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.

Preaching What’s There But Not

April 11, 2012April 10, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I’ve mentioned it before, as have many others, but its worth another shot – don’t rush to “find a message” in your passage, be sure to find the message of the passage.

There are shortcuts that inevitably are attractive to busy and often tired preachers. Here are a few variations:

1. Harvesting Imperatives – you scan the passage and determine there are about three imperatives in the text. Bingo. Three point sermon. But what if those imperatives are all working together, but actually two-thirds of the passage has no imperative? There’s a lot more to making sense of a passage than just spotting terms that look like they might be imperatival.

2. Chunk Chopping – you scan the passage and determine a specific number of roughly equal chunks and chop the passage accordingly. Divide and conquer! Then each chunk becomes a point, and voila, a sermon! But what if there is an internal logic to the passage that isn’t simply about numbers of verses (there usually is something more going on!)

3. Highlight Spotlighting – you scan the passage for something “that will preach” and then you put the spotlight onto it. For instance, I heard a sermon where the preacher spent almost half the message extolling the virtues of getting out of financial debt, all because the passage made a passing transitional reference to having no debt except…well, except the one thing the passage actually was addressing (but that didn’t come through in the message, and nor did the actual message of the author).

4. Morals as Morales – you scan the passage, especially narratives, and identify a moral morale of the story, then preach that. Essentially you are using the text to make your “improving society” speech, but you are probably not actually preaching the text in its context. Certainly the Bible does address morality issues, but it does so in the context of a greater God-human framework than would lead to trite after-dinner morality speeches.

5. Shallow Starters – you say enough about a passage to look like you’ve said something about the passage, and then you get to say what it is you want to say. But this is preaching your own wisdom, why bother? I guarantee God’s content is better than yours.

There are other ways too, I’m sure, but it all boils down to this: do we believe that God is the greatest communicator? If so, then let’s do our best to actually preach the message of the passage, not just settle for a message from a passage.

Preaching Triangle & Touching a Nerve

March 17, 2012March 17, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

This week in Cor Deo I had the chance to give an hour’s introduction to Ezekiel. A brief look at chapter 28 in our sweeping overview allowed a glimpse of the message to the “King of Tyre” and a chance to ponder the fall of Lucifer through a heart corrupted by a self-ward gaze.

I suspect the enemy isn’t overly concerned by some Christian preaching. You know, the kind that offers a sanctified version of Genesis 3. You can be independent, you can be successful, you can be like your own god, you can be equipped for a self-concerned life. Whether it is evangelistic (you can get yourself the best future for you, here’s a ticket to a nice heaven password) or edificatory (you can be an independent success story, just look to yourself and do these things)…I suspect the enemy isn’t too bothered.

But what if a preacher catches on to the Preaching Triangle reality of interdependence? The preacher’s own dependence on God in a love relationship, then a shared concern for the listeners to become reliant on God in a love relationship, manifesting in preaching that seeks to forge connections between listeners and preacher, and more importantly, God. This be fighting talk from the perspective of the enemy of our souls!

Interesting how the verses that jump to mind seem to support this post. Resist the devil and persist in being right and doing good? No, resist the devil and draw near to God (in the context of broken relationships, friendship with the world, the jealousy of God over the Spirit made to dwell in us, humble dependence on God). The devil prowls around like a roaring lion, so resist him and do right in yourself? No, resist, recognize the experience of your brothers around the world, look to God to restore, confirm, strengthen, etc., which is why in humility we should cast our cares on the God who cares for us.

But what about the armour of God, that is all about individual response isn’t it? Oh hang on, a key part is praying at all times in the Spirit, and they were to be praying for Paul too. Never mind. One more? The god of this age has blinded the minds to keep folks from seeing the light of the good news of the glory of Christ, the image of God, so how did Paul preach? Take a look at 2Cor.4 and see his dependence on God and self-giving for them . . . preaching triangle in the context of a great spiritual battle.

Do not lose heart. Real relationally driven preaching will touch a nerve with the enemy, but the solution can never be a retreat into non-relational solitude, that’s just his way.

Saturday Short Thought: Image of God

March 10, 2012March 9, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

This week I’ve been blogging about the inherent relational connections in the preaching event. I have just finished writing notes for a session on the Life of the Preacher (more than a bit about relationships in that!), and today am looking forward to a reunion of last year’s Cor Deo team, along with this year’s team. There is a theme here!

And yet the preaching ministry is often such a lonely one. While I understand all the dynamics that can make it so, I have to say that it is incredibly inconsistent with the gospel we preach. This week I was in a conversation where the image of God was raised. This is often defined anachronistically by imposing a much later philosophical anthropology onto the notion, resulting in the image of God being seen to mean our unique ability among God’s creatures to think abstractly, choose freely and rule as we see fit in our independence. But is the image of God really and primarily about our cognitive faculty and self-directed will? Is that really what God is like in Himself?

Looking at the text in context, it is clear that a major feature of the image of God must be some aspect of relationality. The “let us” language, the male and female, the unity in diversity, even the dominion elements seem to be more about a loving care than a sharp powerful domination. The Bible, from that point on, from cover to cover seems to support a relational core to what it is to be made as human in God’s image.

Looking at our world today, we see that relationality is so important, even to those who deny it with every fibre of their being and action of their life. People sacrifice family on the altar of career advancement, achieve all their life goals and then drink themselves into oblivion because they have nobody to share the triumph with. Maybe our relationships should feature more on our CV’s than merely a token reference or two at the end.

So as preacher’s of God’s Word, let’s be sure to not impose cultural or philosophical values onto the text of Scripture. More than that, let’s be sure to let the biblical emphasis on relationality mark our lives and ministries. Let us not contradict by our lives the truths we preach with our lips.

Old is Not Always Better

March 5, 2012March 5, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

This morning I have been reflecting on the messages I heard yesterday and post the link here for your interest. I wonder if sometimes we fall back toward the Old Covenant because we haven’t fully grasped the wonder and superiority of the New. Anyway, I’ll just link to the post and let you go there if you choose.