Most people reading this have probably already seen the links I’m going to point to, but in case you haven’t…

By way of introduction, this summer in Brighton (as it is every summer in Brighton!) was the Newfrontiers leadership conference Together on a Mission. Mark Driscoll came to share with us, and spoke powerfully and prophetically to Newfrontiers as a movement. Those messages are available on the Newfrontiers website, and at the time were instantly recognised as being God’s word to us.

Terry has now given us some insight into what is being done, on an organisational level, about what Mark said to us. His thoughts are available here. I think it’s spot on, and I’m excited to see what God is going to do with us over this next period.

Terry has also posted an interview he did recently with Tim Keller. As far as I understand he was integral in Driscoll coming to TOAM in the first place. He is something of a ‘church growth’ expert, and the interview makes fascinating reading. The two parts are available here and here.

Now - go and read something more interesting!

To start with here’s a little story from our honeymoon.

We were staying in Sorrento, which is a medium sized town in the Neapolitan Riveria, roughly opposite Naples in the bay. Having visited various mediterrian countires before, Italy looked broadly similar to the others I’d been to except for one thing - a remarkable (but unsurprising) amount of devotion to Mary and assorted other saints.

Everywhere you went in the town, there were houses with little pictures of saints by the door, or pictures of a dying Jesus painted on the side. Throughout the city there were alcoves with giant, typically more than life sized, statues of Mary with small shrines underneath them.

We did visit one church, and again the depiction of Mary was on a par with, and probably above, that of Jesus himself. Commentary on that aside, it was something that doesn’t have a counter-part in English life. We aren’t a religious nation, and the thought of having devotional sites, that seemed to be used and tended, within the very walls of a town, would be totally alien to our culture.

During our holiday, we visited Pompeii, which was fascinating for several reasons. In every ruined dwelling you enter there are niches cut out of the walls. We learned as we were looking round that these were for the household and the city gods.

It was at this point that Helen commented: “Italians haven’t changed much, have they?”

As startling an observation as that may be, it drove me to thinking: idols are comfortable. It’s easy to set them up and use them as our religious crutch. It’s easy to cast Jesus in our own image and set him up in the corner of the house for when we need him.

We need to get to know the Biblical Jesus better.

Recently a couple of people have written some very insightful commentaries that I wanted to point to.

Terry Virgo has two very good posts. Absolutely recommended:

Lakeland, Florida

Lakeland, Florida (continued)

Adrian Warnock has a round-up of Jesse Phillips thoughts here:

Jesse Phillips Gives His Final Conclusions on the Lakeland, Florida ‘Revival Meetings’ with Todd Bentley

and his own thoughts here:

Todd Bentley and the Lakeland, Florida ‘Revival Meetings’

Finally, Dan Phillips has his thoughts here. To give you some context, Dan is a cessationist, so is immediately more cynical than I would be about whether or not this is ‘of God’. However he offers excellent thoughts on what ‘revival’ should look like:

What I think about “the Florida revival”

These articles should give you a picture: essentially, something of God is happening, I don’t think it yet warrants being called ‘revival’, and I would have some serious doctrinal reservations about some of the teaching. Read discerningly!

That’s the background for what I want to briefly talk about. Many of his messages have touched on a particular aspect of healing that struck me: the place of compassion.

Now I’m making a few assumptions here: a) that God can heal people today in through both supernatural and medical means, b) that God does heal people today, c) that God wants to heal people and that d) God often heals people. I’m not going to examine these, but some of those messages at the Grace Church website would be good places to start.

I’ve often heard people speak on the importance of faith in healing, and they’re right, the Bible clearly places an emphasis on faith. I think that can be overstated - but it can’t be denied.

Far less often (i.e., not really ever), have I heard people speak on the importance of compassion for healing. Essentially I have two very simple statements to make and comment on:

Firstly, God experiences compassion for the hurting.

Yahweh is a personal God. He loves people. He loves people even while they hate him. He has voluntarily invested his very happiness in the happiness of his people. God’s happiness and future glorification is bound up in the redemption of his people and the ‘glorification’ of them and creation. In other words; God has chosen to love us and to save us. This choice means he has tied his happiness up with ours. This means two things: 1) Our future redemption and resurrection is assured; 2) God now involuntarily feels compassion towards us. I don’t mean that he’s forced to, I mean that by the nature of his choice he will do nothing else. We can know for sure that he will.

If you read the gospels you meet a Jesus who is unlike the Jesus you think you know. That’s always going to be the case. Most recently I have been struck by Jesus’ compassion for the broken.

He cares.

Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man.

Mark 1:41

(Yeah that’s the NIV. I don’t think that the ESV’s ‘pity’ adequately sums up Jesus’ emotion. He isn’t sad that someone’s hurt, like me looking at a poorly kitty. He’s the incarnate Lord of the universe - he is involved.)

The Jesus that walks off the pages of the gospels is a Jesus who hates it when people are ill. A Jesus who has promised that one day all will be made well in the eventual resurrection of the dead and redemption of the earth. After all, there will only be one wounded man in heaven - and there is no way it is going to be me.

Secondly, we need to feel compassion when we pray for people to be healed.

Praying for the sick isn’t an exercise in hyping yourself up into ‘faith’ or in saying the right magical words. Our faith comes from our knowledge of who our God is (and is augmented by testimony of his works), and our God is a compassionate God.

I feel convicted that I have prayed for the sick looking for a ’sign’. I feel convicted that I have prayed for the sick because I want the testimony to tell people. I feel convicted that I have prayed for the sick in order to build the church, or see the kingdom ‘breaking in’, or to see people saved. Some of these are good reasons, but without one little thing they are frankly a mockery of the entire purpose of healing.

If I pray like that I can turn the person into an object, a statistic. If you are praying for someone to be healed then you are praying for someone to be healed. They are a person.

Your motivation should be that they are sick and need to get well. Sounds obvious, comes like a revelatory express-train to the temple. As Christians, we have to care more.

And, because stories are fun, after we were talking about this at my midweek group last Thursday, we prayed for my friend Ali’s trapped nerve in his shoulder - which got miraculously better. Praise Jesus!

As a final note, let’s remember something about our God: It’s his name.

I am Yahweh-your-healer.

Exodus 15:26

Anyway, a few thoughts on the dude - none of them original.

He says offensive and shocking things. That’s his style. I find it funny. Sometimes I shouldn’t. Let’s be honest though, a lot of what he gets stick for is the fact that people think what he is saying would be inappropriate in their churches.

They’re right. It would be. His entire point is that he is presenting the gospel in the context of the culture of Seattle. In other words much of what he says that sounds odd to our ears is appropriate in his context.

That’s not the point I wanted to make though - this isn’t a thought-through interaction with how we should adapt the way we present the old-old truths to be appropriate to our audience.

I don’t agree with everything Mark says. That isn’t really a problem - I don’t see why I should expect to. What I do admire about him is not simply that he presents the gospel faithfully while remaining contextual, what I admire is the guts with which he presents the gospel.

He calls a spade a spade. He talks about wrath and judgment and hell. How many of us do that unashamedly? I’m not saying that you should be able to talk about hell without feeling like your insides are being ripped out, but how many of us actually do it anyway? He presents the gospel with guts. His gospel has a big strong Jesus. His gospel has a Jesus who hates sinners. His gospel has a Revelation 19 Jesus covered in blood and carrying a sword on his way to make war.

How often have we lost this emphasis? I know that all too often I reduce God’s holiness in my mind and I place an over-emphasis on his friendliness towards me. Yes I have friendship with God, but I think we forget who this God is and where we’ve come from.

Mark is right to proclaim that Jesus is not a woss in a dress and to openly say that ‘he couldn’t worship a God he could beat up.’ The implication of course is that he couldn’t beat Jesus up. Because Jesus is hard. And has a big sword. And tattoos. And is generally badass.

If we proclaim a reformed gospel, that Jesus rescues us, it is amazing that we can forget that that means that Jesus kicked down the door, shot the bad guys stone dead and carried the hostages out on his shoulders. (Don’t over stretch the analogy).

We need to remember who Jesus is. We need to grow some backbone.

Apologies that this isn’t as structured as it could be, or as clear as it should be, but hear this:

When we proclaim Jesus in truth and with boldness, when we present Jesus as he really is - that is when lives are changed.

Rest assured - because I know you were panicking - there will be more on the Reformation in the New Year. If that won’t cheer you up, nothing will.

So then, it’s Christmas. It is therefore obligatory to write about Christmas. It’s probably also obligatory to write about how people are missing the point of the festival, which is convenient as that’s true.

It’s beginning to sound like a cliche in Evangelical circles to say that the meaning of Christmas is Easter. The intention here being, of course, to suggest that Jesus birth always pointed towards his death and resurrection and therefore towards the life-giving offer of freedom in the gospel.

That’s true. It’s also not all of the truth. While it is very helpful to read Jesus life in light of his death as the eventual conclusive end of his mission, it isn’t all of the story. We run the risk of saying that Jesus’ life is only important in the way it points towards his inevitable death and glorious resurrection. This isn’t entirely wrong, it’s dangerous to forget that Jesus was always looking forwards towards that future time.

So, Christmas is about Easter. But it isn’t only about Easter.

The length and depth of the meaning and import of Jesus’ life would take hundreds of blog posts to encapsulate. My offering is simply this:

This Christmas in our struggle to remember the scandal of the babe born to die, let us not forget the scandal of God born.

The idea that God died on a cross is ridiculous. This isn’t hard to see. We often miss that the idea of God born as a man is just as bonkers.

The almighty, all-perfect, ever-present Lord of hosts - infinite, eternal and glorious - was born, which in itself is an impossible statement, as a man, the complete opposite of what he was, at that a finite, weak, limited man in a body doomed to death and ignominy.

Why did he do that? Bizarrely because he loved us and wanted to show us his glory.

Remember that this Christmas.

His boldness had unexpected effects. Over the next four years everyone in Europe heard of Luther’s beliefs. Thousands were saved. Protestant churches sprung up. Protestantism stopped being a one-man movement. It was a full blown heresy for the Catholic Church to crush just as it had had to previously crush hundreds of leaders who had explained the gospel faithfully.

Not even the megalithic edifice of the medieval Catholic church can even slow the purposes of God.

The most obvious and most famous opposition Luther had was in 1521 when he was called before the Diet of Worms. A ‘diet’ is a general assembly and Worms is a place, so it wasn’t about being forced to eat insects until you recant your beliefs, nor was it a particularly early episode of ‘I’m a Celebrity…’.

Luther was called before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to explain himself. Charles V called Luther’s ideas a ‘cesspool of heresies,’ he wasn’t exactly a sympathetic judge.

Luther was presented with all of his writings and asked if they were his. He told them that they were. Luther was then asked if he still believed what he had written. He said that he did, but he apologised for some of his attacks on individuals who disagreed with him. He agreed with what he’d said wholeheartedly, but with repentance accepted that he hadn’t always expressed himself the best.

If you write, you’ve been there.

Luther told them:

Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason —I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other— my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.

Luther couldn’t say he didn’t believe what he’d written, because he did. He didn’t care that the Pope and all the official church said he was wrong, he knew scripture proved him right. This isn’t to say that he wouldn’t listen to correction, this is to say that he wouldn’t listen to correction that didn’t take its authority from the Bible.

We shouldn’t dispute correction, we should however look at where that correction is coming from - is it Biblical?

Luther also uttered the most famous phrase in the reformation, possibly in all of church history, at the Diet of Worms:

Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.

Luther said that he would stand for the gospel. He couldn’t do anything else.

Would that by the grace of God we would all have that strength to stand in the face of opposition.

As he left the Diet, Luther was kidnapped by his friends for his own safety. He was taken to Wartburg castle where he translated the Bible into German. The story was put about that he was dead.

It’s dangerous to stand for the truth. Luther never had to pay with his life, but countless have. We must take Luther’s example and stand tall for what we know to be truth, we must stand for the Bible as our final authority when the world wants to tear it to pieces and scoff.

Our culture says that our final authority should be ourselves and that imposing a book that the newest bits of are at the very least 1900 years old as our authority is ridiculous. Imposing it on others as their authority is not only ridiculous is abusive and hateful.

We must stand tall against subjectivity, liberal autonomy and the new religion of tolerance.

Let’s have a brief look at what on earth all that was about:

A chap called Johann Tetzel had been charged by the Pope with the task of selling indulgences in the region of Wittenberg, where Luther was, for the purpose of raising money for the building works on St Peter’s in Rome.

Luther wasn’t happy about this. Which is an understatement. An indulgence is the spiritual equivalent of a ‘get out of jail free’ card in Monopoly - it grants a free passage out of purgatory for you or a family member.

Hopefully it isn’t too surprising that the gospel of grace and faith that Luther had just discovered flatly contradicted such actions. They outraged him. As I’ll go into more detail on another time, Luther did outraged well. Really well.

Tetzel not only peddled indulgences, which would be bad in and of itself, but he was mainly concerned with making money (or at least history records him as being). The famous phrase attributed to Tetzel is:

As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs!

The written text from one of these indulgences reads:

By the authority of all the saints, and in mercy towards you, I absolve you from all sins and misdeeds and remit all punishments for ten days.

Luther’s objection to indulgences is obvious - as soon as you suggest that freedom from sin is temporary you have replaced the work of Christ with something inferior. As soon as you require an act, in this case a payment, for the remission of sins then you’re mired so deep in deadly legalism that you don’t know which way is up and the cloying Pelagianism you advocate is killing not only you but anyone you teach.

When the church teaches this, you’ve got a problem. You need a reformation.
His 95 theses were a set of objections to this practice of selling indulgences as well as other abuses of the medieval Catholic church. You can read them here if it takes your fancy.

What do Luther’s theses teach us? That we have to stand for doctrine. That we have to stand for doctrine even when people profess truth with their mouths but their actions speak of death instead of life. That salvation is freely attributed to us at great cost to Christ. That when we try to add anything beyond Christ’s work as a necessary precursor to salvation we denigrate Christ, rob him of glory and spit on his name.

These weren’t simply issues of abuses within the church and corrupt priests, although they were that - these were issues of the fame and glory of Jesus the resplendent son of the most high God.
Luther teaches us to let grace be grace. Luther teaches us to give Jesus what he’s due.

He’s due everything.

The Reformers had two main principles for us that are still highly relevant today:

Sola Scriptura and Semper Reformanda.

Yes, I just used the Latin to make myself look clever. In English then: Scripture Alone and Always Reforming.

In other words we need to be continually taking everything we believe back to the Bible and we need to be prepared to change it.

That’s the sort of legacy the Reformers would have wanted to have left.

Next Wednesday is Reformation day. It’s a shame that it also happens to be Halloween, it would be better if the pagan festival of Samhain didn’t intrude on a date which reminds us of the eternal faithfulness of Yahweh to his covenants, of the everlasting, unstoppable, unrelenting, unfaltering march of the purposes of Yahweh.

You might be thinking “Tim, you’re a few days early to be blogging about the Reformation!” You’d probably be right, if it were a once a year sort of thing. It isn’t. Church history is important. Church history allows us to learn from the mistakes of the past, to not forget the victories of the past and to observe the majestic purposes of our God as they sweep through salvation-history.

This is also a cheap excuse for something to blog about - I have recently been teaching at the East Midlands Wordplus course on the Reformations in Europe and England (that’s multiple in both, properly speaking, not one in each). I’m going to turn my notes into a short series.

So without further ado let’s start with the Man of the hour: Martin Luther.

It’s October 31st 1517, you’re in Wittenberg in the Holy Roman Empire (it’s in modern day Germany) and you’re standing in sight of the church door - the town noticeboard of its day. You don’t realise it, but you’re about to watch an event that will cause nations to rise and fall, that will start numerous wars and kill thousands, that will cause untold strife and upheaval in Europe. You’re about to watch an event that will lead to the salvation of countless multitudes, rip the church into pieces, send the gospel flying to all the corners of the globe and return God’s people to his truth. You’re about to witness the unsearchable purposes of the living God unfold.

You’re about to see a monk and a mallet change the world.

Enter Martin Luther, stage left. Luther was an Augustinian Monk who had been struggling with his personal knowledge of the depth of his sin for some time. When alone, agonising over his sin and his inability to live rightly, Luther read Romans 1:17:

For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

The ‘it’ referred to there is the gospel. Luther didn’t get this at all, how could the retributive righteousness of God - his anger against sin - be good news? What did this have to do with faith?

His revelations as to what Paul meant shaped his thinking. Luther began to realise that ‘righteousness’ did not refer simply to a judgment, but to a gift attributed to us by faith.

His new understanding revolutionised a continent. On that day in Wittenberg he nailed to that door his ‘95 theses’, a document listing 95 objections to certain practices in the Catholic church, and how these practices had encroached upon the gospel, how these practices were obscuring the gospel and causing a different ‘truth’ to be proclaimed by the church.

The world turned upside down.