But two of my friends have beaten me to it. Glen Scrivener highlights the importance of not being too earnest. He reckons the moralism is punctuated by fairly blunt sex gags and fails to deliver any real edge. He also makes a point which I heartily agree with – we must learn to take God very seriously, and ourselves not too seriously.

Stephen Watkinson in a Facebook Note (so you may not be able to read this link if you are not a friend? Not sure how FB works in this context) observes that the writer seems to know more about the Church of England than about God. He also bemoans the caricature of a ‘charismatic’ (in week 2) and the sub-Biblical virtue of doubt (by this I don’t think Stephen is advocating certainty on all things – but surely at the heart of Biblical Christianity are a number of very important things that we can be certain about.

All I would add to this, is that I love the title character’s prayers – which seem conversational and real and not ‘polished’ – which is surely how we should address our Heavenly Father. And there is also a degree of reality about the ‘on call 24/7′ nature of the ‘job’, and the variety of characters the church seems to attract – which is certainly true in every church I have been a part of. And there is some humour that arrives out of this truth.

A bit of a curate’s egg of comedy then?

Anyway, for anyone unfamiliar with HP, a boggart is a shape-shifting nasty that takes on the form of its intended victim’s worst fear. For our purposes, the key thing to know is that in order to defend oneself against a boggart, you need to use the spell “Riddikulus” and at the same time think of something very funny or ridiculous.

Now, in a sense, we become fearful of our idols – because we feel trapped by their power – we can feel there is nothing we can do to overcome their hold on us. But a very helpful strategy is to carefully examine that idol and to uncover the lie that it is promoting. As soon as we see how ridulous that lie is – the idol begins to lose something of its power over us.

Of course, we need to confront the lie with the corresponding truth of God’s word. And we cannot do any of this in our own strength or wisdom, but only in the Lord’s. But I think there may be a helpful tool in the armoury here.

I should note that these reflections arose out of a discussion of part of Tim Chester’s extremely helpful book You can change.

Some years ago I remember someone (John Piper?) speaking on this subject at the EMA and they made a helpful comparison to music lessons. The aim of a music lesson is not that a week later you can remember you need to press this finger in order to get that note. You actually want the knowledge to have become internalised – you don’t remember the process of learning it necessarily, but you will forever know that pressing this finger has that result.

Of course, there is nothing new under the sun. I have just finished reading, and thoroughly enjoyed Marsden’s awesome biography of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards, famously, is known for the rigour and ruthless logic of his preaching. But here is one of his comments on the subject:

The main benefit that is obtained by preaching is by impression made upon the mind at the time of it, and not by the effect that arises afterwards by a remembrance of what was delivered.

As Marsden comments – “Preaching, in other words, must first of all touch the affections.”

We must never lose sight of the fact that more is going on when we preach than just the transfer of information. We trust and pray that God is at work, by His Holy Spirit, who will be at work in our mind, our hearts and our will.

At the risk of sounding unduly cynical, our current crop of politicians seem more motivated by what people want to hear, rather than what they actually believe/stand for. Perhaps this is the real reason for the increasing apathy amongst young voters.

It strikes me that the same tendency can easily slip into our pulpits today – the desire to say what people want to hear rather than what we actually believe. Ironically when we say what “itching ears” want to hear (cf. 2 Tim 4:3), we may reach a wider audience, but all power and authenticity is lost. Hence the historical decline in the liberal churches. This may parallel the disenfranchisement of many voters in the UK today.

Psalm 118 Wordle

Psalm 119 Wordle

Enjoy…

The way these work is the size of a word is proportional to its frequency within a given text. So, at one level, the more important the word in a text, the larger it will be.

I will post a couple today, and some of the others at a later stage. But for now, have a look at the difference between the Old and the New Testament when viewed through the eyes of a Wordle based on the ESV. It highlights some interesting features…

Old Testament Wordle

New Testament Wordle

Enjoy…

But I have been reflecting recently on what happened to that ’spirit of the possible.’ In particular, I have been wondering if there is something inherent in my Christian faith, or more worryingly part of our ‘Christian subculture’ which squashes that attitude. Here are a few reflections without any sense of a conclusion.

• There is a right sense in which I am now less reliant on my self and place less confidence in my own abilities than when I was younger and not a Christian.
• But this should surely be balanced by a greater sense of confidence in God (and I think on a deep level it is).
• There may be other theological reasons. For example, as a tentatively amillennial Christian, I may be less optimistic in my outlook than my postmillennial brothers and sisters, especially when I live in a country where there is relatively little Gospel growth.
• Maybe I do not hear enough preaching (within the churches in my rather conservative constituency) about the power and glory of God, which would give me more of a vision of what He could do – in my life, in my land. Perhaps some of my more charismatic brothers and sisters are better at this, and as a result, more visionary.
• Perhaps Tim Keller’s critique of British churches as generally ‘not entrepreneurial enough’ has some substance.
• Perhaps I don’t pray enough, so I don’t see God answering prayers enough, and so again, I lack vision and excitement.

So I need to pray more. I need to reflect (personally) on God’s character and power to give me greater confidence in what He could do.

And as churches, we need to do the same. We need to develop a richer, more fully-orbed theology which shows us how God is part of all of our life – not just Sunday worship, but our work and rest and play. We need to be encouraging each other to use the gifts that God has given us (and in our churches recognising that Word gifts aren’t the only gifts – and that all gifts can be used for the edification of the body of Christ). We need to trust that God is who He says He is, and will do what He says He will do.

And then, with Paul, we can declare, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13)

I have been reflecting on this whole question of grace quite a bit recently. I am saddened by the way my own particular constituency of Christ’s church, which is (often) so good at preaching grace, often seems so poor at living grace (and of course I am including my own failures when I make this sweeping generalisation).

I think it is Tim Keller who reminds us that “religion is the default mode of the human heart” – and perhaps herein lies one of the reasons for this particular shortcoming. We can be so keen to believe and hold on to the truth (a right instinct) that we inadvertently make our own ‘system’ and understanding of ‘orthodoxy’ the religion that we follow – our own neat conceptions of what God is like (and likes!) become the idol of our heart. And anyone that doesn’t quite measure up is somehow ‘outside.’

And even as I write this, there is a voice in my heading telling me that some people will think I’m going liberal if I suggest that God’s own view of things might be slightly larger than our own carefully worked out systems. There is a sense that the ‘eyebrow of orthodoxy’ might be raised quizzically at the suggestion that loving Jesus and trying to follow Him might be enough – even if we don’t tick all the theological boxes we have tried to put Him into.

And that is why, as we were meditating on 2 Kings 5 this morning, that my eyes were drawn to verses 17-19:

17 “If you will not,” said Naaman, “please let me, your servant, be given as much earth as a pair of mules can carry, for your servant will never again make burnt offerings and sacrifices to any other god but the LORD. 18 But may the LORD forgive your servant for this one thing: When my master enters the temple of Rimmon to bow down and he is leaning on my arm and I bow there also—when I bow down in the temple of Rimmon, may the LORD forgive your servant for this.”
19 “Go in peace,” Elisha said. (NIV)

I take it that the request of verse 17 (and the declaration of verse 15 – “Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel.”) is meant to demonstrate that Naaman had come to some kind of faith. And yet verse 18 shows that in the messiness of his life, he wasn’t going to be able to live quite the life a more orthodox Israelite would have demanded. Whilst I am aware that the issue here is one of praxis rather than belief, we see God’s grace on the lips of God’s prophet – “Go in peace.”

Lord Jesus, help us to live and speak likewise.

The central premise was that historically we have loved to kid ourselves that the world operates according to nicely ordered processes, but that the reality is much less ordered than this, and that we need to face up to this in order to survive.

I have a couple of specific questions about the coherency of the message of the show, and then some thoughts about application for Christians.

Firstly, despite the surface message that the programme was promoting, the underlying message seemed to be (and I acknowledge that my mathematics may be lacking here) that systems ARE regular, but that miniscule variations in ’starting conditions’ can dramatically affect the outcome of the system. In other words, it is not that ‘reality’ is any more chaotic than we like to think, but that our grasp of reality is much weaker than we have tended to assume. That is, rather than undermining our ability to make ‘real’ models, it really suggests that we should be more modest in the claims we make for our systems, recognising the limitations of our own observation of ’starting conditions’. It is really a call for humility.

Secondly, one of the more negative views of the current environmental situation we are in suggested that far from being at a ‘tipping point’ (with its implications of being able to tip back the other way), we are actually on a slope – the only question being at what point our momentum will become so great that we will be unable to hold on. In other words, he was suggesting that there is some kind of linear pattern to the changing pattern of the environment. And yet, one of the main points of the mathematics of the programme was that a small (and potentially unobserved) change early on in the system may have dramatic consquences later on which we are unable to predict. By building his model on a ‘long view’ of the earth’s environmental changes he was falling foul of the very fallacy which the programme was trying to expose.

So much for the coherency of the model.

In terms of Christian application, we probably fall back to some well-worn paths. The limits of our own knowledge and observation (of ’starting conditions’) are precisely a function of our creaturely-ness. Our creator God is limited by no such lack of knowledge. So in Him lies the possibility of true knowledge, and indeed the foundation for all our own attempts to ‘do science’ or to speak truly of the world (see almost anything John Frame has written for a fuller argument on these lines).

Apologetically, the uncertainty caused by economic and environmental chaos must be a good starting point for gospel proclamation. We have a message of certainty and hope to proclaim in a world which lacks these things.

Pragmatically, whether many non-Christians are prepared to acknowledge these doubts, to question the inconsistencies in their own worldview, and to consider the claims of Christ is a moot point. But such a spiritual battle must always be fought in the first instance upon our knees.

We’ve just been reminded of this truth in a sermon this afternoon.  And it is a really helpful reminder at a time when Fear grips global stock markets.  The sovereign God who made this world is not taken by surprise by events in the stock markets, His past performance always guarantees His future performance.  And Christians can and must stand confidently on the promise we have of an unshakeable inheritance with Him in the future.

Praise the Lord!