James’s Blog: When We Feel Wronged by God.

James’s Blog: When We Feel Wronged by God.

Poor old Job. He gets a bit of a raw deal, losing everything that he had in such a short space of time. He has a lot to deal with but the author of the book is keen to point out, even though Job is confused about the source of all his trouble, that “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.”

That’s chapter one and chapter two anyway. From chapter three onwards Job gets a little less…stoic. Here are some of the things Job throws at God:

“He would crush me with a storm and multiply my wounds for no reason…”

“Does it please you to oppress me, to spurn the work of your hands, while you smile on the schemes of the wicked?”

“God assails me and tears me in his anger and gnashes his teeth at me;”

“…know that God has wronged me and drawn his net around me.”

There’s more. It’s quite a long book. If Job avoids sin in the early chapters by not accusing God of wrongdoing, then he’s going to be in for it once God gets around to reading the rest of the book.

Now, I’m sure that a first-rate lawyer would pour over Job’s words and argue that “my client, Your Honour, doesn’t ever explicitly accuse God of wrongdoing (except maybe in that last bit quoted above, though he was under immense strain at the time)…”. We, however, are not under the Law but under the Spirit, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the spirit of Job’s words are very much about wrongdoing. God is to blame for his plight and He’s not being fair. God is unjust.

So, we’d expect that when God finally shows up, Job’s going to be in trouble and, sure enough, God has something to bring to the table. Namely, four chapters of “Job, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And yet…God reserves His anger for someone else. It’s Job’s friends who get it in the neck because, as God says, “You have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has.”

Really? After all that stuff Job said about God crushing him unjustly and smiling on the wicked and wronging him? “You have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has.”

I suppose I can think of two possible explanations for this. One, God tunes out and stops listening when we go off on a rant. He wouldn’t be the only parent to adopt this posture. Or two, when we’re struggling, when we loathe our life and give free rein to our complaint, when we’re dealing with genuine tragedy and just want to scream and shout and find someone to blame, God cuts us some slack.

I know which of those two I think it could be.

James’s Blog: Repairs.

James’s Blog: Repairs.

I once met a man, a connesieur of D.I.Y. if you will. I watched him at work, skilfully carving, cutting and fixing. The thing I noticed is how old his tools seemed. I’d expected him to be equipped with the latest and best, seeing as how he was an expert and all, but instead he used a patchwork of old, venerable tools.

“Why don’t you chuck that lot away and get some new stuff?” I asked him.

He looked at me as though I was an idiot.

“Why? There’s nothing wrong with these. The blades are still sharp, the heads still solid. They get scuffed and damaged over the years, and need to be patched up – a new handle here, a sharpening there – but they’re still good. Better than good actually.”

“Ah, sentimental value,” I said.

He nodded. “A bit, but not just that. They do the job, and do it well. Those new tools are alright, but they don’t make them like this anymore.”

I knew a man in Christ who had been broken but got up again, and been broken but got up again, and been broken but got up again. He limped his way along, leaving the fragrance of the Kingdom of God wherever he went.

“Why don’t you use someone else, God?” I asked. “That guy’s had it.”

He looked at me as though I were an idiot.

“I don’t throw things away, James.” Then He looked at the man with such love in His eyes. “They don’t make them like this anymore.”

James’s Blog: Lines in the Sand.

James’s Blog: Lines in the Sand.

We’re pretty good at drawing lines in the sand, but I wonder where God draws His. What’s God’s deal-breaker? Maybe it’s a good thing to not be able to provide a concrete answer to that question – after all, human beings have a tendency to take lines in the sand and turn then into a box and then to wish hell upon everyone who’s on the outside.

Take ‘Statements of Faith’ for example. These can be helpful things for organisations and churches. They can help individuals find a home where they can grow in some measure of security and comfort, without having to navigate tricky conversations every day. You know what you’re getting. They’re like stablisers; training wheels as we learn how to relate to and love others.

But they can also consist of nothing more than ornate lines in the sand, drawn by human hands; the stone cold truth about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Sin, Humanity, the Bible, Heaven, Hell, Predestination, Women in Leadership, Baptism. Death by bullet points.

Those lines can become a box, or perhaps more acurately, a cage, where what you think about the person and work of Jesus Christ carries as much orthodoxy as what you think about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and someone who thinks differently to you on whether or not women should be allowed to preach is as much ‘in error’ as someone who thinks that God is a cola-flavoured ice lolly.

(Sigh) I’m not against theological wrestling, by no means, but I remember one of my lecturers once saying that the goal of theology is not to provide answers but to categorise mysteries and I think there’s a lot of mileage in that. Certainly, it helps us deep thinkers with the old humility problem. No, what I’m against is drawing lines in the sand in places other than where God might have drawn them.

As I’ve pondered these mysteries, I have adapted my views and changed my positions over the years, and I have no doubt I will continue to refine my worldview as I continue to better understand the rhythmn of God’s heart. But here’s the thing: God has been with me and guided me and helped me and blessed me and used me all the way along my journey – regardless of my views on predestination or tongues or baptism. God has remained faithful while I’ve stumbled along, sometimes holding views that were quite damaging to myself and potentially others. So God must draw His line in the sand somewhere other than along the denominational or theological boundaries that have provided the framework of my faith for so long. Otherwise, at some point in my journey I would have been persona non grata to Him for some belief I held.

I think God does draw lines, and I think there is a point where God says, “You and I can no longer do business together”, but I think this has much more to do with Jesus than it does to do with all those other details that take up so much space on the page – after all, you know who you find in the details…

James’s Blog: Small Lies and Big Truth.

James’s Blog: Small Lies and Big Truth.

Recently, I’ve found myself dwelling on mistakes that I’ve made in my relationships, and not in a healthy way. It’s like I’m being aggressively confronted with the 10% that I got wrong rather than the 90% that I got right. I’ve spent a lot of time out of my depth with people, but the truth is that I have very few drowned relationships to my name. These thoughts don’t seem to care. They just seem to want me to feel guilty about something, anything. It’s odd to find yourself thinking about somebody with whom you have a good relationship, somebody who you know you have helped and has expressed gratitude for the help that you have given them, and yet immediately be thinking of the little ways in which you feel like you failed them, or things you wish you had or hadn’t said or done.

These thought patterns often crop up when I’m praying for people, and have the fingerprints of accusation all over them, so these days I file them under ‘spiritual warfare’ and try to deal with them appropriately. How I go with that depends on how well tuned in I am to what is true.

We all make mistakes in the way that we relate to others, we might damage relationships and make less than perfect decisions at times, but that’s rarely the whole story. I want to remind myself, and you dear (and not-so-dear) readers, that our relationships are not usually as bad as we think they are, our mistakes not necessarily as damaging as we fear they might be, our failures not the giant blots on our record that we suspect they are, and that we have done more good than we know just by being a friend to someone. We can’t necessarily stop those accusing thoughts from coming, those regrets and should-haves, but we don’t have to give our failures too much credit, and we don’t have to give the enemy an easy victory.

James’s Blog: Like Us or Like Him?

James’s Blog: Like Us or Like Him?

The heart of the gospel speaks, I believe, to all people, regardless of culture, creed or race. Because of this, we can make the mistake of thinking that the gospel belongs solely to us; to our culture, creed or race. If it speaks to us, then God meant it for us, right? And if He meant it for us, then you have to be like us to fully appreciate and understand the gospel, right? Then we find ourselves in a position where we assume that being a true follower of Jesus means fitting in with a particular culture – or as Steve Taylor puts it in I Want to be a Clone, ‘if you want to be one of His, got to act like one of us.’

This was perhaps at its most blatant in past missionary eras, where the line between ‘Christianizing’ and ‘Westernizing’ was blurred at best. In the 19th century, the London Missionary Society established a mission in Bechuanaland in Africa, and the Missionary Magazine reported on its progress in the following way:

‘The people are now dressed in British manufactures and make a very respectable appearance in the house of God. The children who formerly went naked and presented a most disgusting appearance are decently clothed…’

Of course, it’s easy to look down our noses at the missionary pioneers of the past, but we’re guilty of the same crime when we insist that there’s only one ‘proper’ way to do worship, one ‘proper’ way to preach, one ‘proper’ way to look and sound. We’re too quick at times to slap the label ‘Biblical’ on things that turn out to just be cultural traditions, and too slow to deny the implied criticism that traditions which differ from our own are therefore ‘Unbiblical’. Our cultural perspectives enable us to share something of the truth of God with others, but not everything of the truth.

In this blog’s first year, I posted a ‘poem‘ (I use that term loosely), suggesting that sometimes an author will write a book about what Jesus is really like and, what do you know, it turns out that Jesus is just like them.

There’s something in our humanity that seems determined to repeatedly recreate God in our own image, to want to turn Him into one us – whatever we are. The irony is, of course, that God has already turned Himself into one of us, through Christ. When we do it, we make God smaller. When He does it, He makes us bigger. We do it to bring God down to our level, to make Him easily digestible. He does it to bring us up to His level, to make us more than we are.

We can’t help but be shaped by our culture and history, but we can certainly try to make sure that it’s God who is shaping us more.

James’s Blog: The Face of the Pilot.

James’s Blog: The Face of the Pilot.
Shortly after Ruth and I were married we received a letter. It was a letter that promised us huge amounts of money provided that we respond immediately. There was, however, a catch. There’s always a catch. In order to qualify for the cash, we had to take out an insurance policy with the organisation who had sent out the letter. The bulk of the letter outlined the benefits of taking out the policy that we were being offered, but as I read the letter I felt a little…well, threatened. For example, I read: Imagine what would happen to a relative or friend, who suffered an injury and could never lead a normal life again. Everyone is at risk, no matter how careful. Accidents do happen! Although still very much alive, they may not be able to see, or may lose the use of a limb…and that can lead to serious money worries. The letter also included testimonies from people who had, it seemed, suffered terrible life-changing injuries within hours of taking out the insurance policy: “I’m so lucky…In October I took out insurance. In December I had an accident which has left me paralysed and facing a bleak future…” You and I have very different ideas of what constitutes being ‘lucky’, friend. Anyway, I was undecided. If I didn’t take out the insurance then perhaps they’d send someone round to follow up on the promise that ‘Accidents do happen!‘, but if I did take out the policy then I was pretty much guaranteed to suffer some horrible injury in the next few months anyway. What was I to do? I did nothing. I’m a risk-taker by nature. I doubt there was anything genuine about the offer that we received in that letter, but it was clear that they had a very deliberate marketing tactic. Fear. Fear. There’s a lot of it going around at the moment, and it can be hard to keep it at bay, even when you’re not receiving letters designed to terrify you into parting with your money. And why shouldn’t we be afraid, not just of the things that are happening, but also of the things that might happen? After all, accidents do happen and many of us know all too well that a bleak future is always a possibility. Paul writes that we are ‘…hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed’.  J.B. Phillips translates the last part of this verse as ‘[we are]…knocked down, but never knocked out’. If we are knocked down, but never knocked out, what should we fear? What can fear do to one who is not destroyed, never abandoned? And what might I see if I gathered up my fears and took them directly to God? Robert Louis Stevenson tells the story of a ship experiencing a storm at sea. The passengers were terrified as the ship rocked to the right and the left, and as the waves crashed against the deck. Eventually one of the passengers, against orders, left the hold and crept up the deck to see what was going on. Amidst the torrential rain and wind the passenger saw the pilot, lashed to the wheel, steering calmly as though it were a pleasure cruise. The pilot turned and saw the passenger, and simply gave him a reassuring smile.  The passenger went back below and comforted the others, saying, “I have seen the face of the pilot, and all is well.” Fear. There is a lot of it going around at the moment, but I have seen the face of the pilot, and all is well.

James’s Blog: The New Circumcision.

James’s Blog: The New Circumcision.

Recently, I’ve been slowly making my way through Galatians. It’s been a helpful way of following Paul’s train of thought and seeing the context and bigger argument in a book which is full of ubiquitous Christian soundbites.

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James’s Blog: Tax Return.

James’s Blog: Tax Return.

Another post from the archives here (April 2011). This one resonated with me more than I expected, and not just because the tax year ended last month. Possibly it’s because the Coronavirus situation and recent health issues for Ruth have thrown up that recurring question for me again – how can one learn to be content in each and every situation?

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James’s Blog: Forgiveness Plus.

James’s Blog: Forgiveness Plus.

With everything that’s going on it might be easy to forget that Easter is on the way. We lose sight of Easter at our peril, especially at a time like this, so that’s what I’m going to write about for the next couple of weeks. I’m sure you’ve had your fill of talking about the Coronavirus anyway…

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James’s Blog: Something From My Firebrand Phase…

James’s Blog: Something From My Firebrand Phase…

Here’s another old blog post – May 14th 2011. As you will see, I used to be quite opinionated. Actually, to be honest, this is still the way I think about church and mission. I thought it seemed quite relevant, considering that we’ve currently lost our ability to invite people to physical gatherings. If nothing else, the next few months is going to expose whether or not our churches really are missional or not…

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