(Daniel 3:13-18; Acts 4:1-31)

Eight years ago, in the summer of 2006, I horrified a group of my colleagues.  We were delegates to General Synod, which is the Reformed Church’s equivalent to the Presbyterian General Assembly.  A number of us were out for a walk one night, and I made the statement—in response to what, I don’t recall—that the job of the pastor is to be crucified for the congregation.  You would have thought I’d set off a bomb.

It wasn’t that they thought I had delusions of grandeur; they knew me well enough to know that I didn’t think of myself (or any of them) as some sort of messiah.  Rather, they reacted to it as a highly uncomfortable view of pastoral ministry.  I didn’t disagree, but I don’t see any way around it if you’re going to be faithful to Scripture.  Jesus says, as we read a few weeks ago, “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.”  Paul makes clear in 1 Timothy that Christian leadership is about modeling and imitation; the basic principle is one which he states concisely in 1 Corinthians 11:1:  “Follow my pattern of life as I follow the pattern of Christ.”  We can’t learn to live like Christ just by reading about it, even though the book we read was written by God.  We need to see it lived out, which is why God didn’t just give us his word, he also gave us his people.

The first job of those of us called to be elders and deacons for the church—including pastors, as we are called teaching elders—is to be models of the life of Jesus.  Yes, we’re all most imperfect models, but we need to be committed to that purpose; and part of our calling is to model the right way to respond when we do sin and fall short of the measure of Christ.  We are humble sinners saved only by grace who need grace from the Lord and from his church, just as much as anyone is, and we need to show by our lives what it means to live openly and honestly in that way.  Beyond that, if we want to lead the church to be faithful to Jesus’ call to take up the cross and follow him, we need to do that ourselves.  To lead the church on the road to the cross, we have to walk that road in our own lives, on our own two feet.Read more→

(Isaiah 66:18-22; Acts 3)

There is a story about an encounter between Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, and the pope.  I don’t know if it actually happened, but it does fit with the time in which he lived.  As the story has it, after making some display of the church’s wealth to Aquinas, the pope said, “Thomas, you can see the church no longer has to say ‘Silver and gold have I none.’”  Aquinas responded, “True, holy father; but neither can she now say to the lame man, ‘Rise up and walk!’”

Now, as I said, I don’t know for sure that this conversation happened, or that it happened in just that way.  I do know this:  it’s believable because both statements are true.  For all the wars fought by the popes, the Roman hierarchy was wealthy, and its wealth was growing.  We have a rich heritage of great artworks and beautiful buildings that were paid for by the blood, toil, tears and sweat of the peasants of Europe.  But for all the church’s silver and gold, it lacked spiritual power.

That should have been a sign that something was badly wrong; but it took the explosion of the Reformation a few centuries later to get the point across.  As we see in Acts, when God builds the church, he does it by the power of his Holy Spirit, not by the power of the sword or the purse; and as we began to see last week, when this happens, the results look very different from anything the world expects.Read more→

(Joel 2:28-29; Acts 2:1-42)

We’ve been spending the last number of weeks talking about revival.  We’ve seen that it’s God’s work, not ours, and that we’re utterly dependent on him—that only God can bring the dead to life, and that’s exactly what he’s on about doing.  We took some time to read the end of the story so that we know where it’s going, which is the total renewal of creation:  all things (including us) will be made entirely new.  We’ve been reminded that everything we have is God’s, and he calls us to spend all of it—our time, our money, our talents and skills—in his service.  Where we might use our lives to pile up temporary treasure in this world which is passing away, he gives us the opportunity to use them instead to store up treasure in the next, which is eternal.

With all of that said, we need more—we need to go beyond the limits of our own experience and see what revival looks like.  That’s why we’re going to spend the next several weeks in the first part of the book of Acts, which records the first mass movement of the Spirit of God in human history.  When the Holy Spirit goes to work on a large scale in the full power of God, what happens?Read more→

(Exodus 16:13-20; 2 Corinthians 8:1-15)

Kaleb’s experience illustrates a couple aspects of the reality Paul’s talking about in 2 Corinthians 8.  First, he reminds us that God provides for his children, and in fact that everything we have is God’s provision.  Yes, none of the extra money they received simply appeared miraculously out of nowhere; it could all be tracked to where it came from and why.  But God was in command of all those events; he set each in its proper place and time to meet Kaleb and Ashlea’s needs at that point.

The fact is, God most often works through other people to accomplish his purposes, even when they’re completely unaware of it.  As we see in Paul, he provides for our needs through other people, and provides for the needs of others through us.  This is simply how he chooses to operate.  I don’t know all his reasons for working this way, but at least in part, it’s a matter of taking us seriously and treating us with respect.

When God uses us to take care of other people, it makes our actions and our lives meaningful.  He could easily do everything directly, all by himself—but then what would we have to do?  What would we matter?  He makes us instruments of his blessing so that we can see that our lives are important.  He does it in ways that are completely apart from our own plans—like that woman who ended up blessing Kaleb by accident—to help us see that everything we do, even the smallest thing, has consequences which ripple out far beyond and outside anything we could ever predict, or even understand.Read more→