The Kingdom advances - at a price

It was a great privilege to travel recently with the international chairman of our movement, David Devenish. He taught a powerful message based on the parable of the wheat and the tares. God has sown us as children of the kingdom into this world in order that the kingdom would advance. And advance it will, until that day when the gospel is proclaimed to every nation, and the Lord will return. Yet while God has been busy sowing, so also has the enemy. He has sown weeds into God’s field. The weed he sowed, darnel, looks deceptively like wheat in its early stages. By the time it can be recognized for what it is, it’s too late. It has a deep root system that means if you try to pick it out, it will take a lot of the young wheat shoots with it. And so it is with this world in which we live. For God to destroy the wicked would involve too much collateral damage. Instead, he allows the agents of evil to remain and to spread, along with the seed of the kingdom. He will deal with the evil later.

It was the application of the text that was so riveting. Dave has been involved in dangerous areas of the world, developing church planting teams for the last twenty years. Some of the places he is involved with cannot be named publicly. The good news is the kingdom is advancing! Hundreds of churches have, like the good wheat, been planted in areas we would not have dreamed possible. Many of these churches are sizeable. Thousands have come to Christ. But in the midst of this, pastors have been martyred. Leaders have been caught in the crossfire of war and violence and killed. Many have become refugees, fleeing areas of intense conflict. In the midst of it all, courageous Christians have kept the faith.

Christians seem to have a habit of alternating between triumphalism and defeatism. Sometimes we preach a sugar-coated gospel based on optimism far more than faith. Everything will come out just fine. We’re a bit like the Jews of Jesus’ day who expected the Messiah to drive the Romans out, not wind up hanging on a Roman cross. We, like they, have no grid to deal with disappointment or suffering. On the other hand, some preachers are gloomier than Winnie the Pooh’s Eeyore. The world is going to hell in a handbasket. The only hope is for a weak church to be “raptured” out of the world before it gets any worse.

What the Bible teaches, as reflected in my friend’s preaching, is something less simplistic but more accurate. God is at work, the church is expanding across the globe as never before, yet there is a price to be paid.

After hearing Dave bring this message at a leadership day in Newmarket (near Toronto), I asked him to consider preaching it again at the next church we were heading to, Firm Foundation in Centreville, Michigan. I thought it would resonate there, and for this reason. The senior pastor, my close friend and colleague Don Smith, felt at the beginning of January that he had received a promise from God of great blessings in 2016. Two weeks later, Don lost his grandson Camden. Camden’s dad Brian pastors the church planted out last year in Kalamazoo. The two churches could not have received a worse blow. Yet in the midst of such sorrow, the kingdom advances. God is moving in those churches, and I have not the shadow of a doubt this will be the best year they have ever experienced.  What I did not know in all this was that Dave himself had preached this message for the first time a year ago two days after conducting the funeral of his own two newborn grandsons.  

So what do you and I take personally out of this? Here’s the most important thing. We are called to follow Jesus and to walk in the way of the cross. The rest is up to God. Whatever the cost may be, humanly speaking, will be more than recompensed in this life and the next. Jesus said it: you may lose home and family, but you will receive more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.

It isn’t the simplest or easiest answer, but it is the best answer, and it’s the truth.

Expect God to do great things in your life this year. Leave the rest to him.

The thin silence of God

How is it that we can have an amazing encounter with God, then apparently fall off the edge of a spiritual cliff? If it’s any encouragement, the same thing happened to one of my greatest heroes of faith, Elijah. Here’s why his story will inspire you anyway.

The story, contained in 1 Kings 18, of how Elijah vanquished the prophets of Baal is one of the great epics of the Bible. One man against 450! Even Bruce Willis couldn’t beat that.

At the day’s end, when the fire fell on Elijah’s offering and the prophets were slaughtered, it appeared that Elijah’s long battle against the wicked king Ahab had come to a triumphant conclusion. Even the three year drought, at the prophet’s word, had suddenly come to an end. But the story was not over. The very next day, Jezebel sent messengers to Elijah vowing to take his life in return for what he had done.

And Elijah fled.

Yes, fled! Hard to believe isn’t it? How can this invincible hero, who single-handedly destroyed the assembled powers of wickedness the previous day, have been in one moment so utterly vanquished?

God took him on a pilgrimage to find out why. Having arrived at Beersheba, God sent him on a 40 day journey to Horeb (another name for Mount Sinai). There, hidden in probably the same cleft of rock Moses found himself in many centuries before (Exodus 33), he witnessed three spectacular signs - a wind, an earthquake and a fire. Yet God was not in any of them. Then came what is usually translated as a still, small voice or a low whisper (1 Kings 19:12). The phrase in Hebrew is literally “a thin silence.”

God showed up, but not in the way Elijah had expected. And that was the point.

Elijah was expecting the triumph of God to arrive through manifestations of power, and when those manifestations did not stop Jezebel, his ultimate enemy, he gave up. Elijah’s identity worked in strength, but not in weakness.

Jesus understood this, even though his disciples did not. Surely his mission would overcome every obstacle through the performance of the most extraordinary miracles ever seen since since the days of Moses and Elijah. Every foe would bow in the face of such demonstrations of power!  That’s why the disciples were asking for the seats of power at his right hand and his left when the new revolutionary government was established in Jerusalem. Yet Jesus knew victory would not come through the power of his miracles. No, victory would come and the redemptive purposes of God would be released only through a naked man hanging in utter humiliation and apparently total defeat on a Roman cross.

Or, as another of my heroes put it: “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).

God can come in ways we expect and pray for -- provision, promotion, things going right, churches growing. But what happens when he doesn’t? What happens when we faithfully serve him and yet things are still hard, things don’t happen as we hoped, things even go wrong? Do we run or give up when it doesn’t work out the way we hoped?

For me, Elijah remains a source of massive encouragement. His works of faith lead to him being pictured in Revelation 11, along with Moses, as representatives of everything the church should be as the people of God.  And strangely enough, he’s encouraging to me even in his failures. When I fail, I’m in good company!

And failure, when placed in God’s hands, is never really failure. Elijah was commanded to anoint Hazael king over Syria, Jehu king over Israel and Elisha as prophet in his place. He lived to pronounce the doom of both Ahab and Jezebel, a task Jehu duly completed. Meanwhile, Elisha raised up a whole school of prophets to carry on Elijah’s work. And Elijah was transported to heaven in a whirlwind.

So here we have both triumph and failure and triumph, all in one package.

The secret to walking through it well is in finding God not in the whirlwind, but in the whisper. That’s where his presence is.

No matter what your circumstances, you will never fail to find him there.

How to know God's will - and why so many don't

Why is it that so many Christians are always struggling to know God’s will on some important matter? I think it’s because they are approaching the subject from the wrong perspective.

Paul prays that believers would be “filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding” (Colossians 1:9). And he prays similar prayers elsewhere. So to know God’s will is an important thing.

The problem is we interpret knowing God’s will as receiving a laundry list of instructions from God as to what we are to do about various problems we face. We don’t understand that to know God’s will is first and foremost simply to know God.

The world looks at knowledge as the accumulation of pieces of information. That is in truth the lowest form of knowledge. You can know a lot of information and be a very foolish person. Knowing information may have no effect on our lives at all, but knowing Christ changes everything. Knowledge in the Bible applied to God is a term of the closest intimacy, as in a man “knowing” a woman. We can know information about a person, but do we know the person? We can know information about Christ, even correct information, but this does not mean that we know Christ.

We should not think of the will of God as a kind of cosmic library of God’s opinions on things, and the knowledge of God’s will as the accumulation of information on those topics and how that can benefit us.

Sometimes we think of the Bible as a collection of information to be downloaded and applied. That is the wrong way to approach the Bible. You have to come to the Bible through Christ. Why? Because the will of God confronts us most completely, powerfully and accurately in the one person who walked completely and totally in it. If you want to know the will of God, look at Christ. He embodies God’s will. He came as God’s will in the flesh. The knowledge of God’s will is the knowledge of Jesus Christ. If you don’t know Christ, you cannot understand the Bible, no matter how much you study it, because the Bible is about Christ.

Knowing Christ unlocks the door to the amazing treasure house of the Bible and to knowing the will of God. Why? Because knowing Christ means receiving his Spirit. The more deeply we know him, the more powerfully his Spirit invades our lives. The Spirit unlocks the Word of God to us and applies it to our lives. He shows us how to live as Jesus did. He turns information into revelation. His will comes to us as we dwell in his presence. We know by his Spirit within us what we are to do if we are to follow Jesus with all our heart, and we avoid the consequences of the many mistaken and often self-centred actions we take as a result of being out of relationship with him.

So often, our attempts at seeking guidance are rooted in a crisis or problem in our life that has come about because we have been out of relationship with the Lord. Suddenly we find out we are drawing a blank when it comes to knowing what he wants us to do, because the heart has fallen out of our relationship with him.

I want to know Christ more than anything else, even more than what I am to do with my life. I want to know him no matter what it costs me to know him. In knowing him, I will for the first time truly know myself. And I will truly begin to know what he wants me to do today, tomorrow and the rest of my life.

This knowledge is pure gold. Be like the merchant who bought the pearl. Sell everything else and get it. It’s the best investment you’ll ever make.

When the fog clears

One day in 1872, a ship crossing the Atlantic from England to Canada was caught in a dense fog off the banks of Newfoundland. Captain Dutton had been on the bridge for twenty-two hours without a break. An elderly passenger came up to him, tapped him on the shoulder and told him he had to be in Quebec by Wednesday. It was now Saturday. The captain said it was impossible. The passenger said that in that case God would have to find him some other means of transportation because he had never missed an engagement in over fifty years. The passenger’s name was George Muller.

Mr Muller suggested he and the captain go down to the chart room to pray. The captain wondered what kind of lunatic asylum the man had come from.  “Don’t you know how dense the fog is?” The reply came back, “My eye is not on the fog, but on the living God who controls every circumstance of my life.”

Down in the chart room, Muller got down on his knees and prayed a very simple prayer the captain thought was more appropriate for a child. Yet when he finished, the captain himself felt he ought to pray. Muller put his hand on the captain’s shoulder and told him not to. “First, you don’t believe God will answer; and second, he already has. Get up Captain, open the door and you will find the fog has gone.” Muller reached his appointment on time. And the encounter changed the captain’s life.

At 93 years of age, Muller was still looking after two thousand orphans from his base in Bristol, as well as supporting missionaries and Christian efforts all over the world. He never once asked for money. His secret was what he told the captain: “I have known my Lord for forty-seven years, and there has never been a single day that I have failed to gain an audience with the king.”

Muller had learned a secret from Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 4:18: “We fix our eyes not on the things that are seen but the things that are unseen.” Two words for seeing are used. The first (“fix our eyes”) is skopeo, from which we get the words scope, microscope and telescope. The second (“seen”) is the ordinary word for unaided natural vision. What is right in front of us can be seen by the natural eye. But spiritual vision sees what cannot be seen any other way. There is a difference between shooting by natural eyesight, and shooting using the scope of a high-powered rifle. There is a difference between looking at an unidentifiable smear on a piece of glass, and examining it under the microscope. There is a difference between going outside at night and gazing at the stars, and examining those stars through the most powerful telescope on earth.

Two men stood side by side on the ship’s bridge. One saw himself in Quebec on Wednesday, the other saw only the fog in front of him. By the grace of God, the fog disappeared that day not only from the waters of the Atlantic. It also disappeared from the life of the captain.

Don’t expect God to clear the fog just to make life easier for you. Don’t expect him to do nothing more than facilitate your personal agenda. Muller knew the will of God for his life because long before he had submitted his life to the Lord.

When you walk in obedience to God’s will, God is committed to fulfilling that will in your life. In other words, he will always clear the fog to get you to the place he wants you to be.

Have some fog in front of you right now? You know what to do. Seek an audience with the King.

Collapsing into his will

Last weekend I co-led a conference designed for younger men which I call the Challenge. This is the eighth Challenge event I have led in Canada and the UK over the last few years. Over eighty men shared in fellowship, tears, love, teaching and even a baptismal service in the frigid waters of an adjacent river. That made me pine for the Presbyterian mode of baptism by sprinkling I was raised in!

Every one of the men comes with an assignment describing a challenge he has faced over the last year, and how God has helped him through it. Then I get as many as possible of them to share, which leads into prayer for those still experiencing the type of challenge described in the assignment. The result has been a massive impact on mens’ lives which again and again has left me in amazement.

My son-in-law Josh walked into the conference centre and dropped his assignment into my lap. It was a minor miracle that he made it, as his wife (our daughter Katie) is eight months pregnant with their second child, and experiencing some complications. In addition, he was trying to meet a deadline for his MA thesis, and look for a job. But Josh and Katie decided his meeting with God took priority. How much of a priority do you make meeting with God? Just a thought.

In his assignment, Josh talked about how the magnitude of the financial challenges facing them as a family had begun to rob him of his peace with God. He had begun to learn how God increases our capacity to receive peace not in spite of, but through times of pain and tears. And he shared how the Lord was drawing him to become “greedy” for his presence, for the tremendous riches of love flowing from the throne of grace.

He shared how in the process of drawing near to God, the Lord had exposed areas of rebellion in his life. He shared his discovery that fighting God’s ways was in the end pointless. And he shared that as their bank account got lower day by day, he made a critical strategic decision: to collapse into God’s will.

I think that is a remarkable and profound statement for anyone, let alone a young man, to make. We can fight God’s will through disobedience. We can ignore God’s will through apathy. We can pay lip service to God’s will through religious exercises. Or we can collapse into his will through radical obedience.

The statement reminded me of the prophetic words spoken by Moses shortly before he died: “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deuteronomy 33:27). We often use these words in funeral services, but in context they are about life, not death. They are about the God who rides through the heavens to help his people (verse 26), and who thrusts the enemy out before them (verse 27). They are about a people “saved by the Lord, the shield of your help, and the sword of your triumph” (verse 29).

The time of crisis is not a time to rush out and do all sorts of things on your own initiative and in your own wisdom. The time of crisis is not a time in which your disobedience, apathy or religious exercises will help you.

The time of crisis is the time to collapse into God’s will. And if you’re a wise person, you might even learn to collapse into it before the crisis comes.

When I was at university, we used to challenge each other to a “trust exercise,” in which one guy had to fall backward, not knowing whether the other guy would catch him or not. Most of the guys were not Christians, and the results were interesting. But God is not like that. God is all-powerful and he is all-merciful. His arms are underneath you, not so much to sustain you in death as to strengthen you in life.

Try collapsing into his will today. Those results will be interesting too.