John H Armstrong

Seek God Obediently

We are regularly urged to seek God in and through the Bible. The problem is that we have turned this "seeking" into a type of passivity that passes for reasonableness and calm. I believe in reasonableness and calm but I do not believe in seeking God in any other way than obediently. John R. W. Stott says it so well: "This is the hardest condition of all to fulfill. In seeking God we have to be prepared not only to revise our ideas but to reform our lives."

Evangelicals seem to have forgotten that the Christian gospel has a moral challenge inherent in it. Since we stress grace alone we forget that grace, if it is real grace, is never alone. If the gospel is true then those who believe it, really and truly believe it, must act upon it. The moral challenges that one finds in following Jesus are not optional, or add-on extras, for those who want to get rewards in heaven.

Stott is again provocative and helpful when he says: "So God is not a fit object for man's detached scrutiny." You cannot seek God and say, "How interesting!" No, you have to seek God in order to hear him and obey him. I think this sums up the major problem in the American church. We want to discuss God, seek God's help in crisis, etc. We would be better to seek Santa Claus.

P. Carnegie Simpson has concluded:

We had thought intellectually to examine him: we find that he is spiritually examining us. The roles are reversed between us . . . We study Aristotle and are intellectually edified thereby; we study Jesus and are, in the profoundest way, spiritually disturbed. . . . We are constrained to take some inward moral attitude of heart and will in relation to this Jesus. . . . A man may study Jesus with intellectual impartiality, he cannot do it with moral neutrality. . . . We must declare our colors. To this has our unevasive contact with Jesus brought us. We began it in the calm of the study; we are called out to the field of moral decision (The Fact of Christ, 1930).

He is Risen

Without the resurrection Christianity falls apart. With it the Church has a clear word that marks it and equips it to engage the entire world with a message of hope.  I pray that you found today's celebration of his resurrection a time of incredible joy filled with the gospel of peace. It brings to a close a long phase of the church year and opens up to us a whole new season to follow.

All Christians, East and West, celebrated Easter on the same date this year, which doesn't happen too often. This fact, in itself, brought a sense of the unity of the church to my own mind today. May the Holy Spirit give all Christians a deeper experience of their inherent unity in the months ahead. Amen.

Jesus Changes Everything

Bishop William Temple once said, "Christ was not a man, but Man, he was not a god, but God." Pilate, when he looked at Jesus to examine him, concluded "Here (Behold) is the man" (John 19:5). There is more in this confession than perhaps he knew. Pilate recognizes, in ways beyond the ordinary, that this was not just any man, but rather this was: "The Man." He was not a man among many other men, a prophet, a great teacher or a moral leader among others. Jesus was Christos, the messiah, "the man of God's own choosing" as Luther put it. He was, and is, unique.

E. Stanley Jones, one of my favorite twentieth century writers, once wrote, "In him we see what man is and how far he has fallen, in him we see what God is and how far we may rise. He is the universal meeting us personalized. Since I am a person, the universal must meet me pesonalized." And Jones adds, "Jesus changes everything he touches. Call him a man, and you will have to change your ideas of what man is; call him God, and you will have to change your ideas of what God is. You can transfer every quality of Jesus into God without the slightest sense of loss or blasphemy. And when you set him up as man he appeals to universal man."

Yesterday's blog, March 20, elicited several excellent comments. Today's blog should remind us that if Jesus really is who we say he is then we ought to be lost in wonder at the feet of this amazing person who is both fully God and fully man. E. Stanley Jones again helps us see this point ever so clearly:

But if he is the perfect, he is also the progressive. We have discovered an Ultimate, but this does not stop progress, it begins it. We have a Fixed Point, but the point is not fixed. Jesus is not behind us in the past. He is the great Contemporary. More---he is ahead of us. "He stands on the further side of our twenty centuries," calling us into the new life. He has not been surpassed, not even approximated. He is no spent force. Jesus is God's final but unfolding word. More and more light breaks out from him. Since our code is a Character, we can never say we have attained. We are always discovering new meanings in him.

A religion founded upon rules is soon outgrown, for rules are temporary, growing out of temporary conditions; principles are never outgrown, they are the same yesterday, today, and forever; but principles meeting us in a Person are not only eternal, they are eternally concreted, kept close to life, always illustrated. Jesus did not give rules, he did not even give principles alone, he gave principles illustrated by what he was and did. Hence he is never outgrown.

Follow Me

The most consistent invitation the Gospel writers attribute to Jesus is found in the plain words: "Follow me." This command is often found in conjunction with references to "taking up the cross" and to "dying" to one's self. The implications are pretty plain if you know the place of the cross in the ancient world.

It never ceases to amaze me, over the course of decades of ministry in America, that so many preachers and everyday Christians miss this simple, frequently given, exhortation when it comes to inviting people to come to Christ. We have all kinds of formulas for telling people how to come to Christ but almost never do we actually tell people what Jesus plainly says about this matter.

N.T. Wright, in one of his frequent moments of insight into the text of the Gospels, suggests that Jesus' invitation to faith and discipleship could best be summarized, at least in our culture, in these simple words: "Give up your own agenda and follow me!" I agree. If you would follow Christ now, and in this New Year, this is clearly what is required. I have resolved that in 2006 I will tell everyone I can, in public and private, that this is the simple essence of real faith and personal commitment to Jesus. If you want to be a real Christian you must "give up your own agenda and follow" Christ as revealed to your soul through Holy Scripture.