
3 If you, LORD, kept a record of sins,
so that we can, with reverence, serve you.
Ah, that’s our hope for ourselves, our parenting, and our children. The mercy of God.
Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art
3 If you, LORD, kept a record of sins,
so that we can, with reverence, serve you.
Ah, that’s our hope for ourselves, our parenting, and our children. The mercy of God.
* * *
Matt Redman says, “Every authentic response in worship comes from revelation. When you become a Christian, you commit your life to God. And then from that moment on, everything you see of God, everything that is revealed to you, everything you find in His Word, everything you realize when you gather with the believers, every time you take a walk under a night sky and gaze up at the stars above is revelation. It’s like fuel for the fire of worship.”
In this amazing diverse world, no two zebras have the same stripes, no two roses, or snowflakes, or fingerprints, or the iris of eyes have the same pattern. Each African penguin has a unique spot pattern on its chest, which zoo-keepers—and other penguins—soon get to recognise.
So too, God shares different revelations, different aspects of his personality, to each of his beloved. God is always speaking, A. W. Tozer says. His voice rises above the din and clatter of the world around us.
Just as we instinctively adjust our description of an idea or experience to our audience, the Spirit who created vast diversity reminds us of ancient truths in unique words and images, differing in emphasis, colour and music, geared towards each of our Myers-Briggs personality, IQ, culture and life-experience, our spiritual age, if you like, and our capacity to be changed by our insights.
And the fresh insights the Spirit gives us, the new wine he pours, needs new words, a fresh expression. New wineskins for New Wine.
* * *
Make it New was Ezra Pound’s slogan, adopted by the Modernist movement.
To write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant—that was his only lesson in the art of writing, Virginia Woolf wrote of her father, brilliant literary scholar Lesley Stephen, who home-educated her.
We do not need to strain after newness. By being brave and honest and telling the truth the way we see it, we will be fresh. And by trying to say as clearly as possible, exactly what we mean, in our own words, not anyone else’s, we will be unique.
And so no two Christian writers or bloggers writing about prayer, or hearing God’s voice, or loving one another should say the same thing in the same way, because, you see, our experience will be slightly different. No two people will have an identical spiritual experience; different things will strike each of us with gale force.
Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fulfilled beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice
To purify the dialect of the tribe (T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding)
* * *
When I expressed my dream of a Blog through the Bible project last year, my daughter Zoe said dubiously, “Do you know Mike Pilavachi is doing that too? Nicky Gumbel is doing that too?”
At first you feel “Why bother”? Nicky Gumbel is cleverer, theologically trained, experienced. Why read me if you can read him?
But God gives each of us unique circles of influence, unique tribes. And our life-experience, personalities, and ways of expressing ourselves speak to our own tribe, in a way someone else’s might not.
And so we continue “writing down the revelation and make it plain that he may run who reads it,” (Hab 2:20), continue recording what we hear the Spirit say, even while John, Mark, Luke Matthew, James, Peter, Paul, Nicky and Mike are doing it too, and doing it better.
* * *
Fortunately, the eight authors of the New Testament were not deterred by the fact that Paul and Luke were clearly better educated and more intelligent and better writers than Peter or Matthew or James or Mark, because all eight of them contribute richly to our New Testament, and we each have a favourite book, and those who have no time for Paul have a lot of time for John or Luke. And vice-versa.
![]() |
Image Credit |
As I reflected on this response, it dawned on me that the inclination to settle for less does not stop with chocolates. It may have an impact on an untold number of experiences in our lives. Take a handful, go for it, follow your dreams …
I hoped I would have been one of those who pushed through to wipe the face of Jesus, who dipped a sponge in wine vinegar. That surely I would not have been among the mocking crowd.
But would I? Very few stood by Jesus: the Marys and John. Peter and the disciples had fled. The crowds who acclaimed him as he entered Jerusalem—vanished. They were now a mocking mob chanting, “He trusted in God, let God deliver him. Let him deliver if he delight in him.”
* * *
Where would I stand, with the mocking, mobbing horde, or with the quiet succourers?
You see, Jesus had been disgraced. He was subject to a myriad false accusations. He had been brutalized, savaged, and humiliated. Ridiculed and made into a laughing stock. Everyone said he was wrong, ridiculous and dangerous—telling them to destroy the temple, and not to pay taxes to Caesar.
He was mobbed. Only a very few had the courage not to join the mockers.
* * *
Blessed is he who does not sit in the company of mockers, Psalm 1 declares. I want to be blessed. And so I want to avoid the ugliness of mockery, which diminishes the mocker more certainly than it diminishes the object of mockery.
Sadly, both because of my cast of mind, and the company I’ve kept, irony, sarcasm, and mild mockery come naturally to me, so I guess I need some retraining of the mind.
* * *
Here’s a possible way of guessing at what kind of men and women we might have been at Calvary: Standing with the mockers, or the compassionate.
In my 34 months in the Christian blogosphere, I’ve noticed that pretty much every month, a follower of Christ makes himself, or is made, into an object of international public derision.
Mark Driscoll who baptized 1392 people in 2011 alone declares that the UK church are “a bunch of cowards,” “guys in dresses, preaching to grandmas.”
He is mocked and condemned on most blogs, though he qualifies his statement.
Mark Driscoll also said…Well, let me not go there. I am not a fan, of course; I just don’t want to take my seat among the mockers.
* * *
John Piper dismisses a young, wildly popular preacher with a three word tweet, Farewell, Rob Bell. The blogosphere explodes in mockery and condemnation of Piper who has written one of the best Christian books of the last twentieth century, Desiring God.
As it does, when John Piper declares he knows why a tornado hit Minneapolis on the day the Lutherans were debating homosexuality. The message of the tornado, he says was, Turn from the approval of sin.
* * *
Pat Robertson says the earthquake and the string of disasters which have cursed Haiti was a result of their ancient national pact with the devil. That there is a connection between terrorist attacks on America, Hurricane Katrina and American sin. He is widely mocked and scorned because, well, we are in the 21st century, without anyone considering that the Old Testament continually talks about curses on nations, peoples, and families, though well, all that seems Old to us. But Jesus warned of such things too.
And we all mock the self-professed Christ-followers on the fringes of faith—poor deluded Harold Camping, or beyond the pale, Burn a Koran Terry Jones, or Westboro Baptist Church. Or anyone really, who gets too politically incorrect, as the younger Graham does, all the time, in calling Islam wicked and evil. (Though as I wrote in a very early blog post I can see why he thinks so.)
* * *
Andy Warhol famously said, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” Well, the flip side of that could be that everyone who is in any way a public figure, might make themselves the object of public opprobrium for least 15 minutes, whether on a public or private stage.
Even our Christian brothers and sisters. And the issue is: are we going to join the mobs baying for their blood? This lowers us far more than it lowers them. They have already been publicly diminished. We diminish ourselves by our eagerness to kick and stone the man or woman who is already down.
So, will we join the mocking hordes at their Golgothas, or be the discreet and kind who quietly pray, knowing: There, but for the grace of God, go I?
Will we be the One who is blessed, who does not sit in the company of mockers? (Psalm 1).
I want to be blessed, and I do not want to mock, and Lord, please lead me not into temptation.