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January 2014

Daily Bible thoughts 525: Tuesday 7th January 2014:

 2 Chronicles 29:34: Conscientious Consecration.

Before moving on to look at the next chapter in 2 Chronicles, I want to pause and linger over some words in (34): …the Levites had been more conscientious in consecrating themselves than the priests had been.

For the King’s church in Boston Spa, our overarching theme in 2014 is: ‘Climb higher, go deeper.’ We want to foster spiritual growth in each and all. We desire to see personal growth and growth together as a church. But there always will be those who ‘climb higher’ and ‘go deeper’ than others. There will always be those among us who, like the Levites in today’s passage, seem to be more determined to make progress than others. There are people who really mean business with God. The problem is that we so often admire them when we ought to emulate them. We applaud them when we ought to be following in their steps. We write them rave reviews instead of asking them to be our mentors.

At our family service held last Sunday morning, we had a height chart on the wall. Many different people, of all ages were measured. Of course what we found was that some grow taller than others. There are no surprises there. We all know that where there is life there will be growth and some grow bigger than others. There isn’t a lot we can do about our height. There are a lot of genetic factors involved. But if we are alive, and we take adequate nourishment, we will grow and achieve our biological potential.

Similarly, in our spiritual walk, we too will grow if we feed properly. We need regular interaction with the Scriptures; not only reading but reflecting on the meaning for our own lives and making concrete application. This ‘eating’ and ‘exercising’ will contribute significantly to growth .And, in one sense, we can choose how ‘tall’ we grow. (At this point the parallel breaks down, because here is something we can’t do in natural life.) But we can decide that we are going to get bigger and bigger in God , with His help . As J.Oswald Sanders said, ‘We are at this moment as close to God as we really choose to be.’

How conscientious is your consecration? Some students were talking about a Bible College lecturer. ‘He’s very serious isn’t he?’ one said. Well, it’s not good to be humourless, but when it comes to the Bible, how can we be other than serious in our approach? On television programmes like ‘X Factor’ it’s a bit of a cliché for contestants to be interviewed and you hear them say, ‘I really want this’ or ‘I want this so much.’ If you want to grow spiritually, don’t just talk about it. Get on with it. Be conscientious in your use of the spiritual disciplines and watch where it takes you; see what God will do with that.

Writing about this chapter (and especially verse 27, but his words are pertinent here) F.B. Meyer  said: ‘Cleanse the house of the Lord. Bring out all the uncleanness. By self-examination, confession, and repudiation, be clean of all the filth which has accumulated through months and years of neglect. Resume the position of entire devotion, as a prepared and sanctified soul. Offer the sin-offering for the past, and prepare the burnt-offering of entire consecration for the future. And when that is offered, when you determine to be wholly God’s, lay yourself, with all the interests of your life, at the feet of Jesus, for his disposal; then the song of the Lord will begin again.’ Great verses through the Bible, p.160.

Prayer: Lord, help me to be conscientious about being your disciple.

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Daily Bible thoughts 524: Monday 6th January 2014:

 2 Chronicles 29: 20 – 36

At the re-establishing of the services in the temple (35) there was a lavish offering of sacrifices. I am reminded of someone saying that Old Testament worship resembled ‘an abattoir’. This shedding of the blood of animals on a large scale may seem barbaric to us. But God established this system as a way for people to be forgiven and reconciled to Himself. Innocent victims were offered in the place of guilty people, and the animal’s lives were sacrificed for those who had sinned. Taking the Bible’s teaching as a whole, it is clear that all this was preparatory for the coming of Jesus. After His death on the cross there is no more need for sacrifice. He has offered His own perfect life as the final sacrifice. Through faith in Jesus we are restored to God. Every animal sacrifice was an imperfect offering of an imperfect life. It was a temporary measure and could only ‘cover over’ sin. Hence many sacrifices were made throughout the Old Testament era, and they had to be brought repeatedly. But Jesus came to remove sin altogether by His ultimate sacrifice.

Note three things here about this offering of sacrifices:

  • It was accompanied by music and singing (25-31). (It is a beautiful picture, by the way, to see the king kneeling down and worshipping alongside everyone else. What a great leader he was! We need more like him in political/national life: leaders not ashamed to bow before Almighty God, to publicly confess their need of Him and willingly obey Him.) There was joyful, thankful worship. When we know we are forgiven and our consciences are cleaned, this is a cause for deep happiness. Even in the days before Jesus came; at a time when He could only be dimly anticipated, corporate worship was supposed to be over flowingly delightful (25, 26). It was what God wanted. A man who worked for a time at the Garden tomb in Jerusalem told a story. One day he was pointing out to visitors the skull-like rocky cliff which may have been the site of Golgotha, where Jesus died. He also indicated the vicinity where Jesus may have been buried before rising from the dead. A young hippie was in the crowd that day. He was roaming the world looking for meaning. He suddenly said something like this, ‘If what you say is true, this place should be filled with singing every day of the year!’ He got it. All that Jesus is and has done is cause for the most profound joy.
  • All this great musical outpouring came in obedience to God (25, 26). Through their Scriptures; through the proclamation of God’s Word by the prophets they saw what God required of them, and they were quick to obey. ‘Whatever He says to you do it.’ It is not too early to prepare yourself from now on for next Sunday (or for the next occasion when you will gather with other Christians to hear God’s Word taught). Pray for the preacher. Pray for yourself that you will hear and understand and be swift to obey.
  • The people gave God all the glory for what had happened (36). I am reminded of the story of a Vicar walking down the road one day. He came across one of his parishioners tending his garden. ‘Ah, the Lord can do wonderful things with a garden,’ said the man of the cloth. ‘Yes Vicar,’ came the reply, ‘but you should have seen it when the Lord had it to Himself!!’ I wrote a note in my Bible when I read the thirty sixth verse a little while ago: ‘Clearly, all the emphasis thus far (in the chapter) has been on them and their work. They had put so much effort in but knew where the glory should go.’ We discover in our reading of the Bible that God works in, with, on and through people. We are His instruments and we are fully involved. It’s what a friend calls the 200% principle: 100% of God and 100% of me.

Prayer: Help me to labour with all your energy that so powerfully works in me (Colossians 1:29).

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Daily Bible thoughts 523: Friday 3rd January 2013:

 2 Chronicles 29: 10-19

Hezekiah was ‘Mister Motivator’. He had credibility as a leader because of what he was. What the leader is in their character is so much more important than what he/she says. Words are not unimportant but they must be backed up by ‘works’. If there is a ‘credibility gap’ between our talk and our walk; if our lips are going one way while our lives are moving another, then lack of authenticity will tell against us. So, verse eleven follows not only numerically, but also logically and spiritually from verse ten. If you’re going to call for great commitment then you need to give it yourself. It’s not good enough to merely bark orders because you’re the leader. You must show yourself prepared to do what you’re asking other people to do.

I’m not surprised to read in (7): Then these Levites set to work… They did exactly what Hezekiah asked of them (5). They started with themselves (always the starting point). From there they got to work on the temple. (So you want to change the church? Begin with your own heart.

  • They had heard God’s Word (Presumably from the king: verses 15b, 5);
  • They had also heard his call to diligent service (11);
  • But they had also seen his example (10)

Emotions do communicate powerfully. A business man wrote that people can smell commitment a mile off. These leaders must have realised that Hezekiah was serious about heading up a thorough-going reformation. To get anywhere near him was to catch a whiff of smoke! The man was so ‘on fire!!’It was no wonder that he was able to motivate good and capable people and hitch their gifts to the chariot of his godly cause. The Message tells us: The priests started from the inside and worked out; they emptied the place of the accumulation of defiling junk – pagan rubbish that had no business in that holy place – and the Levites hauled it off to the Kidron Valley. They began the Temple cleaning on the first day of the first month and by the eighth day they had worked their way out to the porch – eight days it took them to clean and consecrate The Temple itself, and in eight more days they had finished with the entire Temple complex. The Apostle Paul teaches that a Christian’s body is God’s Temple (1 Corinthians 6:19/20) and that, by inference, there are things that do not belong in it. There is a spiritual equivalent to this cleaning project, as we go to work on ourselves, with God’s help, and remove the stuff that really ought not to be there. It may not all be ‘defiling.’ Maybe some of it is just clutter. But it gets in the way.  From the moment of becoming a Christian you have to look at your life through new eyes. It is no longer yours but God’s. Anything incompatible with that must be hurled in the direction of the rubbish heap.

Cleaning up the temple took time. It can be so with us. A thoroughgoing repentance will be painful, and may not be the thing of a moment. Many years ago I had a friend whose Christianity began when he spent a week praying and weeping over the bad and wrong stuff in his life. He just felt terrible about who he was and how he’d been living. At the end of that week he had no categories to describe what had happened to him; no technical theological jargon to explain it. He just knew he felt clean and was right with His Maker. When someone told him he’d been ‘born again’ he accepted it, but he wouldn’t have used that unfamiliar Biblical language himself. What he did know was that he was forgiven and accepted. Life was far from easy for him, but his face lit up like the midday sun and in his eyes were deep pools of peace. Something real had happened. It took time, but there was a massive clean out.  Prayer: Help me Lord to ‘clean house’ and show me where to start.

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Daily Bible thoughts 522: Thursday 2nd January 2014

2 Chronicles 29:6-11

During last August, just before attending the ‘Global Leadership Summit’ at Willow Creek Church, my wife and I spent approximately twenty four hours in down town Chicago. We managed to fit in a guided tour of both the north and south sides of the city. To my surprise and delight, when we were exploring the south side, the guide pointed out the ‘Moody’ Church and Bible Institute. Not long after this we were shown Hugh Hefner’s former Playboy mansion, then the club where Frank Sinatra and his cronies hung out when they were in town, and also the bullet hole in the façade of a church building left from the Al Capone gangster era! I was struck by the thought that this one humble and simple (in the best sense) man made such an enormous impact on his city, that he is still remembered today. (Of course his influence was even greater than on this one city. He impacted the world as an evangelist: a powerful preacher about Jesus.) It was this same D.L. Moody, I believe, who said, ‘The world is yet to see what God will do with one man who is fully surrendered to Him.’ Then he added, ‘God helping me, I will be that man!’ It appears he was.

I thought about Moody as I was mulling over Hezekiah’s commitment expressed in 2 Chronicles 29:10: Now I intend to make a covenant with the LORD, the God of Israel, so that his fierce anger will turn away from us. In my Bible I have highlighted the words: Now I intend…  As the great Anglican pastor, John Stott, observed, no-one drifts into holiness. Hezekiah wasn’t making a ‘new year’s resolution’ type of thing that would be broken in days, or perhaps weeks. He was making a serious commitment, and he was highly intentional about it.

We have seen in recent days how the people of Judah had turned away from God, and from regular worship in the temple. In fact, the ‘church’ in Hezekiah’s day had closed down. This led to very serious consequences, and this comes across well in The Message, which is a modern paraphrase of the Bible: And because of that, GOD’s anger flared up and he turned those people into a public exhibit of disaster, a moral history lesson – look and read! The Bible repeatedly teaches the principle that we reap what we sow. We do so personally and nationally. There is a lesson to be learned that sin (that tendency in all of us to go our own way rather than God’s), if unchecked, will lead to a car wreck at the bottom of the hill. Ultimately it doesn’t lead anywhere good. It takes us in the direction of pain, misery and loss. (But it was to rescue us from the guilt and power of sin that Jesus came into the world: an event the world has apparently been celebrating recently. I have noticed though that Jesus is not always welcome at His own birthday party! But that’s another subject altogether.)

Hezekiah was appalled at the situation he had inherited. He saw the spiritual danger he and his people were facing, and he was determined to do something about it. He drew a line in the sand. Things were going to change if he had anything to do with it, and he was going to have a lot to do with it: I have decided to make a covenant with the GOD of Israel and turn history around… The Message. One with God is a majority, and Hezekiah intended to be a history maker. Was it Wesley who said something like this, ‘Give me a handful of people who love nothing but God and hate nothing but sin, and we’ll change the world’? It doesn’t take large numbers to make a big difference. It just takes a heartfelt commitment; a life fully given over to God. Someone said: ‘Be the difference you want to see in the world.’

Prayer: Lord, It amazes me how you take very ordinary people and use them in your service. Like Hezekiah, I give what I am and have to you. May I be a difference-maker in your purposes.

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Daily Bible thoughts 521: Wednesday 1st January 2014

: 2 Chronicles 29: 6

Hezekiah came to the throne as a young man and sought to reverse a situation of national spiritual decline. It is surely noteworthy that the turning away from God went hand in hand with turning away from the ‘church’: They turned their faces away from the LORD’s dwelling place and turned their backs on him (6) Our ancestors went wrong and lived badly before GOD – they discarded him, turned away from this house where we meet with GOD, and walked off. They boarded up the doors, turned out the lights, and cancelled all the acts of worship of the GOD of Israel in the holy Temple. The Message. I strongly believe that (what I see as) an ever decreasing desire in many professing Christians, to be habitually part of regular fellowship with other believers, is a symptom of a serious and potentially terminal illness. There is something profoundly unhealthy going on. Now let me stress that I don’t consider you can measure spirituality by the number of church meetings attended. That’s not my concern. But through my lifetime I have observed a marked change of attitude towards worship gatherings. I was brought up in an era where we went to meetings three times on a Sunday. I’m not saying there was anything inherently virtuous about this, but it was the reality of our childhood years. There would also be at least one midweek meeting to attend as well. (It seems to me that many Christians of my father’s generation had a sense of ‘churchmanship’ that is not so common today.) About 20/25 years ago, I began to notice a shift in church culture: a significant number of Christians were starting to attend church once a week only. (This was so much the case that when a young couple joined our church in Boston Spa, and turned out twice on a Sunday and again in the week, we spoke of them as having a kind of ‘old-fashioned’ commitment to the life of the church. Needless to say, this was not a disparaging remark. We were delighted with them and their involvement, which was somewhat out of sync with where things were heading in the church generally.) We are a now in a situation where many believers will show up at a meeting once a fortnight, possibly every three weeks, and even monthly.  Although there can be legitimate reasons for this, it seems to me, as a pastor, and as an observer of these trends over a number of years, that domestic and social commitments often take precedence over commitment to the local church.  I repeat that we can’t measure the true health of a person’s spiritual life by the number of meetings they attend. I accept that totally. But commitment to Christ cannot be expressed apart from commitment to His body, the church. I believe many pastors would say that Sunday by Sunday their local expression of ‘the body’ seems like a multiple amputee case! So many ‘body parts’ are missing!! How can you say you are committed to Christ when you are not playing your full part in His church? This is not a healthy trend.  It feels like an attitude of, ‘How little can I get away with?’ in terms of commitment to the church services. Are we gradually heading towards boarding up the doors and turning out the lights and cancelling the acts of worship? Perhaps not. But who would have thought that such change as we have seen could have come about in one generation?

I will return to this tomorrow, but in (10) Hezekiah says: Now I intend… (I have decided…The Message). On this New Year’s Day, I would like to see every Christian re-evaluate their relationship with Christ’s church. Maybe 2014 requires some intentionality towards change?  Perhaps we need to make decisions that will enable us to be like the first Pentecostal church: They devoted themselves…to the fellowship… (Acts 2:42). Such devotion is sadly lacking in large sectors of the church.

Prayer: Lord you tell us not to forsake our gathering together as your people. Forgive us, please, our increasing apathy and lethargy about such meeting, and help us to obey you.

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