The Paradoxes of Christianity...

"Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. Of these theological equalisations I have to speak afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

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It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own."

G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy - The Paradoxes of Christianity

God Bless.

Dear Freedom

"Listen..."

"The danger always in a place like Fulwood, with its great tradition, is that we want to master the word rather than to be mastered by the word. There are keen students who want guidance on the best Bible commentaries, home group leaders that set themselves up as Bible experts, and Sunday service critics that would quite like to hold up a scorecard at the end of every sermon. How easy for speaker and listener alike to prize ourselves on our understanding of the word, but miss the most important point which is acceptance of the word. You can miss a work of genius on the subway, you can reject the word of God’s King in a Harvest service. And so if this Harvest is to be more than seasonal mood music, Jesus says to you and me, “Listen!” – hear what Jesus says, and accept it. And the amazing encouragement here, is that in hearing and accepting Jesus’ words, it will make the most astonishing, miraculous difference in our lives, verse 20: “Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown.”"

Jason Clarke speaks on "A Great Crop" from Mark 4:1-20.

God Bless.

Dear Freedom

The Lord is at your right hand... He will judge nations...

“In the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare “That is mine!””

What a glorious truth that is! It has somewhat been the quote of the last few weeks. A lot of people have mentioned it on a number of different occasions and in a number of different settings. The quote was originally uttered by Abraham Kuyper who was the Dutch prime minister from 1901-1905. We used this phrase at church yesterday as we were discussing what it meant to be both a student and a follower of Jesus.

We studied Psalm 110, the Psalm that Jesus quotes in Mark 12 when he is challenged by the Pharisees with regard to being descended from David. It became very apparent just how narrow and self-centred our view of Jesus is. If we are to be followers of Jesus we must understand who he is. Discovering who Jesus is, what a relationship with him means is obviously a life-long process more commonly known as being a Christian, but it is important for us to be continually looking at the life of Christ, both individually and collectively, and asking “what about today?”.

In the west today we talk about “my Jesus” and “my saviour”. We talk about Jesus being our best friend, the one who I continually rely on. This is all true, indeed it is true truth, but it is not the complete picture. To use a stolen phrase; Jesus is always a personal God, he is never less than that, but he is always more. As we study Psalm 110 we see a Jesus who is Lord of all. He is the LORD’S Lord. The one whom God the Father has appointed to be our mediator, our high priest forever, a high priest in the order of Melchizedek.

One of the people in the discussion made this comment, which I think perfectly sums up what it means to be a Christian, what it means to be in a relationship with Jesus; “Who better to have interceding for us than the one who will judge us!?” Jesus is also my judge, but he isn’t just my judge he is your judge and the judge of the whole world. He is personal, but just as importantly, he is universal. This is something that I think we have forgotten in the west. We spend so much time talking about our own walk, our own relationship, our own personal experience that we have forgotten he is also Lord of our next door neighbour, he is Lord of my course mates, and he is Lord of the whole universe. We neglect to tell the world of this fact and then we get frustrated about the presence of moral decay, social depravity and an absence of values – as if it wasn’t our duty to lead by example; to lead lives where it is quite evident that Christ is Lord of all. People may not accept him as Lord of all, but the fact is:

“In the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare “That is mine!””

God Bless.

Dear Freedom