Just a quick note from Northumbria...
Please do keep praying for the Free outreach here. It's been quite a struggle over recent days - there are a small number of committed CU members, but pray that more get involved over the next couple of days. I'm speaking on Mark 7 tonight at a pub quiz, and then Mark 8 tomorrow night. Pray that there's something of a gathering of momentum, and that we see some of the same faces coming back.
I'm writing from Newcastle, where I am this week for the Free outreach organised by the University of Northumbria Christian Union.
I've not had a chance to update things here much. Last week, we had a brilliant time at the University of Central Lancashire's Free outreach in Preston. All of the events were packed and it was brilliant to be partnered by my friend Andrew Norbury who presented Jesus from Mark's Gospel at each event. There is something very special about working with people time and again, especially when you have learned almost by intuition what they are thinking. Paul modelled this with Silas, Timothy and the others. It was great to have a taste of ongoing gospel partnership with Andrew last week. The week built on a steady but discernible growth in love for Jesus and in passion for evangelism amongst the CU members. Thursday night was particularly brilliant - nearly 100 crammed in for a three course meal prepared by CU members and Andrew's message entitled 'Free from guilt'.
This week I'm speaking each day here in Newcastle. The lunchbar today provided a solid start to the week's events. Tonight I'm speaking on 'Free from spin: will the real Jesus please stand up.' The CU here is less experienced in evangelism and this is the first time they've had a single speaker at their events for the whole week. I can't help feeling a sense of anticipation in launching these students into a lifetime of speaking for Jesus.
Please do pray for me over the coming week, especially as I've damaged tendons in my right foot which is causing my energy levels to sap more quickly than normal. I'm very aware that I'm a jar of clay (which is a good thing) - pray I'd rely on Jesus as I seek to present him as the supreme treasure this week.
The 'Free machine' rolls into Lancaster University over the next fortnight: it's the turn of the CU there to offer their campus the opportunity to engage with Jesus and his claims.
The CU at Lancaster have got quite brave plans for the next fortnight: aiming to give out 4000 Gospels by hand (representing over one-third of the university undergraduate population), five lunchbars, five evening talks the following week as well as events in departments and colleges. I've also been really delighted to see how creative the CU have been in putting together plans: there's a Free 'Zine of poetry that's been made by some Creative Writing students, a series of audiovisuals to be shown on the uni LCD boards and a whole 'bedroom' assembled in the centre of campus where people will be able to come, chill out and say what they think constitutes true freedom. It's been great seeing everyone pull together and use their gifts.
Please pray for the CU over the coming fortnight. This next couple of weeks is probably as high-profile as the group there have been during my time; not least because of the Free marquee currently standing outside of a busy university building. We can expect opposition and things probably won't be plain sailing. But pray that we're bold in proclaiming the gospel, and that God uses these efforts to bring others to faith over the coming weeks and months.
Week 1 speaker Michael Ots gives his perspective.
A gem from JI Packer and Carolyn Nystrom on a simple distinction that has helped me in my prayer life recently:
'It is helpful, in our praying, to make a distinction between praise and thanks, and to make sure we express both. Prayers of thanks tend to focus to some extent on us. We thank God for particular gifts given to us and others personally, and for general gifts bestowed on all. Praise, on the other hand, focuses directly on God. We praise him because of who and what he is. It is the difference between one spouse saying to the other, "You are the most understanding person I know; that's one reason I love you so much" and "Thanks for the sandwich; I needed it." Both kinds of prayers are appropriate. But because we are naturally self-centred creatures, we tend to major on thanks, because God's gifts and mercies to us constantly fill our minds. Yet God himself is to be praised, for he is supremely praiseworthy. "Praise to the LORD! For it is good to sing praises our God; for he is beautiful, and a song of praise is fitting." (Psalm 147:1). "Let everything that has breath praise the LORD." (Psalm 150:6). So it is good and right to occasionally wrestle our attention away from ourselves and turn it toward God in prayers of praise.' (Praying, IVP, p. 31-32).
I've been trying to put this into practice recently. So Maurice and Sarah (via the Ferndale website) have both commented on last week's University of Cumbria FREE outreach. There's plenty to give thanks for: good numbers at events, great gospel partnership and the gospel's effect seen in the lives of both Christians and non-Christians. But perhaps above all we should be praising the Lord that he's the sort of God who wants relationship with creatures like us, that he's the sort of God that comes not to be served but to serve, and to sort of God who accepts us if only we admit that we are ill and sinful and have nothing to offer, and approach him as children. What a beautiful character he has! "Great is the LORD, and most worthy of praise."
Tonight I spoke at the last 'Free week' event at the University of Cumbria. I spoke on the parable of the tenants (Mark 12:1-12). The talk is reproduced below. I struggled to sufficiently include the original challenge to the religious teachers of Israel, but hopefully haven't changed the message too much.
I recently heard about magazine article in which a mother wrote in to say this, “Our 10 year old son Robin would invariably live in a complete mess. His bedroom was a sight to behold. Finally after all the nagging seemed to have failed, I wrote the following note and left it on his pillow:
‘Dear Robin, I wish I was clean and tidy like all the other rooms in the house. Please could you do something about this? Love, Bedroom.’
Next day, to my surprise, I found the room spick and span, and my son had left a note for me to find. It read:
‘Dear Bedroom, There you are. I hope you feel better now. Love, Robin. PS You’re beginning to sound just like my mother.’"
I guess you could say our parents are our earliest landlords. We live in their space. They have rightful authority over us. And yet from the word ‘go’ we show our natural inclination to reject that authority.
That, in effect, is the issue that Jesus addresses in the story we’re going to spend just a few minutes looking at tonight. The title of the talk advertised was ‘Jesus as he really is.’ And we’ll see that to understand Jesus as he really is, we need to turn to the issue of taking other people’s things for ourselves, passing them off as our own and rejecting their love. It would be helpful if you turned to page 39 in your black books [Matthew 12:1-12], as that’s where the story is recorded. We’re going to look at it in three parts.
First of all, it’s a story about bad tenants. Let’s read verse 1: ‘Jesus them told them this story: “A farmer once planted a vineyard. He built a wall around it and dug a pit to crush the grapes in. He also built a lookout tower. Then he let his vineyard and left the country.”’ Now that wasn’t that unusual at the time of Jesus. There were plenty of mostly foreign landowners who let their land out to Jewish tenants. But perhaps the thing that might have jumped out to Jesus’ original listeners was how generously the owner had provided for them: a wall to protect the vineyard from wild animals, a winepress where the process of fermentation could begin, and a lookout tower ensuring that the vineyard isn’t destroyed by animals or humans. These tenants are in a good position thanks to the provision and kindness of the owner.
But the tenants don’t seem to appreciate the owner’s kindness. Let’s read on, in verses 2-3: ‘When it was harvest time, the owner sent a servant to get a share of the grapes. The tenants grabbed the servant. They beat him up and sent him away without a thing.’ When we read that the owner had let the vineyard to the tenants, the deal was that they were responsible to pay a fixed part of the proceeds. It’s a bit like on Dragon’s Den, where the Dragons resource entrepreneurs on the basis they’ll get a future share of profits. But when the owner sends a servant to ‘get his share of the grapes’, they resist him. At the time, you could establish your right as owner of a piece of land if you had undisputed use of it for three years. And so the tenants refused to pay their share of grapes as rent, they were attempting to deny the owner’s claim of possession. They wanted to keep the vineyard for themselves. And so the tenants treat the servant that had been sent to collect the rent like a robber, trying to deprive them of what they considered already to be theirs.
Read verses 4-5 and you see that, despite the patience of the owner with the tenants, the pattern continues: ‘The owner sent another servant, but the tenants beat him on the head and insulted him terribly. Then the man sent another servant, and they killed him. He kept sending servant after servant. They beat some of them and killed others.’ They all receive the same reception. The tenants intended to keep the fruit for themselves. They were using the vineyard as a means of gaining power for themselves. In their minds, the vineyard was their vineyard, like Robin’s room was, in his mind, his own. He could live as he wanted.
Now look at verse 12, because this makes sense of the story: ‘The leaders knew that Jesus was really talking about them, and they wanted to arrest him.’ Jesus originally told this story to religious leaders, and they understood exactly what he’d been saying. They’d have known this because they were Jewish people familiar with the Old Testament, the part of the Bible written before Jesus came. In the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah tells a very similar story to this one by Jesus, involving a vineyard rented out to tenants. Isaiah’s story is addressed to the people of Israel – he reminds Israel that although God built them up as a nation, they’d turned against him. He sent prophet after prophet to speak to them and to call them back to him. The difference with Jesus’ parable is the bit involving the son. But the key thing is that the people there understood that they represented the tenants. The scandal is that, despite having been warned otherwise, they took things that belonged to God and passed them off as their own.
The story of the Bible opens with God creating the world. As humans, he made us tenants in God’s world. God has given us a responsibility to look after the world and to enjoy it. But we don’t own it. God owns the world and we are ultimately answerable to him. And so we’re just like the tenants in the parable.
We’ve seen that the tenants acted as they did because they thought it would lead to getting the vineyard for themselves. They wanted to be owners of the vineyard and run it their own way. And that describes the attitude of each of us. God has made us tenants in a world that belongs to him, he’s kindly provided for us – but our response is to choose to ignore God, to own the world and rule and run it as though it all belongs to us. We want to be God of the world for ourselves.
But here’s the thing. A world that has walked out on God will always end up a war zone. God created us to submit to him, at the centre of our lives. Everything fitted together for God's good purposes. But now each of us has tried to redefine reality so that we are at the centre serving our own ambitions.
So if I am trying to rearrange the world so that I get to the top, I’m probably not very bothered about the rainforests or the fact that a child dies every six seconds of a preventable disease. When it doesn’t suit me, I am not going to be very bothered about you either. I am looking out for myself. And things get ugly because just as I am looking out for me, you are looking out for you. In my version, I get to the top, in your version you do. So what so we do? We fight. Not just with bombs over Baghdad, but with snide words and cutting remarks over the washing up. We try to prop up our version of how we think things should be. That’s what happens when we take God out of the picture and when we forget that God is the true owner.
So here’s the scandal. Blessing upon blessing has come our way from God. But what have we done with them? Thanked God the Giver? Not exactly. The natural reaction of each of us is to take each of these gifts for granted, rejecting his love. Even though our every breath depends on God, the natural reaction of each of us is to airbrush him out of our existence.
But look again at this story. Do you see how much God is showing his patience with his people – how much he loves them? He sends messenger after messenger and in one last desperate act we read in verse 6, last of all he sent his son to them and says, 'They will respect my son.' That is how much God cares for a wayward world and wayward people. He sends Jesus. A lot of people think that Jesus has come to stop their fun. But, as we see in this parable, Jesus’ claim is that he is the son; that he is the owner of everything. In other words, when he calls us to repent – to put God at the centre of our universes – he isn’t calling us to some strange religious cult, he is calling us to do what we should rightly do, what we are made to do: to submit to his authority as the King sent by God and give all that we have to him.
But let's look at what happens to this son, as we turn to its second element: a story about the death of a much-loved son.
Look at verses 7-8: ‘But they said to themselves, “Some day he will own this vineyard. Let’s kill him! That way we can have it for ourselves.” So they grabbed the owner’s son and killed him. Then they threw his body out of the vineyard.’
The Bible teaches that, far from what we often think, rather than being essentially good, humans are essentially bad. And the ultimate proof of that, according to the Bible, is that we murdered our Maker. That is what Jesus’ death on the cross, illustrated in this parable by the murder of the Son outside the vineyard, means. Remember Jesus’ call was just that each of us should place God at the centre of the Universe, in the place that he belongs. He said that humans experience true freedom when we live this way, the way we were created to live. As a fish is free in the ocean, as an eagle is free in the air, so humans are free when we live in the environment in which we made to live, submitting our lives to God. And Jesus’ life backed up this claim as, through submitting his own life to God the Father, he always put others before himself. And so the human response to him, to sentence him to death, is the ultimate insult, the supreme gesture to what we think about the idea of God as our king, as the owner of the vineyard. It is the final snub which puts the lid on all the snubs that God has received from the human race.
Sure, none of us was actually there when Jesus was crucified. ‘Oh yes,’ we say, ‘It was all their fault. The Jews, the Romans, we all know how barbaric they were. The crucifixion of Jesus was such an appalling act of judicial murder.’
But it’s the conviction of the Bible that those that actually put Jesus to death merely represented each of us. Some of us are represented by the Roman bureaucrats, turning a blind eye to the injustice of the crucifixion, just as we turn a blind eye to the evidence for Jesus today. Some of us are represented by the smug religious leaders, very religious but wanting rid of Jesus for the sake of the quiet life. Perhaps most of us are represented by the crowd crying ‘Crucify, crucify’. Our hands were not the actual hands that drove the nails into his hands and the wood, but our lives show that we want rid of Jesus’ claim to be at the centre of our lives.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking about what Jesus cried out on the cross: 'Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.' But this parable shows the generosity of that prayer, because verse 7 shows that the tenants knew exactly what they were doing. If there was any ignorance in those that killed Jesus, it was an ignorance for which they were responsible. And we living today have even less excuse for rejecting Jesus than they had for we have the whole Bible in our hands, God's complete and clear revelation. To walk away from Jesus is to add our own personal nail to the cross.
And this is why Jesus gives us a final element to the story: a story about a choice that faces each of us.
Remember, Jesus is speaking to those who quite literally got rid of him. In this parable he paints a picture of them as confident that they can get rid of him and get away with it. But Jesus goes on at the end of his story, in verse 9, “What do you think the owner of the vineyard will do?”
Jesus assumes that his listeners have the sense to see the story can’t end at verse 8 – the tenants can’t have the last word, they surely can’t get away with it. The owner must ultimately step in and act. And so he continues, “He will come and kill those tenants and let someone else have his vineyard.”
And he goes on, “Surely you know that the Scriptures say, ‘The stone that the builders tossed aside is now the most important stone.’” That’s slightly enigmatic stuff. In fact, it’s a quotation from the Old Testament, from a time when God’s Old Testament people were under attack. The people around them were trying to overthrow their king in order to build their own empires. And God had turned the tables, the attackers had failed, and the king had survived. So this line came to be written, ‘The stone that the builders tossed aside is now the most important stone’, in other words, ‘God’s king the attackers rejected has now become the most important one.’
So the picture is of a building site and there is a stone lying there. The architect’s plan is that that stone is central to what he is building. And various other builders say ‘Well, actually we want to build differently. We want to get rid of that stone.’ So they chuck it out of the building site. Then the architect himself walks onto the site. He turns the tables by rescuing that stone, bringing it back and building on it. That’s the picture Jesus is building. He’s saying that he’s the stone, God’s son, our rightful king.
The builders, the leaders of Israel are about to crucify him, and throw him off the building site thinking they can get on with building their lives as they please. But Jesus says, ‘Not so. Very soon you will realise the stone the builders tossed aside is now the most important stone.’ He is God’s king, he is risen from the dead and he will judge. And so, in effect, Jesus says, “You can reject me, but you cannot ultimately get rid of me, and you will ultimately have to reckon with me. The reality is that I belong at the centre of the universe.”
And so, it seems like a grim story, as we’ve all been bad tenants. The amazing news, however, of Mark’s Gospel that we’ve been sharing for the whole week is that God still longs to have relationship with us, the people he has created. And so Jesus’ first words in Mark’s Gospel, way back in chapter 1, are these: ‘The time has come! God’s kingdom will soon be here. Turn back to God and believe the good news!’ The good news is that God will accept us back just as we are, if only we will put him back in his right place, admit that he owns the vineyard, and believe the good news. The good news is when we admit we don’t deserve anything from God, he accepts us through Jesus’ death on the cross in our place. At the cross, Jesus took the punishment in our place and in our shoes. As we’ve been saying all week, that’s the best news about accepting the resurrected Jesus as our King: he lays aside everything and gives his life so that we might be forgiven.
So will you come clean tonight? Will you admit that you’ve acted as though you’re the owner of the vineyard, that you’ve lived at the centre of your Universe and that you’ve ignored the true king? Do you see how deluded that is, that it messes with true reality? If you will, and you will admit that you’ve nothing to commend yourself before God, he will accept you tonight on account of Jesus. Each of us must face Jesus as either saviour or judge. It would be an amazing thing if you arrived here tonight as a rebellious tenant, and go home reconciled through Jesus’ death on our behalf.
The first of the Gospel distributions in Lancashire starts this week at the University of Cumbria campus in Lancaster.
The CU are hoping to give out about 1,000 Gospels, which is roughly one-third of the undergraduate population.
There is also a series of events designed to help those that have received the Gospels to engage with the life and claims of Jesus. All of the talks will be using passages from Mark's Gospel. Maurice and Anna McCracken are the main speakers for the week, and there's a great team of CU Guests coming too, including bloggers Sarah Dawkins, Andy Jinks and Tim Sandell.
Here's are the planned events, outside of Gospel distribution and first contact evangelism - we'd crave your prayers:
Monday
Lunchbar: What would Jesus say to Richard Dawkins? "Faith is one of the world's great evils, similar to smallpox, but harder to eradicate"
Evening: Acoustic night with talk: Why would God bother with me?
Tuesday
Lunchbar: What would Jesus say to Michael Phelps? "I want to be able to look back and say, 'I've done everything I can, and I was successful.'"
Evening: Pub quiz with talk: Jesus on losing your religion
Wednesday
Lunchbar: What would Jesus say to Jennifer Aniston? "The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel pain"
Evening: 'Invite the campus to dinner' - CU members offering dinner to their friends, with short talks given by CU Guests
Thursday
Lunchbar: What would Jesus say to Simon Cowell? "I'm not being rude, but you look like the Incredible Hulk's wife"
Thursday: CU meeting, with talk: Why should I bother with God?
Friday
Lunchbar: What would Jesus say to Madonna? "I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams.”
Evening: three course dinner with talk: Jesus as he really is
I've been working through Mark's Gospel in my own personal Bible study over the past couple of months. Mark 13 is a difficult chapter (although I think it's easier when you consider that essentially its describing something of the nature of Jesus' kingdom), but I think Ronald Kernaghan's commentary has helped me to unpick it.
Here's a fascinating thing the commentary showed me, unpacking these verses:
Mark 13:26-27: 'At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels [or 'messengers'] and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.'
Mark 14:61-62: 'Again the high priest asked him, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?" "I am," said Jesus. "And you [i.e. the Sanhedrin] will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."'
Here's Kernaghan's commentary:
'Mark 14:62 extends the imagery of 13:26 so that the members of the Sanhedrin are told not only that they would see the Son of Man coming with the clouds, but also that they would see him seated at the right hand of God. The picture of Jesus' sitting at God's right hand recalls the concluding condemnation of the leaders of Jerusalem (12:35-37) in which Jesus quoted from Psalm 110:1: 'The Lord said to my Lord: "Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet."' That image of judgement and condemnation does not appear explicitly in Mark 13, but it is consistent with the central theme of this prophecy - the destruction of the temple. Indeed, since Jesus entered Jerusalem in 11:11 his condemnation of the temple has been the catalyst for every other event. The best answer then to the question of what they would see is the destruction of the temple. That event would be the corollary of the Son of Man's exaltation. The exaltation of the Son of Man to heaven would be an event that the chief priests, elders and scribes could not actually see because it would take place before the throne of God. The exaltation of the Son of Man, however, would also mean the destruction of the temple. In its destruction, they would see the vindication of the Son of Man.'I find this very helpful. It sheds real light on the nature of Jesus' kingdom. Jesus has been demonstrating throughout Mark's Gospel that his kingdom isn't what the disciples were expecting. It comes partially, as the word is proclaimed, rather than at once (see Mark 4). Now Jesus shows that, following judgement on Jerusalem, and as he takes his seat before the Ancient of Days (which doesn't refer to this second coming - see Daniel 7:13), his kingdom still does not come immediately in its fullness. The preaching of the gospel to the whole world will be accomplished, not through temple activity but through the Son of Man's own agents in the world. There is a period where his angels (or messengers) gather the elect before his return. His kingdom continues to grow today (even through the distribution of copies of Mark's Gospel in the FREE Gospel Project), before its consummation at his return.
I was reminded once again in reading this article of the power of stories. It's no coincidence that God's revelation to us is of a big story, which itself is a patchwork of different forms of literature (but very often in story form).
One of the frustrations as a Staff Worker is often that students will less discernment often like speakers who don't really unpack the word of God. So why are these speakers often so popular? Because they are great story tellers.
At the moment, I'm writing a batch of talks on Mark's Gospel. The temptation is to flatten these stories to find some 'kernel of truth'. So how can we best let these amazing stories of Jesus speak for themselves? One of the things I'm trying to do is to re-tell the stories in the present tense in order to preserve the feeling of immediacy. But I'd love to hear tips from others on how we can avoid robbing narrative of its power.
Today I met with Sam, a Christian at Blackpool School of Art and Design, who is planning to set up a CU there in September.
I found this meeting exciting for a whole number of reasons. One of them is that until a couple of weeks ago, I never even realised that there was a degree-level Art College there. Another is the timing: if I'd received a request to help support a CU there before this year there's no way I could have done it. But with the arrival of Adam as Cumbria staff worker, there's now extra time to help. Sam's own story of coming to faith and God's work in his since was exciting. And, perhaps most excitingly of all, he was really keen to be part of the FREE Gospel Project, and even reckons that there's a good chance that all 400 students at his college could be offered a copy of Mark's Gospel. All in all, I came away really celebrating God's sovereignty.
It's been a busy week since my last post.
Tuesday was, perhaps, one of my all-time favourite days as Staff Worker. We had a wonderful team day with fantastic and very stretching teaching on Genesis from Martin Downes, lots of sunshine and good food (amazingly our hosts for the day paid for us all to enjoy a swanky three course meal in Chester!). A time of feeding in many senses of the word, very good for the soul.
On Wednesday, I met up for my weekly meeting with Relay Workers, Sarah and Nick. Amongst other things, we've been listening together to Don Carson's series Reaching an Untouched Generation. We've all found it very stimulating in thinking about reaching Biblical illiterates for Christ (the mp3s are free online here). It's been great putting some of what we've learned into practice through outreach on Wednesday afternoons at Myerscough College, an FE college full of mainly 16-19 year olds who know little or nothing about Christ. I was also struck by some of what Dr Carson said as I prepared a talk for Cumbria CU on Thursday night.
Later in the week saw the start of interviews for our summer team to Moldova. I really can't wait for this trip. It was excellent interviewing a whole number of students who are willing to sacrifice their comfort, time and earning-potential over the summer through volunteering to help run the English and Bible camp in Moldova. I found it particularly heart-warming to hear of how many of the students in my patch came to Christ - a great reminder that we're all wired differently and that God is big enough to work through different circumstances and temperaments when he calls us!
Finally, yesterday was our patch training day for CU leaders in Lancashire and Cumbria (quite possibly the last one ever, as my friend Adam Beattie will be starting as Cumbria Staff Worker from August). Marcus Mosey, from Christians Alive church in Lancaster (and a great partner in the gospel here) spoke on being a grace-filled leader, and we also devoted time to thinking about Freshers' Week outreach, the FREE Gospel project and to praying for each other. It's encouraging to see, under God, many students taking up the challenge set in the Gospel project, and some exciting plans developing!
The latest quote on Biblical freedom comes from Geerhardus Vos in a sermon he gave at Princeton University in 1913. The sermon can be read in full here.
The sermon was on Mark 10:45, which gave the FREE project its very name: 'For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.' Here is an extended quote:
Let us look for a few moments into the supreme end of our Lord's service and the method pursued towards accomplishing this. His ministry had for its supreme end the procuring of freedom of those for whom he gave his life. It was a ministry with that specific thing in view. It was not to help them generally, but to set them free. This is clearly given with the contrast between what he does and what the rulers of the Gentiles do (Mark 10:42). They lord it over them and exercise authority. That is to say: their striving is to make their subjects minister unto them and more and more to reduce them to a state of bondage. Jesus' purpose is the opposite. He came to minister unto men so as to place them in a state of freedom.
The same thing is also explicitly stated in the figure of the ransom-giving here employed by our Lord. A ransom is that which buys the freedom of a person. The many, therefore, for whom our Lord gives his life are in a state of bondage and his death procures their liberation.
Christ gave his life as a ransom. That is to say he deliberately took his life and put it into the bondage of guilt and shame and death in which our lives were held by the divine justice. To become a ransom means to take the place of the other and accept all the consequences. And this Jesus did. I am afraid that as a rule we do not penetrate far enough into the mystery of the cross to realize this situation. What must it have meant to the Son of God whose blessed life had never been disturbed by the least cloud of trouble to enter into that tremendous strain of the divine justice, to feel the waves of guilt and wrath unleashing their fury upon him, so that he cried out in the bitterness of his anguish: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” All this and more than we can possibly realize lies in this single phrase—that he gave his life a ransom for many. But only in the same proportion that we realize something of all this shall we begin to measure what is meant by the other phrase that he came to minister, and what is the unique force of the admonition that we should minister not like, but at an infinite distance minister as he did minister.
You can now become a Facebook fan of the FREE Gospel Project, that will see 400,000 copies of Mark's Gospel given personally to students next year.
To celebrate, here's another quote about Christian freedom:
'The common sense definition of ‘freedom’ is ‘to be able to do what you most want to do’. In the Christian gospel – and only in the gospel – pleasing and obeying God finally becomes what we most want to do. That is freedom! Because, at last, our deepest desires conform with the realities of the universe and our own nature.'
[Tim Keller, sermon on Galatians 5:1-15]
I picked up JI Packer's little book Freedom, Authority and Scripture in a second hand bookshop for 50p (the whole text of the book is online here). Although now somewhat dated in language (originally written in 1981), I've found what Dr Packer has to say very helpful.
Ahead of UCCF's FREE project, I thought that this gem on freedom might be worth reproducing in full. Enjoy!
Freedom has become a word to conjure with. It is modern man's way to treat freedom as the supreme value in life. Everyone wants more freedom than he has, and the quick way to get a following is to lay claim to a formula whereby freedom may be increased. It makes Westerners feel good to see themselves as the ‘free world’, just as it must have made the late Bertrand Russell feel good to announce his anti-Christianity in an essay entitled ‘A Free Man’s Worship.’ Politicians, lawyers, educationalists and social planners, if asked in public what they are after, will certainly reply in terms of maximising personal freedom. Many hail today’s permissiveness as a social virtue because it gives freedom for deviant behaviour which ‘less tolerant’ ages would not have countenanced. ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ was the war-cry of the French Revolution, and the testimony of liberation-movements, literature, pop songs and political rhetoric all over the world is that liberty is no less vehemently sought today than it was in eighteenth century France.
But what is liberty? Under what circumstances are we genuinely free? Ask this question, and the solid-looking front of freedom seekers breaks up at once. There is no agreement on the answer.
Basically there are two ways of conceiving freedom. The first is to view freedom as secular, external and worldly. It is essentially a matter of breaking bonds and abolishing restrictions and hardships. It seeks freedom from or freedom not to. Those who think thus of freedom have different ways of pursuing it. Some hit out. These are the revolutionaries, social, political and aesthetic, who constantly strive to overthrow ‘the system’. Others drop out. These are the hippies, the counter-culturalists, those who hole up in rural communities and farms, who do their own thing and never mind what the rest of the world is doing. Still other throw out. In the name of humanism these jettison Christianity with its supposedly dehumanising restraints on conduct. Such also are those who seek women’s liberation by decrying the leadership roles of men. The idea common to all these endeavours is that you gain freedom by negating something else.
The results are unimpressive. Revolutions turn out to be an exchange of one tyranny for another. Hippy-ness is found to be no passport to happiness. The self-styled ‘freethinker’ spends his strength denying what his parents or some other authority-figure once tried to teach him, and he never gets beyond it. Women denouncing male leadership end up mannish and loud. Is any of this recognizable as the freedom for which we all inwardly long? The idea that freedom is what you have when you have thrown off all that represses or constrains you is a false trail which leads nowhere save to puzzlement and disillusioned bitterness.
The second approach to freedom is distinctively Christian. It is evangelical, personal and positive. It defines freedom persuasively, that is, in terms which (so it urges) all should recognize as expressing what they are really after. These terms relate not to externals, which vary from age to age and person to person, but to the unchanging realities of the inner life. This definition starts with freedom from and freedom not to — in this case, freedom from the guilt and power of sin, and freedom not to be dominated by tyrannical self-will — but it centres on freedom for: freedom for God and godliness, freedom to love and serve one’s Maker and fellow-creatures, freedom for the joy, hope and contentment which God gives to sinners who believe in Christ. The essence of freedom (so the claim runs) lies in these inward qualities of heart, of which modern secular man knows nothing.
This approach sees freedom as the inner state of all who are fulfilling the potential of their own created nature by worshipping and serving their Saviour-God from the heart. Their freedom is freedom not to do wrong, but to do right; not to break the moral law, but to keep it; not to forget God, but to cleave to him every moment, in every endeavour and relationship; not to abuse and exploit others, but to lay down one’s life for them (cf. John 15:12 f.; 1 John 3:16). Freedom for such free service and self-giving is beyond the capacity, even the comprehension, of fallen human nature. At first sight few can recognize it as freedom at all. Though it is really the way of life for which we were made, it so negates the self-absorbed lifestyle which we all instinctively choose that it seems to us anti-human and frightens us off. In fact, the only way anyone comes to know it at all is as the gift of the risen Christ, who affirms his penitent disciples in their self-denial and imparts his life to us as we give away our own.
One aspect of this freedom is integrity, that simplicity and purity of heart which, as Kierkegaard analysed it, consists in willing one thing, namely the will and glory of God, so that one’s motives are freed from the taint of self-regard. A second aspect is spontaneity. Unlike the rule-ridden Pharisees, whom Jesus pictured living (as it were) by numbers, the free person in Christ invests creative enterprise and resourcefulness in the task of pleasing and praising God and doing good to one’s fellows. Where the Pharisee’s concern is to avoid doing wrong, the free person seeks to make the most and best of every situation, so that he is lively and sometimes breath-taking company. A final aspect is contentment, the fruit of God’s gift of a joy within that increases all life’s pleasures, stays with him whatever is present or lacking in his outward circumstances, and enables him to accept without bitterness the most acute forms of suffering and pain. In short, this person is free for holiness, humanness and happiness — a freedom which surely merits its name.
Where does this freedom come from? Jesus Christ, the one perfectly free man that history has seen, is its source as well as its model. He himself said, "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed" (John 8:36; for biblical development of the thought see Romans 6:1-7:6 and Galatians 4:21-6: 10). The exchange from which this promise comes is worth noting. Jesus has said: "If you hold to my teaching ... the truth will set you free." His Jewish hearers, bridling, had protested (with pathetic unrealism, in view of the Roman occupation), "We … have never been slaves of any one." Their protest showed them to be thinking of freedom in the purely external terms whose inadequacy we noted. But Jesus replied that he was talking of real freedom, freedom by comparison with which mere external non-servitude is not freedom at all. The real freedom is freedom from sin, which brings with it sonship to God and eternal security. Jesus tells them that only those whom he himself has freed, as they have entrusted themselves to him, are free in this full sense.
Jesus did not say, nor do I, that freedom from external pressures is not worth seeking or should not actually be sought by those for whom true freedom has become a reality. That is a different issue. My point, rather, is that while enjoyment of external freedom does not guarantee a free heart, the freedom that Christ gives can be enjoyed — praise God! — whatever external pressures there may be.
It must be plain that the second view of freedom is the profounder of the two, and since this freedom is bound up with personal salvation, social usefulness and the praise of God together, we should want to see everyone’s feet set on the road to it. But that road takes the form of accepting authority — the authority of God the Creator, who designed and sustains our human nature and alone can tell us what best to do with it; the authority of Jesus Christ, God incarnate, the risen, reigning Son of God to whom all authority is given, who frees and keeps free those who continue in his word; the authority of Holy Scripture, which, as we shall see, is not just a witness to Christ’s universal reign but is actually the instrument of it so far as men are concerned; and the authority of the Holy Spirit, who so opens and applies Scripture to our hearts that we discern Christ’s will and are enabled to do it.
