Biggest Big Ideas – 9. Hope

May 10, 2012May 10, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

I started this series last week with the note that Haddon Robinson had suggested that the Bible weaves together about ten bigger big ideas. I’m offering my list, feel encouraged to read the Scriptures and write your own. We’ve pondered our triune God, His creation, our fall into sin, His grace, our faith, His great work of redemption, resulting in our unity, the spreading giving goodness of God’s plan and now we have two left. The Bible is saturated with this theme:

9. A fallen world is a place of despair, yet sin cannot win against our great God, so His people always have hope.

From the very beginning God’s book is a book of hope, because God’s people have a God worth trusting. Even in the very moment of rebellion, in the sentencing phase of the first ever trial, God gave not punishment, but promise. The seed of the woman is the hope of a fallen humanity.

Eve thought she had him in the joy of a son born. The generations passed, but God is not slow in keeping His promise. The promised one was coming in the line of Shem, of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Judah, of Jesse, of David – of the unlikely, of the unholy, of the ordinary people in the line of an extraordinary promise.

The prophets told of the coming servant who would suffer, the coming King who would reign. Generations ticked by, but for those with hearts aligned with God’s, hope only grew stronger. Each father potentially in the line and gazing into his little Jewish boy’s face would wonder. Finally it was a step-Dad’s little boy, a tiny bundle of life that he carried into the temple courts to be gazed on by two sets of faithful hope-filled aged eyes.

Now we live in light of His coming, and yet we look forward. Almost every book of the New Testament speaks of the future return of our Christ, the groom coming to take us home to the Father’s house prepared for us. We live in the shadows between two great spotlights, the appearing of the grace of God, and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ. That is our blessed hope.

Some suggest such a hope is a crutch for the weak, or an anesthetic for the hurting. The truth is we are so weak we need more than a crutch, but this hope does not dull our senses. It enlivens us to live this life with hearts beating after His, with eyes to see His faithful loyal love, with ears to hear His word that stirs faith. Hope transforms the darkest vale of tears, not by a temporary fix, but with the perspective of His forever plan.

The hope of the people of God is not a hope restricted to manageable circumstances or changeable situations. It is a hope that holds in the face of hellish opposition. It is a hope that stirs when death seems to own valley of the shadow in which we walk. It is a hope that steps forward to pay even the greatest price, knowing that it is not we that stand on a slippery slope.

This earth has nothing we desire besides Him. So we live on this earth gripped by the hope that only a good God would offer.

And we will not be disappointed. We wait, we live and we die still anticipating a city whose maker and builder is God. We hail home and do not shrink back, as those looking forward to the homecoming of those bought and washed in precious blood, a community with no trace of sin and its effects.

Yet our hope is not really the city with its perfect architecture and untarnished building materials. They are as asphalt compared to the real glory of that city. For our hope is not merely the place, nor even the privilege of participating in the gathering of the rescued people, our hope is the Person himself in whose presence we will know the fullness of joy – we will be forever with the Lord!

The hope God gives has always gone beyond the where, to the who.

God, who has called you into fellowship with His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful.

Biggest Big Ideas – 8. Spreading Goodness

May 9, 2012May 7, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I suspect there is something of a story even in the sequence of big thematic ideas I am pondering in this series. God, creation, sin, grace, faith, redemption, community, and building on last time:

8. God’s character is marked by a certain spreading goodness that moves outwards to us and to all nations, rather than the self-oriented glory grab we might expect.

It is strange that we have expectations of God. If it weren’t for His self-revelation we would know nothing. Yet somehow we can easily assume we know quite a lot, even apart from the Bible. So we take the speculative notions of the classical Greek theologians and voila, a bank of knowledge about the supreme being.

If we would just listen to the Bible we would surely hear something different.

God is not a self-oriented glory hunter. He is not some sort of power-obsessed despot creating and playing for his own amusement. Even though a god made in our image would be self-concerned, the God of the Bible is anything but.

There is no more glorious glimpse into the eternal experience of God than the Son’s prayer in which we discover that the Father and Son are completely concerned with the other, not with self. There is glory, but it is a far more glorious glory, the glory of a loving giving kind, the biblical God kind. And even the prayer is a prayer for others to share in that eternal experience!

It is the outward moving motivation of God’s love that makes sense of creation rather than non-creation. It is the spreading goodness of God that makes sense of mercy triumphing over judgment. It is the overflowing and giving character of God that makes sense of His missionary mindset – in the sending of His Son, in the Son’s sending of His followers, and in His going with us.

It is the revealing, speaking, good God of Isaiah that wants witnesses to get to the ends of the earth, and His Son, His ultimate revelation, speaking to His followers with a commission in the same language.

So God’s character is reflected throughout the canon of Scripture. God is a giving God, a going God, a to the ends of the earth kind of a God. There is nothing grabby about this deity, other alternatives should be set aside in response to the great theme of God’s spreading goodness.

We may have consumed a diet of divinity teaching from the world, or even in the church, that somehow hasn’t felt quite consistent with the Bible. We need to preach His Word so that others can taste and see that the Lord is good.

Biggest Big Ideas – 7. Community

May 8, 2012May 7, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Woven through the warp and woof of Scripture’s great landscape are themes so glorious and rich that we can barely put them into words. I’m trying. What are the ten big ideas of the Bible? God, creation, sin, grace, faith, redemption. Where next? I suppose it is obvious if we pause to consider what kind of God we have:

7. The glorious tri-unity of God reaches out to both create community, and to draw us into the community of His love.

God’s passion for beautiful unity in diversity brings the unlikely into unexplainable unity to reflect the good and pleasant bond of God’s fellowship.

In the very beginning, the conversation of God led to the creation of two creatures made in His image. Male and female. United to each other and to God by His Spirit. Diversity, yet beautiful other-centred unity. The image of God. A wedding to start the story, but nothing like the wedding that will end it.

Sin drove distance like a wedge into the Edenic marriage, and the relationship with God. The apparent freedom of self-love is a destructive prison of competition, fear, hatred, as well as the deafening silence and dark terror of living as the dead, alone in the coffin of our self-defined worlds.

So God has continually moved toward His creation, promising to create community beyond our wildest dreams. He promised to bless all families through one man’s seed. He promised to establish a kingdom of righteousness, even though his holy nation resisted the privilege of priesthood.

He is now calling out a bride for the Son He loves – the church, a temple of stones united in one God-inhabited structure of worship, a body of diverse yet valued parts united under one head, a bride of diverse peoples bound together by the captivating love of the beloved and longing for His return.

As God brought together Jew and Gentile into one body, His multi-coloured wisdom has quite literally been presented to a watching world and spiritual realm. Where else can there be true unity between people long divided? Where else can a world be taken aback by the mutual love of people so different and naturally opposed? (Consequently where else is racism, or hatred, or political power-mongering, or falsity so unspeakably hideous?)

Unity among God’s people is not just a pragmatic idea – a means by which we can avoid losing energy for our greater mission of reaching the world. Unity among God’s people is our greatest testimony in reaching the world. Our unity speaks of His character and nature. Our disunity screams a lie about God to a watching world.

So we long for the day when all the tribes of Israel and all the tribes and tongues and nations and languages of the church will reflect God’s unity and diversity in our eternal reflections on His worthiness around the throne and the Lamb. This will be no cacophony. This will be the most harmonious symphony of voices, of languages, of stories, of peoples…of one people, united in the world of God’s love.

There are not a few passages that address issues of unity among God’s people – from narratives of brotherly disunity to psalms celebrating the refreshing nature of brotherly unity. From Jesus’ foundational instruction of squabbling disciples, to epistles extolling the glorious potential implicit in the gospel applied.

Let’s not preach unity as some pragmatic ideal for the sake of some other goal. Let’s not preach unity as independent creatures tolerating each other. Let’s recognize that God’s passion for unity flows from who He is, and what He’s making us to be.

10 Biggest Big Ideas – 5. Faith

May 4, 2012May 4, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

So what are the biggest recurring ideas underlying the whole sweep of Scripture? I am enjoying tracing out a few thoughts on ten of the biggest. So far I’ve pondered our triune God, His wondrous creation, our profound fall, His glorious grace. Now to the mechanism of our restoration:

5. Every person in every situation stands at a fork in the road, free to trust God’s good word or to orient their hearts after the words of another – for the just shall live by faith.

In that garden the first couple were presented with a lie. It was a lie about God’s character: He cannot be trusted to determine what is best for you. It was a lie about human status: you can be like God. And in God’s apparent absence it was a battle of words: His word versus the lie. It has been ever since.

Every person in every narrative of Scripture stands at a fork in the road. We stand continually at that same fork in the road, whatever the situation. The question remains the same. Will we trust the good word of God, or the forked tongue of the serpent. The truth versus the lie.

What is God’s solution to the great problem of sin? It is His grace. Yet it would be no solution if that grace were forced on people. They freely chose to love another. So God offers His word and invites us to trust, drawing our hearts from the magnetic captivating grip of self-love to respond to His self-giving love. Faced with the lie, gripped by the lie, saturated in the lie, we are invited to trust His Word.

Faith? Seriously God, will you make it all dependent on fallen ones trusting in your Word? Yes. The word of God’s promise can be trusted. The Word of God’s presence calls us to trust. Just as the serpent skewered and lifted up was a solution for snake-bitten sinners, so the snake crushing elevation of Him who knew no sin becomes for us the focus of a trusting gaze.

So faith is absolutely the antithesis of works. Works can never be a ladder out of death. Only God can raise the dead, so He calls humanity not to work, but to trust. Faith is not the answer to what must I do? Faith is the answer to the cry, I can do nothing!

God is God, we are not. God is good, we are not. And God is ours, if we will trust Him, His word, His provision, His grace. Faith is trust in His Word. Faith is gaze on His gracious provision. Faith is the bond that brings us into the fellowship of our Triune God.

May our preaching of His Word offer opportunity to trust in His goodness, both for those dead in sin, and for us who now having been made alive are delightd to do the good that He prepared beforehand for us.

10 Biggest Big Ideas – 4. Grace

May 3, 2012April 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

This week I have been pondering what might be the overarching, biggest of big ideas in the Bible. These ideas pervade so much of the canon and are reflected in the specific main ideas of individual passages.

So far we have pondered God, creation and sin. Now to the continual surprise of the Bible:

4. God’s solution to great sin is the greater power of His glorious grace.

God’s right to rule has been profoundly challenged by the rebellion of Lucifer and humanity. Surely if God is God then the response from above must be the crashing fist of divine judgment?

Surprisingly, yet unsurprisingly, God’s solution is grace. Surprisingly because in our power-hungry corruption of the divine image, we naturally would judge all sin in a self-serving display of divine wrath. Unsurprisingly God is not like the fallen us, but He is just like Himself – that is, self-giving, generous, the God who is love.

Yet surely this is to deny another side of God, another mood of His? Surely we must balance God’s love with God’s wrath?

No, we do not honour God by offering a schizophrenic portrait of a two-sided God. Nor do we help by making the Father angry and the Son kind. We must instead seek to present God as He does in His Word. God’s love spurned leads to wrath, but this shows the fullness of His love, not the reining in of love.

The holiness of God is His perfect, untainted, uncorrupted love. This profoundly loving God has a purity about all He is and all He does. So the prophets presented both the muscly arm of divine recompense, right alongside the arm that tenderly cares for the sheep that have young. And the climax of that prophetic vision is not the crashing down of the fist of divine judgment on sinners, but the outstretched arms of the Lamb upon whom that fist would fall. All sin will be judged, the wonder is that mine is judged already.

We should always be surprised by grace since it is by definition undeserved. We should never be surprised by grace since it comes from the core of who God is.

There are glimpses of grace in every corner of the canon, whispers of love when screams of vengeance would fit. Threaded from the fall in one garden to the rising in another garden is the ribbon of God’s great promise:

In a fallen world there is hope in the coming seed. There is to be blessing for all the families on earth through the seed of one man. There is hope for the firm and forever establishment of the kingdom of the seed of another man in the same line. The ribbon of God’s great promise threads through sinning kings and trusting prostitutes, through flawed heroes and unknowns, showing grace on its journey to grace made flesh in the single seed of the woman, of Abraham, of David. The seed that must fall into the ground and die, yet in humiliating death demonstrate the depth of God’s glory.

The great corruption of sin marks every passage, and the super-abounding solution is not raw justice, but unjust grace. God in His goodness moves toward his harlot creation in love, giving of Himself, so that the greatest of sins pale before the greater glory of God’s goodness and grace.

If we preach the Bible with a pounding fist of self-righteous indignation, what are we doing? Surely the Bible preached should lead to a pounding of the hearts of those captivated by God’s extravagant grace.

10 Biggest Big Ideas – 3. Sin

May 2, 2012May 2, 2012 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

The 10 biggest ideas in the Bible? We’ve considered God and His creation. Now we need to probe the problem.

3. Our profound capacity for love has been perverted into a self-love that drives a charade of independent divine status, in mockery of and in sickening rebellion against the loving leadership of our good God.

Within three biblical chapters God’s perfect creation is corrupted to the core. It is corrupted from the core. And the story of God’s resolution to our relational rebellion takes the whole canon to fully resolve, leaving only two chapters for the briefest glimpse of a post-fall new creation. This is the great tension in the grandest of meta-narratives.

Lovingly created for relational interdependence and trusting dependence, the human race is marred by love perverted and trust destroyed. The manifestation of the fall, the fruit, if you will, was in the eating of the forbidden fruit. Yet the core of the event was at the level of the heart, not merely a matter of rule-breaking. The corruption was caused by a love turned inwards, by a rebellious spurning of God’s right to rule in love, and by a fatal distrust of His good Word.

A God-given capacity to love another, delight in another, live for another, trust in another and give to another was twisted, perverted and corrupted. It became the horrific reorientation of the power of divine love into a love of divine power – shamefully manifesting in a love for self, delight in self, living for self, trusting in self and giving to self.

Now the god of a human heart is the perceived good of that same human heart. Instead of lovingly trusting a loving and trustworthy self-giving God, the default wiring of humanity is to hate and despise Him, performing the charade of god-hood as if that is really about self-concern, independence and power. Even the pathetic performance shows a profound corruption of God’s true nature.

Believing the lie, we present a lie. Every person a theologian by birth, and every person profoundly wrong. God is not self-concerned and power-obsessed – it’s not just the “who is God?” question we answer so badly, but also the “what is God like?” question.

Sin re-orients the heart, taints the mind and manifests in broken behavior. Some shake their fist at heaven in acts of overt rebellion, demonstrating the horrific and grotesque nature of sin by the evil that they do. Others shake their fist at heaven in an act of apparent goodness, diligently demonstrating their ability to do good in a self-loving independence from the God who alone is good. Even righteous deeds are as filthy rags. Whatever is of independent un-faith is sin.

Sin is the tension in every biblical narrative, and every personal narrative. It isn’t a question about whether we can do good, or whether we can be empowered to do good. It is a question about what or who can ever recapture our hearts and draw our incurved souls from addiction to self, to gaze on the truly lovely, the genuinely loving and the profoundly trustworthy God who made us for participation in His love.

So as we preach the Bible we must never miss the fallen condition focus of every passage, the context of sin in which every text swims. Neither must we offer any sense of instruction for independent goodness, for that was the root of the issue. Sin is pervasive and profound, and God’s solution is glorious beyond words. Yet we preach. We preach . . . you finish the sentence: “we preach . . . and Him . . . .”

10 Biggest Big Ideas – 2. Creation

May 1, 2012April 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I am slowly offering what I think might be the ten biggest ideas in the Bible. I encourage you to write your own list, the process is a real joy. Yesterday I wrote about God and His self-giving goodness. I need to develop one aspect from that post:

2. Even in its current corrupted state, God’s creation reflects God’s heart and nature.

Those who start with a generic God born of human speculation will tend to emphasize the power of God. Often this truth grows so loud that other truths are drowned out. Yet the God of the Bible doesn’t seem as passionate about His own power as some might suggest. He is all-powerful, of course, but that is defined and driven by the loving relationality of the unity of the three – Father, Son and Spirit.

The giving and overflowing love of the Three-in-One speaks a word, and an abundantly diverse and beautifully united creation into existence. His eternal power is seen in the stunning reflection of His divine nature – with its vibrant, abundant, giving, creative, procreating, beauty.

Yet the beauty of creation is merely a stage for the most powerful beauty of all – the wonder of loving relationship. Creation is the stage for the relationships of creatures made in the image of a relational God. So every field, every mountain, every sunset, every vista, is a delight best experienced alongside another with whom God’s creation might be enjoyed.

We live in a broken, corrupted and perverted creation. Even through the death and the brokenness, we still see overwhelming beauty – from the abiding grandeur of the milky way, to the unique features of an individual leaf. Yet it is not only the lingering beauty that captivates, it is also the smothered whisper of what could be and should be.

The greatest pain is not that felt in a dying body, or that of a marred creation, but the deepest agony of broken relationship. Sadly we may experience the worst of fallenness in our bodies, or see the most grotesque disfigurement of creation, but every human inherently feels the deepest agony of all in the context of broken relationships: with friends, with family, with God.

Creation stirs us, yet creation itself groans. It groans to be the stage of what could be and should be, and by God’s grace and power, one day will be.

The Bible repeatedly returns to the relationship of creation to God – He made it, He owns it, He stamped it with His imprimatur, and He will pour out life to overcome death. Our hope is the new creation, the stage for a greater joy than could ever have been known in Eden.

So we preach a Bible that is earthed, quite literally. Both the past stories, our present experience, and our shared future hope, is well earthed in a world that reflects more about God than we usually even begin to notice. One day we will.

10 Biggest Big Ideas – 1. God

April 30, 2012April 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Every passage has a unique main idea. But are there thousands of completely different main ideas in the Bible? Haddon Robinson said several times that there are basically variations on roughly ten big Big Ideas in the Bible. We students kept trying to get a list out of him, but to no avail.

So I’ve decided to suggest my own ten. As you read through the Bible you may come up with a different list, but I suspect these macro main ideas are recognizable to all who are reading the Scriptures.

1. Everything is defined in relation to the triune God whose relational nature overflows into all that He has made.

The Bible doesn’t argue for the existence of some generic divine being, but assumes the existence of the one true God. He is a God who exists in the loving communion of Father and Son and Spirit. God is not only inherently good, His loving bond is the very measure of goodness.

It is out of this relationship that creation comes, the unrequired but unsurprising act of a loving and giving God. Creation reflects His creative artistry, His generous power, and His delight in blending diversity in beautiful unity. Even creation in its present corruption demonstrates the pervasive power of relationship.

Yet creation is not all God gives to enable us to know Him. His nature and character is revealed definitively by the Son who always reveals the unseen Father to us, and His Spirit who points us to the Son. Both the Son and the Spirit are given into a fallen world in an act of deep generosity.

It is out of God’s nature that the whole human story makes sense. Created as loving responders, humanity has a wondrous capacity for love and joy and delight and response. Equally, as true heart-driven beings, humans have an equally profound capacity for hate and grief and sadness and diverted affection.

It is not possible to make sense of creation without seeing it in the context of God’s goodness and the profound impact of creaturely rebellion. It is not possible to make sense of any human without seeing him or her in the context of their relationships, especially the pre-eminent relationship with God himself.

Not only is every aspect of creation, and every human, defined by their response to God, so is every event only understood in light of God’s role. So every narrative in Scripture is primarily a narrative about God, even when He is not mentioned. Every character is either trusting Him or not.

Consequently every biblical sermon has to be, above all else, a sermon about God. Technically this is called Theocentric preaching. The term doesn’t matter. God does. And not just any God, or even some assumed generic God of human speculation, it must be the triune, covenant making and keeping, self-giving God who is love.

Let’s be sure to preach every passage with a profound prayerful awareness of the God whose Scripture it is.

Clarity: More Than Thinking

April 26, 2012April 25, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Yesterday I offered three implications of the doctrine of Biblical clarity for us as preachers. Since the Bible is written by a master communicator who made sure it could be understood, therefore we need to work hard at understanding, we should help others know it can be understood, and we should strive to be clear in our own preaching.

There’s one more issue that I wanted to add to the list. This might be the one we need to ponder more than the others. Clarity is not really about intellectual capacity. The brightest scholars can make the biggest mess with interpreting Biblical texts. The simplest Christian can profoundly understand God’s Word.

Intellect is a blessing, but it is not a requirement. Formal training is a privilege, but it is not the definitive necessity. Reference resources are helps, but they are not preconditions for understanding. We have to grasp the fact that understanding communication is not an exclusively brain-defined exercise – our brain, or anyone else’s.

Dr B may be a very intelligent individual. Mr S may never have finished school and struggle to read. But which of these two is most likely to understand the nuances of Mrs S’s communication? Probably the husband who loves her.

4. Preachers have to both recognize and model that understanding is not primarily a matter of intellectual capacity or formal training, but alignment of heart by the Spirit. We can so easily purvey the notion that scholarship and intellect are pre-eminent distinctives of effective biblical study. The Word of God makes wise the simple. But there is a profound spiritual and relational aspect to understanding the Bible.

Notice how Jesus speaks of the role of the soil in the parable of the good soils (Matthew 13, Mark 4, Luke 8). In his explanation the repeated issue is their hearing. He continues on in Mark and Luke to speak of a lamp under a jar, then returning immediately to the issue of hearing. He warns them, “Take care then how you hear, for the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks that he has will be taken away.”

So how is the good soil defined? In Matthew it is the one who hears and understands. In Mark, it is those who hear and accept. In Luke, it is those who hear the word, holding it fast in an honest and good heart.

As preachers we can easily give the impression that the issue is intellect. It isn’t. The real issue is the alignment of the heart, its responsiveness to the God whose word is being spoken. It is more about Spirit enlivened relational capacity than genetically transferred intellectual capacity. As preachers of God’s Word, we must both recognize and model that.

Beyond Guilt – Part 3

April 18, 2012April 18, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

So far we have looked at issues of stance and tone in this series. It is easy to have a minimalist default approach of piling on the pressure and using guilt to twist arms. The biblical preacher needs to get beyond that.

3. The Preacher’s Strategy. Let’s face the real issue head on. What is our strategy in preaching? If the goal is life transformation, then what strategy makes sense? It certainly can’t be a simplistic answer since the human is a complex creature. But here are some pointers on strategy issues.

Transformation involves movement from a negative to a positive. Preaching for that transformation cannot simply critique the negative. We need to help people see what life would look like if the biblical truth were to take hold. Simply making people feel bad is not a solution.

Often people simply cannot conceive of what a faith-filled Christ-like in-step-with-the-Spirit life would look like in terms of a specific issue. In one sense then we have some role as life coaches. But it is more than that.

Transformation involves motivation for applying the message of God’s Word. Preaching for that transformation cannot simply inform, or even pressure, it needs to motivate. We need to understand how people work at the deepest level. If we think that information plus pressure will generate good things then we have been significantly led away from the teaching of the Bible by the thinking of this world.

What is the root issue Paul points to in Ephesians 4:17ff? People act and behave a certain way because of their thinking – so we need to educate! Hang on, yes we do, but he goes further, there’s a deeper issue…the root issue is the hardness of heart. Somehow the heart influences even how the mind will process information. Christian transformation is not really about well-informed minds and well-disciplined wills. It is an issue of the heart, inside to out, a matter of response as opposed to responsibility.

Transformation involves response to more than a vision of better living. It is not about realizing innate potential, but about responding from the core to a compelling love that alone can truly transform a life.

So our strategy includes presentation of application rather than just declaration of guilt. Our strategy includes communicating with people as if they are heart-driven beings and not just informed decision makers. But the ultimate issue has to be the One to whom people should respond, which I’ll leave until tomorrow’s post.