by James Webb
The twelfth chapter of Hebrews starts with a vaguely threatening verse: ‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.’ Read more
The other day I was walking aimlessly around the church building, and I found myself wandering down a corridor I had never been down before. I’m not usually the adventurous type, but I thought I’d see where it ended up. At the end of the corridor was a big, thick, old wooden door. As I said, I’m not the adventurous type, but I took a look anyway.
The door opened into a large room, and it was absolutely full of people. There were all kinds in there, old and young, men and women. Anyone that you could imagine was there, and they were all busy with something. There was a group of people painting the walls, and a group of people setting out chairs, and a group of people cleaning the carpets, and all sorts of things going on.
I thought they must be preparing for some type of church service or something. Everyone was working so hard, and the room looked amazing. I mean, it’s hard to get the feel of a room right sometimes, but these people had nailed it. The way that everything was set out, the colours of the walls and carpet, the clean windows, the smell. I don’t know exactly what it was, but it was without a doubt, hands-down, the best room I had ever seen anywhere in any church ever.
I stood in the doorway watching them work for a while. One of the painters ended up near me, meticulously applying some magnolia to the wall beside to the door.
“What time does it start?” I said.
“What?” he said without looking at me. He was giving all of his concentration to the painting.
“The service, or whatever it is you have here. What time does it start?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“It must be soon though? The way everyone’s working so hard.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, how long have you been doing this?” I said.
He stopped painting long enough to shrug. “A while. Days. Months. Maybe longer.”
“Months?” I looked around the room. All these people working so hard. For months? “But it shouldn’t take months to get a room ready, should it?”
“The wall could always do with another coat,” he said. “You know how it is. You’ve just finished and then you notice a patch that needs touching up. A fingerprint or smear that needs covering. It’s the same with the carpet. And you’d be surprised at how much work has to go into getting the chairs just right.”
“But why?” I said.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Why are you doing this?”
He finally turned his attention to me. “Because the room has to be ready. We have to work hard to get the room ready. It’s the way to please God.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah,” the man said. “God wants us to work hard. It pleases Him. Then we get to go and be with Him forever.”
“Huh,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”
“That’s how it is. Would you like to join us? The guys in the kitchen could always do with one more. There’s just so much washing up.”
“No,you’re alright,” I said. I looked at the watch I wasn’t wearing. “I think I’ll be going now.”
“It’s your soul,” said the man. He went back to his painting.
I backed out of the room and carefully shut the door. As I turned to leave, I saw the sign above the door. It was quite small. I hadn’t noticed it before. It read ‘Welcome to Hell’.
The wind and the waves crashed against the sides of the boat, so frail out there in the middle of the dark sea all by itself. Keeping steady footing was impossible, and keeping a steady head even harder.
And as the crew huddled together and screamed and wept and wished it were all a dream, The Man slept the sleep of the righteous, undisturbed and unafraid, the fury of nature powerless to break his peace. Read more
Sometimes an idea just won’t let me go, and so it has been with my thoughts about dependence on God and just asking for what we need each day.
It occurred to me that the future is often a source of anxiety and frustration for me. It doesn’t have to be, but it is. Jesus understood the way that our minds work, which is why he said, “Don’t worry about tomorrow, because you’ve got enough to worry about today.” The thing is, the future is all in my head. How I think about it is what creates the anxiety and the frustration, not the future itself. Developing an attitude of relaxed, daily dependence on the Father is the cure.
This is what I have figured out: If I am thinking about the future, then what I have today isn’t enough, but if I am just thinking about this day, then what I have for today is an abundance. Does that make sense? If I expect God to give me everything I need for my whole life today, then He is a stingy and unhelpful deity. If I expect God to give me just what I need for today, then He is a generous and extravagant Father. I do not have nearly enough to get me to the end of my life (assuming I make it to old age), but He has provided ample to get me through the next twenty-four hours.
This isn’t a rant against wealth or putting things aside for the future, rather it’s a pointed conversation I’m having with myself about where my trust lies. If I take Jesus seriously then my focus is clear – “Put the Kingdom first, and God will take care of the rest,” he said. If I’m seriously putting God and His agenda first, then I can live fearlessly with empty hands. “Father, give us what we need for today,” becomes enough.
Sometimes I challenge myself but more often I leave it to others to challenge me. Recently, I came across an observation made by someone else: the suggestion to pray for ‘our daily bread’ in the Lord’s Prayer is supposed to encourage us towards a daily trust in God to meet our needs. It challenged me because I know that even when I’m asking for my ‘daily bread’ I’m already thinking about what I’m going to eat tomorrow. I’m not in the habit of asking God to meet my daily needs, I’m in the habit of asking Him for a surplus so that I don’t have to worry about empty cupboards for the next few years. I wonder what would happen if all I ever asked for was just what I needed for that day? I know one thing it would change – It’d certainly be an incentive to check in with my heavenly Father at least once every twenty-four hours…
It made me think about ‘stuff’, why I worry about it and why I cling so hard to it. Sometimes I think I justify acquiring stuff by telling myself that it’s another resource I can use for God’s purposes. I’m not sure I’m being entirely honest with myself, and I wonder if – in my case – empty hands are more useful to Him.
I had a little thought last weekend. What if we get to heaven and God asks us to show Him our hands? What if everyone’s hands look the same – damaged and battered and bruised and scarred? But what if our hands aren’t the same? What if God knows that some of us have wounded hands because we’ve worked hard for Him, but others of us have wounded hands because we’ve been holding on to our treasure too tightly?
I think that there are at least five different types of God to trust. Which one do you put your hope in?
1) The Enabler of Spoilt Children.
This God owes you. Everyone knows that when this God says things like, “But seek first the kingdom and my righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well,” what he’s really saying is, “What do want for Christmas?”. When life doesn’t go well, it is this God’s fault – after all, didn’t he say he’d look after you? Following this God is like being on a roller coaster, dipping and climbing between feelings of confident entitlement and angry disappointment.
2) The One Who Doesn’t Really Mean It.
This God, like everyone else in your life, will let you down. He makes promises all the time, but doesn’t deliver. The only thing you can be certain of is that he won’t come through for you. He’s like a lifeguard who encourages you to dive headfirst into the pool, with no intention of jumping in after you when you get out of your depth. Trusting this God turns you into a nervous swimmer, stuck on the side of the pool, unable to put even a toe into the water.
3) The Master of the Monkey’s Paw.
This God keeps his promises, but in an unexpected and unpleasant way, like one of those horror story genies who gives you exactly what you asked for. He is a trickster who needs to be outsmarted rather than trusted. You’ve accepted that your best bet for happiness is to try and manipulate the small print in order to get a positive outcome. Believing in this God leads to a crushed, submissive spirit that is constantly expecting to be punished ‘…for your own good.’
4) The Divine Bureaucrat.
This God also keeps his promises, but only to the letter of the law. You will get what you’re entitled to – nothing more, nothing less. He is always busy figuring out how little he can give away without being sued for breach of contract. Under this God, the Bible becomes a watertight legal contract. Trusting this God leads to low expectations, and a feeling that he needs to be backed into a corner before he’ll reluctantly dish out bread and water and expect you to be grateful for it.
5) The Real Deal.
This God can’t be contained by small words like ‘gracious’ and ‘generous’. To this God, the promises that are written in the Bible reveal his heart without defining the limit of it. He believes that it is possible to be kind without needing to announce it first, and that children can have birthday presents even though nothing has been submitted in writing beforehand. Following this God will get you into trouble, but the good kind of trouble, and eventually you’ll be able to face whatever life throws at you with a quiet confidence and hope.
I’ve been doing some work for a sermon on Jesus as the Messiah, and it got me thinking. Israel had been waiting and watching for the Messiah for hundreds of years and when he finally appeared they missed him, because he wasn’t the sort of Messiah they were looking for. They had been expecting a great political and military leader to set the nation’s wrongs right – a new King David. What they got was a homeless preacher who was obsessed with healing the sick and lacked nationalistic zeal. What I realised yesterday was that the Old Testament makes it kind of obvious exactly how the Messiah would follow in David’s footsteps.
David’s kingship is a story of two halves. His rise to the throne is told in 1 Samuel, and is full of some very well known stories. David slays Goliath and flees from Saul, fearing for his life, and eventually forgiving the man who persecutes him. He faces many obstacles, but the theme that comes through is best spelt out in 1 Samuel 30:6 – ‘David was greatly distressed because the men were talking of stoning him…But David found strength in the LORD his God.”
By contrast, the story of David’s kingship in 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles is very different. Although he achieves many important things, the stories that stand out from David’s reign are not like those that went before. Instead, we hear about his adultery with Bathsheba and murder of her husband; his trust shifting from God to his army; being told that he will not build the temple because he has too much blood on his hands; a brutal civil war because he was a bad father to Absalom. These are all things that happened after David reached the pinnacle of power. Yes, he was a great leader and a godly man, but the Old Testament isn’t shy about his failings. It’s almost as if those who compiled the stories want to say that David, the refugee shepherd of misfits, trumps David, the mighty warrior king, every time.
If the people of Israel had seen that, then they might have been able to make sense of Jesus. Of the two halves of the great king’s story, it makes perfect sense that the Messianic Son of David would base his life on the first. After all, Jesus himself said that it was the poor in spirit who would lay hold of the Kingdom of God, not the influential power brokers. I have to confess that I can’t understand those Christians who think that the best way to further God’s purposes is from the throne, from a position of strength and power. I wonder if they’ve even ever read their Bibles.
1 O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I
rise;
you perceive my thoughts from
afar.
3 You discern my going out and my
lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.
5 But I think that what you’re doing
is illegal, O LORD.
6 I’m pretty sure you need my permission
to hold my personal information.
7 It’s a violation of my human rights
or something.
8 At the very least it’s a violation of my
personal space.
9 It’s called stalking, and it’s actually against
the law, you know;
10 I don’t want you following my every
move, O LORD.
11 I would take out a restraining order if I
could.
12 But I don’t know how that works on someone
who’s omnipresent.
13 There was that guy who sued Google
for his right to be forgotten;
so that people couldn’t know his past.
14 And there’s been all the stuff on the news
about Facebook recently.
15 Even Mark Zuckerberg is being held
accountable now.
16 Who said that you were allowed to remember
everything about me, O LORD?
Who holds you accountable?
17 I don’t care if you created my inmost being;
or knit me together in my mother’s womb.
18 That doesn’t give you the right to invade
my privacy.
19 And you say that all the days ordained
for me were written in Your book…
20 Actually, that sounds like a threat;
Are you threatening me, O LORD?
21 My business is my business;
My life is mine and mine alone.
22 And it’s none of your business what I do
with it.
23 Or what I do in the privacy of my
own home.
I don’t want you knowing everything I do.
24 I’d rather be anonymous than have
you close, O LORD.
1) Trusting God to be faithful is like trusting the sun to be hot. It seems like a sure thing in theory, and we’re very happy to say that we believe it to be true, but we’re also really hoping that we can get through life without having to prove it.
2) I suffer from Truster’s Remorse. It’s that feeling you get when you actively take steps to trust God, but then you worry that the warm glow on the horizon is not the welcoming hearth-fire of heaven, but rather just your bridges burning.
3) Sometimes I wish that I could pin God down before trust is required. It would be nice, for example, to have His signature at the bottom of an iron-clad contract before taking steps. However, I know for a fact that He prefers clay to paper. Plus I hear rumours that it’s possible for even lawyers to be saved.
4) When I reflect on those times that I’ve trusted God with something big – I mean really trusted and not just paid lip-service to the concept of trust – I’m forced to admit that He’s never let me down. Well, except for that one time in 2015 when I really wanted Him to do something specific and He did something else instead. He never seems to like my ideas.
5) C.S. Lewis was on to something when he wrote, “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.” I’m not really afraid of trusting God, rather I’m afraid that trusting God will mean having to follow Him down some dark paths. So it becomes a question not of trusting God to keep His promises, but rather trusting Him to not break me along the way. If God can be trusted in this way, then I have nothing to worry about. If I can’t trust Him with my life , then it’s time to find a new God, don’t you think?
Sometimes, I find it hard to remain totally committed to hope when a cursory look around provides plenty of reasons to despair. Thankfully, I am totally committed to hope. When I wrote Look on the Bright Side (which appears in The Listening Book) I was trying to nail my colours to the mast, the reasoning being that if I publicly put my beliefs on paper then I can’t really give up without looking like a hypocrite. That’s one way to make pride work for you. Read more
