to help the group learn what the Bible was teaching, not just share opinions with each other. And this required the leader to do sufficient preparation to understand the passage, and to be able to lead a Bible discussion that revealed and applied the passage’s main points.In the heyday of Growth Groups, it was assumed that most leaders would prepare and write their own Bible studies most of the time.Was this a high bar for many leaders and churches? No doubt. And perhaps this is why the pendulum has swung back towards ‘facilitation’ in recent years.The increasingly common pattern today is for small groups either to do some version of the Swedish method together, or to use pre-written studies, often prepared by the church staff in line with the current sermon series. Leaders see themselves more as a chairperson than a teacher. And if there is a conclusion or landing point to get to, it’s the one that’s been given to them by the pre-written study. Small group leaders writing their own Bible studies from scratch now seems to be a rarity.I am tempted at this point to do a not-in-my-day rant about falling standards.But perhaps there is something more helpful to say. Let’s think afresh about the pros and cons of each swing of this pendulum.On the ‘teacher-leader’ side, the main weakness is simply the high expectations it places on the average group leader. This not only makes it harder to find suitable leaders willing and able to embrace the responsibility, but also means that their training takes longer, and that they are more likely to burn out after a few years. Many churches have found that trying to train all their leaders to this level is unrealistic, and places a cap on how many groups can actually be run. How many churches can find space in their program to run the full 10-week Growth Groups training course for their would-be leaders? Not very many.Then again, the strength of the ‘teacher-leader’ model is its realism about the ineffectiveness of loosey-goosey, facilitator-type discussions run by inadequately trained leaders. If sermonettes produce Christianettes (as the old saying goes) then meandering group discussions without a landing point produce meandering Christians without a landing point.The strength of the ‘teacher-leader’ approach is that it recognizes the weakness and potential danger of poorly led opinion sharing, and does something about it. The goal (after all) is not to have a discussion, but to ‘let the word dwell among us richly’ (as Col 3:16 says); to teach and encourage and edify one another in, with and by the Word. This is the goal of all Christian fellowship, of which the small group is one particular type. It’s hard to see why leadership and purposefulness wouldn’t be needed in this context as much as in any other. To think that it will all just happen without well-trained, good quality leadership is a touch naive.Then again, a well-intended swing towards ‘teaching’ can prompt a teacher-leader to exert too much control over the group, and to squelch or crowd out another theologically vital facet of small group life—the opportunity for members to speak the word to each other for mutual instruction and encouragement. This is the key strength of a ‘facilitated’ group. The facilitator’s whole aim is to stimulate one-another speech, to let the conversation flow freely and go where it will. There is maximum opportunity for mutual encouragement, even if there is also maximum opportunity for missing what the passage is actually about.So where does that all leave us?Can we stop this pendulum swinging somehow? Is there a Goldilocks solution?“Yes!” I hear you pastors say who write Bible studies for their leaders. “That’s why we write these studies. It allows us to exert some direction and quality control over the group discussions, but not place too heavy a burden on our leaders’ shoulders.”Well, perhaps. Except that pre-written studies can be the worst of both worlds. There is not the freedom of undirected exploration and discovery—since there’s a list of seven questions we all know we have to get through. And unless the studies are very well done, and the leader is experienced, maintaining a natural flow and momentum to the discussion is difficult. It feels clunky, like we’re reading someone else’s lines (because we are). A question seems to be driving at something, but none of us can figure out what it is.Leading a genuine discussion towards a conclusion is not an easy thing to do. You need to know where you’re going, and to have identified some key milestones along the way. This is impossible without training and preparation. The kind of leader who can make good use of pre-written studies is usually the kind of leader who doesn’t need pre-written studies.So what is the solution?Before I say anything else, I have a confession to make.I reached this point in the first draft of this article, and began to outline a way to think about small group leadership that preserved the key strengths of the ‘teacher-leader’ model of Growth Groups but at a more achievable level for the average or beginner leader in most churches.And it was only at that point that I remembered that I’d written and published a training course a few years ago that did precisely that. (That’s what comes of churning out too much stuff over too many years I suppose.)So this nice little article that I was quite enjoying writing suddenly changed into a thinly-disguised promotional piece to get you to buy one of my training courses—which as an Australian is embarrassing.If you’re prepared to believe me (thousands wouldn’t, as my mother used to say), I’ll leave further mention of the training course to the end, and continue with what I was about to say.A useful way to think about the leader of a small group Bible study is that he is neither a full-on teacher, nor merely a chairperson or facilitator. He is a tour guide. His role is to lead the group into the Word so that they arrive at the major landmark that every Bible tourist needs to see—that is the main points of this passage, and what they mean for our lives. There is almost always more than one route that will get you there. There may be side-streets and other attractions to view along the way. And occasionally, you may spend so long stopping to look at something really interesting that you don’t get to the major landmark.But the key point is this: the small group tour guide can only lead and nudge and direct his rag-tag group of easily distracted tourists to the destination if he knows the way. He can only lead them to the right spot if he’s been there himself already. He may have a printed map or a set of directions in his hand (a pre-written Bible study), but if he doesn’t actually know the way himself, the journey will be clunky and dissatisfying for the tour group, and they will wonder why he didn’t just give them the map and let them figure it out for themselves.In other words, there is no avoiding the reality that a small group leader must personally understand the passage and its key points before he embarks on leading others in a discussion of that passage. This requires three things: a decent amount of experience as a Christian in reading the Bible (i.e. newish Christians don’t make good small group leaders);a decent amount of training in how to understand a passage and lead a group to that understanding (i.e. providing pre-written studies cannot replace the need for good quality training);a decent amount of prayerful preparation time each week (around two hours for most people); enough time to get to know the passage well, and to understand what God is saying in it. The leader needs to feel confident that whatever twists and turns the discussion might take, he knows the destination.With this training and preparation under his belt, the tour guide leader can use a number of approaches in shepherding his group toward the destination, depending on his personality and experience. He might favour a fairly easy going approach—“let’s just start exploring and see what we find”—but this works because he’s very familiar with where he needs to get to. He might prefer to write down his own set of directions in detail—his own Bible study. Or if he’s a beginner tour guide, he might prefer to use someone else’s map, with some of his own notes scribbled on it—a pre-written Bible study.Whatever the method that is finally used, the desired outcome is a genuine group exploration of God’s word, with enough freedom to enjoy the journey along the way, as well as enough direction to arrive at the destination—which is to hear the message that the living God is speaking to us through this passage of his life-giving word.PSGrowth Groups is the Rolls Royce training program to equip leaders for this kind of tour guide leadership. (In fact, there’s a nice little section in Growth Groups about balancing ‘control’ and ‘freedom’ in small group Bible discussions, much along the lines of this article.) However, as I’ve already noted, for many people, Growth Groups functions these days more as a resource book than an actual 10-week leader training course (as it was originally written to be).The new training framework that Marty Sweeney and I put together a few years ago is called The Small Group and the Vine. It’s a more achievable five-part program, with a workbook and videos. It could be done in a series of Saturday seminars, or over a weekend, or on five consecutive Monday nights—but whatever the format, the idea is to provide small group leaders with a clear understanding of their role, along with the basic tools to prepare a Bible passage for themselves so as to be a good ‘tour guide’ for their groups. (Follow the link above for a free sample chapter and video intro to what it is about.)Whether or not you use this particular resource, the important question to consider is how we are training and equipping all our group leaders to be good ‘tour guides’ of the Word.Some of you may have noticed a consistent use of ‘he’ and ‘his’ throughout this article. In case this comes across as chauvinism, rather than grammatical convenience (which is what it is), let me say that many of the best-prepared and most skilful small group tour guides I have known have been the female leaders of women’s Bible study groups. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

Before we get started, some news to share: you can now read The Payneful Truth in the new Substack app for iPhone. With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my newsletter and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never be cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s an upgrade to the reading experience I think. The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist <a href="https://substack.com/app/android-waitlist?utm_campaign=app-marketing&amp;utm_context=author-post-insert&amp;utm_content=thepaynefultruth" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>. Anyway, on to this week’s subject. Facilitators or teachers? Is a small group leader a facilitator? Or more of a teacher? It’s funny how the answer to that question seems to go in cycles. In the 1980s, most people in my part of the world would have leaned towards ‘facilitator’. The job of the small group leader was not to deliver a mini-sermon or be a ‘teacher’, but to stimulate some discussion around a Bible passage. Get things moving, try to keep it vaguely on track, but don’t feel it’s your responsibility to impose a conclusion or ‘lesson’ on the group. In the 90s, there was a pendulum swing away from this thinking, as captured in Col Marshall’s classic book <a href="https://matthiasmedia.com.au/products/growth-groups-manual?_pos=1&amp;_sid=060348e3a&amp;_ss=r" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Growth Groups</a>. Col argued explicitly against the concept of ‘facilitator’, and trained a generation of small group leaders to think of themselves more as teachers and leaders—as small-p ‘pastors’ who took a measure of responsibility for the spiritual health of the group members. The leader’s job was to help the group learn what the Bible was teaching, not just share opinions with each other. And this required the leader to do sufficient preparation to understand the passage, and to be able to lead a Bible discussion that revealed and applied the passage’s main points. In the heyday of Growth Groups, it was assumed that most leaders would prepare and write their own Bible studies most of the time. Was this a high bar for many leaders and churches? No doubt. And perhaps this is why the pendulum has swung back towards ‘facilitation’ in recent years. The increasingly common pattern today is for small groups either to do some version of the <a href="https://www.challies.com/christian-living/faith-hacking-the-swedish-method/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Swedish method </a>together, or to use pre-written studies, often prepared by the church staff in line with the current sermon series. Leaders see themselves more as a chairperson than a teacher. And if there is a conclusion or landing point to get to, it’s the one that’s been given to them by the pre-written study. Small group leaders writing their own Bible studies from scratch now seems to be a rarity. I am tempted at this point to do a not-in-my-day rant about falling standards. But perhaps there is something more helpful to say. Let’s think afresh about the pros and cons of each swing of this pendulum. On the ‘teacher-leader’ side, the main weakness is simply the high expectations it places on the average group leader. This not only makes it harder to find suitable leaders willing and able to embrace the responsibility, but also means that their training takes longer, and that they are more likely to burn out after a few years. Many churches have found that trying to train all their leaders to this level is unrealistic, and places a cap on how many groups can actually be run. How many churches can find space in their program to run the full 10-week Growth Groups training course for their would-be leaders? Not very many. Then again, the strength of the ‘teacher-leader’ model is its realism about the ineffectiveness of loosey-goosey, facilitator-type discussions run by inadequately trained leaders. If sermonettes produce Christianettes (as the old saying goes) then meandering group discussions without a landing point produce meandering Christians without a landing point. The strength of the ‘teacher-leader’ approach is that it recognizes the weakness and potential danger of poorly led opinion sharing, and does something about it. The goal (after all) is not to have a discussion, but to ‘let the word dwell among us richly’ (as Col 3:16 says); to teach and encourage and edify one another in, with and by the Word. This is the goal of all Christian fellowship, of which the small group is one particular type. It’s hard to see why leadership and purposefulness wouldn’t be needed in this context as much as in any other. To think that it will all just happen without well-trained, good quality leadership is a touch naive. Then again, a well-intended swing towards ‘teaching’ can prompt a teacher-leader to exert too much control over the group, and to squelch or crowd out another theologically vital facet of small group life—the opportunity for members to speak the word to each other for mutual instruction and encouragement. This is the key strength of a ‘facilitated’ group. The facilitator’s whole aim is to stimulate one-another speech, to let the conversation flow freely and go where it will. There is maximum opportunity for mutual encouragement, even if there is also maximum opportunity for missing what the passage is actually about. So where does that all leave us? Can we stop this pendulum swinging somehow? Is there a Goldilocks solution? “Yes!” I hear you pastors say who write Bible studies for their leaders. “That’s why we write these studies. It allows us to exert some direction and quality control over the group discussions, but not place too heavy a burden on our leaders’ shoulders.” Well, perhaps. Except that pre-written studies can be the worst of both worlds. There is not the freedom of undirected exploration and discovery—since there’s a list of seven questions we all know we have to get through. And unless the studies are very well done, and the leader is experienced, maintaining a natural flow and momentum to the discussion is difficult. It feels clunky, like we’re reading someone else’s lines (because we are). A question seems to be driving at something, but none of us can figure out what it is. Leading a genuine discussion towards a conclusion is not an easy thing to do. You need to know where you’re going, and to have identified some key milestones along the way. This is impossible without training and preparation. The kind of leader who can make good use of pre-written studies is usually the kind of leader who doesn’t need pre-written studies. So what is the solution? Before I say anything else, I have a confession to make. I reached this point in the first draft of this article, and began to outline a way to think about small group leadership that preserved the key strengths of the ‘teacher-leader’ model of Growth Groups but at a more achievable level for the average or beginner leader in most churches. And it was only at that point that I remembered that I’d written and published a training course a few years ago that did precisely that. (That’s what comes of churning out too much stuff over too many years I suppose.) So this nice little article that I was quite enjoying writing suddenly changed into a thinly-disguised promotional piece to get you to buy one of my training courses—which as an Australian is embarrassing. If you’re prepared to believe me (thousands wouldn’t, as my mother used to say), I’ll leave further mention of the training course to the end, and continue with what I was about to say. A useful way to think about the leader of a small group Bible study is that he is neither a full-on teacher, nor merely a chairperson or facilitator. He is a tour guide. His role is to lead the group into the Word so that they arrive at the major landmark that every Bible tourist needs to see—that is the main points of this passage, and what they mean for our lives. There is almost always more than one route that will get you there. There may be side-streets and other attractions to view along the way. And occasionally, you may spend so long stopping to look at something really interesting that you don’t get to the major landmark. But the key point is this: the small group tour guide can only lead and nudge and direct his rag-tag group of easily distracted tourists to the destination if he knows the way. He can only lead them to the right spot if he’s been there himself already. He may have a printed map or a set of directions in his hand (a pre-written Bible study), but if he doesn’t actually know the way himself, the journey will be clunky and dissatisfying for the tour group, and they will wonder why he didn’t just give them the map and let them figure it out for themselves. In other words, there is no avoiding the reality that a small group leader must personally understand the passage and its key points before he embarks on leading others in a discussion of that passage. This requires three things: a decent amount of experience as a Christian in reading the Bible (i.e. newish Christians don’t make good small group leaders); a decent amount of training in how to understand a passage and lead a group to that understanding (i.e. providing pre-written studies cannot replace the need for good quality training); a decent amount of prayerful preparation time each week (around two hours for most people); enough time to get to know the passage well, and to understand what God is saying in it. The leader needs to feel confident that whatever twists and turns the discussion might take, he knows the destination. With this training and preparation under his belt, the tour guide leader can use a number of approaches in shepherding his group toward the destination, depending on his personality and experience. He might favour a fairly easy going approach—“let’s just start exploring and see what we find”—but this works because he’s very familiar with where he needs to get to. He might prefer to write down his own set of directions in detail—his own Bible study. Or if he’s a beginner tour guide, he might prefer to use someone else’s map, with some of his own notes scribbled on it—a pre-written Bible study. Whatever the method that is finally used, the desired outcome is a genuine group exploration of God’s word, with enough freedom to enjoy the journey along the way, as well as enough direction to arrive at the destination—which is to hear the message that the living God is speaking to us through this passage of his life-giving word. PS <a href="https://matthiasmedia.com.au/products/growth-groups-manual?_pos=1&amp;_sid=060348e3a&amp;_ss=r" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Growth Groups</a><a href="https://matthiasmedia.com.au/products/growth-groups-manual?_pos=1&amp;_sid=060348e3a&amp;_ss=r" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> </a>is the Rolls Royce training program to equip leaders for this kind of tour guide leadership. (In fact, there’s a nice little section in Growth Groups about balancing ‘control’ and ‘freedom’ in small group Bible discussions, much along the lines of this article.) However, as I’ve already noted, for many people, Growth Groups functions these days more as a resource book than an actual 10-week leader training course (as it was originally written to be). The new training framework that Marty Sweeney and I put together a few years ago is called <a href="https://matthiasmedia.com.au/products/small-group-and-the-vine-workbook?_pos=2&amp;_sid=2012726dd&amp;_ss=r" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Small Group and the Vine</a>. It’s a more achievable five-part program, with a workbook and videos. It could be done in a series of Saturday seminars, or over a weekend, or on five consecutive Monday nights—but whatever the format, the idea is to provide small group leaders with a clear understanding of their role, along with the basic tools to prepare a Bible passage for themselves so as to be a good ‘tour guide’ for their groups. (Follow the link above for a free sample chapter and video intro to what it is about.) Whether or not you use this particular resource, the important question to consider is how we are training and equipping all our group leaders to be good ‘tour guides’ of the Word. Some of you may have noticed a consistent use of ‘he’ and ‘his’ throughout this article. In case this comes across as chauvinism, rather than grammatical convenience (which is what it is), let me say that many of the best-prepared and most skilful small group tour guides I have known have been the female leaders of women’s Bible study groups. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

Facilitators or teachers? 

It’s funny how the big puzzle in a Bible passage can often distract you from seeing the smaller enigma.For example, in 1 Cor 14, the question I immediately want answered is about prophecy. It’s the gift I should pursue, says Paul, because it is the best way to edify others in love. But what prophecy it exactly?This is a big question. (And for those who are interested, I came up with a big, long answer to it during my PhD research a few years ago. Just drop me a line if you’d like a copy to send you off to sleep at night.)But the big question of prophecy might lead us to miss the smaller but no less intriguing question in verse 26:What then, brothers? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up.People turn up at church with various things to contribute to others for their edification. ‘Hymns’ and ‘lessons’ I can understand. ‘Tongues’ is another can of worms. But pretty casually and in passing Paul says that you also might bring a revelation with you.This makes me kind of nervous.I can see that strange guy with the intense eyes turning up to church with a new book of the Bible under his arm that God has told him to write. Or I see that overly confident woman with the matronly manner rolling up to me and telling me with divine authority that God knows exactly what I’m up to and that I should knock it off.What are these ‘revelations’ that the Corinthians are having and bringing to church with them? It sounds a bit alarming.Like all words, it’s possible to confuse what ‘revelation’ means as a word with how it is used or what it refers to. The word literally means to make something fully known or clear; to uncover or disclose some person or truth or knowledge.In the NT, it can be the ‘making known’ of Jesus Christ when he comes again in glory (e.g. 1 Cor 1:7). He’ll be ‘revealed’ for all to see. Or it can be some special knowledge that is made to someone directly by God, such as when Paul says that he was not taught the gospel by any man but received it ‘through a revelation of Jesus Christ’ (referring probably to the Damascus road experience where Jesus confronted him personally as his Lord in Gal 1:12).So what is it that is becoming known or clear to someone here in 1 Cor 14, such that they can bring that ‘revelation’ with them to church to edify others? It doesn’t necessarily mean that they have had their own Damascus road vision, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they have received a whole new gospel because an angel has appeared and given it to them. (In fact, if that happens, we can be pretty sure it was certainly no angel of God! See Gal 1:8.)Earlier in 1 Cor 14, the possibility of having a ‘revelation’ to share is also mentioned, and again it’s one of a list of similarly edifying words:Now, brothers, if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I bring you some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching? (1 Cor 14:6)How is a ‘revelation’ different from ‘teaching’ or ‘knowledge’ or ‘prophecy’?There’s some overlap no doubt, but it’s not hard to see differences between them. A ‘teaching’ might be a specific nugget of truth that has been passed on to us, and that we bring with us in order to teach others. ‘Knowledge’ is a broader category of understanding that we’ve acquired over time, and that we can also share with others. ‘Prophecy’ is a particular application of the gospel to a particular context (to give you the shorthand answer to that big question).But that again leaves ‘revelation’.I think the way it’s being used in both instances in 1 Cor 14 is rather like the way the same word is used in Phil 3:15:Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you.When things are unclear or partially known or misunderstood completely, the problem often lies not in receiving a new teaching or new piece of knowledge, but in what is already partially or poorly known becoming fully known, by the work of God in our minds.This is a common Christian experience. For me, it often occurs over a number of days and conversations.I find myself reading something interesting one evening, which then connects with a conversation I have the next day, which then reminds me of a sermon I heard two weeks ago, which then prompts me to chat to Ali about it over dinner, which then casts a whole new light on the conversation I had earlier, and which then incredibly lines up with the Bible reading I happen to look at the next morning. It all percolates in my slow-witted brain for a few days, and then seemingly from nowhere comes the Aha! moment. The clouds part, the pieces lock into place, and all of a sudden some fresh aspect of the truth of Christ becomes clear to me.It might be something I once was taught but had forgotten, or never quite understood. It might be something I now understand in a new or clearer or fuller way.Whatever it is, even though it may not have been through a Damascus road apocalypse, God has made something known to me that I didn’t know before. He has uncovered a new light in my understanding. And very often it is not by him inserting a brand new piece of information, but by clearing away all the intellectual junk that has been preventing me from seeing the truth and implications of what he has already told me many times through the Scriptures.This kind of ‘revelation’ can creep up on you over time, or it can occur to you quite suddenly, or possibly both. Later in the chapter, we see it happening suddenly as people are sharing their words of prophecy and encouragement with each other:Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent. (1 Cor 14:29-30)The edifying words we bring with us to church don’t have the status of Scripture! They need to be tested and considered. In fact, as one speaks, another might suddenly have an insight (a ‘revelation’) that builds or improves what is being said.1 Cor 14 paints a delightful and challenging picture of what should happen when we get together as Christ’s congregation. We all bring God-given words with us to the gathering—the gospel we’ve been taught, the Scriptural knowledge we have, the lessons we’ve learned, the prophetic applications we’ve discerned, the ‘revelations’ we’ve received—and we share them with each other, for mutual benefit.What do you bring with you to church on Sunday?A Bible perhaps, or these days a phone? A tired and disengaged mind? A set of grievances? A desire to be fed and cared for? Some grumbling kids?The key things to bring with us, says 1 Cor 14, are God-given words with which to edify and encourage each other in love.Is that a revelation for you?PSI was rather hoping to send out the sixth and final chapter of the Two ways to live evangelistic book in this week’s edition. But it’s been a crazy week, and it just wasn’t ready. God willing, next week! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

It’s funny how the big puzzle in a Bible passage can often distract you from seeing the smaller enigma. For example, in 1 Cor 14, the question I immediately want answered is about prophecy. It’s the gift I should pursue, says Paul, because it is the best way to edify others in love. But what prophecy it exactly? This is a big question. (And for those who are interested, I came up with a big, long answer to it during my PhD research a few years ago. Just drop me a line if you’d like a copy to send you off to sleep at night.) But the big question of prophecy might lead us to miss the smaller but no less intriguing question in verse 26: What then, brothers? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up. People turn up at church with various things to contribute to others for their edification. ‘Hymns’ and ‘lessons’ I can understand. ‘Tongues’ is another can of worms. But pretty casually and in passing Paul says that you also might bring a revelation with you. This makes me kind of nervous. I can see that strange guy with the intense eyes turning up to church with a new book of the Bible under his arm that God has told him to write. Or I see that overly confident woman with the matronly manner rolling up to me and telling me with divine authority that God knows exactly what I’m up to and that I should knock it off. What are these ‘revelations’ that the Corinthians are having and bringing to church with them? It sounds a bit alarming. Like all words, it’s possible to confuse what ‘revelation’ means as a word with how it is used or what it refers to. The word literally means to make something fully known or clear; to uncover or disclose some person or truth or knowledge. In the NT, it can be the ‘making known’ of Jesus Christ when he comes again in glory (e.g. 1 Cor 1:7). He’ll be ‘revealed’ for all to see. Or it can be some special knowledge that is made to someone directly by God, such as when Paul says that he was not taught the gospel by any man but received it ‘through a revelation of Jesus Christ’ (referring probably to the Damascus road experience where Jesus confronted him personally as his Lord in Gal 1:12). So what is it that is becoming known or clear to someone here in 1 Cor 14, such that they can bring that ‘revelation’ with them to church to edify others? It doesn’t necessarily mean that they have had their own Damascus road vision, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they have received a whole new gospel because an angel has appeared and given it to them. (In fact, if that happens, we can be pretty sure it was certainly no angel of God! See Gal 1:8.) Earlier in 1 Cor 14, the possibility of having a ‘revelation’ to share is also mentioned, and again it’s one of a list of similarly edifying words: Now, brothers, if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I bring you some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching? (1 Cor 14:6) How is a ‘revelation’ different from ‘teaching’ or ‘knowledge’ or ‘prophecy’? There’s some overlap no doubt, but it’s not hard to see differences between them. A ‘teaching’ might be a specific nugget of truth that has been passed on to us, and that we bring with us in order to teach others. ‘Knowledge’ is a broader category of understanding that we’ve acquired over time, and that we can also share with others. ‘Prophecy’ is a particular application of the gospel to a particular context (to give you the shorthand answer to that big question). But that again leaves ‘revelation’. I think the way it’s being used in both instances in 1 Cor 14 is rather like the way the same word is used in Phil 3:15: Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. When things are unclear or partially known or misunderstood completely, the problem often lies not in receiving a new teaching or new piece of knowledge, but in what is already partially or poorly known becoming fully known, by the work of God in our minds. This is a common Christian experience. For me, it often occurs over a number of days and conversations. I find myself reading something interesting one evening, which then connects with a conversation I have the next day, which then reminds me of a sermon I heard two weeks ago, which then prompts me to chat to Ali about it over dinner, which then casts a whole new light on the conversation I had earlier, and which then incredibly lines up with the Bible reading I happen to look at the next morning. It all percolates in my slow-witted brain for a few days, and then seemingly from nowhere comes the Aha! moment. The clouds part, the pieces lock into place, and all of a sudden some fresh aspect of the truth of Christ becomes clear to me. It might be something I once was taught but had forgotten, or never quite understood. It might be something I now understand in a new or clearer or fuller way. Whatever it is, even though it may not have been through a Damascus road apocalypse, God has made something known to me that I didn’t know before. He has uncovered a new light in my understanding. And very often it is not by him inserting a brand new piece of information, but by clearing away all the intellectual junk that has been preventing me from seeing the truth and implications of what he has already told me many times through the Scriptures. This kind of ‘revelation’ can creep up on you over time, or it can occur to you quite suddenly, or possibly both. Later in the chapter, we see it happening suddenly as people are sharing their words of prophecy and encouragement with each other: Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent. (1 Cor 14:29-30) The edifying words we bring with us to church don’t have the status of Scripture! They need to be tested and considered. In fact, as one speaks, another might suddenly have an insight (a ‘revelation’) that builds or improves what is being said. 1 Cor 14 paints a delightful and challenging picture of what should happen when we get together as Christ’s congregation. We all bring God-given words with us to the gathering—the gospel we’ve been taught, the Scriptural knowledge we have, the lessons we’ve learned, the prophetic applications we’ve discerned, the ‘revelations’ we’ve received—and we share them with each other, for mutual benefit. What do you bring with you to church on Sunday? A Bible perhaps, or these days a phone? A tired and disengaged mind? A set of grievances? A desire to be fed and cared for? Some grumbling kids? The key things to bring with us, says 1 Cor 14, are God-given words with which to edify and encourage each other in love. Is that a revelation for you? PS I was rather hoping to send out the sixth and final chapter of the Two ways to live evangelistic book in this week’s edition. But it’s been a crazy week, and it just wasn’t ready. God willing, next week! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

It's a revelation

As promised, here is the next instalment in the gospel book you’re helping me write. I felt a bit excited and daunted at the same time working on this draft. There’s nothing more bracing than writing about the death of Jesus, but I also couldn’t escape the feeling of not wanting to muck this up. We’re getting to the heart of things; this has to be good!I’m not sure whether it is yet, but I’m sure you’ll help me figure that out.Just a quick recap: this chapter is based on Point 4 of the Two Ways to Live outline:Because of his love, God sent his Son into the world: the man Jesus Christ.Jesus always lived under God’s rule.But Jesus took our punishment by dying in our place.The first instalment dealt with the opening two statements, under headings of ‘His arrival’ and ‘His life’. This second part of the chapter is about ‘his death’.You can read the text below, or listen via the audio player above, or you can also download a PDF of the chapter, which is easier for printing and for referring to specific lines and paragraphs.His deathIf you’ve never really read one of the Gospels, you might assume that they are mainly about Jesus’ teaching and parables and miracles. That it’s all good Samaritans and prodigal sons and walking on water.There is certainly quite a bit of that.But as biographies the four Gospels are strangely lopsided. They say very little about Jesus’ birth and early life (Mark and John don’t mention these subjects at all). They ignore his adolescence and young adulthood entirely. They recount in snapshot fashion the key events of his public ministry that took place over an approximately three year period—his teachings and parables, his healings and mighty works, his clashes with the religious authorities.But then the narrative slows right down. Each of the Gospels spends chapter after chapter recounting in depth the final days of Jesus’ life, and in particular the details of his betrayal, trial and humiliating death. It’s as if the events of Jesus’ arrival and extraordinary life are an extended introduction. The real action of the story is the death of the hero.If this seems strange to you, then join the party. It was also very confusing for Jesus’ disciples.Throughout the Gospels, they become increasingly convinced that Jesus is the One—the Messiah-king or ‘Christ’ whom God had sent to save his people and rule the world. About half way through Mark’s Gospel, Jesus comes straight out and asks his disciples who they think he is.Peter answers with a directness that is typical of him, “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29).You would think this might be the climax of the story. After seven chapters of following him around and watching everything, and not always covering themselves in glory, the disciples have finally done something right. They have realised who Jesus is, and said so. Bells pealing. Fireworks going off.But no.Jesus responds in an unexpected way. He starts by strictly commanding them not to tell anyone else what they’ve come to know about him—which seems odd. Doesn’t he want people to know that God has sent his Christ into the world?And then he explains to them that he must “suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31).This is even stranger. Jesus not only wants to be an anonymous, under-the-radar sort of Christ, but he insists that the Christ is going to rejected and killed by the key religious leaders of the Jewish people—the very people you would expect to welcome the Christ with fanfare and festivals.Peter is incredulous and takes Jesus aside and starts telling him off. To which Jesus gives the famous reply, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Mark 8:33).I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Peter. He has, after all, just gotten something right for pretty much the first time in the Gospel story so far. He has recognized that Jesus is the long-promised Saviour-King. And understandably, he thinks that everything is on the up and up. All that remains is for Jesus to be anointed King, to defeat all Israel’s enemies (like the occupying Romans), to establish a new, glorious kingdom, and for everything generally to be hotsy-totsy.This is what any of us would have expected a glorious Christ-Saviour-King to do. What’s the point of waiting centuries for the Messiah to turn up, only for him to say, “Oh and by the way, they’re all going to hate me and kill me”? It seems crazy.And from a human point of view it is. This was Jesus’ rebuke to Peter: you’re thinking along human lines, not along God-type lines. God has a completely different plan for what his Christ will do, and how he will establish his kingdom.That plan unfolds over the following eight chapters of Mark’s Gospel. As Jesus heads towards Jerusalem and towards the final week of his life, two things increase in intensity—the angry opposition of the religious authorities, and Jesus’ predictions about his impending death.Twice more he takes his disciples aside and tells them that when they get to Jerusalem he is going to be humiliated, tortured and killed. The disciples remain dumbfounded, and continue to make stupid comments.In chapter 10, for example, just after Jesus has again predicted his death, the brothers James and John take him aside and ask him a favour: “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory” (Mark 10:37). When you do become the glorious king, which we’re sure is still going to happen somehow, can we be your Deputy King 1 and Deputy King 2? What about it?(A Jewish friend of mine once commented: “Talk about a pair of pushy Jews!”)Jesus gently rebukes James and John by suggesting that they don’t really know what they’re asking for. There will be two spots available, as it turns out, one on his right and one on his left, when he is crucified a few short days later. Are those the positions they’re asking for?But then he explains in the clearest words so far what he has been talking about all this time. His kingship, his Christ-hood, is not the kind of rule or lordship that we specialise in as humans—the kind that we know so well from history and from our current political leaders; the kind that is lordly and arrogant and obsessed with power. It’s quite different.“You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:42-45).In the kingdom of Jesus, greatness is servitude. And this is from the king all the way down. For even the king himself, the Christ, the ‘Son of Man’ (as Jesus was fond of calling himself), “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”.Jesus is the greatest, and he undertakes the greatest possible service—to give up his life as a payment or price or ransom for many others. The reason for his approaching death was not only going to be the growing hostility of the religious authorities. In some way, it was also going to be a ‘payment’. It was going to be a ransom that set people free.If James and John and the other disciples were good readers of their Bibles—which at the time consisted of what we now call the Old Testament—they would have known exactly what Jesus was talking about.Scattered in plain sight throughout the Old Testament are numerous events, laws and prophecies that foreshadow just such an idea. The Old Testament promised that when God finally fixed everything up, and established a new kingdom through his Messiah-Christ-King, he would need to deal with the fundamental human problem—the problem of humanity’s rebellion against him as our Creator and Ruler, with all its consequences.This takes us back to chapters 1-3 of this book, and why they are such essential background for understanding the message of Christianity. The death of Jesus was God’s answer to problem of human rebellion against him.Perhaps the most famous Old Testament passage about this is one we’ve already looked at. Back in chapter 2, we quoted the prophet Isaiah describing our basic rejection of God like this:We all like sheep have gone astray; each of us has turned to his own way … (Isaiah 53:6)But those three dots at the end of that quote indicate that the sentence is not finished. The whole sentence reads:We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.Iniquity is not the most common word these days. I’ve been known to describe the cost of toll roads in Sydney as ‘iniquitous’. And cheap, low-life, degenerate establishments are sometimes called ‘dens of iniquity’.But the general idea is straightforward enough. It means something grossly wrong or guilty or wicked.God has laid on ‘him’ (in this quote) the guilt and wrongdoing of us all.We know all about the guilt and wrongdoing (see chapter 2). And we know that the rightful sentence against us is death (see chapter 3).But who is the ‘him’ that all this iniquity is laid upon?In the rest of the extraordinary prophecy of Isaiah, it becomes very plain who it is. It’s a prophecy about a ‘servant’ who will come to save God’s people. Here are some of the verses that lead up to the quote above, and then follow on from it:See, my servant will act wisely; he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.Just as there were many who were appalled at him — his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness—so he will sprinkle many nations, and kings will shut their mouths because of him.…He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.…After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors.For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus says that he is a servant, who will be rejected by men and die as a ransom for many, and that after that he will ‘rise’ to glory. It could not be plainer that he sees himself fulfilling the words of this ancient promise.God’s extraordinary plan was to send his own Son into the world as a servant, to die as a substitute for rebels like us. Jesus died so that our iniquity might be laid on him.The logic of the whole thing is stunning and humbling. It goes like this:We all rebel against God as our Creator and Ruler. We all deserve his judgement. We all deserve death.Jesus was a man, but never rebelled against God. He didn’t deserve any judgement or any death.But Jesus did willingly and deliberately die at the hands of rebellious humanity.Jesus died not for his own rebellion but for ours.He died to take upon himself the punishment we deserved. He died as a ransom for many.This is what happened when a man named Jesus died by crucifixion on a hill outside Jerusalem in 33AD, and it is no wonder that the day of his death became known as ‘Good Friday’. It’s no wonder that the cross became the centre and symbol of Christianity, and that as Christianity grew and shaped Western civilisation, the concept of humble, sacrificial service became a central value of our culture.The death of Jesus on behalf of rebels is the glorious and confounding twist that dominates the Gospel narratives. His death was no accident, and no failure. It was the supreme act of love—God sending his Son to die as our substitute, to die the death that we deserved, so that we could be set free from death and judgement.But what does this ‘freedom’ mean? What are the consequences and implications of Jesus’ death?To answer this, and to arrive at the final climactic truth of the Christian message, we turn to the even more extraordinary event that comes three days after Jesus’ death.PSAs usual, send your comments and feedback to tonyjpayne@me.com, or jot them in the comment section on the website.Once again, a huge thank you to the many of you who’ve been sending in feedback and ideas as the instalments have rolled out. Apologies that I haven’t been able to respond individually to you all (as I normally do with the emails I get)—but there are just too many! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

As promised, here is the next instalment in the gospel book you’re helping me write. I felt a bit excited and daunted at the same time working on this draft. There’s nothing more bracing than writing about the death of Jesus, but I also couldn’t escape the feeling of not wanting to muck this up. We’re getting to the heart of things; this has to be good! I’m not sure whether it is yet, but I’m sure you’ll help me figure that out. Just a quick recap: this chapter is based on Point 4 of the Two Ways to Live outline: Because of his love, God sent his Son into the world: the man Jesus Christ. Jesus always lived under God’s rule. But Jesus took our punishment by dying in our place. The first instalment dealt with the opening two statements, under headings of ‘His arrival’ and ‘His life’. This second part of the chapter is about ‘his death’. You can read the text below, or listen via the audio player above, or you can also download a PDF of the chapter, which is easier for printing and for referring to specific lines and paragraphs. His death If you’ve never really read one of the Gospels, you might assume that they are mainly about Jesus’ teaching and parables and miracles. That it’s all good Samaritans and prodigal sons and walking on water. There is certainly quite a bit of that. But as biographies the four Gospels are strangely lopsided. They say very little about Jesus’ birth and early life (Mark and John don’t mention these subjects at all). They ignore his adolescence and young adulthood entirely. They recount in snapshot fashion the key events of his public ministry that took place over an approximately three year period—his teachings and parables, his healings and mighty works, his clashes with the religious authorities. But then the narrative slows right down. Each of the Gospels spends chapter after chapter recounting in depth the final days of Jesus’ life, and in particular the details of his betrayal, trial and humiliating death. It’s as if the events of Jesus’ arrival and extraordinary life are an extended introduction. The real action of the story is the death of the hero. If this seems strange to you, then join the party. It was also very confusing for Jesus’ disciples. Throughout the Gospels, they become increasingly convinced that Jesus is the One—the Messiah-king or ‘Christ’ whom God had sent to save his people and rule the world. About half way through Mark’s Gospel, Jesus comes straight out and asks his disciples who they think he is. Peter answers with a directness that is typical of him, “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29). You would think this might be the climax of the story. After seven chapters of following him around and watching everything, and not always covering themselves in glory, the disciples have finally done something right. They have realised who Jesus is, and said so. Bells pealing. Fireworks going off. But no. Jesus responds in an unexpected way. He starts by strictly commanding them not to tell anyone else what they’ve come to know about him—which seems odd. Doesn’t he want people to know that God has sent his Christ into the world? And then he explains to them that he must “suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31). This is even stranger. Jesus not only wants to be an anonymous, under-the-radar sort of Christ, but he insists that the Christ is going to rejected and killed by the key religious leaders of the Jewish people—the very people you would expect to welcome the Christ with fanfare and festivals. Peter is incredulous and takes Jesus aside and starts telling him off. To which Jesus gives the famous reply, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Mark 8:33). I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Peter. He has, after all, just gotten something right for pretty much the first time in the Gospel story so far. He has recognized that Jesus is the long-promised Saviour-King. And understandably, he thinks that everything is on the up and up. All that remains is for Jesus to be anointed King, to defeat all Israel’s enemies (like the occupying Romans), to establish a new, glorious kingdom, and for everything generally to be hotsy-totsy. This is what any of us would have expected a glorious Christ-Saviour-King to do. What’s the point of waiting centuries for the Messiah to turn up, only for him to say, “Oh and by the way, they’re all going to hate me and kill me”? It seems crazy. And from a human point of view it is. This was Jesus’ rebuke to Peter: you’re thinking along human lines, not along God-type lines. God has a completely different plan for what his Christ will do, and how he will establish his kingdom. That plan unfolds over the following eight chapters of Mark’s Gospel. As Jesus heads towards Jerusalem and towards the final week of his life, two things increase in intensity—the angry opposition of the religious authorities, and Jesus’ predictions about his impending death. Twice more he takes his disciples aside and tells them that when they get to Jerusalem he is going to be humiliated, tortured and killed. The disciples remain dumbfounded, and continue to make stupid comments. In chapter 10, for example, just after Jesus has again predicted his death, the brothers James and John take him aside and ask him a favour: “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory” (Mark 10:37). When you do become the glorious king, which we’re sure is still going to happen somehow, can we be your Deputy King 1 and Deputy King 2? What about it? (A Jewish friend of mine once commented: “Talk about a pair of pushy Jews!”) Jesus gently rebukes James and John by suggesting that they don’t really know what they’re asking for. There will be two spots available, as it turns out, one on his right and one on his left, when he is crucified a few short days later. Are those the positions they’re asking for? But then he explains in the clearest words so far what he has been talking about all this time. His kingship, his Christ-hood, is not the kind of rule or lordship that we specialise in as humans—the kind that we know so well from history and from our current political leaders; the kind that is lordly and arrogant and obsessed with power. It’s quite different. “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:42-45). In the kingdom of Jesus, greatness is servitude. And this is from the king all the way down. For even the king himself, the Christ, the ‘Son of Man’ (as Jesus was fond of calling himself), “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”. Jesus is the greatest, and he undertakes the greatest possible service—to give up his life as a payment or price or ransom for many others. The reason for his approaching death was not only going to be the growing hostility of the religious authorities. In some way, it was also going to be a ‘payment’. It was going to be a ransom that set people free. If James and John and the other disciples were good readers of their Bibles—which at the time consisted of what we now call the Old Testament—they would have known exactly what Jesus was talking about. Scattered in plain sight throughout the Old Testament are numerous events, laws and prophecies that foreshadow just such an idea. The Old Testament promised that when God finally fixed everything up, and established a new kingdom through his Messiah-Christ-King, he would need to deal with the fundamental human problem—the problem of humanity’s rebellion against him as our Creator and Ruler, with all its consequences. This takes us back to chapters 1-3 of this book, and why they are such essential background for understanding the message of Christianity. The death of Jesus was God’s answer to problem of human rebellion against him. Perhaps the most famous Old Testament passage about this is one we’ve already looked at. Back in chapter 2, we quoted the prophet Isaiah describing our basic rejection of God like this: We all like sheep have gone astray; each of us has turned to his own way … (Isaiah 53:6) But those three dots at the end of that quote indicate that the sentence is not finished. The whole sentence reads: We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Iniquity is not the most common word these days. I’ve been known to describe the cost of toll roads in Sydney as ‘iniquitous’. And cheap, low-life, degenerate establishments are sometimes called ‘dens of iniquity’. But the general idea is straightforward enough. It means something grossly wrong or guilty or wicked. God has laid on ‘him’ (in this quote) the guilt and wrongdoing of us all. We know all about the guilt and wrongdoing (see chapter 2). And we know that the rightful sentence against us is death (see chapter 3). But who is the ‘him’ that all this iniquity is laid upon? In the rest of the extraordinary prophecy of Isaiah, it becomes very plain who it is. It’s a prophecy about a ‘servant’ who will come to save God’s people. Here are some of the verses that lead up to the quote above, and then follow on from it: See, my servant will act wisely; he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted. Just as there were many who were appalled at him — his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness—so he will sprinkle many nations, and kings will shut their mouths because of him. … He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. … After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus says that he is a servant, who will be rejected by men and die as a ransom for many, and that after that he will ‘rise’ to glory. It could not be plainer that he sees himself fulfilling the words of this ancient promise. God’s extraordinary plan was to send his own Son into the world as a servant, to die as a substitute for rebels like us. Jesus died so that our iniquity might be laid on him. The logic of the whole thing is stunning and humbling. It goes like this: We all rebel against God as our Creator and Ruler. We all deserve his judgement. We all deserve death. Jesus was a man, but never rebelled against God. He didn’t deserve any judgement or any death. But Jesus did willingly and deliberately die at the hands of rebellious humanity. Jesus died not for his own rebellion but for ours. He died to take upon himself the punishment we deserved. He died as a ransom for many. This is what happened when a man named Jesus died by crucifixion on a hill outside Jerusalem in 33AD, and it is no wonder that the day of his death became known as ‘Good Friday’. It’s no wonder that the cross became the centre and symbol of Christianity, and that as Christianity grew and shaped Western civilisation, the concept of humble, sacrificial service became a central value of our culture. The death of Jesus on behalf of rebels is the glorious and confounding twist that dominates the Gospel narratives. His death was no accident, and no failure. It was the supreme act of love—God sending his Son to die as our substitute, to die the death that we deserved, so that we could be set free from death and judgement. But what does this ‘freedom’ mean? What are the consequences and implications of Jesus’ death? To answer this, and to arrive at the final climactic truth of the Christian message, we turn to the even more extraordinary event that comes three days after Jesus’ death. PS As usual, send your comments and feedback to tonyjpayne@me.com, or jot them in the comment section on the website. Once again, a huge thank you to the many of you who’ve been sending in feedback and ideas as the instalments have rolled out. Apologies that I haven’t been able to respond individually to you all (as I normally do with the emails I get)—but there are just too many! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

The 2wtl Book: Chapter 4 (pt 2)

As small groups get started for another year (in my part of the world) I thought it might be useful to write something on ‘How to be a small group member’. But then I thought better of it.I remembered something from a management book that I once read in a moment of weakness. It was called Start With Why, and I can save you the trouble of wading through its 250 padded-out pages of case studies, personal stories and general fluff by summarizing its one, short, helpful point. It’s wisest to start by asking why you’re doing something, before moving on to ask how you’re going to do it, and then in turn think about what you’re going to do next.An obvious but useful thought.So rather than asking how to be a better small group member, let’s start with why.Why belong to a small group at church?Three common answers spring to mind.Because that’s what committed Christians do. Christians go to small groups like tradies go to the pub. It’s what we’ve always done—except that for most of the last two millennia of Christian history, we haven’t. Small groups (as we know them) weren’t really a thing before about 50 years ago.Because that’s the expectation set by your church. In many churches, to be a true-blue member you’re supposed to come regularly on Sunday, give money and go to a small group. This is actually not a bad rule of thumb by which to recognize committed church involvement, but is it really an adequate reason for going to small groups? Because I kind of have to in order to belong to the club?Because it’s a great way to get to know people and feel part of the church community. This feels better, and at least has a bit of relational zip to it. It is indeed hard in a church of even moderate size to really get to know people over a quick cuppa on Sunday morning. Small groups usually help with that.Even so, I’m not sure any of these reasons are going to motivate us consistently to drag ourselves out the door every week at 7:30pm at the end of a long day to engage in chit-chat with a bunch of other tired people. Not to mention the fact we still haven’t said anything related to … you know, God.Does God have a why for us to join a small group?He does as it turns out.The reason God gathers us together in Christian communities is not just so we get to know people or feel the warmth of being part of a group of like-minded people—it’s for a specific purpose.Of the many places we find this purpose in the Bible, one of the clearest is in Colossians 3. This extraordinary chapter starts by summarizing the foundation and essence of the Christian life: “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (vv. 3-4).Our new life is summed up in one word: ‘Christ’. We’re united with him in his death and resurrection. His life is our life.The rest of the chapter is about living in light of that stunning truth—that is, killing off every vestige of our old fleshly life (anger, lies, malice, that sort of thing) and clothing ourselves instead in the new Christ-like life that we’ve been given, “which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (v. 10).  The punchline is in verse 17. Since our life = Christ, then everything we do—every word and every deed—should be done in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.What does this have to do with why God gathers us into Christian communities, including the little communities we call small groups?Everything, and it is spelled out in verses 12-16. This new life in Christ is essentially and unavoidably a team life. It’s something we do together as God’s chosen and beloved people:Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.Three things stand out in this paragraph:Our team life is complicated by the ongoing sinful vestiges of our old selves. There’s a constant need for humility and kindness and forbearance. We all have growing to do.The over-arching characteristic of our community life is love—which isn’t so surprising, given that it is a life lived in the name of Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us.Our task—in love, and with much patience and kindness—is to increase the rich presence of the word of Christ amongst each other by speaking it to each other. The word of Christ is what grows and changes us to be like Christ. The more it permeates our lives, the more each word and deed of our lives will be done in his name.The reason God calls us together in community is so that the Word of Christ can dwell richly in our midst and grow us to be like him. This happens as we love each other by patiently, kindly and humbly speaking that word to each other in any way we can.The passage mentions a number of ways we can do this—it speaks of teaching and admonishing and singing and giving thanks. We could easily flesh that list out with other speaking verbs like reminding, encouraging, exhorting, discussing, chewing over, and asking-the-kind-of-dumb-but-obvious-question-that-helps-everyone.Whatever mode of speech is involved, the content is ‘the Word of Christ’ and the purpose is to help one another grow to be like Christ.Now there’s a why to get us out the door on Wednesday nights.Small groups aren’t about helping me feel part of things, or helping me to connect with people, or even expressing my commitment to church. In fact, they are not really about me at all. The reason to go to a small group is that God has called me to love you and be an agent of your growth in Christ. I go because you need me to speak the Word of Christ to you (and because I need to hear it from you).The how of belonging to a small group flows straight out of this why, and is not very hard to figure out. It would include things like this:We should turn up every week, unless there is some important other reason—because is there really anything more important in your life than the job God has given us to do with each other in a small group?We should come ready to speak in love. Read and prepare the passage in advance if that helps, and take the initiative to speak in any way you can to help others understand and apply this part of God’s word. Ask questions. Answer questions. Grapple hard with the text in front of you. Share what you see. Look out for people who were just about to speak but got cut off, and invite them to contribute. Open up about your own struggles to put the word into practice. There are scads of opportunities to allow the ‘word to dwell richly’ in your group—and that’s your task.This why also generates a copious list of don’ts that I find very easy to compile (by thinking back over my own thoughtless, self-oriented behaviour in small groups over the years). Don’t sit on your hands during the discussion. Don’t try to save face or protect yourself. Don’t leave it to everyone else. Don’t jump on your hobby horses when they pass by. Don’t stick tenaciously to your point in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Don’t try to make yourself look good. Don’t give the lazy pat answer that you could have given without even looking at the text. Don’t take the group off to some other interesting passage that you like, unless it is vital for understanding the passage you’re actually reading. Don’t be afraid to open up and be honest about your struggles.I’ll leave you to figure out your own specific list of how-to’s, because it will be a little different for each person in each different group and circumstance. But if you can grasp why God wants to you go to small group this Wednesday night, then how is not so difficult.At least, it’s not difficult to understand. Doing it consistently and lovingly? Well that’s that the challenge the word of Christ brings us as we start a new of small group life together.PS.Feel free to share this article with your church or small group members. It might be a useful discussion-starter sometime early in the year as you talk about group norms and goals together. And if you’d like to get The Payneful Truth every week, along with work in progress excerpts and other goodies, sign up as a Partner. You can try it free for 90-days (click the button for more details).  This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

As small groups get started for another year (in my part of the world) I thought it might be useful to write something on ‘How to be a small group member’. But then I thought better of it. I remembered something from a management book that I once read in a moment of weakness. It was called <a href="https://www.booktopia.com.au/start-with-why-simon-sinek/book/9780241958223.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Start With Why</a>, and I can save you the trouble of wading through its 250 padded-out pages of case studies, personal stories and general fluff by summarizing its one, short, helpful point. It’s wisest to start by asking why you’re doing something, before moving on to ask how you’re going to do it, and then in turn think about what you’re going to do next. An obvious but useful thought. So rather than asking how to be a better small group member, let’s start with why. Why belong to a small group at church? Three common answers spring to mind. Because that’s what committed Christians do. Christians go to small groups like tradies go to the pub. It’s what we’ve always done—except that for most of the last two millennia of Christian history, we haven’t. Small groups (as we know them) weren’t really a thing before about 50 years ago. Because that’s the expectation set by your church. In many churches, to be a true-blue member you’re supposed to come regularly on Sunday, give money and go to a small group. This is actually not a bad rule of thumb by which to recognize committed church involvement, but is it really an adequate reason for going to small groups? Because I kind of have to in order to belong to the club? Because it’s a great way to get to know people and feel part of the church community. This feels better, and at least has a bit of relational zip to it. It is indeed hard in a church of even moderate size to really get to know people over a quick cuppa on Sunday morning. Small groups usually help with that. Even so, I’m not sure any of these reasons are going to motivate us consistently to drag ourselves out the door every week at 7:30pm at the end of a long day to engage in chit-chat with a bunch of other tired people. Not to mention the fact we still haven’t said anything related to … you know, God. Does God have a why for us to join a small group? He does as it turns out. The reason God gathers us together in Christian communities is not just so we get to know people or feel the warmth of being part of a group of like-minded people—it’s for a specific purpose. Of the many places we find this purpose in the Bible, one of the clearest is in Colossians 3. This extraordinary chapter starts by summarizing the foundation and essence of the Christian life: “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (vv. 3-4). Our new life is summed up in one word: ‘Christ’. We’re united with him in his death and resurrection. His life is our life. The rest of the chapter is about living in light of that stunning truth—that is, killing off every vestige of our old fleshly life (anger, lies, malice, that sort of thing) and clothing ourselves instead in the new Christ-like life that we’ve been given, “which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (v. 10).   The punchline is in verse 17. Since our life = Christ, then everything we do—every word and every deed—should be done in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. What does this have to do with why God gathers us into Christian communities, including the little communities we call small groups? Everything, and it is spelled out in verses 12-16. This new life in Christ is essentially and unavoidably a team life. It’s something we do together as God’s chosen and beloved people: Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Three things stand out in this paragraph: Our team life is complicated by the ongoing sinful vestiges of our old selves. There’s a constant need for humility and kindness and forbearance. We all have growing to do. The over-arching characteristic of our community life is love—which isn’t so surprising, given that it is a life lived in the name of Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us. Our task—in love, and with much patience and kindness—is to increase the rich presence of the word of Christ amongst each other by speaking it to each other. The word of Christ is what grows and changes us to be like Christ. The more it permeates our lives, the more each word and deed of our lives will be done in his name. The reason God calls us together in community is so that the Word of Christ can dwell richly in our midst and grow us to be like him. This happens as we love each other by patiently, kindly and humbly speaking that word to each other in any way we can. The passage mentions a number of ways we can do this—it speaks of teaching and admonishing and singing and giving thanks. We could easily flesh that list out with other speaking verbs like reminding, encouraging, exhorting, discussing, chewing over, and asking-the-kind-of-dumb-but-obvious-question-that-helps-everyone. Whatever mode of speech is involved, the content is ‘the Word of Christ’ and the purpose is to help one another grow to be like Christ. Now there’s a why to get us out the door on Wednesday nights. Small groups aren’t about helping me feel part of things, or helping me to connect with people, or even expressing my commitment to church. In fact, they are not really about me at all. The reason to go to a small group is that God has called me to love you and be an agent of your growth in Christ. I go because you need me to speak the Word of Christ to you (and because I need to hear it from you). The how of belonging to a small group flows straight out of this why, and is not very hard to figure out. It would include things like this: We should turn up every week, unless there is some important other reason—because is there really anything more important in your life than the job God has given us to do with each other in a small group? We should come ready to speak in love. Read and prepare the passage in advance if that helps, and take the initiative to speak in any way you can to help others understand and apply this part of God’s word. Ask questions. Answer questions. Grapple hard with the text in front of you. Share what you see. Look out for people who were just about to speak but got cut off, and invite them to contribute. Open up about your own struggles to put the word into practice. There are scads of opportunities to allow the ‘word to dwell richly’ in your group—and that’s your task. This why also generates a copious list of don’ts that I find very easy to compile (by thinking back over my own thoughtless, self-oriented behaviour in small groups over the years). Don’t sit on your hands during the discussion. Don’t try to save face or protect yourself. Don’t leave it to everyone else. Don’t jump on your hobby horses when they pass by. Don’t stick tenaciously to your point in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Don’t try to make yourself look good. Don’t give the lazy pat answer that you could have given without even looking at the text. Don’t take the group off to some other interesting passage that you like, unless it is vital for understanding the passage you’re actually reading. Don’t be afraid to open up and be honest about your struggles. I’ll leave you to figure out your own specific list of how-to’s, because it will be a little different for each person in each different group and circumstance. But if you can grasp why God wants to you go to small group this Wednesday night, then how is not so difficult. At least, it’s not difficult to understand. Doing it consistently and lovingly? Well that’s that the challenge the word of Christ brings us as we start a new of small group life together. PS. Feel free to share this article with your church or small group members. It might be a useful discussion-starter sometime early in the year as you talk about group norms and goals together. And if you’d like to get The Payneful Truth every week, along with work in progress excerpts and other goodies, sign up as a Partner. You can try it free for 90-days (click the button for more details). This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

Why be a small group member?

This is the audio version of a regular weekly email journal from Tony Payne, that seeks to apply the liberating truth of Christ crucified to every aspect of life and ministry.  www.thepaynefultruth.online

Here’s the next chapter of the evangelistic book you’re helping me write. It’s a bit longer than the earlier chapters—more like 3000 words than 2000—so I’m sending it out in two chunks (starting with the first half this week).The chapter is based on Point 4 of Two ways to live, which in the latest revised version says:Because of his love, God sent his Son into the world: the man Jesus Christ.Jesus always lived under God’s rule.But Jesus took our punishment by dying in our place.Massive ideas, all of them. You’ll see that this week’s instalment basically discusses the first two of the statements. As I’m always I’m keen to hear from you, with critiques, suggestions and ideas. Don’t hold back! In particular, because there is just SO much to say about who Jesus is, about his coming into the world, his life, his atoning death—I’m especially keen to hear about anything vital you think I’ve missed out so far, and whether anything I have included could be sacrificed if necessary. You can read the text below, or listen via the audio player above, or you can also download a PDF of the chapter, which is easier for printing and for referring to specific lines and paragraphs. TPChapter 4: The life and death of JesusThe backdrop is in place. The supporting actors are in position. The lights go up, and now the main act begins. The central character of the Christian message steps onto the stage of history.Jesus himself.The background we’ve traced so far—of God as creator and ruler of all, of human rebellion against God, and God’s justice against us—all of this prepares us for Jesus’ arrival.This is how the Bible itself is structured. The first half (the Old Testament) sets up the great problem of God and us and the world; the second half (the New Testament) tells us what God himself does to redeem the situation through Jesus.However, it would be wrong to think that the Old Testament is only about the doom and gloom of the human problem. Also running through the Old Testament like a scarlet thread is the patience and kindness and love of God for flawed, rebellious humans like us. God chooses a particular nation—Israel, the descendants of Abraham—to be his own special people. Time and again in the Old Testament, God kindly and lovingly rescues his people from the consequences of their own actions. He delivers them from their enemies, and provides for them in multiple ways, even though they continue to be stubborn and rebellious towards him.In fact, God repeatedly promises in the Old Testament that because of his love, he will one day step in personally to fix all the mess that has erupted and spread because of human rebellion against him. Sometimes God promises that he himself will come and bring mercy and salvation (for example in Isaiah 40). At other points, he promises that he will send his anointed king, or ‘Messiah’, to set people free and defeat evil and reign victorious over all.(A little footnote here that will be important later on. In the Old Testament, the way someone was made king was by anointing them with oil. So the Hebrew word for ‘anointed one’ came to mean essentially ‘the king God had appointed’. That word was ‘Messiah’. The word ‘Christ’ in the New Testament is the Greek language version of that same word. So a ‘Messiah’ or ‘Christ’ is a ‘king appointed by God’.)Here’s what the prophet Isaiah predicted would happen when God sent his anointed Messiah to bring relief to his people:The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,because the LORD has anointed me (i.e. made me a ‘Messiah-king’)to bring good news to the poor;he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,to proclaim liberty to the captives,and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor,and the day of vengeance of our God. (Isaiah 61:1-2)At the time that Jesus was born, some 700 years after Isaiah’s prophecy, the Jewish people were still expecting this liberating Messiah-King to arrive.But when Jesus did come, he didn’t fit their expectations at all. He still doesn’t meet our expectations today.If God was going to send a ‘Messiah’ to fix everything up, to right all the wrongs, to bring restoration and liberty and salvation and all the rest, how would you write the script? What sort of person would he be? And what would he do to save the day and set everything straight?You probably wouldn’t have him being born to a young unmarried girl in an out of the way place in the humblest of circumstances, with his first cradle being a ‘manger’ (which was either a stable for sheltering animals, or perhaps an animal food trough).You probably wouldn’t have him live in obscurity as a tradesman until his 30th birthday, have a short three-year career as a teacher and wonder-worker, give him a support crew of nobodies and lowlifes, have the entire intellectual, religious and political establishment against him, and then cap it all off by having him executed in the most humiliating way possible.In so many ways, Jesus wasn’t and isn’t what people expected. And there’s so much that could be said about him—who he was, what he taught, what he did, the impact he had on those around him, and so on. There are four accounts of Jesus’ life in the New Testament (the four ‘Gospels’, as they are called). It’s well worth reading one of them to fill out what I am going to summarize here only briefly. (Footnote here to The Essential Jesus).There are four really significant things to know about Jesus. We’ll talk about the first three in this chapter and the fourth in the next: his arrival, his life, his death, his resurrection.His arrivalMost of the time, we talk about babies being born not arriving. To ‘arrive’ means that you’ve come from somewhere else.That’s how the New Testament authors constantly talk about Jesus. He wasn’t simply born. He arrived. He ‘came’ into the world. He was God’s own Son, sent into the world by God to be born as a man; sent to fulfil God’s ancient promise that he would one day come to his people and rescue them.One of the most striking and beautiful passages in the New Testament, the opening of John’s Gospel, puts it like this:In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it …And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.With the birth of Jesus, John is saying here, God himself stepped into his creation. His own ‘word’—the very expression of his mind and person—became flesh and lived among us.As the Gospel accounts unfold, we constantly see people trying to come to terms with this. On the one hand, Jesus is clearly a real, flesh-and-blood man like anyone else. He eats, he sleeps, he weeps, he gets angry, he suffers.And yet he keeps speaking and acting as he if he is more than a man. He tells people that their sins are forgiven (Mark 2:5). He speaks and acts with an extraordinary authority, even over the creation itself. He heals diseases and stills storms with a word (Mark 2:1-12; Mark 4:35-41). He claims to be God’s Son, sent from God the Father, the only one who truly knows the Father, and whom the Father has appointed to be the judge of the world (John 5:19-29). It’s no wonder that the people of Jesus’ time were astonished and confounded by him, and wondered whether he might be the long-awaited Messiah-king.As CS Lewis once famously wrote, someone who says the kinds of things that Jesus said about himself is not simply a noble moral teacher. He is either seriously deluded about himself, or else a charlatan making outrageous claims about himself, or else he is who he claims to be—God’s own Son, sent into the world. But a nice, safe, admirable, moral teacher? This is not really an option that Jesus himself leaves open to us.His lifeAll the same, Jesus certainly lived an impeccably moral life, and was an extraordinary teacher.For me personally, this is one of the reasons I find the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life so compelling. I’m a devoted reader of novels, and one of the hardest tasks in fiction is to create a genuinely good character. The more moral and good you try to make your character, the less believable they become. Perhaps this is because we know that humans are so flawed, and that even the best of us can’t escape the gravitational pull of our own weakness and self-interest.In the Gospels, though, we constantly encounter someone who does what is right and good and loving and compassionate, and never seems to get it wrong. Jesus knows when to be indignantly angry at injustice and corruption, and when to weep over it. He knows when to rebuke religious hypocrites and when to offer them a path to forgiveness and change.He is just … perfect on every occasion, and yet in a way that is utterly believable as you read it. I don’t see how you could make Jesus up.The Bible’s own explanation for Jesus’ perfection of character is that he was the one human being in all of our history who didn’t reject God in any way, or rebel against his rule—as we all have done. Jesus always lived with God as king.His teaching also constantly revolved around this theme. He spoke often of ‘the kingdom of God’—what it would mean to live under God’s rule instead of rebelling against him. He taught about living a ‘kingdom’ kind of life, a life of love, justice, mercy, kindness, and so on—that is, the kind of life we were created to live, but which we’ve all walked away from and messed up, by rebelling against God and his ways.Jesus always lived under God’s kingship or rule, and taught others to do the same.Of all the people who have ever lived, he was the only one not to come under the sentence of God’s judgement. He was the only human who didn’t deserve to die.And yet he not only died; he died an agonising and humiliating death as a criminal.You have to ask why.His death(Stay tuned …) This is one of the ‘freelist’ editions of The Payneful Truth that goes out to everyone on the list. If you’d like to get every edition every week, sign up as a subscriber. Click this button to find out more and to get a 90-day free trial. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

Here’s the next chapter of <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/p/the-2wtl-book-introduction" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the evangelistic book you’re helping me write</a>. It’s a bit longer than the earlier chapters—more like 3000 words than 2000—so I’m sending it out in two chunks (starting with the first half this week). The chapter is based on Point 4 of Two ways to live, which in the latest revised version says: Because of his love, God sent his Son into the world: the man Jesus Christ. Jesus always lived under God’s rule. But Jesus took our punishment by dying in our place. Massive ideas, all of them. You’ll see that this week’s instalment basically discusses the first two of the statements. As I’m always I’m keen to hear from you, with critiques, suggestions and ideas. Don’t hold back! In particular, because there is just SO much to say about who Jesus is, about his coming into the world, his life, his atoning death—I’m especially keen to hear about anything vital you think I’ve missed out so far, and whether anything I have included could be sacrificed if necessary. You can read the text below, or listen via the audio player above, or you can also download a PDF of the chapter, which is easier for printing and for referring to specific lines and paragraphs. TP Chapter 4: The life and death of Jesus The backdrop is in place. The supporting actors are in position. The lights go up, and now the main act begins. The central character of the Christian message steps onto the stage of history. Jesus himself. The background we’ve traced so far—of God as creator and ruler of all, of human rebellion against God, and God’s justice against us—all of this prepares us for Jesus’ arrival. This is how the Bible itself is structured. The first half (the Old Testament) sets up the great problem of God and us and the world; the second half (the New Testament) tells us what God himself does to redeem the situation through Jesus. However, it would be wrong to think that the Old Testament is only about the doom and gloom of the human problem. Also running through the Old Testament like a scarlet thread is the patience and kindness and love of God for flawed, rebellious humans like us. God chooses a particular nation—Israel, the descendants of Abraham—to be his own special people. Time and again in the Old Testament, God kindly and lovingly rescues his people from the consequences of their own actions. He delivers them from their enemies, and provides for them in multiple ways, even though they continue to be stubborn and rebellious towards him. In fact, God repeatedly promises in the Old Testament that because of his love, he will one day step in personally to fix all the mess that has erupted and spread because of human rebellion against him. Sometimes God promises that he himself will come and bring mercy and salvation (for example in Isaiah 40). At other points, he promises that he will send his anointed king, or ‘Messiah’, to set people free and defeat evil and reign victorious over all. (A little footnote here that will be important later on. In the Old Testament, the way someone was made king was by anointing them with oil. So the Hebrew word for ‘anointed one’ came to mean essentially ‘the king God had appointed’. That word was ‘Messiah’. The word ‘Christ’ in the New Testament is the Greek language version of that same word. So a ‘Messiah’ or ‘Christ’ is a ‘king appointed by God’.) Here’s what the prophet Isaiah predicted would happen when God sent his anointed Messiah to bring relief to his people: The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me (i.e. made me a ‘Messiah-king’) to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God. (Isaiah 61:1-2) At the time that Jesus was born, some 700 years after Isaiah’s prophecy, the Jewish people were still expecting this liberating Messiah-King to arrive. But when Jesus did come, he didn’t fit their expectations at all. He still doesn’t meet our expectations today. If God was going to send a ‘Messiah’ to fix everything up, to right all the wrongs, to bring restoration and liberty and salvation and all the rest, how would you write the script? What sort of person would he be? And what would he do to save the day and set everything straight? You probably wouldn’t have him being born to a young unmarried girl in an out of the way place in the humblest of circumstances, with his first cradle being a ‘manger’ (which was either a stable for sheltering animals, or perhaps an animal food trough). You probably wouldn’t have him live in obscurity as a tradesman until his 30th birthday, have a short three-year career as a teacher and wonder-worker, give him a support crew of nobodies and lowlifes, have the entire intellectual, religious and political establishment against him, and then cap it all off by having him executed in the most humiliating way possible. In so many ways, Jesus wasn’t and isn’t what people expected. And there’s so much that could be said about him—who he was, what he taught, what he did, the impact he had on those around him, and so on. There are four accounts of Jesus’ life in the New Testament (the four ‘Gospels’, as they are called). It’s well worth reading one of them to fill out what I am going to summarize here only briefly. (Footnote here to The Essential Jesus). There are four really significant things to know about Jesus. We’ll talk about the first three in this chapter and the fourth in the next: his arrival, his life, his death, his resurrection. His arrival Most of the time, we talk about babies being born not arriving. To ‘arrive’ means that you’ve come from somewhere else. That’s how the New Testament authors constantly talk about Jesus. He wasn’t simply born. He arrived. He ‘came’ into the world. He was God’s own Son, sent into the world by God to be born as a man; sent to fulfil God’s ancient promise that he would one day come to his people and rescue them. One of the most striking and beautiful passages in the New Testament, the opening of John’s Gospel, puts it like this: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it … And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. With the birth of Jesus, John is saying here, God himself stepped into his creation. His own ‘word’—the very expression of his mind and person—became flesh and lived among us. As the Gospel accounts unfold, we constantly see people trying to come to terms with this. On the one hand, Jesus is clearly a real, flesh-and-blood man like anyone else. He eats, he sleeps, he weeps, he gets angry, he suffers. And yet he keeps speaking and acting as he if he is more than a man. He tells people that their sins are forgiven (Mark 2:5). He speaks and acts with an extraordinary authority, even over the creation itself. He heals diseases and stills storms with a word (Mark 2:1-12; Mark 4:35-41). He claims to be God’s Son, sent from God the Father, the only one who truly knows the Father, and whom the Father has appointed to be the judge of the world (John 5:19-29). It’s no wonder that the people of Jesus’ time were astonished and confounded by him, and wondered whether he might be the long-awaited Messiah-king. As CS Lewis once famously wrote, someone who says the kinds of things that Jesus said about himself is not simply a noble moral teacher. He is either seriously deluded about himself, or else a charlatan making outrageous claims about himself, or else he is who he claims to be—God’s own Son, sent into the world. But a nice, safe, admirable, moral teacher? This is not really an option that Jesus himself leaves open to us. His life All the same, Jesus certainly lived an impeccably moral life, and was an extraordinary teacher. For me personally, this is one of the reasons I find the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life so compelling. I’m a devoted reader of novels, and one of the hardest tasks in fiction is to create a genuinely good character. The more moral and good you try to make your character, the less believable they become. Perhaps this is because we know that humans are so flawed, and that even the best of us can’t escape the gravitational pull of our own weakness and self-interest. In the Gospels, though, we constantly encounter someone who does what is right and good and loving and compassionate, and never seems to get it wrong. Jesus knows when to be indignantly angry at injustice and corruption, and when to weep over it. He knows when to rebuke religious hypocrites and when to offer them a path to forgiveness and change. He is just … perfect on every occasion, and yet in a way that is utterly believable as you read it. I don’t see how you could make Jesus up. The Bible’s own explanation for Jesus’ perfection of character is that he was the one human being in all of our history who didn’t reject God in any way, or rebel against his rule—as we all have done. Jesus always lived with God as king. His teaching also constantly revolved around this theme. He spoke often of ‘the kingdom of God’—what it would mean to live under God’s rule instead of rebelling against him. He taught about living a ‘kingdom’ kind of life, a life of love, justice, mercy, kindness, and so on—that is, the kind of life we were created to live, but which we’ve all walked away from and messed up, by rebelling against God and his ways. Jesus always lived under God’s kingship or rule, and taught others to do the same. Of all the people who have ever lived, he was the only one not to come under the sentence of God’s judgement. He was the only human who didn’t deserve to die. And yet he not only died; he died an agonising and humiliating death as a criminal. You have to ask why. His death (Stay tuned …) This is one of the ‘freelist’ editions of The Payneful Truth that goes out to everyone on the list. If you’d like to get every edition every week, sign up as a subscriber. Click this button to find out more and to get a 90-day free trial. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

The 2wtl book: Chapter 4 (pt 1)

For our first Q&amp;A interview for 2022, I figured it was time to sit down with Phillip Jensen and have a chin wag. As is usually the case when we get together, the conversation bounced here and there, covering everything from why the resurrection is the climax of the gospel, to why our preaching should be more like an exposé than an apology. The audio version of the conversation goes for about 40 minutes. The edited text version below doesn’t cover the whole thing—but I figured that 3000 words of transcript was enough!Enjoy.TPTony: So there are all kinds of things I was going to talk you about today. But you just were mentioning before that you’ve started work on another book—on evangelism. Why do we need a book on evangelism?Phillip: Well, the book that's been a great help to people was Chapman's Know and Tell The Gospel. But a generation has risen up that has never heard of Chappo, and people read books that are current rather than what is really best. So I think we just need another book that is currently teaching people about evangelism, encouraging them to do it.TP: What’s the outline of it?PJ: Part 1 is on the who, why, what, when kind of thing—who evangelises, why do you evangelise? Part 2 then works through the gospel itself (I'm going to use Two ways to live as the summary) showing the kategorics of it rather than the apologetics of it. Because I think in our evangelism, we are too defensive and not... What's the alternate word for defensive that's nice?TP: Positive?PJ: Well … we're not telling the world that the world is wrong. But if the end point is that want to ask people to repent, you’ve got to point out what's wrong with your life that you need to repent from. And so, it's showing the implications of creation and rebellion and judgment in terms of how the world is operating in blindness and ignorance. So it's the accusing of the world by the gospel. And then, Part 3 of the book is about the spiritual nature of evangelism. Because it's about prayer. It's about the work of the Holy Spirit in changing people's lives. It's about our need to beg God for the mercy that is really required. We need to be more encouraged, I think, that this is not an impossible task because we have God doing the task. The Holy Spirit in the end is the evangelist.TP: In talking about ‘kategorics’ in Part 2, are you saying—if repentance is a turning from and a turning to, what are you turning from? Like turning from idols to the true and living God?PJ: Yes that’s right. Think how the Bible treats idolatry. It really says that it's foolishness; it's an absurdity. To worship things that are less than yourself as if they are God, is just an absurdity. And likewise, the fool says in his heart, there is no God. But we say, “All of the most educated, wise, sensible people in all the universe are saying there is no God. And so we've got to answer their accusations.” Now, the fool of Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 is a moral fool—but then that's the point.TP: So ‘positive’ is not the right word. We’re not trying to be positive about the world, but expose the folly of the world through shining the light of the gospel on it. But I was going to ask you: how do we do that in a way that doesn't come across as the Nasty Party or as a negative, unattractive kind of presentation?PJ: Well, personally, it’s simple. Because personally, it's so easy to love people. And in the context of your genuine care and concern and love for them, the negative things that you say are part of that expression of love. But media-wise and in a book, it's much harder to do.What I am trying to emphasize is that the thing that connects us with people in the world is not culture studies, and so on. The thing that connects us is creation. We're humans, we have babies, we're in love, we live in a magnificent creation. And so, try and say the positive things that are part of the way in which God has made us and which work and which we enjoy.But having said all that, no matter how hard you try, in a hyper-sensitive age, as soon as you say, "Yeah, but we're all liars" …  It’s offensive.TP: Are you saying that if we get too apologetic or defensive about the gospel, we don't expose people to truth about themselves?PJ: Yes, absolutely. And in fact, I looked at apologia in the New Testament. It's never used of intellectual defence. It's always used of what you say when you're dragged in front of the court.TP: Like when Paul making his defence before...PJ: Festus or Agrippa or people like that. That's when you use the word. There is the reference in 1 Peter 3 about giving the defence for the hope that lies within you. But that's in the context of being accused of being immoral and then being dragged off and persecuted. So it always seems to be in the persecution context.And kategoria (to accuse, to convict) is used almost twice as often as apologia. But hardly anybody talks about that—about ‘kategorics’.The other good word, which we don't know how to translate, is the one in John 16 about Holy Spirit convicting the world of sin and righteous and judgement. And in that sense, while I need to point out what's wrong with the world, it's the Holy Spirit who does that work of conviction.I wonder if the best word is ‘exposé’. We’re trying to do an exposé of the world. A bit like how the ICAC in NSW ‘exposes’ corruption but doesn’t actually do the prosecuting. It’s the Holy Spirit who prosecutes.TP: So as part of this book on evangelism, you're going to be talking about what the gospel actually is, the gospel that we preach, and you’re going to use Two Ways To Live as your summary or framework—which is a convenient segue to one of the things that I wanted to ask you about.With this new version of Two Ways To Live—one of the things that it's managed to successfully convey is the centrality and importance of the resurrection of Jesus.Most people don't think of it that way. In fact, most of us would probably say the cross is the centre or the nutshell or the climax of the gospel, and the resurrection is kind of the denouement, the wrapping up of the loose ends. So why do you say that the resurrection is the climax of the gospel?PJ: When you analyse the New Testament and its gospel preaching, it nearly always features the resurrection. And I think in the Book of Acts, it always is on the resurrection. And what is interesting in the Book of Acts is that it's never on the atoning work of the cross. Luke knows about the atoning work of the cross, because Paul speaks about it in Acts 20 to the Ephesian elders. It's not as if it's a theologically unknown thing. But that’s not what they preached when they were speaking to the Jews in the synagogues, or the Gentiles in the synagogues, or the out and out Gentiles in Athens. But they always preached the resurrection.It's slightly astonishing when you first see it, because most gospel preaching in my lifetime has been about Jesus dying on the cross for my sins—which I believe and the New Testament believes. But then the resurrection is, “Oh and by the way, he's not dead; he's alive.” It has no theological place. It's just a kind of an end point somehow.But that's not how it was in the New Testament. As you explore the word ‘gospel’, it means ‘the great declaration’. And the great declaration is that Jesus is King. Which explains why in the Gospels, when Jesus preaches the gospel, it's all about the kingdom of God. It's not about the crucifixion there either. And so the opening gospel reference is Jesus in Mark 1:14-15: "The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel." It's about the coming of the Kingdom. And with the resurrection of Jesus, the kingdom of Jesus, the kingdom of our Lord has arrived. And so, that's the announcement, the King has come.But when you come to the answer, “the King has come”, you find out that the way he came, was by conquering the enemy. And he conquered the enemy by his death and resurrection—not that I want toreplace Penal Substitutionary Atonement with Christus Victor. But Christus Victor is there. It's just not the alternative to Penal Sub. How did he conquer the enemy? Well, by paying the penalty for us and turning aside God's wrath—so that the outcome is you can preach to those who repent and acknowledge the King that you'll be forgiven, you'll be pardoned, because he became King by his atoning death and resurrection. But resurrection is a key element to it.Once you notice this, you also begin to notice all the other NT gospel summaries in which the resurrection is central. For example, much of Romans is an exposition of the propitiatory redemption by Jesus, but it starts with Paul talking about the ‘gospel of God’, and summarizing it as: “concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 1:3-4).  2 Tim 2:8 is much the same: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel”.Now, none of this means that the atoning work of the Lord, His death on the cross is an irrelevance! It is absolutely fundamental to his resurrection. Without it, there would be no resurrection. The two go hand-in-hand, but the thing you say to the outsider first is resurrection. The thing that you then say is forgiveness through the death. That would seem as the pattern in the New Testament uses.TP: It's like that verse in Acts 2 when Peter gets to the climax of his sermon and he says, "Therefore let all Israel know that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified."PJ: Yes, and then they're cut to the heart. And ask what can we do?TP: Repent and be forgiven.PJ: Yes.TP: So, in Two Ways To Live you get to the resurrection at point five of the six points. It's the climax, and point six is the response. And in this new edition, we've put the offer of forgiveness of sins into point five, into the resurrection box for this reason—to capture the sense that we're at the climax and the offer of the gospel. Everything has now been said. We've understood the death of Jesus, because we've understood the judgment of God, because we've understood sin, because we've understood creation, and so then you get to the climax in the resurrection where the gospel declaration and offer is.PJ: Yes. In Luke 24, in the upper room where he's speaking to the apostles in his resurrection, he says: "It was necessary for the Christ to suffer and rise from the dead, and repentance and forgiveness of sins to be preached to all nations” and so on. I think most of the community's evangelism in my lifetime has been “Christ suffered for your sins … and repentance and forgiveness of sin should be all preached to all nations”. You leave out the resurrection phrase—whereas the resurrection is the effective solution, and the effective consequence, of him dying for our sins, which enables repentance and forgiveness now to be preached to all nations.TP: And to go further, I'd say the gospel I've heard for most of my lifetime in evangelical churches is: he died for our sins so that you can be forgiven and receive eternal life through that atonement. Virtually full stop. ‘Repent’ is often not there.PJ: Yes. And why is that so? It can be lots of reasons. One is we don't like to say anything negative to people about their lives. Another is that we're so committed to the idea that gospel is ‘good news’, rather than ‘great news’ that we don't want to say anything that has any negative element to it at all. We just want to tell the good news that you're forgiven, you're forgiven, you're forgiven.TP: And if you don't talk about Jesus as the Risen King, then there's nobody really to repent before.PJ: I spent many, many happy years at Katoomba Convention. And I was a young fellow when I was involved in the Council there. And there are a lot of really great old men of evangelicalism in Sydney, who shared with me lots of stories and episodes of life. I heard many times about the famous evangelists who came to Sydney in the 1930s and 40s and 50s.  Billy Graham (in 1959) was just the end one. There was Hiram Appleby, and all kinds of people. But they said that the one who had the smallest number of converts, but the highest rate of retention was WP Nicholson, the great Irish evangelist. Not many people got converted by his preaching, but the people who got converted were really converted. The jungle doctor, Paul White, was one of them. And one of the distinctive things of WP Nicholson's evangelism was that he used to ask for repentance and restitution. "If you really are repentant, well then go and pay back what you've done." He preached restitution, which limited the number of people who signed the decision cards! But those who did, really repented.TP: As I've read about the gospel and controversies about the gospel over the last 25 or 30 years, there's been this fight between two groups—the forgiveness-cross-penal substitution people, and the resurrection-kingdom people; almost like there are two gospels. And the resurrection-kingdom gospel is often about the renovation and renewal of the world, and it becomes an atonement-less, cross-less kind of gospel.  And I can understand why many good brothers  don't want to go there, and so are a bit reluctant to give the resurrection too much play in case it becomes this kind of kingdom gospel.PJ: Yes you have to keep the two together. It’s also like that gospel where you can supposedly have Jesus as your Saviour and then some other time have a second kind of blessing of his Lordship. But, the only way he saves you is by being your Lord. You have to keep the two things together.TP: The other really unique thing about Two Ways To Live as a gospel outline is that it talks about creation, and hardly any other gospel presentations do that.PJ: No, they don't. And hardly any in the New Testament do either. Adam is hardly mentioned in the Old Testament once you get past Gen 1-3. But creation is the backdrop to everything that happens in the selection of Abraham and the history of Israel. And it's a part that I think the Jews didn't quarrel about. The Sadducees and the Pharisees fought over the resurrection and over angels and over prophets. They didn't fight over creation; that was just a given. And so, there was no reason for Paul to particularly preach in the synagogues about creation or for Jesus to preach about creation. However, it is striking that when Paul goes to Lystra and he's talking to pagans and when he goes to Athens and he's talking to idolaters, then he begins with the one God, who is the creator of all and to whom we are answerable—and so worshipping men in Lystra, and worshipping idols in Acts 17, is totally inappropriate. This is critical to understanding their situation and need of forgiveness and the need of the Christ.And that I think is true in our context. In one sense, previous generations accepted creation. But we’ve now lived through this great fight over evolution and intelligent design, where atheists use evolution to argue against God's existence, and Christians use intelligent design to argue for God's existence, and neither are listening to each other at all.The opposite of creation is not evolution. The opposite of creation is accidentalism; it's naturalistic materialism and atheism. That's why the Christians are right in feeling that evolution is on the side of the atheists because the atheists use evolution in that way. But we mustn't get ourselves hung up with the mechanisms. The issue is accidentalism, as opposed to purposeful personal creation. You get rid of creation and the creator, you then change the doctrine of sin, because sin is no longer humans’ rebellion against their creator; sin now becomes breaking rules and regulations. And so, instead of being people who place themselves outside the law, and people who make their own laws, as the essence of sin, we become law breakers as the essence of sin. And so, we then move to solve the problems by attending to the symptoms, rather than attending to the disease. And if you've got a wrong diagnosis, just attending to symptoms for example, you'll never solve the problem.PJ: You've got to diagnose what the disease is. And the disease is our rebellion against God—which means you can be a highly moral person, and totally godless. Whereas the highly moral person doesn't feel like we are preaching to them because they are moral.And so, without a proper doctrine of creation, I don't think you've get a proper doctrine of sin. And without a proper doctrine of sin, the reason for judgment seems weird. Because, I mean, why do you get sent to hell for eternity for telling lies or stealing from Woolworths. It seems disproportionate, somehow. But that's because you're thinking just of the symptoms; you're not thinking of how you have put yourself in total opposition to God.And so you don't understand, "How did Jesus dying on the cross actually pay for my sin?" It all becomes de-personalized, de-relationalized and symptomatic, rather than disease-oriented. So we need to re-introduce creation into our understanding, so that people will understand what sin is, what God's judgment is, and how Jesus' death pays for it.TP: I think that's very true. I think some of the other gospel presentations I've seen recently focus on the problems we have—our lack of meaning, our lack of purpose, the things that we desire and seek, and so on. These are symptoms. But if we don't penetrate further down to the underlying problem, which is a rebellion against God, it's very hard to see then why death is God's judgment against us, and why Jesus’ death is the answer.PJ: And it lacks the eschatology too, doesn't it? It speaks of the damage that we do to ourselves, each other and the world (as our new version puts it), but doesn’t go further than offering to fix that damage. If I can fix the damage, then I’ve helped you. And so, Jesus loves you, and he's shown he loves you by his death, and has risen from the dead. And so now turn back to him, and you will have a fulfilled, happy, satisfied life. But the eschatology of the gospel has just completely gone.So I think the creation background is an important one for our understanding.Hope you enjoyed that. I’ll be back next week, God willing, with another instalment from the Two Ways to Live evangelistic book that I’m writing. I’m up to chapter 4 on the death of Jesus, and plan to send at least some of that chapter out to the whole list next week. If you’d like to get every edition of The Payneful Truth every week, become a subscriber. Here’s a free trial link: This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

Conducting an expos&#233;

I like Christmas, in a bittersweet kind of way. It’s beautiful and fun and full of hope, but also complex and difficult and sometimes sad. My mother died a few months ago, and I’m sure I’ll really miss her on Christmas morning. Christmas is a time of joy that reminds us that joy is elusive and surrounded by trouble.Like a baby laid in a manger, you might say.My favourite secular Christmas song captures this: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas”, originally sung by Judy Garland in Meet me in St Louis, and included on just about everyone’s Christmas album ever since.It captures the bittersweet nature of Christmas so wistfully and longingly. It speaks of Christmas as a time of gathering and friends and even hope. And yet our lives never live up to that dream. In fact, we can only hope that maybe next year “our troubles will be far away”. Maybe next year, we will actually be able to gather with all our old friends as we once did. “Until then, we’ll just have to muddle through somehow.”Here’s the James Taylor version:Of course, the best Christmas carols reflect this even better—that is, the joy of God becoming man because man is in such a desperate state. Hark, the Herald is famous for speaking of “Peace on earth and mercy mild; God and sinners reconciled”. Joy to the world has an often-omitted third verse that speaks of Jesus coming to lift the curse.But my favourite Christmas hymn, which is hardly ever sung these days, does it beautifully:Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour,All for love’s sake becamest poor;Thrones for a manger didst surrender,Sapphire paved courts for stable floor.Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour,All for love’s sake becamest poor.Thou who art God beyond all praising,All for love’s sake becamest man;Stooping so low, but sinners raising,Heavenward by Thine eternal plan.Thou who art God beyond all praising,All for love’s sake becamest man.(Here’s the King’s College Cambridge version:)The news of Jesus’ incarnation is good news, because of the lost and sinful world into which he was born, and which he came to save. He became poor to make the poor rich. I’ve spent the last few days of this last pre-Christmas week finishing a draft of chapter 2 of the Two ways to live evangelistic book (that a number of you are helping me write). It’s the chapter all about our rejection of God, and all the damage we do to ourselves and each other and the world. I’ve pasted the final section of the chapter below (this is the part that those of you who are partner/subscribers have been waiting on).It’s certainly not the happiest, tinsel-covered subject for an end of year meditation.But then again, maybe it’s the perfect pre-Christmas reading; a picture of the black night of Christmas eve into which the light of the world was born.The 2wtl Book: Chapter 2The Human ProblemThe first two thirds of the chapter sets out the nature of rebellion against God. This final part thinks about the consequences for our lives.…When we reject God, we attack the foundations of everything that is true and good and beautiful in the world. We embrace the first lie. And then all the other lies and follies and consequences start to compound.We see this played out in so many ways, in our own lives and in our broader culture.In our personal lives, perhaps the most significant consequence of our declaration of independence from God is how hard we find it to be interdependent with each other. Once I’ve decided that I’m the centre of my world (not God), that puts me in an odd position with respect to You. We’re no longer on the same level—both creatures of God, both in his image, both taking our cue from him as to how we are to treat each other as fellow creatures.Now I’m the little god in charge of my own self and my own world, and when I encounter You, I find another little god who also thinks they are the most important person in their world. And then I find that there isn’t room in our relationship for two little gods. One of us has to prevail.The self-interest that comes so naturally to us makes all relationships difficult. We’re alienated from each other.We’re also alienated from the world itself. Because Western society is no longer confident that the world is a created place, with a good and beautiful shape given to it by its Creator, we don’t know what to do with the world. There are multiple examples. We don’t seem able to manage and develop the world’s resources without exploiting and destroying them. We aren’t able to find political leaders who don’t end up disillusioning us with their lies or folly or corruption. We even don’t seem able to figure out something as basic as what it means to be a man or a woman—in fact, a growing number of Westerners are now nervous to say that there even are such things as ‘men’ and ‘women’ (which is a rebellion against reality if ever there was one).For me personally, one of the most interesting and striking consequences is simply how ugly the modern Western world is. We seem to have lost confidence in the possibility or desirability of beauty. Our cities are full of thrusting buildings of concrete and glass and steel, whose ugliness we hardly notice any more. When was the last time you saw a house or a set of apartments built in the last 50 years, and thought how pleasing it was to the eye?It’s the same with the arts. Almost no-one listens to modern orchestral music these days, because it has become discordant and jarring. Modern art seems more interested in making political or transgressive statements than in expressing anything beautiful about the world. And whenever I see a poem printed in the review section of the Saturday paper, I valiantly try to read and make sense of it, but give up half way through.This was not the case in a previous era. The arts were massively and widely appreciated, and we still enjoy and appreciate the artfulness and beauty of those works today. We look at the architecture of a century ago and wonder how they made buildings of such lasting character and beauty.As a culture we find ourselves in the strange position. We’re like teenagers who can’t help being shaped and moulded by the family we were raised in, and yet whose hostility and rebellion against those values leaves us conflicted and confused. Our underlying cultural values are mostly Christian. And yet our rebellion against God and Christianity has clouded our minds and hearts. We can’t make sense of the world or of our lives. We still encounter the goodness and beauty of the world, and yet perversely we embrace ugliness and self-destructive behaviour.This is true of our culture. But more importantly, it is true for each one of us. The human problem isn’t just out there in society. It’s in each of our hearts. We’re all personally in rebellion against the God who made us.This is the human problem, and it’s grim news.But this grim news is a vital part of the back story to the incredible news (or ‘gospel’) about Jesus. If the news about Jesus was a movie, we’re still in that middle part of the story where things are getting worse and more complicated.Good news is coming. A resolution is coming. But to understand and appreciate it, there’s one more piece of sober news to wrap our minds and hearts around.It’s about God. We’ve talked a lot in this chapter about our attitude to God, our rebellion against him, and all the consequences that flow from that.But what is God’s attitude to our rebellion?Well that’s the end of chapter 2. Would love your thoughts, as always.Thanks again for your partnership and fellowship over this past 12 months. It’s been a joy to be able to write for you.Time for a little break (for all of us). I’ll be back in touch in the second week of January.TP This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

I like Christmas, in a bittersweet kind of way. It’s beautiful and fun and full of hope, but also complex and difficult and sometimes sad. My mother died a few months ago, and I’m sure I’ll really miss her on Christmas morning. Christmas is a time of joy that reminds us that joy is elusive and surrounded by trouble. Like a baby laid in a manger, you might say. My favourite secular Christmas song captures this: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas”, originally sung by Judy Garland in Meet me in St Louis, and included on just about everyone’s Christmas album ever since. It captures the bittersweet nature of Christmas so wistfully and longingly. It speaks of Christmas as a time of gathering and friends and even hope. And yet our lives never live up to that dream. In fact, we can only hope that maybe next year “our troubles will be far away”. Maybe next year, we will actually be able to gather with all our old friends as we once did. “Until then, we’ll just have to muddle through somehow.” Here’s the James Taylor version: Of course, the best Christmas carols reflect this even better—that is, the joy of God becoming man because man is in such a desperate state. Hark, the Herald is famous for speaking of “Peace on earth and mercy mild; God and sinners reconciled”. Joy to the world has an often-omitted third verse that speaks of Jesus coming to lift the curse. But my favourite Christmas hymn, which is hardly ever sung these days, does it beautifully: Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour, All for love’s sake becamest poor; Thrones for a manger didst surrender, Sapphire paved courts for stable floor. Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour, All for love’s sake becamest poor. Thou who art God beyond all praising, All for love’s sake becamest man; Stooping so low, but sinners raising, Heavenward by Thine eternal plan. Thou who art God beyond all praising, All for love’s sake becamest man. (Here’s the King’s College Cambridge version:) The news of Jesus’ incarnation is good news, because of the lost and sinful world into which he was born, and which he came to save. He became poor to make the poor rich. I’ve spent the last few days of this last pre-Christmas week finishing a draft of chapter 2 of the <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/p/lets-write-a-book" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Two ways to live</a><a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/p/lets-write-a-book" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> evangelistic book </a>(that a number of you are helping me write). It’s the chapter all about our rejection of God, and all the damage we do to ourselves and each other and the world. I’ve pasted the final section of the chapter below (this is the part that those of you who are partner/subscribers have been waiting on). It’s certainly not the happiest, tinsel-covered subject for an end of year meditation. But then again, maybe it’s the perfect pre-Christmas reading; a picture of the black night of Christmas eve into which the light of the world was born. The 2wtl Book: Chapter 2 The Human Problem The first two thirds of the chapter sets out the nature of rebellion against God. This final part thinks about the consequences for our lives. … When we reject God, we attack the foundations of everything that is true and good and beautiful in the world. We embrace the first lie. And then all the other lies and follies and consequences start to compound. We see this played out in so many ways, in our own lives and in our broader culture. In our personal lives, perhaps the most significant consequence of our declaration of independence from God is how hard we find it to be interdependent with each other. Once I’ve decided that I’m the centre of my world (not God), that puts me in an odd position with respect to You. We’re no longer on the same level—both creatures of God, both in his image, both taking our cue from him as to how we are to treat each other as fellow creatures. Now I’m the little god in charge of my own self and my own world, and when I encounter You, I find another little god who also thinks they are the most important person in their world. And then I find that there isn’t room in our relationship for two little gods. One of us has to prevail. The self-interest that comes so naturally to us makes all relationships difficult. We’re alienated from each other. We’re also alienated from the world itself. Because Western society is no longer confident that the world is a created place, with a good and beautiful shape given to it by its Creator, we don’t know what to do with the world. There are multiple examples. We don’t seem able to manage and develop the world’s resources without exploiting and destroying them. We aren’t able to find political leaders who don’t end up disillusioning us with their lies or folly or corruption. We even don’t seem able to figure out something as basic as what it means to be a man or a woman—in fact, a growing number of Westerners are now nervous to say that there even are such things as ‘men’ and ‘women’ (which is a rebellion against reality if ever there was one). For me personally, one of the most interesting and striking consequences is simply how ugly the modern Western world is. We seem to have lost confidence in the possibility or desirability of beauty. Our cities are full of thrusting buildings of concrete and glass and steel, whose ugliness we hardly notice any more. When was the last time you saw a house or a set of apartments built in the last 50 years, and thought how pleasing it was to the eye? It’s the same with the arts. Almost no-one listens to modern orchestral music these days, because it has become discordant and jarring. Modern art seems more interested in making political or transgressive statements than in expressing anything beautiful about the world. And whenever I see a poem printed in the review section of the Saturday paper, I valiantly try to read and make sense of it, but give up half way through. This was not the case in a previous era. The arts were massively and widely appreciated, and we still enjoy and appreciate the artfulness and beauty of those works today. We look at the architecture of a century ago and wonder how they made buildings of such lasting character and beauty. As a culture we find ourselves in the strange position. We’re like teenagers who can’t help being shaped and moulded by the family we were raised in, and yet whose hostility and rebellion against those values leaves us conflicted and confused. Our underlying cultural values are mostly Christian. And yet our rebellion against God and Christianity has clouded our minds and hearts. We can’t make sense of the world or of our lives. We still encounter the goodness and beauty of the world, and yet perversely we embrace ugliness and self-destructive behaviour. This is true of our culture. But more importantly, it is true for each one of us. The human problem isn’t just out there in society. It’s in each of our hearts. We’re all personally in rebellion against the God who made us. This is the human problem, and it’s grim news. But this grim news is a vital part of the back story to the incredible news (or ‘gospel’) about Jesus. If the news about Jesus was a movie, we’re still in that middle part of the story where things are getting worse and more complicated. Good news is coming. A resolution is coming. But to understand and appreciate it, there’s one more piece of sober news to wrap our minds and hearts around. It’s about God. We’ve talked a lot in this chapter about our attitude to God, our rebellion against him, and all the consequences that flow from that. But what is God’s attitude to our rebellion? Well that’s the end of chapter 2. Would love your thoughts, as always. Thanks again for your partnership and fellowship over this past 12 months. It’s been a joy to be able to write for you. Time for a little break (for all of us). I’ll be back in touch in the second week of January. TP This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Well, as promised, I’ve written the first draft of an introduction to the Two Ways to Live evangelistic book I’m hoping we can write together. (There’s a link below to read it.)Three quick things before we dive in.First off, does the book have a title? It’s way too early to worry about that. Let’s see what floats to the surface as we go along. For the time being, I’m just going to call it The 2WTL book.Secondly, who are we writing for? We could simply say ‘the non-Christian reader’, but we have to be more specific. The gospel conversation we have will always be shaped by the person we are talking to—by how much they already know, by their hang-ups or questions, by the language they use, by the assumptions they bring to the table.Books are the same. Every book has to have a clear idea of its readership. Who do we envisage holding this book in their hands and (God willing) being interested to read the whole thing?As you’ll see from the introduction, my instinct is to aim this book at the largest category of non-Christian people we are likely come across among our friends and family: the person who has been raised in our culture (that is, Western culture) but who has little or no current interest or contact with Christianity. They may have varying degrees of hostility or apathy or interest or total ignorance towards the gospel, but what unites them is that they inhabit our post-Christian, Western society.Is this the right target? It will make the book less effective for people who are still enmeshed in non-Western cultures (like Buddhism or Islam), even though they live in our street. And it will make the book a bit less sharp for ‘nominal Christians’ who go to church but aren’t converted.But it does target the vast majority of people we come across day-to-day. I’m interested in what you think about this. For the kind of people you’d like to give a gospel book to, is this an introduction that motivates them to keep reading, with the right expectations as they do so?Thirdly, what sort of feedback do I want from you? I don’t need comments on typos, grammar or spelling mistakes at this point. That’s for later. For the introduction, and for every chapter, what I’d love to hear from you is any of the following:Can you imagine your non-Christian friends and family reading this? Is there anything that would bore them, put them off or needlessly offend them?Is there something you think I could add—an idea or illustration or argument that would strengthen the chapter?Is there anything that could be cut, without making any real difference? Is the whole thing too long?Is any sentence or phrase or word unclear or obscure?To make it easier for you to give this feedback, and for me to collate and integrate it, I’m going to send each chapter out as a PDF with line numbers. This will mean there’s a standard way for us all to refer to particular sentences or parts of the chapter, and it also makes it easy for those of you who’d prefer to print out the chapter for reading.If you follow this link, it will take you to the post where you can download the PDF or listen to the chapter read out. After this first intro chapter, the remaining chapters will get emailed out to subscribers as part of the normal weekly edition. This means that if you want to keep getting the chapters as they come out, you’ll have to subscribe to the The Payneful Truth. And you can do that via the 90-day free-trial I’m running at the moment: When you’ve read the chapter, just send an email with your general comments and specific feedback to tonyjpayne@me.com. (Use those line numbers to refer to particular paragraphs or sentences.)I hope all that makes sense. Thanks again for being willing to help out.Looking at my schedule over the next few days, and where I’m up to with the next chapter (Chapter 1), I’m pretty sure it’s going to be later next week (or even early the week after) before I send that one out. Anyway, let’s get started. Here again is the link for the intro chapter:TP This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

Well, <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/p/lets-write-a-book" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">as promised</a>, I’ve written the first draft of an introduction to the Two Ways to Live evangelistic book I’m hoping we can write together. (There’s a link below to read it.) Three quick things before we dive in. First off, does the book have a title? It’s way too early to worry about that. Let’s see what floats to the surface as we go along. For the time being, I’m just going to call it The 2WTL book. Secondly, who are we writing for? We could simply say ‘the non-Christian reader’, but we have to be more specific. The gospel conversation we have will always be shaped by the person we are talking to—by how much they already know, by their hang-ups or questions, by the language they use, by the assumptions they bring to the table. Books are the same. Every book has to have a clear idea of its readership. Who do we envisage holding this book in their hands and (God willing) being interested to read the whole thing? As you’ll see from the introduction, my instinct is to aim this book at the largest category of non-Christian people we are likely come across among our friends and family: the person who has been raised in our culture (that is, Western culture) but who has little or no current interest or contact with Christianity. They may have varying degrees of hostility or apathy or interest or total ignorance towards the gospel, but what unites them is that they inhabit our post-Christian, Western society. Is this the right target? It will make the book less effective for people who are still enmeshed in non-Western cultures (like Buddhism or Islam), even though they live in our street. And it will make the book a bit less sharp for ‘nominal Christians’ who go to church but aren’t converted. But it does target the vast majority of people we come across day-to-day. I’m interested in what you think about this. For the kind of people you’d like to give a gospel book to, is this an introduction that motivates them to keep reading, with the right expectations as they do so? Thirdly, what sort of feedback do I want from you? I don’t need comments on typos, grammar or spelling mistakes at this point. That’s for later. For the introduction, and for every chapter, what I’d love to hear from you is any of the following: Can you imagine your non-Christian friends and family reading this? Is there anything that would bore them, put them off or needlessly offend them? Is there something you think I could add—an idea or illustration or argument that would strengthen the chapter? Is there anything that could be cut, without making any real difference? Is the whole thing too long? Is any sentence or phrase or word unclear or obscure? To make it easier for you to give this feedback, and for me to collate and integrate it, I’m going to send each chapter out as a PDF with line numbers. This will mean there’s a standard way for us all to refer to particular sentences or parts of the chapter, and it also makes it easy for those of you who’d prefer to print out the chapter for reading. <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/p/17b45091-17ab-4337-90ac-c67a32878e98" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">If you follow this link, it will take you to the post where you can download the PDF or listen to the chapter read out</a>. After this first intro chapter, the remaining chapters will get emailed out to subscribers as part of the normal weekly edition. This means that if you want to keep getting the chapters as they come out, you’ll have to subscribe to the The Payneful Truth. And you can do that via the 90-day free-trial I’m running at the moment: When you’ve read the chapter, just send an email with your general comments and specific feedback to tonyjpayne@me.com. (Use those line numbers to refer to particular paragraphs or sentences.) I hope all that makes sense. Thanks again for being willing to help out. Looking at my schedule over the next few days, and where I’m up to with the next chapter (Chapter 1), I’m pretty sure it’s going to be later next week (or even early the week after) before I send that one out. Anyway, let’s get started. Here again is the link for the intro chapter: TP This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

An intro to the intro

Here’s the first draft of the introductory chapter to the new evangelistic book I’m writing, based on Two Ways to Live. (See the PDF below.) The book will be coming out each week (or so) over the next few months here at The Payneful Truth. For more info about this project, and why I’d like your help, see here and then here.To receive each draft chapter as I write it, and to comment and give feedback, you’ll need to be a regular subscriber. To help you do that, here’s a free 90-day trial. Each chapter (including this intro) will be in PDF form, with line numbers (see below). This is to make it easy for everyone to comment, and to be able to refer to particular sections or paragraphs or sentences. Send your comments and feedback to tonyjpayne@me.com.(I’ll also record each chapter as a podcast, for those who prefer to listen.)Happy reading.TP This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

Here’s the first draft of the introductory chapter to the new evangelistic book I’m writing, based on Two Ways to Live. (See the PDF below.) The book will be coming out each week (or so) over the next few months here at The Payneful Truth. For more info about this project, and why I’d like your help, <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/p/lets-write-a-book" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">see here</a> and <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/publish/post/44550817" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">then here</a>. To receive each draft chapter as I write it, and to comment and give feedback, you’ll need to be a regular subscriber. To help you do that, here’s a free 90-day trial. Each chapter (including this intro) will be in PDF form, with line numbers (see below). This is to make it easy for everyone to comment, and to be able to refer to particular sections or paragraphs or sentences. Send your comments and feedback to tonyjpayne@me.com. (I’ll also record each chapter as a podcast, for those who prefer to listen.) Happy reading. TP This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

The 2wtl book: Introduction

More of an invitation than an article this week. (And if you’ve already read this invitation on the Matthias Media enews earlier this week, and signed up to The Payneful Truth, you don’t need to read this again!)I often catch myself when I come across a book with my name on the cover. I pick it up and read a paragraph and think, “Did I write this? Surely it was someone else. Me, write books? Ridiculous.”On the other hand, I also find myself regretting the books I never got around to writing.For example, somehow, in over three decades of producing Christian resources for Matthias Media, I didn’t ever think to write an evangelistic book based on Two Ways to Live. Don’t ask me why. Like most things I regret in life, I think I got distracted. For 35 years.It’s a book we undoubtedly need. We always need fresh evangelistic books, and one based on Two Ways to Live seems a blindingly obvious option. Perhaps that’s why I never thought to do it.Well I think it’s time.Over the next couple of months, I’m going to try to write a shortish, eight-part evangelistic book based around Two Ways to Live—an introduction, a conclusion, and a chapter for each of the six boxes.And if you’re willing, I’d like you to help me write it—in three ways.I’m going to send out each chapter as I write it here at The Payneful Truth, starting with the introduction later this week. That first one will go to everyone on the whole list, but after that I’ll keep sending out chapters most weeks as part of the regular weekly newsletter that partners/subscribers get. So your first job (if you’d like to help) is to become a partner and be part of the readership that forces me to write something every week and press ‘send’. You’ve no idea how valuable that is! (See below for how to sign up on a free trial.)Secondly, and most significantly, your task would be to give me honest feedback and ideas on each of the chapters. These will be first drafts, and the whole purpose of a first draft is to generate the much-better second draft. So I won’t be at all bothered when you tear my first draft to shreds—quite pleased in fact—and I’ll be delighted by the fresh ideas you generate that help make this book as good as it can be. It would be wonderful if, in our collective wisdom, we could come up with a resource that we’d be confident to give to our non-Christian friends and family.Thirdly, if in God’s kindness a good quality gospel book does emerge from this process, I’d love you to actually give it to all your non-Christian friends and family! (As I plan to do with mine.)To join in on this project, you’ll need to become a weekly subscriber. That usually costs $7 a month (or $70 a year). But since you’ll be doing me a favour and helping write this book, there’s a 90-day free trial available. You can hang around for the duration of this project, and drop back onto the free list after that if you’d like to. (Or stay on!)What do you think?Shall we write a book? This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

More of an invitation than an article this week. (And if you’ve already read this invitation on the Matthias Media enews earlier this week, and signed up to The Payneful Truth, you don’t need to read this again!) I often catch myself when I come across a book with my name on the cover. I pick it up and read a paragraph and think, “Did I write this? Surely it was someone else. Me, write books? Ridiculous.” On the other hand, I also find myself regretting the books I never got around to writing. For example, somehow, in over three decades of producing Christian resources for Matthias Media, I didn’t ever think to write an evangelistic book based on Two Ways to Live. Don’t ask me why. Like most things I regret in life, I think I got distracted. For 35 years. It’s a book we undoubtedly need. We always need fresh evangelistic books, and one based on Two Ways to Live seems a blindingly obvious option. Perhaps that’s why I never thought to do it. Well I think it’s time. Over the next couple of months, I’m going to try to write a shortish, eight-part evangelistic book based around Two Ways to Live—an introduction, a conclusion, and a chapter for each of the six boxes. And if you’re willing, I’d like you to help me write it—in three ways. I’m going to send out each chapter as I write it here at The Payneful Truth, starting with the introduction later this week. That first one will go to everyone on the whole list, but after that I’ll keep sending out chapters most weeks as part of the regular weekly newsletter that partners/subscribers get. So your first job (if you’d like to help) is to become a partner and be part of the readership that forces me to write something every week and press ‘send’. You’ve no idea how valuable that is! (See below for how to sign up on a free trial.) Secondly, and most significantly, your task would be to give me honest feedback and ideas on each of the chapters. These will be first drafts, and the whole purpose of a first draft is to generate the much-better second draft. So I won’t be at all bothered when you tear my first draft to shreds—quite pleased in fact—and I’ll be delighted by the fresh ideas you generate that help make this book as good as it can be. It would be wonderful if, in our collective wisdom, we could come up with a resource that we’d be confident to give to our non-Christian friends and family. Thirdly, if in God’s kindness a good quality gospel book does emerge from this process, I’d love you to actually give it to all your non-Christian friends and family! (As I plan to do with mine.) To join in on this project, you’ll need to become a weekly subscriber. That usually costs $7 a month (or $70 a year). But since you’ll be doing me a favour and helping write this book, there’s a <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/FreeTrial90" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">90-day free trial available</a>. You can hang around for the duration of this project, and drop back onto the free list after that if you’d like to. (Or stay on!) What do you think? Shall we write a book? This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

Let's write a book

Q&A with Phil

I can’t remember who first taught me this axiom of Bible reading, but I have been forever grateful. When you come across a knotty passage in Scripture, don’t glide past it—untie it.A confusing or confounding passage is an opportunity to learn. Sometimes knotty verses reveal our ignorance, or that we haven’t understood the passage—such as when we’re reading Hebrews 6 and the obscure figure of Melchizedek suddenly looms out of the mist and we wonder what’s he got to do with the price of fish.But sometimes we come across Bible verses that are knotty and confounding not because they are obscure but because we find them objectionable. They tie us in knots. They cut across our assumptions or expectations about what God is like or we are like or the world is like. They expose our deepest, baseline attitudes and beliefs, and where they have gone astray.We had one like this in church last Sunday. In Romans 9, after talking about how God will have mercy on some people and harden other people, and that it’s entirely up to him, Paul then asks the obvious rhetorical question:You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” (v 18)Fair enough question, you might think. If God calls all the shots, then why are we to blame for finding ourselves on his bad side? And then comes this:But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is moulded say to its moulder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honourable use and another for dishonourable use? (vv 19-20)Perhaps there are more objectionable verses in the Bible than these ones, but surely not by much.Something deep within my Western soul rages against these ideas. Me, a lump of clay?! An object in the hands of a Supreme Being to do with what he wants? How utterly dehumanising and oppressive! Whatever happened to human dignity? Surely this is the poisonous spirit of primitive religion at its worst. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods, They kill us for their sport” (King Lear, 4.1.36-37).As the preacher on Sunday pointed out, these verses in Romans 9 are difficult for us because we are profoundly convinced that we are at the centre of the universe, not God. We can’t cope with the idea that we might be bit players in someone else’s drama, rather than the star of our own story.This is old as Adam and Eve. But it’s a particularly virulent problem for modern, Western people like us. It’s part of what we used to call our ‘worldview’, and which some clever people these days call our ‘social imaginary’, and which (in the words of that philosophical treatise, The Castle) you could think of simply as ‘the Vibe’.  It’s the complex, often unstated web of beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and the world, which our culture constantly reinforces and transmits to us, which we absorb and come to accept, and upon which we operate day by day.For nearly three centuries, our Western culture has been steadily constructing a Vibe in which God is excluded, and man is the centre and measure of all things. We don’t even notice or articulate this any more. We just live as if it’s the case. The debates we have with each other on any issue (political, social, ethical) proceed on this basis. The stories we tell each other—in movies and TV shows and books—assume it and reinforce it constantly.  It’s hard to imagine any Hollywood movie in which God is the potter and we are the clay, unless of course we are the plucky heroic figures of clay, who come to life, follow our hearts, destroy the evil oppressive potter, and go on to realise all our dreams.It occurred to me again on Sunday how important the rejection of God as creator has been to our Vibe. The sovereignty of God over us is the sovereignty of a potter over his clay. To assert ourselves as the centre of all things, and to exclude him as sovereign, we must reject his claim over us as our Potter.And of course, this is what we have done. It started in the 17th century with the semi-polite rejection called Deism, in which we decided that God had made us, once upon a time, but had since lost interest, and no longer really cared very much what we do. He was there (most likely) but he was not a factor, and certainly not knowable in any reliable sense. If we were going to figure out how to be and how to live, we would have to do so on our own terms, starting from scratch. This was essentially the program of the Enlightenment—to construct a worldview-vibe from the ground up, in which we could understand morality, the world and ourselves, without reference to an external divine authority or source of knowledge. It was a program that in most respects assumed that the Christian morality and worldview of the time was correct, but that we should be able to demonstrate and explore and explain it without reference to God.And the sidelining of God as Creator was a critical aspect of this. This sidelining of course moved into overdrive in the late 19th century with the rise of Darwinism, particularly in the way that it was ideologically spun and argued by Thomas Huxley and others. Huxley was a militant atheist and wanted to deny the claim of any supreme God over our lives. He saw, with a clarity perhaps that Darwin didn’t, that if we could dispense with God as Creator we could dispense with any connection that God has with us and our world. His supremacy and authority would evaporate.The consequences of all this have been cataclysmic, and many have traced them. I’m currently reading Carl Trueman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which essentially tells the story of how in our current Western cultural Vibe (or social imaginary), we have come to think of ourselves as psychological self-creators. We are lumps of clay who are convinced that our inner feelings and thoughts determine who we really are, and the reality of the world outside us. If we think and feel that we really are a woman, even though we are biologically a man, then so much the worse for biology. I am a woman trapped in a man’s body. In fact, the whole category of ‘woman’ is now problematic and potentially offensive. Bring on the ‘birthing persons’.Ditto with morality. If there is no Creator, then there is no objective moral order to the world. Morality and ethics emanate outwards from us as human subjects. We value certain things; we come to feel that certain things are right or wrong (for whatever reason); and that’s about it. Morality becomes a framework that we have come up with for our own purposes, or that evolution has thrown up for various advantageous reasons—which sounds great if you want to do exactly what you want, but which is in fact a recipe for moral absurdity and chaos.We can’t even talk to each other properly any more about moral issues, because there is nothing objective beyond ourselves and our feelings to talk about (as ethicists like Alasdair Macintyre and Oliver O’Donovan have sharply pointed out). Coherent moral discussion becomes impossible, because all we have to fall back on is the blunt assertion of our own values—whether they are expressed as ‘rights’ that we assert, or as unassailable moral sentiments that we personally hold.Once we exclude the idea that reality is created and formed and objectively ordered in all its aspects by the true and living God, we descend into confusion and perversity. Or in the words of an ancient cultural critic, “They became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools …”This is why the doctrine of creation is so foundational to the gospel itself, and presumably why it keeps cropping up in New Testament gospel presentations or expositions (e.g. in Acts 14 and 17, and in Romans 1-8). Without it, sin makes no sense, nor judgement, nor (therefore) the atoning work of Christ and his bodily resurrection as the God-man who rules all of creation.If we dig down into the foundations of the gospel and the whole Bible, we find God as the mighty sovereign creator of all things. And the constant rejection of this idea by the Vibe of our culture gives us all sorts of problems. It means that we struggle to explain why we have such a different moral viewpoint on some issues—because we believe, for example, that God made men and women and human sexuality in a certain way, and that this is an objective aspect of the order of our world for us to come to terms with.It also means that we struggle to explain why God has any claim over our lives, and why rejecting and rebelling against him is not only so wrong, but also so damaging to us and the world.Among Christians, in the various debates that we have had about creation, creationism, theistic evolution and the like, this key point has sometimes been lost. The exact mechanism and timeframe within which God created all things is something we can debate, and something that people of good biblical faith will have different views on. You can be a young-earth creationist or an old-earth creationist or a God-used-some-evolutionary-mechanisms-creationist or (like me) a not-entirely-sure-how-creationist. We may differ on the adjective at the front, but not on the noun. We must be creationists.God is the Potter and we are the clay. This is a crucial truth to affirm and fight for and proclaim to one another and to the world. We need to keep doing this until Romans 9 is not a difficult passage for us to read, and to preach to our world.PSI thought it was very disciplined of me not to mention Two ways to live during this post, given that the new edition is due out any day. But I guess I’ve ruined that now! To find out more, here’s some info from Matthias Media on the new 2WTL.  This is a partner post, but as always feel free to share it around with friends, people at church, and and so on. (And if at the same time you want to encourage people to sign up, at least on the free list, then that wouldn’t do any harm either.) This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

I can’t remember who first taught me this axiom of Bible reading, but I have been forever grateful. When you come across a knotty passage in Scripture, don’t glide past it—untie it. A confusing or confounding passage is an opportunity to learn. Sometimes knotty verses reveal our ignorance, or that we haven’t understood the passage—such as when we’re reading Hebrews 6 and the obscure figure of Melchizedek suddenly looms out of the mist and we wonder what’s he got to do with the price of fish. But sometimes we come across Bible verses that are knotty and confounding not because they are obscure but because we find them objectionable. They tie us in knots. They cut across our assumptions or expectations about what God is like or we are like or the world is like. They expose our deepest, baseline attitudes and beliefs, and where they have gone astray. We had one like this in church last Sunday. In Romans 9, after talking about how God will have mercy on some people and harden other people, and that it’s entirely up to him, Paul then asks the obvious rhetorical question: You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” (v 18) Fair enough question, you might think. If God calls all the shots, then why are we to blame for finding ourselves on his bad side? And then comes this: But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is moulded say to its moulder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honourable use and another for dishonourable use? (vv 19-20) Perhaps there are more objectionable verses in the Bible than these ones, but surely not by much. Something deep within my Western soul rages against these ideas. Me, a lump of clay?! An object in the hands of a Supreme Being to do with what he wants? How utterly dehumanising and oppressive! Whatever happened to human dignity? Surely this is the poisonous spirit of primitive religion at its worst. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods, They kill us for their sport” (King Lear, 4.1.36-37). As the preacher on Sunday pointed out, these verses in Romans 9 are difficult for us because we are profoundly convinced that we are at the centre of the universe, not God. We can’t cope with the idea that we might be bit players in someone else’s drama, rather than the star of our own story. This is old as Adam and Eve. But it’s a particularly virulent problem for modern, Western people like us. It’s part of what we used to call our ‘worldview’, and which some clever people these days call our ‘social imaginary’, and which (in the words of that philosophical treatise, The Castle) you could think of simply as ‘the Vibe’.  It’s the complex, often unstated web of beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and the world, which our culture constantly reinforces and transmits to us, which we absorb and come to accept, and upon which we operate day by day. For nearly three centuries, our Western culture has been steadily constructing a Vibe in which God is excluded, and man is the centre and measure of all things. We don’t even notice or articulate this any more. We just live as if it’s the case. The debates we have with each other on any issue (political, social, ethical) proceed on this basis. The stories we tell each other—in movies and TV shows and books—assume it and reinforce it constantly.  It’s hard to imagine any Hollywood movie in which God is the potter and we are the clay, unless of course we are the plucky heroic figures of clay, who come to life, follow our hearts, destroy the evil oppressive potter, and go on to realise all our dreams. It occurred to me again on Sunday how important the rejection of God as creator has been to our Vibe. The sovereignty of God over us is the sovereignty of a potter over his clay. To assert ourselves as the centre of all things, and to exclude him as sovereign, we must reject his claim over us as our Potter. And of course, this is what we have done. It started in the 17th century with the semi-polite rejection called Deism, in which we decided that God had made us, once upon a time, but had since lost interest, and no longer really cared very much what we do. He was there (most likely) but he was not a factor, and certainly not knowable in any reliable sense. If we were going to figure out how to be and how to live, we would have to do so on our own terms, starting from scratch. This was essentially the program of the Enlightenment—to construct a worldview-vibe from the ground up, in which we could understand morality, the world and ourselves, without reference to an external divine authority or source of knowledge. It was a program that in most respects assumed that the Christian morality and worldview of the time was correct, but that we should be able to demonstrate and explore and explain it without reference to God. And the sidelining of God as Creator was a critical aspect of this. This sidelining of course moved into overdrive in the late 19th century with the rise of Darwinism, particularly in the way that it was ideologically spun and argued by Thomas Huxley and others. Huxley was a militant atheist and wanted to deny the claim of any supreme God over our lives. He saw, with a clarity perhaps that Darwin didn’t, that if we could dispense with God as Creator we could dispense with any connection that God has with us and our world. His supremacy and authority would evaporate. The consequences of all this have been cataclysmic, and many have traced them. I’m currently reading Carl Trueman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which essentially tells the story of how in our current Western cultural Vibe (or social imaginary), we have come to think of ourselves as psychological self-creators. We are lumps of clay who are convinced that our inner feelings and thoughts determine who we really are, and the reality of the world outside us. If we think and feel that we really are a woman, even though we are biologically a man, then so much the worse for biology. I am a woman trapped in a man’s body. In fact, the whole category of ‘woman’ is now problematic and potentially offensive. Bring on the ‘birthing persons’. Ditto with morality. If there is no Creator, then there is no objective moral order to the world. Morality and ethics emanate outwards from us as human subjects. We value certain things; we come to feel that certain things are right or wrong (for whatever reason); and that’s about it. Morality becomes a framework that we have come up with for our own purposes, or that evolution has thrown up for various advantageous reasons—which sounds great if you want to do exactly what you want, but which is in fact a recipe for moral absurdity and chaos. We can’t even talk to each other properly any more about moral issues, because there is nothing objective beyond ourselves and our feelings to talk about (as ethicists like Alasdair Macintyre and Oliver O’Donovan have sharply pointed out). Coherent moral discussion becomes impossible, because all we have to fall back on is the blunt assertion of our own values—whether they are expressed as ‘rights’ that we assert, or as unassailable moral sentiments that we personally hold. Once we exclude the idea that reality is created and formed and objectively ordered in all its aspects by the true and living God, we descend into confusion and perversity. Or in the words of an ancient cultural critic, “They became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools …” This is why the doctrine of creation is so foundational to the gospel itself, and presumably why it keeps cropping up in New Testament gospel presentations or expositions (e.g. in Acts 14 and 17, and in Romans 1-8). Without it, sin makes no sense, nor judgement, nor (therefore) the atoning work of Christ and his bodily resurrection as the God-man who rules all of creation. If we dig down into the foundations of the gospel and the whole Bible, we find God as the mighty sovereign creator of all things. And the constant rejection of this idea by the Vibe of our culture gives us all sorts of problems. It means that we struggle to explain why we have such a different moral viewpoint on some issues—because we believe, for example, that God made men and women and human sexuality in a certain way, and that this is an objective aspect of the order of our world for us to come to terms with. It also means that we struggle to explain why God has any claim over our lives, and why rejecting and rebelling against him is not only so wrong, but also so damaging to us and the world. Among Christians, in the various debates that we have had about creation, creationism, theistic evolution and the like, this key point has sometimes been lost. The exact mechanism and timeframe within which God created all things is something we can debate, and something that people of good biblical faith will have different views on. You can be a young-earth creationist or an old-earth creationist or a God-used-some-evolutionary-mechanisms-creationist or (like me) a not-entirely-sure-how-creationist. We may differ on the adjective at the front, but not on the noun. We must be creationists. God is the Potter and we are the clay. This is a crucial truth to affirm and fight for and proclaim to one another and to the world. We need to keep doing this until Romans 9 is not a difficult passage for us to read, and to preach to our world. PS I thought it was very disciplined of me not to mention Two ways to live during this post, given that the new edition is due out any day. But I guess I’ve ruined that now! To find out more, here’s some info from <a href="https://matthiasmedia.com.au/pages/twtl-new-edition-information" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Matthias Media on the new 2WTL</a>.  This is a partner post, but as always feel free to share it around with friends, people at church, and and so on. (And if at the same time you want to encourage people to sign up, at least on the free list, then that wouldn’t do any harm either.) This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

Why I am a creationist

A bit of occasional bored lurking is the most I do on Facebook these days. But my eyes and ears pricked up recently when one of the few organizations I follow (Matthias Media) started teasing the imminent release of the new Two Ways to Live (2WTL) giveaway tract.People were making various comments on MM’s Facebook post—about how they often add in this or that when they’re using 2WTL, or how they wished the wording was different on this or that point. And I did the almost unthinkable and typed a reply. Here’s (in part) what I said:2WTL is by no means perfect, but one of the best things about it is that it’s essentially a framework for gospel conversation or presentation, not a prescribed form of words. So if the transition between points 4 and 5 seems naff to you, David, by all means make it better as you use it. Ditto with the place of God's promises to Israel, Justin, if that’s helpful to include for the people you’re talking to.One of the quirky reasons I’m excited about the release of the new edition of 2WTL is that it gives me an excuse to make this important point all over again. The reason that 2WTL is so invaluable is that it provides something that no other resource currently does: a simple, clear, biblically faithful gospel framework for Christians to use in a multitude of ways. It reaffirms and teaches the one unchanging gospel announcement that we’ve been to proclaim and share; and then equips to talk about that gospel in million different ways. It’s not a form of words to be trotted out on cue. It’s a set of gospel bullet points to learn and take to heart, which we not only know and trust in, but are able to utilize and adapt in a multitude of different conversations and contexts.The forthcoming new 2WTL tract or ‘booklet edition’ is a good example. It’s just one of those possible uses. It contains the revised bullet-point outline, but its main purpose is to explain the gospel to a non-Christian reader. It’s a giveaway booklet. That’s why the classic 2WTL statements (the bullet points) are not very prominent in this new design. The focus is on the explanatory text that fleshes out the statements and on the graphic elements that illustrate them. (We use the actual 2WTL statements as a little inset summary at the end of each page.)The new booklet has a number of other design changes that I think really improve its appeal as a give-away resource—a ‘modern classic’ look-and-feel, new versions of the drawings in badge form, a reworking of how text and graphics interact on the page, and a revision of all the explanatory text.What of the updates to the 2WTL framework itself? Apart from numerous small tweaks to the language here and there, these are the three main changes to the outline itself.#1. Probably the most significant change is the shifting of the offer of forgiveness of sins from box 4 (the atonement) to box 5 (the resurrection). I think this is a genius move (and I wasn’t the one to think of it!), because it reinforces and strengthens the logic of the gospel.2WTL really builds towards box 5. That’s where we get to the essence of the gospel proclamation—that the crucified Jesus has risen to be the ruler and judge of the world, and now offers forgiveness of sins and new life to everyone, in advance of his return. That’s as close to a summary of the NT gospel announcement as you can get, and box 5 is where that is proclaimed. If you work backwards from Box 5, you get the logic of boxes 1-4. In other words:How can the risen Lord Jesus bring forgiveness of sins and new life? By dying on the cross to take the punishment we deserve (atonement, box 4).Why do we deserve punishment and from whom? We’re in line for God’s punishment because of our rebellion against him (judgement, box 3).What rebellion? We all reject God as our ruler and rebel against him (sin, box 2). Why is God our ruler? Because he is the Creator and Ruler of the world, including us (creation, box 1).It starts at box 1 and creation, because that’s the first piece of background knowledge you need in order to proceed through boxes 2-4 and eventually get to 5, where the nub of the gospel proclamation occurs (with box 6 as the response).#2. Speaking of box 1, the second significant content change to the outline happens there. We’ve added in the idea that God’s creation of us (and everything) calls for a response of thanks and honour towards him, in the way that Romans 1 and other places in Scripture suggest. This strengthens what then happens in box 2. Instead of responding to our Creator and Ruler as we should (in honour and thanksgiving), we reject him and ignore him and go our own way.#3. The final shift that many people will notice is a change in the Bible verses used to support boxes 2 and 4. In the past, 2WTL used New Testament verses only, mainly because in the old days people often carried little New Testaments around with them, and so could easily look up those verses and passages with someone they were speaking with.Given that those days are gone, we thought it was a good opportunity to use one of the great texts of Scripture in a way that not only better communicates the ideas of box 2, but ties together boxes 2 and 4 beautifully. In box 2, we quote the first half of Isaiah 53:6: “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way”. And then in box 4, we quote the whole verse:We all, like sheep, have gone astray,                   each of us has turned to our own way;         and the Lord has laid on him                   the iniquity of us all.I’m pretty excited about the new 2WTL booklet edition because it makes it once again the go-to Swiss Army knife of evangelistic resources. Evangelism usually involves multiple conversations and touch points. This 2WTL booklet can be used at many different points along the way:to give to a friend to spark off a conversationto give to a friend to follow up on a conversationas a giveaway resource for evangelistic talks or events (“take this home and have a read; it fleshes out and summarizes what we’ve been talking about today”)to use at some point in the multi-week evangelistic course (as a summary that pulls it all together in one simple package)as a gift for newcomers and visitors at churchas a tool for door-knocking or visitingand so on.We’re not allowed to carry Swiss Army knives anymore, but I’m really looking forward to carrying a few copies of this 2WTL resource around in my backpack.And we’ll all be able to do that as of November 1: the official worldwide release date.PSIf you want to check out the new 2WTL booklet version before Nov 1, I’ve been able to snag a pdf review copy that you can evaluate. It’s only for Payneful Truth readers, so please don’t share it around at this point. You can find it here. As I’ve been working on the new 2WTL outline over the past 12 months or so, I’ve written a few other posts on The Payneful Truth about the nature of the gospel, and about why 2WTL is still valuable (and therefore worth refreshing and relaunching). Here are three of them you might find interesting:This is another free public edition—two in a row! To get every edition every week, you can … As I was just completing this edition, some advance copies of the new 2WTL booklet arrived in the letter box. Here’s a snap … This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

A bit of occasional bored lurking is the most I do on Facebook these days. But my eyes and ears pricked up recently when one of the few organizations I follow (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/matthiasmedia" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Matthias Media</a>) started teasing the imminent release of the new Two Ways to Live (2WTL) giveaway tract. People were making various comments on MM’s Facebook post—about how they often add in this or that when they’re using 2WTL, or how they wished the wording was different on this or that point. And I did the almost unthinkable and typed a reply. Here’s (in part) what I said: 2WTL is by no means perfect, but one of the best things about it is that it’s essentially a framework for gospel conversation or presentation, not a prescribed form of words. So if the transition between points 4 and 5 seems naff to you, David, by all means make it better as you use it. Ditto with the place of God's promises to Israel, Justin, if that’s helpful to include for the people you’re talking to. One of the quirky reasons I’m excited about the release of the new edition of 2WTL is that it gives me an excuse to make this important point all over again. The reason that 2WTL is so invaluable is that it provides something that no other resource currently does: a simple, clear, biblically faithful gospel framework for Christians to use in a multitude of ways. It reaffirms and teaches the one unchanging gospel announcement that we’ve been to proclaim and share; and then equips to talk about that gospel in million different ways. It’s not a form of words to be trotted out on cue. It’s a set of gospel bullet points to learn and take to heart, which we not only know and trust in, but are able to utilize and adapt in a multitude of different conversations and contexts. The forthcoming new 2WTL tract or ‘booklet edition’ is a good example. It’s just one of those possible uses. It contains the revised bullet-point outline, but its main purpose is to explain the gospel to a non-Christian reader. It’s a giveaway booklet. That’s why the classic 2WTL statements (the bullet points) are not very prominent in this new design. The focus is on the explanatory text that fleshes out the statements and on the graphic elements that illustrate them. (We use the actual 2WTL statements as a little inset summary at the end of each page.) The new booklet has a number of other design changes that I think really improve its appeal as a give-away resource—a ‘modern classic’ look-and-feel, new versions of the drawings in badge form, a reworking of how text and graphics interact on the page, and a revision of all the explanatory text. What of the updates to the 2WTL framework itself? Apart from numerous small tweaks to the language here and there, these are the three main changes to the outline itself. #1. Probably the most significant change is the shifting of the offer of forgiveness of sins from box 4 (the atonement) to box 5 (the resurrection). I think this is a genius move (and I wasn’t the one to think of it!), because it reinforces and strengthens the logic of the gospel. 2WTL really builds towards box 5. That’s where we get to the essence of the gospel proclamation—that the crucified Jesus has risen to be the ruler and judge of the world, and now offers forgiveness of sins and new life to everyone, in advance of his return. That’s as close to a summary of the NT gospel announcement as you can get, and box 5 is where that is proclaimed. If you work backwards from Box 5, you get the logic of boxes 1-4. In other words: How can the risen Lord Jesus bring forgiveness of sins and new life? By dying on the cross to take the punishment we deserve (atonement, box 4). Why do we deserve punishment and from whom? We’re in line for God’s punishment because of our rebellion against him (judgement, box 3). What rebellion? We all reject God as our ruler and rebel against him (sin, box 2).  Why is God our ruler? Because he is the Creator and Ruler of the world, including us (creation, box 1). It starts at box 1 and creation, because that’s the first piece of background knowledge you need in order to proceed through boxes 2-4 and eventually get to 5, where the nub of the gospel proclamation occurs (with box 6 as the response). #2. Speaking of box 1, the second significant content change to the outline happens there. We’ve added in the idea that God’s creation of us (and everything) calls for a response of thanks and honour towards him, in the way that Romans 1 and other places in Scripture suggest. This strengthens what then happens in box 2. Instead of responding to our Creator and Ruler as we should (in honour and thanksgiving), we reject him and ignore him and go our own way. #3. The final shift that many people will notice is a change in the Bible verses used to support boxes 2 and 4. In the past, 2WTL used New Testament verses only, mainly because in the old days people often carried little New Testaments around with them, and so could easily look up those verses and passages with someone they were speaking with. Given that those days are gone, we thought it was a good opportunity to use one of the great texts of Scripture in a way that not only better communicates the ideas of box 2, but ties together boxes 2 and 4 beautifully. In box 2, we quote the first half of Isaiah 53:6: “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way”. And then in box 4, we quote the whole verse: We all, like sheep, have gone astray,                    each of us has turned to our own way;          and the Lord has laid on him                    the iniquity of us all. I’m pretty excited about the new 2WTL booklet edition because it makes it once again the go-to Swiss Army knife of evangelistic resources. Evangelism usually involves multiple conversations and touch points. This 2WTL booklet can be used at many different points along the way: to give to a friend to spark off a conversation to give to a friend to follow up on a conversation as a giveaway resource for evangelistic talks or events (“take this home and have a read; it fleshes out and summarizes what we’ve been talking about today”) to use at some point in the multi-week evangelistic course (as a summary that pulls it all together in one simple package) as a gift for newcomers and visitors at church as a tool for door-knocking or visiting and so on. We’re not allowed to carry Swiss Army knives anymore, but I’m really looking forward to carrying a few copies of this 2WTL resource around in my backpack. And we’ll all be able to do that as of November 1: the official worldwide release date. PS If you want to check out the new 2WTL booklet version before Nov 1, I’ve been able to snag a pdf review copy that you can evaluate. It’s only for Payneful Truth readers, so please don’t share it around at this point. You can<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oWYMm2QxQ_-UBk7as1LXrr-b7wKC2Vbd/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> find it here</a>. As I’ve been working on the new 2WTL outline over the past 12 months or so, I’ve written a few other posts on The Payneful Truth about the nature of the gospel, and about why 2WTL is still valuable (and therefore worth refreshing and relaunching). Here are three of them you might find interesting: This is another free public edition—two in a row! To get every edition every week, you can …  As I was just completing this edition, some advance copies of the new 2WTL booklet arrived in the letter box. Here’s a snap … This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

A Swiss Army knife for evangelism

This is one of the freebie editions of The Payneful Truth. To receive every edition, every week, plus various other goodies and the joy of partnership, here’s what to do … A lot of Christian pixels have been spilt over the past several weeks about vaccination, conscience, the weaker brother, civil obedience, the freedom to gather, the desirability of not excluding anyone, and more besides.I wasn’t really planning to spill any more. However, there is one facet that I haven’t seen anything much written on, and which I think is important.In dealing with differences opinion among Christians about how to handle various covid-related issues, the lens many people have used is conscience. Given that people have different views, we should be considerate with each other, not force people to go against their consciences, not cause one another to stumble, and so on. Bring on Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8-10.However, I don’t think conscience is the main issue, at least in most cases.Just to clarify—when I say ‘conscience’ I am talking about the inner grief or pain we experience when we transgress the moral standards that we hold. Those standards may be aligned with God’s standards or not (depending on how morally well-educated we are), but the experience of conscience is that awful sick feeling we get in our guts when our moral decisions part company with our moral compass. Conscience is like a moral geiger counter—it starts beeping louder and louder the closer we get to doing something morally toxic (according to whatever values we hold), and then administers a nasty shock if we go ahead and do it.Conscience, then, relates to what we view as morally right or wrong, or good or evil. And this is why it’s so important (as passages like Rom 14 tell us) not to force one another to go against our conscience—because the conscience is tied to what we genuinely believe to be sin.I know of some people on various sides of the covid debate, for whom there are questions of conscience—for example, who think that the covid vaccines were developed in morally reprehensible ways (e.g. by relying on stem-cell lines from aborted foetal tissue). If that is someone’s position, then ‘conscience’ may well be a primary category for talking about it.For most others, however, conscience is not the issue.The issue is more often fear, or its little brother, anxiety.Fear is different from conscience, although there are also some similarities. Like conscience, fear doesn’t come up with its own content. It’s a reaction we have to something we perceive—not a moral standard, but an approaching threat or danger. Even if we are ill-informed or mistaken about the nature of the threat, we will still feel the fear in our guts, and react accordingly.If conscience is a moral-hazard-meter, fear is a danger-meter. And just as some of us have more tender or sensitive conscience-meters than others, so some of us are more fearful than others. More anxious, more risk averse.It’s possible to be too fearful—that is, for the level of our fear to be disproportionate to the actual threat, perhaps because we have over-estimated the threat or are misinformed about it, or because our fear-meter is on the sensitive side. A hyperchondriac is someone with a malfunctioning fear-meter—who gets anxious over every tiny symptom because it could possibly indicate a life-threatening disease.And for the opposite reasons it is also possible to be too fearless—I’m thinking of you, adolescent boys, and of everyone who does not fear Him who can cast soul and body into hell (Matt 10:28).Most of the debates I see around covid-19 relate to fear and anxiety, not conscience.We are afraid of various things to differing degrees—that the vaccines aren’t really safe, that catching covid will be life-threatening for us or our children (or parents), that gathering with others increases our risk of catching it or passing it on, that mixing with the unvaccinated is a particular threat, that it would be a PR disaster if our church became a super-spreader, and so on.How we work through these fears with individuals and as a Christian community will be similar in some ways to how we talk about issues of conscience—we should be considerate and kind to each other, and recognize that we will react differently.  But there will be differences too, because fear and conscience are different, and the gospel speaks to them in different ways.How does the work of God in the gospel transform our experience of fear and anxiety?Whole books could be written about this, and recently have! I know of two new titles about anxiety coming out from Matthias Media in the next couple of months. (See below in the PS for details).Time and space allow me only the briefest of summaries.Through the gospel of Jesus, God recalibrates our fear-meter by liberating us from our greatest fear—the fear of death and judgement (Heb 2:14-15; 1 Jn 4:17-19). Because we know that the sovereign God has loved us in his Son, and given us all things in him, we can face anything that life throws at us with rejoicing and hope (Rom 5:1-11; 8:28-39). We can cast our anxieties upon him, knowing that he cares for us (1 Pet 5:7), and has already won the victory that gives us peace (Phil 4:6-7).Moreover, the gospel sets us free from the crushing burden of our pride and selfishness and inwardness. God gives us a new heart of love for others, such that we are willing to put ourselves in harm’s way for the sake of others. The natural fear and timidity we feel when we are threatened with suffering can be overcome by the power and love and self-control that God gives us by his Spirit (2 Tim 1:6-9).As we grow in faith, love and hope, the kind of fear that belongs to our old lives begins to diminish—the fear of death, the fear of what others might do to us, the fear that protects ourselves and our wellbeing and our possessions at all costs. This is why Christians have always been the ones to care for the sick during plagues, to give away their possessions rather than hoard them, to treat lepers when no-one else would go near them.The new eyes of faith also change our perception of risk and control. When we come to understand that God is sovereign, not us, we realise (if we didn’t know it already) that events aren’t within our control. The anxiety-producing illusion (bolstered by technology) that we can master our environment, and manage every aspect of our lives, and control our futures—that dissolves when we realise that God’s will determines the future, not ours. We are but a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes (James 4:12-13).The gospel changes our experience of anxiety and fear, but it doesn’t eliminate it.For example, if there’s a genuine threat to our safety, our fear-meter alerts us to its presence, and allows us to take evasive action. We also don’t have to court danger foolishly in order to show our gospel fearlessness—like the Christian snake-handlers, or those who say that the ‘blood of Jesus’ protects from covid-19 infection.Nor can we avoid our fallenness, and the fact that we will sometimes be afraid or anxious when we needn’t be, and vice versa—because we’re misinformed or aren’t thinking straight about the danger; or because our faith, love and hope are still works in progress (as they are for us all); or because our fear-and-anxiety-meter is wonky for some reason (sometimes we call this an ‘anxiety disorder’ or a ‘phobia’).However, here is the key point, and the key difference between fear and conscience.It is often right to act against fear; it is never right to act against conscience. We may need to exhort the fearful to overcome their fears through faith, love and hope (as the NT frequently does). But we would never exhort people to overcome their consciences.This will play out in how we relate to one another about covid-19 and vaccinations. In some circumstances, it will lead us to encourage one another to overcome our fears; in others, to encourage one another not to downplay real threats, especially if our behaviour is a threat to others. In all things, it will mean to act in faith, love and hope.Speaking about the current situation in the part of the world I inhabit (in Sydney), it seems that the actual dangers associated with covid-19 are receding greatly. With so many people vaccinated, the overall level of danger is now more what it would have been like during a bad flu season in the past. In other words, as with a bad flu season, there’s a slight chance of catching the disease (in a city of 5 million people); if you do and you’re unvaccinated, it can be nasty (and even life threatening); but if you’re vaccinated, the chances of serious illness or hospitalization (let alone death) are very small; if you’re very old or otherwise medically compromised, the risks are greater; the risk of experiencing a bad reaction to the vaccine is not zero, but is so close to zero as to not be a threat.Please note: I’m not saying, as some overly fearless people did early in the pandemic, that covid-19 is ‘just like the flu’. It’s clearly a more virulent, transmissable and dangerous virus. However, the massive levels of vaccination in Sydney have changed the risk equation. From all that I’ve read, the level of actual risk we now experience is much diminished.In a bad flu season, we acknowledge the various risks, and take some precautions, but we don’t over-react. I suspect that if our fear-meter is currently blipping significantly about coming to church or  mixing with people generally—much more than it would have during a bad flu season in the past—it may need some attention. Perhaps the level of anxiety has been stoked by the general craziness of the last several months, or by the opinions of others (expressed in the mainstream media or on the internet).In these circumstances, with patience and kindness, let us help each other not to give in to fear. Let’s not give up meeting together, but keep encouraging one another, and all the more as the Day draws near.PSI confess to feeling a bit of anxiety in writing this piece, particularly on behalf of those of you who might suffer from various kinds of anxiety issues or disorders. I know about this well—three members of my immediate family have or are being treated for anxiety disorders.There are multiple and complex reasons why our fear-and-anxiety response becomes dysfunctionally over-active. And dealing with that medically and professionally, not to mention coming to terms with it Christianly, is a real and complicated question.Two new books from Matthias Media on this subject are due out early next year: Anxiety and me by Guan Un, and When the noise won’t stop by Paul Grimmond. Stay tuned for more details.And as I was looking for images to accompany today’s post, I came across this one from one of my favourite TV shows growing up. Recognize it? This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe

This is one of the freebie editions of The Payneful Truth. To receive every edition, every week, plus various other goodies and the joy of partnership, here’s what to do … A lot of Christian pixels have been spilt over the past several weeks about vaccination, conscience, the weaker brother, civil obedience, the freedom to gather, the desirability of not excluding anyone, and more besides. I wasn’t really planning to spill any more. However, there is one facet that I haven’t seen anything much written on, and which I think is important. In dealing with differences opinion among Christians about how to handle various covid-related issues, the lens many people have used is conscience. Given that people have different views, we should be considerate with each other, not force people to go against their consciences, not cause one another to stumble, and so on. Bring on Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8-10. However, I don’t think conscience is the main issue, at least in most cases. Just to clarify—when I say ‘conscience’ I am talking about the inner grief or pain we experience when we transgress the moral standards that we hold. Those standards may be aligned with God’s standards or not (depending on how morally well-educated we are), but the experience of conscience is that awful sick feeling we get in our guts when our moral decisions part company with our moral compass. Conscience is like a moral geiger counter—it starts beeping louder and louder the closer we get to doing something morally toxic (according to whatever values we hold), and then administers a nasty shock if we go ahead and do it. Conscience, then, relates to what we view as morally right or wrong, or good or evil. And this is why it’s so important (as passages like Rom 14 tell us) not to force one another to go against our conscience—because the conscience is tied to what we genuinely believe to be sin. I know of some people on various sides of the covid debate, for whom there are questions of conscience—for example, who think that the covid vaccines were developed in morally reprehensible ways (e.g. by relying on stem-cell lines from aborted foetal tissue). If that is someone’s position, then ‘conscience’ may well be a primary category for talking about it. For most others, however, conscience is not the issue. The issue is more often fear, or its little brother, anxiety. Fear is different from conscience, although there are also some similarities. Like conscience, fear doesn’t come up with its own content. It’s a reaction we have to something we perceive—not a moral standard, but an approaching threat or danger. Even if we are ill-informed or mistaken about the nature of the threat, we will still feel the fear in our guts, and react accordingly. If conscience is a moral-hazard-meter, fear is a danger-meter. And just as some of us have more tender or sensitive conscience-meters than others, so some of us are more fearful than others. More anxious, more risk averse. It’s possible to be too fearful—that is, for the level of our fear to be disproportionate to the actual threat, perhaps because we have over-estimated the threat or are misinformed about it, or because our fear-meter is on the sensitive side. A hyperchondriac is someone with a malfunctioning fear-meter—who gets anxious over every tiny symptom because it could possibly indicate a life-threatening disease. And for the opposite reasons it is also possible to be too fearless—I’m thinking of you, adolescent boys, and of everyone who does not fear Him who can cast soul and body into hell (Matt 10:28). Most of the debates I see around covid-19 relate to fear and anxiety, not conscience. We are afraid of various things to differing degrees—that the vaccines aren’t really safe, that catching covid will be life-threatening for us or our children (or parents), that gathering with others increases our risk of catching it or passing it on, that mixing with the unvaccinated is a particular threat, that it would be a PR disaster if our church became a super-spreader, and so on. How we work through these fears with individuals and as a Christian community will be similar in some ways to how we talk about issues of conscience—we should be considerate and kind to each other, and recognize that we will react differently.  But there will be differences too, because fear and conscience are different, and the gospel speaks to them in different ways. How does the work of God in the gospel transform our experience of fear and anxiety? Whole books could be written about this, and recently have! I know of two new titles about anxiety coming out from Matthias Media in the next couple of months. (See below in the PS for details). Time and space allow me only the briefest of summaries. Through the gospel of Jesus, God recalibrates our fear-meter by liberating us from our greatest fear—the fear of death and judgement (Heb 2:14-15; 1 Jn 4:17-19). Because we know that the sovereign God has loved us in his Son, and given us all things in him, we can face anything that life throws at us with rejoicing and hope (Rom 5:1-11; 8:28-39). We can cast our anxieties upon him, knowing that he cares for us (1 Pet 5:7), and has already won the victory that gives us peace (Phil 4:6-7). Moreover, the gospel sets us free from the crushing burden of our pride and selfishness and inwardness. God gives us a new heart of love for others, such that we are willing to put ourselves in harm’s way for the sake of others. The natural fear and timidity we feel when we are threatened with suffering can be overcome by the power and love and self-control that God gives us by his Spirit (2 Tim 1:6-9). As we grow in faith, love and hope, the kind of fear that belongs to our old lives begins to diminish—the fear of death, the fear of what others might do to us, the fear that protects ourselves and our wellbeing and our possessions at all costs. This is why Christians have always been the ones to care for the sick during plagues, to give away their possessions rather than hoard them, to treat lepers when no-one else would go near them. The new eyes of faith also change our perception of risk and control. When we come to understand that God is sovereign, not us, we realise (if we didn’t know it already) that events aren’t within our control. The anxiety-producing illusion (bolstered by technology) that we can master our environment, and manage every aspect of our lives, and control our futures—that dissolves when we realise that God’s will determines the future, not ours. We are but a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes (James 4:12-13). The gospel changes our experience of anxiety and fear, but it doesn’t eliminate it. For example, if there’s a genuine threat to our safety, our fear-meter alerts us to its presence, and allows us to take evasive action. We also don’t have to court danger foolishly in order to show our gospel fearlessness—like the Christian snake-handlers, or those who say that the ‘blood of Jesus’ protects from covid-19 infection. Nor can we avoid our fallenness, and the fact that we will sometimes be afraid or anxious when we needn’t be, and vice versa—because we’re misinformed or aren’t thinking straight about the danger; or because our faith, love and hope are still works in progress (as they are for us all); or because our fear-and-anxiety-meter is wonky for some reason (sometimes we call this an ‘anxiety disorder’ or a ‘phobia’). However, here is the key point, and the key difference between fear and conscience. It is often right to act against fear; it is never right to act against conscience. We may need to exhort the fearful to overcome their fears through faith, love and hope (as the NT frequently does). But we would never exhort people to overcome their consciences. This will play out in how we relate to one another about covid-19 and vaccinations. In some circumstances, it will lead us to encourage one another to overcome our fears; in others, to encourage one another not to downplay real threats, especially if our behaviour is a threat to others. In all things, it will mean to act in faith, love and hope. Speaking about the current situation in the part of the world I inhabit (in Sydney), it seems that the actual dangers associated with covid-19 are receding greatly. With so many people vaccinated, the overall level of danger is now more what it would have been like during a bad flu season in the past. In other words, as with a bad flu season, there’s a slight chance of catching the disease (in a city of 5 million people); if you do and you’re unvaccinated, it can be nasty (and even life threatening); but if you’re vaccinated, the chances of serious illness or hospitalization (let alone death) are very small; if you’re very old or otherwise medically compromised, the risks are greater; the risk of experiencing a bad reaction to the vaccine is not zero, but is so close to zero as to not be a threat. Please note: I’m not saying, as some overly fearless people did early in the pandemic, that covid-19 is ‘just like the flu’. It’s clearly a more virulent, transmissable and dangerous virus. However, the massive levels of vaccination in Sydney have changed the risk equation. From all that I’ve read, the level of actual risk we now experience is much diminished. In a bad flu season, we acknowledge the various risks, and take some precautions, but we don’t over-react. I suspect that if our fear-meter is currently blipping significantly about coming to church or  mixing with people generally—much more than it would have during a bad flu season in the past—it may need some attention. Perhaps the level of anxiety has been stoked by the general craziness of the last several months, or by the opinions of others (expressed in the mainstream media or on the internet). In these circumstances, with patience and kindness, let us help each other not to give in to fear. Let’s not give up meeting together, but keep encouraging one another, and all the more as the Day draws near. PS I confess to feeling a bit of anxiety in writing this piece, particularly on behalf of those of you who might suffer from various kinds of anxiety issues or disorders. I know about this well—three members of my immediate family have or are being treated for anxiety disorders. There are multiple and complex reasons why our fear-and-anxiety response becomes dysfunctionally over-active. And dealing with that medically and professionally, not to mention coming to terms with it Christianly, is a real and complicated question. Two new books from Matthias Media on this subject are due out early next year: Anxiety and me by Guan Un, and When the noise won’t stop by Paul Grimmond. Stay tuned for more details. And as I was looking for images to accompany today’s post, I came across this one from one of my favourite TV shows growing up. Recognize it? This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online/subscribe</a>

Fear in a time of covid

Thanks for making your clear and biblical philosophy of ministry available. I’ve always benefited from your writing and this will be no different.

Ministry training and reflections

This is the audio version of a regular weekly email journal from Tony Payne, that seeks to apply the liberating truth of Christ crucified to every aspect of life and ministry. <a href="https://www.thepaynefultruth.online?utm_medium=podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.thepaynefultruth.online</a>

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