Sunday 23 March 2008

From words to wallpaper

From words to wallpaper
From the Word to babble
From meaning to meaninglessness
From peace to strife
From joy to a constant searching for the next kick
From love to emptiness
From hope to distress

When Jesus is Lord, everything fits together, not just in the church, but everything, art, culture, music. When Jesus is Lord music has sound, and sound has a depth that resonates within the soul.

When Jesus is Lord there is something to paint.

When Jesus is Lord there is something to believe in, something to live for.

When Jesus is Lord, it matters and everything matters.

One of the reasons why people attack Christianity is because they have nothing else to do. Bereft of anything to believe in themselves, they fill their emptiness by attacking those who do believe. I say this not because of paranoia but because I read the front page of the Coventry Times which was attacking the failures of a church. Full front page, without Jesus there is no news, without Jesus nothing matters.

Everything is empty, and why bother to produce great music, or great art, or great anything - it does not matter, we do not matter, nothing matters.

We are just large ants in a big ants nest, with no more meaning. Working hard to build a bigger little nest for ourselves. What for? For nothing, because when perish whoever has the most toys still dies. What does it matter to the Medici's now in their wonderful chapel that they sponsored Michel Angelo who produced fantastic art? Can they enjoy the satisfaction when they are dead? Does it really matter?

The further we get from God, the more we die, at first we live on no longer connected to the power of the universe, yet it takes a while for the lights to go out. It takes a while for the glory to fade.

So we move from words and great sentiment, from great art and great music to wallpaper. Songs like And Can it Be or Love Divine are songs you cannot just ignore. They grab your attention, they get into your head, they speak of a truth, that is The Truth, that cannot be ignored. So much today just fades naturally into the background, it does not interrupt, it is not interesting enough to, but it provides some background noise, like the hum of the fan on our IT equipment if whirs reminding us that we are alive, in case we forget.

Life without God is in fact a bit of a contradiction in terms, life with God and death without.

Life without God has an allure, it is tempting, but in the end though it may promise us greater love, deeper truths, greater experiences. At the end of the day, in the land where nothing matters, nothing is interesting, because it does not matter. I may go for my fix, but that is all that it is, a fix.

Jesus conquered the grave, He rose to life, death could not hold Him even when it drove nails into his hands and feet, whipped him until His skin was peeling off, and thrust a spear into His side. The problem is that though death could not hold Jesus even when it threw everything it had at Him, death still holds so many others captive. Fit, young and healthy, but their vital signs are fading, and the heart though it throws itself into everything loses the will to live.

At Easter Jesus rose from the dead, and we need to challenge the people around us, when are they going to rise from the dead! People are fit, and young and healthy and yet they need resurrecting. They need to be born again.

We have moved from words to wall paper, but before you fall asleep for the last time the Word is still alive and well, and the Word wants to speak to you today.

Happy Easter.

Friday 14 March 2008

The flow of grace

I'm currently reading a book Lean Thinking, which is about helpfully enough Lean thinking. This is a philosophy that says cut out waste, achieve flow (i.e. don't just do it all in bulk but actually work in flowing processes) and achieve pull (that is let the customer determine what a company wants and be driven by that.

It goes against the logic of economies of scale and producing big batches and instead has an understanding of business and humanity that at times is totally surprising. While the conventional wisdom of the factory floor is line up the machines, make the workers work as fast and as hard as possible, and let it all operate like robots. Lean says forget producing batches, actually people want differentiated goods, so produce what people want. Don't produce 100 blue cars and then switch over and produce 100 red, and then be left with 50 blue cars which no one wants. Instead when someone orders a red car produce a red car.

What you end up with is a more skilled workforce who do not just produce a 100 red cars, and a 100 red cars, but produce one at a time products that people want. It seems like the system works.

So what on earth has this got to do with grace?

How much of what we do is really what God wants? How much of our lives are pulled by what God desires. We end up doing lots of things that "are right" but no one wants, not even the Almighty.

We need instead to be directed by the flow of God and the pull of His Holy Spirit. As Christians we need to stop producing lots of what God does not really want and start dynamically listening to Him and doing His will.

Jesus calls us to Follow Him, that is both pull and flow. Instead we get stuck in a religion of business, of doing stuff. Like the car company stock piling cars that no one really want, we produce stuff that no one really wants.

If we as churches threw off the waste that we spend so much of our lives on, then not only would we achieve so much more for the Kingdom, that is Kingdom value, we would have so much better relationship with God, because we would not blame Him for us spending our time and efforts doing stuff that He never asked us to do in the first place.

We need to learn to be followers, and followers do when Jesus does, but they also rest when Jesus would rest.

One of the biggest questions is do we really know what Jesus wants, and the probable answer for many of us, is that we do not. Isaiah (Is 55v2) commented,
Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labour on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.

Many of us are fixated with doing, but that is not the point. There is no innate value in being busy, sometimes what we need to do is to take a break and work on our spiritual life. Jesus never said that we needed to get out of your comfort zone, instead He actually said, Matt 11v29 "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls."

We spend so much of our lives trying to please other people, or in reaction to that.

We can become so competitive that we stop competing because we believe that we cannot win. We choose to opt out of the race because we do not believe that we can win it. We get left on the side of the losers.

In the end with God His love is not based on whether we win or lose.

The point about getting out of the boat is not about discomfort, it actually was not that comfortable in the boat. I'd be far more comfortable standing on the water than I would rocking up and down on the boat. The boat was being tossed about, Jesus was walking on the water.

The issue of getting out of the boat is the choice to follow the logic of the Kingdom and not the logic of the world. It is about putting our faith in the God who made the world, not in a man made boat. The issue in the story is about faith, not about comfort.

It is about seeing the world differently and obeying Jesus. Most of the time getting out of a boat and onto the water is only worth it if you want to go for a swim. The point about miracles is that they are special occasions. The point was that Peter did what Jesus called him to do, and put his trust in Jesus, thereby acknowledging who Jesus was.

Jesus loved Peter and He did this for a reason. Peter needed to know who Jesus was, and Peter learned to put His trust in Jesus, even when it looked stupid. He found the path of calm through the storm, the place of comfort in the pain of life. He found peace, he found the place of rest.

How much of our lives is wasted on the unecessary, and how much is given, really given to God.