I am gonna introduce Paul with just a little something.
A little nugget, a nugget, a nugget.
I went to university a long time ago and I didn't actually read
theology. I was tempted to, I actually was
choosing between theology, English and history as the three
subjects I wanted to read at uni.
And we prayed, me and my mum, and felt for a number of reasons
to read English. And I'm really, really pleased
that I did that because what I noticed at the university I went
to is that a lot of people who read theology lost their faith.
But a lot of people who did English didn't have faith, so
they had nothing to lose. It was absolutely brilliant
doing English because no one had any expectations of faith.
It's a very secular subject and as a person of faith I could
kind of navigate through. But I felt that was really
heartbreaking. It was, it was heartbreaking for
people to go to university having had this deeply rich,
emotional, often family inheritance, belief in God, and
then just have it shot down ruthlessly and brutally for
three years. And of course, some people got
through it, but the way they got through it was what we've talked
about before, something called cognitive dissonance.
They got through it by kind of parking that stuff they heard
and then going, I know I experienced God in worship.
I know he leads me. I know he provides for me.
But there was a disintegration between a kind of faith in God
that makes sense, a loving God with our mind, and then this
kind of gut instinct that God's real.
And then about 2025 years later, I went to a lecture by a man who
said, who talked about something called the synoptic problem.
This is a problem to do with the order and the historicity of the
four accounts of the person of Jesus and the synoptics being
same view synoptic of Matthew, Mark, Luke, that very similar
view of Jesus. And there's this academic issue
around those gospels, and this man delivered this lecture, and
it was exactly the same issue as had been the issue where people
lost their faith 20 to 30 years ago.
But the only difference was that this person believed in the
resurrection from the dead, and therefore he framed the synoptic
problem completely differently. It turns out it's not really a
problem at all. The issue is do we believe in
the resurrection from the dead? So I found this healing.
I began to find a healing in a theology that we would call is
both mystical, where it's an experience, a revelatory
experience of God, and then something you can then
articulate with your mind. We're designed to love God, but
it's never, it's not with our mind first.
It's heart, soul, mind and body. There's an order.
We have the revelation and at the beginning of 1 John, he
says, I'm trying to explain to you something I touched, I felt
I experienced. There was this person called
Jesus who was the incarnation, the Word made flesh.
And I am really struggling with the words to express that
incredibly profound reality. So this is kind of happening to
me and I realise that I am believing things that are
unbelievably mind blowing, and yet my experience of life isn't
mind blowing. I'm believing that the Christ
holds the cosmos together and holds me together and holds
history together and is the beginning and the end.
But I'm living as if death is bigger.
I'm living as if I'm crippled by who's going to pay the bills.
I'm living as if our illness is the final answer.
I'm living like Adam is bigger than Jesus.
So we're going to push into some stuff that's painful that we
might not agree with, we might never agree with, but I am sick
and tired of living in that world.
I want to live in a world of reality where Jesus is bigger
than Adam. Do you understand what I'm
saying by that? New creation is bigger than old
creation. Life is bigger than death.
The reality of union is bigger than than the worst case
scenario of what humans can come up with.
So in order to do that, we want two things in this church.
We want to be what we call psychologically safe.
So these are the boundaries of this conversation, which we've
I've had with Paul for about 7 years and we're going to have
for years, but we're really going to have it for this year.
What I mean by psychological safety is everyone is free
before God to believe what they like.
No one can ever violate or presume anyone else's conscience
or conviction. We believe what we believe.
It's a mystery, but we do. It's all sorts of influences in
what we believe, but we believe it.
And we never, ever want to be a culture where we violate that
fundamental I just believe this or I don't believe this or I
believe this, but I don't believe that.
That is a psychologically safe culture.
As soon as we get to the point where we feel we have to believe
something or we have to say something, that's exactly what's
gone wrong politically is no one has been able to be honest about
what they really believe. And we're literally beginning to
pay hell for that. And we won't be that in this
church. We're going to be a
psychologically safe church where people can literally say,
oh, that resonates, that doesn't, that's exciting, that
is really destabilising. We're going to be that
community. We are not going to be
polarised. We're going to love people who
think differently to us. We're going to have a family
that can hold. I have a very deep relationship
biologically with my biological family.
They will always be my family and I fundamentally disagree
with them on a lot of stuff. We have to get better as the
global church at being in agreement.
Can someone guess how many Protestant denominations there
are? Just Protestant 30 to 45,000,
Protestant demolitions because I had a revelation.
You didn't quite get it. I'm just going to start another
church now. I think there is a lot of unity
in partnership and love between us now.
And more and more with the Catholic.
I think what God is doing, and part of this conversation is I
think he's reuniting with the Orthodox, of which there was a
schism in 1054. So that's part of what this
journey's about. But we're not just going to be
psychologically safe. What is the other thing we're
going to be? We're going to be brave.
The only bravery we can have is
with our own fears. We can't be brave for someone,
we can't make someone be brave, but we can be brave for
ourselves. So we're safe for other people,
but we're brave for ourselves. That's the culture I want us to
be in. If people have not done any of
the Trinitarian videos, we are, there's an introduction and a
lecture 1 and a lecture 2, all three of them.
It would be great if you've seen by this Wednesday, because we're
actually having a whole evening every month with a complete meal
where all of us can start to process these deep things about
what we actually believe. It's really, really unusual for
a, for a church to actually put theology back into the church.
It's been split. It's been put in the Academy and
killed, and then the church has become superficial and
experiential. We're putting theology back into
the church because what we actually believe is how we
actually live. We live out of our beliefs
whether we like it or not. So we've got to understand what
we actually believe. So everyone, Wednesday a month,
we're going through it. We're going through content.
If you can't make the Wednesday pools available for a Zoom in
theology, we call these, we call these kind of conversations
where someone pushes the boundary as a conversation
partner. They are someone who has a
conviction that might be different to us.
And they are so helpful in helping us formulate what we
think because they're not thinking like everyone else.
They've gone through a process and they have a conviction.
That's all we can. That's, that's, that's very
safe, isn't it? They're just a conversation
partner and we are brave enough to go.
I'm going to really listen to what you're going to say.
So all that to say, I'm going to pray.
Now, I'd encourage anyone, we never ask Chris and I never ask
anyone to do anything. I hope, as you know, we're all
grown-ups, we all follow Jesus, blah, blah, blah.
But on this thing, we would love it if everyone could connect him
with this for a year, once a month, we get ditch on Netflix,
ditch your social media scrolling and watch one video,
one hour of theology once a month and come here for a
conversation once a month. You will never get this kind of
opportunity anywhere else. We're getting it for free, and
we probably won't. We may get it again every year,
but we probably won't get it again.
If we do get it again, it started this year.
The conversation started here this year.
This is a big global conversation in the Academy.
It's been going on for decades. We get to do it here.
So I'm going to pray now. I'm going to pray for Paul, but
I'm going to pray for us. There must be more.
Jesus must be bigger than Adam. Lord, I worship you and praise
you, Trinitarian, Godfather, Son and Spirit.
When you became Sark's flesh, you did something to the human
condition which took us all in yourself and reconstituted us.
You were fully human and fully divine, and it took 300 years
for first followers of you to wrestle through to that phrase.
We want our minds blown again with incarnation.
When we come to Christmas, this Christmas, we won't want it to
be like any other Christmas where we say the same quotes
from Isaiah, the same quotes from John, and it means nothing
to us. We want our minds blown by
incarnation. And then something happened when
you absorbed all the evil of the human condition and the
principalities and powers that oppose you on the cross, and you
were executed and dead and buried and you harrowed hell.
Something happened that fundamentally changed us all
forever because death couldn't hold you.
That's apparently what we believe.
Death couldn't hold you. You are life.
And so you were physically raised from the dead as a
vindication that when you said your reality in life, you are.
We want to be the kind of people that actually embody that
reality. We don't just pay Idlib service,
credo, credence. What we believe is what we
actually live out from our gut. Not something we say.
But the only way, and I think Paul talks about this a lot, the
only way we can get there is through revelation.
We need you literally to reveal the nature of the Godhead to us.
We need you to reveal the Christ who holds the cosmos together.
That's what Paul's prayers all the way through his letters
were. Simply we need to know you more.
We need to understand you more. We need to experience more.
We need to know the love you have for us.
Actually, everything changes when we literally just
experience the Godhead. And so we cry out to you.
We're not just going through another Sunday.
We cry out to you to birth in us a new fresh knowledge of you.
We cry out to you to protect this journey, this beautiful
community of people that that anything that isn't of you,
darkness just as easily exposed by light.
We don't have to worry the light, just it, it just clears
away. But we protect us.
Protect us as we go on this journey into reality.
And most of all, or may we be people that are marked by
inexpressible joy and people actually ask us what is the hope
that you have within you? Because we are so full of hope
that people actually ask that question.
Amen. Thanks.
Alice, that's great. So yeah, please do join us on
Wednesday. I've got I've got one simple
thing I'm wanting to do today and then I'll just throw some
sparkles around the outside and see where we land land with
those. But just just picking up on a on
a couple of those things as you were praying, Alice.
So just remembered Jesus promise, one of the one of the
beautiful promises of the New Testament.
He says, Father, I have made you known and I will continue to
make you known. So Jesus promise is that he will
continue to make known to us what he has made known to us,
which is the the true nature and character of the fathers.
He continues to make him known. So we, we've, we've got a good
promise, but it is absolutely right.
We can only know the unknowable by the unknowable revealing
themselves to us. You know, Paul's prayer that we
might know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge being
filled to all the fullness of God.
I love that prayer. I was also thinking, you know,
we, we're used to dealing with the Bible.
I was listening to A, to a podcast that was making me a
little bit cross. And so one of the things that I
thought, Oh yeah, yeah, I know why it's the guy who was being
interviewed said, well, you know, of course we've got the
Bible. And the Bible is a manual, like
the user manual for human life, which is exactly the opposite of
what the Holy Spirit told me is the Bible is absolutely not a
user manual. If you read it like a user
manual, you're going to be in big, big trouble.
But the church has, the church has read it that way.
But I think it's interesting, if you approach the Bible, just
think about the New Testament, approach it from the perspective
of how is it that these people got to say the things that they
said? Like how did they arrive at the
conviction and the conclusion? You know, when Paul says there
is nothing in all of creation that can separate us from the
love of God and he starts listing things, he says there's
no power, there's no principality.
So there's nothing in the present.
No, no, no phenomenon out there that has the capability to
separate us from the love of God.
And then he he says there's nothing in the future that has
the power or the capability to separate us from the love of
God. And the future is an interesting
one because the future is, you know, an an open door of endless
possibilities. We have absolutely no idea
what's coming. So he's saying, look, I'm trying
to say in an is in as emphatic terms as I possibly can.
There is absolutely nothing that can be conceived of that is able
to get between US and the love of God in Christ.
And we read that and think, well, that's great, that's cool.
But how did someone like Paul actually get to the point where
he was able to say that with the with the conviction?
And you know, he's a a God fearing man who doesn't want to
say the wrong things about God, right?
He's a truth teller. How does he come to be able to
be so certain in his convictions about that fact?
Where does he get it from? Because there are lots of things
that you can go through in life that will make you feel like,
yeah, maybe that could separate you or that this could or that
could. There are lots of things.
How can Paul be so emphatic? And I, I want to suggest is
because of what he has seen in the incarnation has said, well,
because of this, because of the revelation of God in Christ in
the incarnation, what we see there is so all-encompassing and
far reaching. I'm able to say beyond a shadow
of a doubt that if you believe in Jesus, you know that it is.
There is no hypothetical possibility in any of the
multiverse that can separate you from his love.
But Paul gets that from his experience and encounter with
Christ. He doesn't get it just because
he's waxing lyrical or being poetic.
He's he is Speaking of what he knows.
He's speaking out of knowledge. I mean real knowledge, not
hypothetical. So again, Alice referenced John.
You know, this is we are giving testimony to what we have
handled with our own hands. John is saying we have seen this
light with our own eyes. We've handled with our own
hands. We've been face to face with
him. And we are testifying to you
what we have come to know about who this person is and what this
means for everything else. And this is the basis of the
Apostolic witness. This is why we're writing these
things. This is why we're teaching these
things. This is why we're living the way
that we are because of an encounter.
And that encounter is informing everything else.
And we've we're still figuring that out, what the implication
of that is. And you can see that in the New
Testament, you can see chronologically as well, the
earlier books of the New Testament have less formed ideas
than the later books of the New Testament.
But these are these are experiences when, when Paul is
giving his prayer, like the one in Ephesians, I pray that I
kneel before the Father from whom all fatherhood or family in
heaven and earth derives his name.
And I pray that you being rooted and grounded in love, may have
power together with all the Saints to grasp the height,
depth, length and breadth to know the love of Christ that
surpasses knowledge and thereby brackets, thereby being filled
to all the fullness of God. Right, when he gives this
prayer, he's not just coming up with a prayer that that prayer
is drawn from the pattern of his experience.
He's saying, I'm, I'm saying there's a, a direct link between
each part, each of the parts of this prayer.
And it begins with the Father. So the revelation of the Father
and all that that implies is the beginning of this sequence in
Paul's prayer, which ends with having a revelation of the love
of Christ, knowing the love that surpasses knowledge, and then
going into being filled with all of the fullness.
And then he says the famous verse, you know, and now to him
to who is able to do immeasurably abundantly beyond
anything we could ask for or imagine according to the power
that is at work within us right now to him be glory in the
church for all generations. So Paul is taking us through a
sequence in his prayer. This is an experience.
He's he's saying I'm telling you what it looks like for a human
being to become awake to the reality of the fullness of God
in them through them and and in everything.
And this is how it happens. It begins with the revelation of
the Father. He says, that's why I bow the
knee before the Father so and you can go through that prayer
and you can see the different components to it.
What thing leads to another. This is supposed to be like a
little map, a little template where you say, all right, this
is something I can pray through. I can engage with in a real
experiential way that helps me to see, OK, what where is the
joy draining out? What is where is not things.
Where are things not actually connecting up for me?
Where are the where is the cognitive dissonance?
Where is the fuse being blown? So Baxter, you know, good
friend, he he, I like the statement.
He said. I wonder what would happen if we
just put a sign up in front of above the door post of every
church saying Jesus said I'm the way, the truth and the life.
Frankly, we have no idea what that means.
But if you want to help us figure out, then you're welcome,
right? Come and help us figure it out.
Come and bring your human experience into this
conversation and let's discover where Jesus is together in that.
Because frankly, we, we just don't really know, but we need
to find out. We want it.
We, we want to find him and what he's like and where he is and
what he's doing. So for me in engaging with the
scripture, I feel like I'm, I'm engaging with the, the, the, the
journalistic record of the Apostolic witness.
So these are people who are telling us what they have
discovered. It's, it's not just come as like
it just dropped out the sky. Like Joseph Smith had some
golden tablets on the ground, you know, in Utah or whatever it
was, you know, that, that that gave him apparently some new
revelation, right? It's not that or like the the
Quran where you know, Muhammad says I'm just getting a I'm just
automatic. Dictating, you know, this,
channelling this voice, these are the the apostles saying,
look, we have witnessed this, we've experienced it, we know
it's crazy, but this is the outcome and all, all of that's
there. It changes how you read the New
Testament when you read it that way, rather than trying to read
it like a manual, you know, thinking that it's a or a legal
document, which is even worse in my opinion.
So I want, I want to just throw that out.
We when we're engaging with the Scripture, it's this question of
what is it we're looking for? How are we looking at the
Scripture on the Wednesdays and in the courses we're doing the,
the lectures and things we're doing with ITTF, we're deep
diving on that. We're covering scriptural,
historical, philosophical, spiritual angles on all kinds of
core things to do with the Christian belief and the gospel.
I've got 20 minutes now, so I'm not not going to be
comprehensive, but I do want to draw some pictures and hopefully
the pictures may speak 1000 words.
And I don't know, it's probably Shakespeare who said that,
wasn't it? But I was thinking, Alice, you
know, you're much better off reading GK Chessis than the Nazi
sprawl. So, you know, choosing English
at university is probably a good decision if you want to actually
come to know Jesus. I mean, there's you, you, you at
least it's honest, you know, I mean, there's a lot of theology
is really very not honest. And I think that, you know, the
scripture says you desire truth in the inward parts.
I feel like the only me that God cannot bless is the fake me.
So as long as I'm turning up fake, then nothing's going to
happen or or worse, right? The bad thing is going to
happen. And the the word hypocrisy in
the New Testament is a drama word, right?
And it's, it's just to live behind the mask.
So the invitation of the gospel is towards truth and truth is
also towards OK, getting the facade out of the way, the
things that we think we're supposed to say do actually to
take that down. That was if we're play acting in
a certain way, let that go so that the truth can actually come
forward. And we need to do that until we
actually show up in truth. We don't ever really meet Jesus
once. Once we show up in truth, we
meet Jesus because he is the truth and he's present in the
truth. And I think one of the
unfortunate things in a lot of church or religious kind of
spiritual context is that there are lots of forces that exert a
pressure on us to not show up in the truth.
It's will show up with a Facade, conceal, hide, cover, don't be
honest. And one of the things I have
pieces of feedback I've had over over the years running the ITTF
course, consistent pieces of feedback is people saying I've
always had XYZ questions and I've never really felt like I
could bring those questions to the table in the church setting.
Those were not allowed. There were some questions that
were just off limits. And so I've kind of just muddled
around having those questions, but not really having anywhere
to go with them. And they, they're reflected on
the fact actually, this course has enabled me.
It's a, it's a safe place to be able to have the, the, the
questions. I mean, I'm not afraid of
questions. I don't mind you can ask
whatever. And I'm also not afraid of
anybody taking me out, buying me a coffee and also asking me
whatever, you know, I used to say again, those of you who know
me, no, I started out in St evangelism and sometimes, you
know, we would hear all kinds of choice and colourful terms and
you know, sometimes people would apologise.
I said, listen, there's literally nothing you can say to
me that I haven't already heard, right?
I've been doing this a long time.
Anything you have to ask about say or whatever, I've heard it
before. So I'm kind of thick skinned on
that. And that's also true as far as
the questions go. And I'm not, I'm not intimidated
by any question whatsoever. And my answer might be I have no
flipping clue, but I'm still not intimidated by by the question.
So please don't be in, don't be intimidated about asking
questions. It's just in general, our faith
is not at risk from questions. I think for a long time I
thought, and again, it was this mentality of all of you go to
university and study theology, you'll lose your faith.
I met a lot of those people doing Oxford theology courses
was it was a bit of a stereotype.
You know, people go and study theology at Oxford and lose
their faith. And I had a lot of
conversations. In fact, for me, you know,
again, being an evangelist, when I first went because Alice,
Chris and I, we crossed over at university just about and when I
arrived, I was praying, what do I do here?
And I just felt Holy Spirit say, just put up signs saying is God
supernatural? Come and find out in lecture and
whatever and pray for the sick. And I and I, I went and
suggested that to my church and they're like, no, we don't think
you should do that. You should do Alpha instead.
We're doing Alpha. You get on board with that.
So it's like, well, OK, I guess I've got to listen to my church,
right? Bad idea.
Sorry, don't listen, don't listen to the Church of the
church is wrong. The church was actually wrong.
I then spent sort of three years of the most unsuccessful
unfruitful alpha initiatives I've ever come across in my life
until in my 4th year, I came round to do you know what,
forget that what they say. Let me go with what God said.
So I went and put the signs up. Come to lecture 8, you know, and
find out whether or not God's supernatural had some of the
most, a couple of the most powerful supernatural sovereign
glory encounters with people coming in and getting completely
just annihilated on the floor by like you're walking into the
thick presence of God blown apart completely.
And then I got into finals and had to stop.
And I thought, gosh, it's a real shame.
I didn't listen to Holy Spirit 3-4 years ago because we could
have been doing this all this time.
And I came pretty late to the party.
So I came to the conclusion, you know, everyone thinks that you
need to be intellectual to reach intellectuals exactly wrong.
Like don't, don't try and do that.
You know, people need an, an, an encounter with the risen Jesus.
They, they certainly don't need us to be pulled down to the
level of, you know, trying to do this intellectual thing.
And, you know, I have no problem with doing the intellectual
thing exactly. But that's not where you're
going to meet Jesus, right? You're going to meet him on the
other side of that. And I think that it can also be
a bit of a deflection and a bit of a defence, you know, try and
hold Jesus at arm's length by just spinning your wheels with
theory. I was in a debate on a podcast
recently with a theologian who frankly, A theologian who I 98%
agree with, but we just ended up in a debate on the 2%.
We didn't. It was a fun, it was a fun
podcast. He, he's good humoured and all
the rest. But I said, you know, I said, I
think one of the things you need to learn to do is watch horror
movies. I said to him, so you don't,
you're a theologian. You're kind of, I have to say
you're a professional theologian.
You spend your, you spend your life in the ivory tower of the
Academy. And I lived in a theology school
for six years. I know, right?
You're there. And what you're speaking about
feels to me to be very divorced from reality.
And I get that, you know, we're in the sort of sanitised Western
world and all the rest. So, you know, you've got
Halloween's coming up. You know, you could watch some
horror movies and it might actually ground you and connect
you back with the, the real lived experience of people on
this planet, which for many of which is far worse than anything
you're going to see on any, on any horror movie, right?
And anyway, that was, he wasn't expecting me to say that, but we
had, we had a good kind of back and forward around it.
But my, my point is Jesus wants to meet us in the reality,
right? And the questions and the
arguments and all of this stuff is not intimidating at all to
him. And if you, if you're afraid of
those, you don't need to be. I understand why you might be
apprehensive about certain things.
I know there are people who refuse to come and meet with me.
They disagree with me from the from the safe distance of behind
their keyboard. They disagree with me there, but
they will never accept my invitation to meet in person.
And I know the reason they won't is because they know if they sit
down with me, they'll walk out and not be able to maintain the
views that they're holding. They know that and they're
afraid of that and they're worried about it because they
are desperately holding on to something that is giving them a
sense of security and they're afraid about letting go of it.
And I know that because that used to be me.
I, I used to exactly be there. So I'm trying to say to them,
listen, it's all right, you know, come, we'll have a nice
conversation. I'll, you know, but if you're
coming at me in public, I'm afraid I'm going to have to take
you down in public. And that's why they sort of hide
behind the keyboard, right? But, but that does happen.
You know, I know people are, are afraid of the, the questions.
They think, oh, it's going to make me confused.
It's going to make me lose my faith or something.
And then then they they might call me a call me a snake or
something. That's that's a fun one.
It's like, well, you know, cool. And I can go with that snake.
Snake is the word serif in the in the, in the Hebrew, you know,
I mean, the serif was the most senior of the angelic being.
So yeah, I'll take that one, you know.
But anyway, we don't need to be afraid, right?
There's No Fear in love. Perfect love casts out all fear.
In fact, I think it's very interesting that the Scripture
at one point, I think it's in the book of Hebrews, describes
the mission of Jesus in the following terms.
It says he came to destroy him, who by means of the fear of
death, kept us captive to death. It's interesting Jesus came to
destroy him. Brackets, the devil came to
destroy him, who by means of the fear of death, kept us captive
to death. Can you plug that back into the
four spiritual laws for me for a moment?
So fear of death holds us captive to death.
Satan holds the power of the fear.
So our attachment to death, which is the thing we, we don't
want, right. You go back to the story of the
garden. The curse comes in the form of
death and he doesn't it doesn't say he came to get us away from
death by judicially declaring us innocent in the judges courtroom
so that we don't get receive the penalty of death.
He said through fear of death we are held captive to death and
Jesus has come to destroy the one who influences us by means
of that fear. So when John says there is No
Fear in love, but perfect love casts out all fear, the one who
fears is not made perfect in love and God is love.
Fear has to do with punishment. Fear has to do with judgement.
You put those together, I think it you think, hang on a minute,
what gospel have I been thinking about?
You know, this is something that is very much rooted in in the
truth, the reality of our inner world that then manifests as in
our outer world through behaviour and action and culture
and all of these things too. And the stories we tell about
that really, really matter. And they're like coloured lenses
that we put on and they enable us to see through that
particular philtre. Only, you know, you wear blue
lenses, everything looks blue. You wear red lenses, everything
looks red. And one of the things we were
singing about in the worship today was about Jesus.
Give us vision, right? We want to see how you see, not
through the distorted lenses of the stories that we've been told
of the, the ideas that we've been holding onto.
You see, Paul had such a reconfiguration of his thinking
that he was able to say there is nothing that exists or could
exist that can separate you from the love of God.
He was able to say that with absolute conviction.
He he did not start out able to say that something happened to
him, a process happened to him whereby he was able to see that.
And that was a process called repentance, right metanoia, a
renewal or a transformation of the mind.
In fact, it was Paul also himself who said you will be
transformed by the renewing of your mind.
That's how this thing happens. As your mind gets straightened
out, the way that you think about things get straightened
out, then transformation follows.
This is a very inside out process, right?
It's from the inward to the outward.
So in my last few minutes, I want to try and put this in
picture form in a way that can whet your appetite for more and
feed in perhaps our discussion on Wednesday as well.
So I became a Christian at 15. I went straight into evangelism
on the street and spent eight years doing that.
At one point in an evangelistic mission, I had a little booklet
called Love is a Bridge. Do you remember that one?
Love is the Bridge, John's Gospel and some stuff at the
start. And when I read it, I suddenly
had this epiphany that I'd read it before and I'd read it when I
was about 5 or 6 years old and someone had given me one and I
suddenly was transported back to I had this.
I read it. I remember being in a room in my
house and praying the sinner's prayer and doing all these kind
of things when I was much younger.
So this is a kind of interesting moment for me because I had no
recollection of that until the point when I picked up this
thing and I realised I'd read it before.
And you know, great. We did, we did, we did a lot
with those tracks. Fantastic, you know, but there's
a there's a time to just run with it and there's a time to
stop and think, hang on, what is it we're running with and can we
do better? So we are often used to this
kind of this kind of perspective, right?
If you've seen this, you've seen this before, you've got God is
here on one side of the equation and we are here over here, us
and there's this chasm in between and how did we get here
on this side when God created us?
Well, there's something to do with snakes and apples and
whatever in the garden. What are we are we, do we
actually believe in that literally or is it symbolic?
Something happened to do with Adam and Eve, whatever that
means. Something happened to put us
here. And now if you're a human being
and if you're born, you're born on this side of the of the of
the chasm, right? You're born there and that's a
problem because God's over here and all these different ways
that we can conceptualise what that means depending on what
particular, you know, flavour of the tradition you're coming
from. Are you there because God is
wrathful with you over there? Are you there because, well, he
loves you, but he can't really do anything about it because
he's a consuming fire and you'll burn up if you come near him.
So he has to withdraw himself or, you know, all these kind of
different ways to think about it.
But then we say, OK, but isn't it great though?
Here comes Jesus and, and here's the cross and the cross kind of
goes like this and it, it bridges the gap like that so
that we happily can, you know, hop, skip in a jump, come back
over here to, to God, right? And, and maybe people write
Jesus there in the middle, you know, so there's this idea.
Love is the bridge, right? So here's Jesus and Jesus is the
bridge and the bridge is the cross because, oh, OK, well,
it's in the in the death of Jesus that the atonement happens
somehow. And that's often thought of in
punitive terms. OK, well, we all deserve to die
over here. Someone's got to pay.
Well, Jesus dies instead. So OK, that's good.
That's paid now. And so that's kind of closed the
gap and is meant we can then get back over to God.
And then of course, everyone argues about, well, what are the
steps to crossover from here to here?
What are the different things? Do you have to believe a certain
thing, confess a certain thing, pray in a certain way?
Do you need to be baptised? Do you need to take the
sacraments? Do you need to persevere or can
you go, can you go like the hokey cokey in and out, right.
All of these other questions, loads and loads of debates.
Well, were you predestined to come this way or is it your free
choice? You know, all, all of that is
there in the mix and with lots of different riffing that takes
place over this kind of picture. And it's quite, it's quite a
convenient picture because when particularly when you're going
out on the street, you're talking to people who know that
they're in a mess, right. It's not hard to convince them
that they're over here. Oh, yeah, definitely my life's
in a mess. Yeah.
Well, if God's around, definitely is not with me.
Not, not hard to speak to that and then sell them away to get
from here to here. Not it is.
It really isn't that hard. I spent a lot of time doing it.
In fact, you know, if you're good at selling, you can, you
can sell this one. Guys, listen, I know it sounds
really bad right now, but look, really, really good news.
All you really need to do is just pray this prayer, right?
Pray the prayer or the questionnaire thing.
Do you remember that when those guys came and they thought we
were having revival because they reinvented questionnaire
evangelism from the 1980s and they called it the turning.
And I said to Chris, my stomach's turning and they they
take them down. And at the end, you know, they
pretend like they're doing a survey.
It's like trick them in a bit like chuggers, you know, the
charity mode trick you in that you're having a conversation and
they want to close the deal at the end.
And if everybody knows where it's going, right.
And at the bottom, they say, now if you, if you were able to know
God personally, would you be interested?
And then they're ticking the box and saying, well, yeah, I
suppose I would like to know God personally.
Yeah, I suppose that sounds good.
So. OK, tick the box.
All right. Well, here's how you can do it.
You know, now I've closed you down on that.
You've said to me that you want to know him personally.
Here's how you can answer. Just pray this prayer after me.
Well, yeah, I guess. I suppose I can just pray that
prayer. I mean, I've just been out
shopping, but I don't know. I don't know of all the
implications of that. Yeah, I can pray the prayer.
Fine. Amazing.
Fantastic. Tick.
And then it goes back and gets reported.
Amazing. We had 57 people become
Christians today in Broadmead, you know, and then it gets
reported back into the, you know, the, the national sales
forecasts and sales and marketing forecasts.
Those, those numbers turn over quite nicely.
And then we can, we can have a good conference about it and we
can have a good speaking tour about how fantastic this method
is of getting people to sign up on the on the dotted line.
And meanwhile, the rest of us are looking around saying, has
anything changed in this in this environment because of this
activity, other than a whole bunch of people getting excited
about an activity that two weeks from now they're not going to be
doing anymore. And then they'll be a little bit
more disappointed than when it started, right?
My stomach's turning. Anyway.
I mean, that one, that was a bit faddish.
It disappeared quite quickly. And then again, some years from
now, someone else will unearth questionnaire evangelism as the
new latest amazing thing that's going to kind of bring revival
anyway. Lots of different ways.
If you really want this to work, then just really turn up the
heat on them. If you were to die tonight,
would you know where you're going to go?
What if you were to walk out and get hit by a truck right now?
I said that to a friend of mine in universe.
Look, I know, I know you're kind of sort of think this is a bit
funny, but if you were to walk out and get hit by a truck right
now and he just, he goes, yeah, yeah, that, that would be
unfortunate. He said, I said like, don't
wait, seal the deal right now. Like pray that pray you don't
know when a meteorite might fall out of the sky and like splat
you right. Anything could happen and you,
you could be gone. Like now is the day of the
salvation. The Bible says not tomorrow.
So get with the programme now. This might be your last chance.
Come on. I've done it.
I've done the crosswalking through the centre of town.
I've done the get up on the on the the PA system.
You know, in fact, other people I was on the PA system with, I
thought they were too soft core. I said no, I you're not being
hardcore enough. If you want the shoppers to to
really pay attention to you, you have to tell them about eternal
conscious torment in a blazing fire of hell.
That's the only way you're going to get them to listen because
they're busy doing their thing and they don't want to listen to
you. You absolutely have to terrify
them to get their attention. I'm speaking from experience.
Anyway, here's this now let me just give you a different, let
me give you a different picture and I'll leave it.
I'll leave you, leave it with you to.
Contemplate and then you can come and then be angry with me
on on Wednesday. I've taken the same to people.
You know, it's not OK if you're afraid by what I'm saying, but
it's absolutely fine if you're angry with what I'm saying.
One of the reasons we get angry is when we realised, you know
what, I've been really sold a crop for the last 30 years and
I've invested an awful lot of time in something.
And hang on a second. Wait a minute.
You mean I didn't need to alienate my whole family by the
fact that I was so afraid that they were going to go to hell?
Absolutely. Right.
Now that I at Christmas dinner, I stood up and I told them so.
And now nobody wants to talk to me.
You mean that 20 years ago I didn't need to do that and kind
of wrecked the wrecked the relationship?
I'm speaking from experienced people.
I'm not. I'm not talking hypotheticals
here. Right.
I'm not talking hypotheticals. Yeah.
So let me give you let me give you another, another version
that I think is a better version of the story.
I think it's better because I happen to think it's true and I
happen to think the other one isn't true.
But you know, if you're not ready to go with me there, at
least consider a better version of the story.
Also also looks like this, but I'm just for the sake of
argument, I'm going to put a bottom on that because it's not
really bottomless. It feels bottomless, but it's
not really right. And now I'm going to put God up
here again, but I'll just say Father, Son in spirit, so we're
not confused as to what God we're talking about.
Oh, but I'm going to put us down here.
All right? This is the biblical picture of
our problem. All God's on one side and we're
on the other side. You know, The thing is about
being on the other side. Well, OK, I stole a paper clip
when I was 11. That was a sin, so that's enough
to qualify me to be on the other side.
Did the paper clip, did the stealing of the paper clip harm
anybody? No.
Did anyone miss the paper clip? No.
Was I trying to be malicious with a paper clip?
No, doesn't matter. It was stealing.
You broke the 10 commandments, you're going to hell.
You're on that side, right? Ray Comfort style of you know
who that cat is. So that's, that's that picture
right here. How about this one again,
starting in the same place. Something happened.
I didn't really understand the details of it, but something
happened where we we did not begin here.
We've begun here in the heart of the, the, the oneness of the
father, son and spirit from time immemorial.
They dreamed us up and said it was very, very good with a good
purpose. Every individual knit together
in the mother's womb. This is where we begin.
Something happens. It's kind of mysterious.
In fact, the Bible calls it the mystery of lawlessness, right?
The, the chaos and sin and these things.
It is kind of irrational. I haven't really got a good
answer for it, but we've got some stories about it, right?
Something happened and that took us down here, right?
And down here we've got fear, we've got jealousy with an A in
it because I didn't study English.
Jealousy. We've got rage, we've got abuse,
we've got war, greed, we've got self hatred, we've got suicide,
addiction. All of these pathologies, right,
that come under the banner of, you know, you want, you want to
call it sin. All that we are down here in the
mess, right at the bottom, the bottom of the chasm.
God's rejected us. God's abandoned us.
We're, we're alone. We've got to figure this thing
out for ourselves. We've got to try and engineer
some way to make this mess down here a little bit better or the
cynical ones. Well, we can't make that better
for other people. So we're just going to try and
make it better for ourselves. Accumulate wealth, hoard power,
do whatever we can to just make this a little bit more tolerable
down here at the at the bottom of the pit, right?
We're all down here and in the middle of this, the Father, Son
and Spirit say we can not tolerate beloved children, our
creation, in the dissolution and dissipation that is down here.
They won't listen to us. In fact, they can't listen to us
because it's got so dark down there.
They can't even recognise who we are without the distortion of
their own issues, their own problems.
They project the abusive father onto US.
They project the absent mother onto US.
They look at earthquakes and disease and all of these things.
I think, well, that must be divine judgement for us doing
bad things. So then they sacrifice because
of fear. They're going to human sacrifice
or other kind of crazy nonsense. To think that maybe they could
do something to prove themselves worthy to climb back up to here,
because this is all about worthiness to them.
They're judging it as well. Who's who's got relative merit?
Which one's higher than the other?
Which one has proved themselves more worthy of this divine thing
up here? And they create these
hierarchies. And who can we follow?
Who can give us the way out down here?
All in the dark. And what does Jesus say?
He says all who came before me are thieves and liars.
They have no idea what they were talking about.
None of them. All who came before me, I don't
know what that says about the prophets, but he said all who
came before me, I don't know if you want to take Jesus literally
or not, but he said all who came before me are thieves and liars
right down here in the Mass. And here's what they're going to
do. They're going to say that the
Father, Son, and Spirit, by the way, live in eternal oneness.
They cannot be divided. They're indivisible,
inseparable. But the Son, the Word, becomes
flesh and dwells among us and within us as us.
The sun is going to go down right to the bottom of the
bottomless pit. The sun is going to make contact
with us in our suffering, dysfunction, and sin.
It's not just the Word became human, it's the Word became
flesh, right? Sarks.
It's the bad word for humanity, not the good Word, right?
He takes on and He doesn't become sarks the moment he's
crucified. He becomes Sox the moment he's
Incarnate in the womb of the Virgin.
And the angels declare peace on earth and goodwill to the human
race. That was the word that was
spoken over his birth right, the Annunciation of the angels.
Peace on earth and goodwill. How can it be peace on earth and
goodwill? Look at what's going on down
here. God, can't you see the horrific
mass that's taking place here? The angels are saying.
But look, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light
here. The light has dawned right in
the centre of the darkness. It's not that.
The lights over here beckoning us to crossover.
OK, I can see the lights over there.
I can kind of find my way to get to it.
The light has come right down into the bottom of the
bottomless pit. And not only that, that light
has gone all the way to death, even beyond earthly existence,
into the very grave itself. And not only death, but the most
horrific death. Because the question isn't why
did Jesus die? If it was about dying, He could
have just killed over and had a heart attack if it was about
that. So why does he?
Why did he die the way that he did?
He died the way that we did because that is what the sum
total of all of this down here inflicted upon him.
In that moment of the cross, every act of human sin and
suffering that ever was and ever would be was brought to Ground
Zero. The cross is the son of God's
connection and identification with every single piece of human
dysfunction and brokenness is when the when the, the, the, you
know, the addict is putting the needle in the arm, that's there.
When the the abusive husband is beating the wife within an inch
of her life, that's there. When the gas is turned on in the
gas chamber, that's there connected to the cross that he
is gathered. And Jesus says in John's gospel,
when I am lifted up, I will draw all to myself.
And it's interesting. He doesn't even qualify the all.
He doesn't even say all people. He says all, meaning all of all,
everything that is every atom in the universe, past, present and
future is being brought to the Ground Zero of the cross, which
is why the sun goes out, right? In Matthew's Gospel, you
remember the sun goes out. They used to say.
We used to say, well, the sun goes out because the Father
turns his face away, not realising we just committed
idolatry, right? That at that, at no point is the
sun in the sky, the shining sun connected with the face of the
Father in the Scripture. In fact, that's sun worship.
It's the opposite, right? We said, oh, well, the son is
the father turning his face away.
No, the sun goes out because the very word who upholds the
existence of the sun just died. So what happens to the sun when
its power source dies? Well, the sun dies too, until
it's raised again, right? So in the Son of God descending
into everything that we are, everything that we've done,
identifying himself with it fully in our experience, not
just in a in the sense of being up here telling us this is the
way out, but coming and fully taking it into his own body.
And he doesn't just take it in because he takes in he takes in
because we put it there right. We are the ones who nail him.
If you can see it. We nailed him to the cross.
Remember Mel Gibson's film The Passion and the hand that's
nailing Jesus's hand into the, the the the nail Mel Gibson was
like, that has to be my hand. I'm going to do it.
He was making a point. He was saying all of human sin
across all ages is what came onto the cross right there.
All of it was put on him. And what does he say at the very
peak of his suffering, which John calls his glorification or
his coronation, the very peak of his suffering, he says, father,
forgive them that they don't know what they do.
He pronounces absolution from the cross because Jesus doesn't
pray a prayer that doesn't get answered right.
When Jesus says father forgive them, the Father answers the
prayer. He doesn't not answer the
prayer. And by the way, the Son can only
do what he sees the Father doing and he can only say what he
hears. So when he says Father forgive
him, he is also perfectly reflecting the heart and the
will and the attitude of the Father because there's not a,
there's not some kind of schizophrenia going on here.
God brackets the Father was in Christ reconciling the world to
himself. The Father was here too.
Jesus says if you've seen me, you have seen the Father.
Wait a minute. We thought if we saw the face of
the Father, we'd spontaneously combust.
Apparently not. Because Philip, you've been face
to face with me the whole time. You haven't spontaneously
combusted. Think of the fear thing again.
I'm going to finish with this. When the apostle Peter first
meets Jesus, he says go away from me, Lord, you're a sinful,
I'm a sinful man. Go away from me, Lord.
Why? He's terrified.
He's terrified if he gets around the holy God or anyone who is
someone who's really close to God, that that might burn him,
right? Within months, Peter's arguing
and saying, who's going to be the greatest in the Kingdom of
heaven? Maybe I get to sit on the right
hand. What does 6-7 months do hanging
out with Jesus to a man who is so weighed down by guilt, fear,
and sin? He's like, I can't even get in
the presence of the holy Rabbi or I'm going to spontaneously
combust to. I might actually have a shot at
being the top, the top honcho in heaven's hierarchy.
That's what hanging out with Jesus does to him, right?
Hanging out, hanging out with Jesus creates A metanoia and
repentance, A transformation to the point that this guy's mind
is so completely blown. He's no longer like, Oh, I'm I'm
could go away from me, Lord of a simple man.
He's like, no, I'm going all the way you.
I will never abandoned you, Jesus.
And of course, we know how that ended up there, right?
But the, but the point is, look at the effect that hanging
around Jesus had on him. His yoke is easy.
His burden is light. It's liberating.
It's lifting off the years and the generation upon generation
of weight and guilt and shame and BS that's been put on these
guys, hanging around with Jesus, detoxing them, curing them.
He comes down not to suffer for us.
He comes down to suffer as us. For as much as you do to the
least of these, you do to me because I am in them and they in
me, because I, I was the one who had the thought of them in the
first place. And I'm the one who sustained
their life and I'm the one who dipped them together in their
womb and who who had a good purpose for them in creating
them. And I'm coming to show you that
there is nothing that exists down here that can create
separation. That's why Paul can say nothing
can separate us from the love of God because he understands that
what's going on in the cross is the sum total of all human
depravity directed at Jesus at that moment.
And at that very moment he says, Father, forgive them.
He pronounces the absolution. So he's able to say beyond a
shadow of a doubt, well, the worst thing you could ever do,
you already did it was crucify Jesus.
If you can recognise that and wake up to that, then welcome to
being a Christian. Thank you very much.
See you Wednesday. Thank you so much.
Welcome back. All the children you see more
clearly than the rest of us. So it's great to have you in
here. I am just going to lead us in a
prayer now. No, we're just, we're just so
grateful that you always want to.
You're always wanting to include us and draw us in.
You love our participation, You love reaching out in
relationship. And we just believe so many lies
and we resist it so often but we repent of that.
We have a change of mindset. We want to believe that nothing
in all creation, unseen and seen realm can separate us from your
love. And that we want a true
enlightenment that enlightens us as to the reality of that,
however young we are in this room, that we know deeply and
profoundly how loved we are and how old we are.
When you reveal to us the reality of what you're like, how
you see us. And I think that the natural
conclusion will be, and this is what we'll be wrestling with,
how you see everyone else. Help us to see clearly through
your lens, the lens of how you see people.
And we just continue to call into the light all the things
that need to come into the light in our own lives and hearts, in
our relationships with each other, in the ways we've been
with other people. We just continually, it's the
scariest prayer that that I pray regularly every day,
particularly around family, but Chris and I pray we just
continually call everything into the light.
It's the best way to live. And so we do that as a
community, as a church, we call everything into the light
because we know there's just so much goodness.
There's so much beauty, so much restoration, so much alignment
in the light. So we receive that absolution
that you declared on the cross, the Father, Son, and Spirit in
agreement, One God, three persons of the same substance.
We receive that absolution that says, Father, forgive all of us,
We don't know what we're doing. Amen.
So as I say, if there's anything that you're wrestling with or
struggling with, please have conversations with people you're
doing life with or come to me or Paul or Chris.
We're all like there. There's one conspiracy.
It's called the conspiracy of the Trinitarian love.
There is no conspiracy theory that there's a whole bunch of
people who think something and we want everyone to be on board.
We all are on different pages with this and we all are having
an open conversation. OK, It's really important.
Everyone knows this. Everyone is really brave to know
that our agreement is not on a kind of an intellectual
affirmation. It's because we love each other.
We're family. And so we can sit in different
spaces with, with some phrases, with some ways of thinking.
So please push back on anything, have conversations, please look
at the videos. We've got an introductory 1,
lecture 1 and lecture 2, and we want to look at lecture 2 this
Wednesday. Please prioritise this, I would
almost say over everything else in your life, which is a really
big thing to say. But I think this, this is a
really big way to see the world. It's a really different way.
And so I think we need to wrestle with it authentically
and deeply and richly. And I'm not even saying it's
live for me personally. I have to say the ocean song for
me is this is being in this position where as a community we
take a step of faith into areas that are uncertain.
That's that's where we step out of the boat.
But personally, I don't want to live any other way and I don't
want to follow Jesus any other way.
And, and most people about my stage are really bored in their
faith. And as John Tyson said, if
God's, if you're bored with your faith, God's probably bored with
your faith too. So let's take this step of faith
and go to these deep places and wrestle through them.
Brilliant. See you on Wednesday.
Sign up for the Curry and keep the conversation.
And this vegetarian. Thanks, Christy.