From a Garden to a City...The Story of Worship

29/09/2019

Harvest is a special time of thanksgiving in the church calendar. We give thanks for those who work the land so that we have so much good food to enjoy, but ultimately, it’s about giving thanks to God, who makes it all possible. As the hymn goes: “He sends the snow in winter, the warmth to swell the grain, The breezes and the sunshine, and soft refreshing rain.”

Thanksgiving is an integral part of worship and so celebrating Harvest is as much about worship as it is about thanksgiving. 

Does anybody remember learning a Catechism in school? Many traditional churches have Catechisms. The Methodist Church in Ireland doesn’t have one, but the British Church does and at least one of the American Methodist Churches.
A Catechism is a way of teaching church doctrine by a series of questions and answers. One of the most famous catechisms was produced by the Presbyterians in 1648 and it was called ‘The Westminster Shorter Catechism” to differentiate itself from ‘The Westminster Larger Catechism”. Out of all 107 questions, the first question in the ‘The Westminster Shorter Catechism” is the most well known and most quoted, and the question is:

What is the chief end of man?
Answer: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.

In other words, we were created to worship God. And the story of humanity is therefore interwoven with the story of worship. And the story of worship takes us on a journey from a Garden to a City, from Genesis to Revelation, from Eden to the New Jerusalem, from Creation to re-Creation, from Fall to Restoration.

There’s an old children’s hymn that goes like this:
God has given us a book full of stories, 
Which was made for his people of old,
It begins with the tale of a garden, 
And ends with the city of gold.

In the Bible, the garden of Eden is a place where God is especially present and the humans who live in it enjoy a close and intimate relationship with him. Some writers suggest that the command to ‘‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it’ meant that God had in mind an expansion plan for the Garden of Eden, so that Adam & Eve’s descendants would enlarge the garden into the surrounding wilderness so that God’s special presence would eventually fill the whole earth.  

But we all know what happened. They are kicked out of the garden and the land becomes subject to a curse and Adam’s work becomes much harder than it was in the garden – it takes much more effort to produce food. 

And then we have Cain who murders his brother and now he’s under a curse which means that he can’t grow anything. God tells him that he is to be a restless wanderer but still under God’s care and protection. But instead, what does he do? He leaves God’s presence, goes to live in the land of Nod and builds a city. Of course it was nothing like a city as we would recognise it today, but this is hugely significant. He creates the first rural/urban divide.

The rural lifestyle that Adam & Eve adopted after leaving Eden was a significant downgrade both in terms of the work required but also in terms of their relationship with God. They lost the glory that they had been crowned with, and much of the intimacy that they enjoyed. But they were still living off the land, working in a rural environment, let’s call it a village, that was geographically shaped by God and dependent on Him for rain and sunshine and security. In a sense, they were still working in partnership with God and His creation to make a living, albeit at a spiritual distance.
Cain, on the other hand, builds a city. The Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him, but he didn’t trust in God’s security. He built a city to try to create his own security. He built a city and shaped it the way he wanted, so that he was in control, not God.
There’s an interesting contrast between the village and the city. In the village, everyone knows each other. In a city, despite there being far more people, you can be completely alone. The saying “It takes a village to raise a child” is an African proverb that means that an entire community of people must interact with children for those children to experience and grow in a safe and healthy environment. It’s much harder to create that same environment in a city.

From Genesis 4, the story of the city really picks up in Genesis 11. It tells us that the people who are supposed to be spreading throughout the earth get to the Plains of Shinar and are settled there. They begin to build a city. In fact, they wanted to build a tower that would take them up to God. They wanted to make a name for themselves.
This is the spirit of the city of man: I don’t need God, I don’t need his glory. I’ll just make my own glory. Of course, we know what happens. This city becomes the city called Babel, and throughout the Bible, Babel—that very nature of a city that’s all about human strength and human glory—evolves into what becomes Babylon: the city that is set against God and set against God’s people.

The story of worship takes an important turn with the giving of the Law through Moses and the worship institution that the Law established. God gave them a very specific set of instructions that included a building (Tabernacle/Temple), a priesthood, a sacrificial system and an ethical code. There is huge symbolism in this and we’ll touch on this later.
In contrast to Babylon, there’s another city established: the city of Jerusalem. It is chosen by God to be the place of His dwelling among his people. It was the focal point of Israel’s worship, especially at festivals of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, when all Jews were incumbent to gather in Jerusalem.

But the story doesn’t end well. Despite having God’s presence, Jerusalem’s leaders don’t walk in God’s ways most of the time and sometimes the Temple is honoured, and sometimes it is filled with sacrilegious images. It is eventually destroyed, then rebuilt, then destroyed again. When God himself comes to dwell on earth in the person of Jesus, it’s in Jerusalem where He is rejected and crucified. It’s in Jerusalem where the veil of the temple which cut off the Holy of Holies from the rest of the world is torn in two. 

It’s in Jerusalem where interestingly, two Gardens feature prominently in the crucifixion story – the Garden of Gethsemane and the Garden Tomb. One is a place of anguished worship in the darkness of impending Death, the other a place of jubilant worship in the light of the Resurrection.
And Jerusalem is the scene of Pentecost, the birth of the church as the Spirit is poured out on all and the true worshipers can now worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth. So Jerusalem is a city of contrasts in the story of worship. With the birth of the New Testament church, it loses its centrality and influence in the worship of God but that’s where the story of the heavenly Jerusalem—the New Jerusalem—picks up.
In John’s vision in the book of Revelation, there is a heavenly city which is the fulfilment of all the promise of Eden. Heaven, the dwelling place of God, comes to earth, the dwelling place of humanity. The people of the city enjoy the presence of God in full measure.
There is no temple in the city, because the city is effectively one massive temple.
There are important links between the New Jerusalem and Old Testament worship. For example, the Holy of Holies in the heart of the Temple was a perfect cube, as is the New Jerusalem in John’s vision. The desert tabernacle Holy of Holies was 10 square cubits (about 15ft square) and in Solomon’s temple it was 20 square cubits (30ft square). The New Jerusalem is 1,400 square miles. The Holy of Holies only needed to be big enough for the Ark of the Covenant and the High Priest whereas the New Jerusalem has to be big enough to fit all of redeemed humanity.

Then we have the stones that adorn the foundations of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 201:19-20). They are the same ones that were part of the breastplates of the high priests as described in Exodus 28:17-20. In the Old Testament, only the high priest wearing the stones could enter God's presence, and only once a year on the Day of Atonement. Now the city itself wears the stones, so that all God's people can live in God’s presence. There’s more! The High Priest had to wear a gold plate attached to a turban, which said: “Holy to the Lord”. In the New Jerusalem, Revelation 22:4 tells us that in the New Jerusalem, all God's people will wear His name on their foreheads.

The role of the cherubim (divine beings) in the story of worship is also worth a mention. At the end of the Eden story, cherubim are placed as guards to stop humans gaining access to the tree of life. Two carved cherubim sat on top of the Ark of the Covenant (an earthly representation of the throne room of heaven) - protecting the very throne of God in the Holy of Holies. They could only be seen by the high priest once a year but in John’s vision, the cherubim surround God's heavenly throne in Revelation 4 and all God's people can see both them and the one who is enthroned among them. 

The New Jerusalem clearly represents a renewal of the garden of Eden. Not only does it portray a restoration of intimacy with God, but central to this dwelling place of God among His people is a life-giving river that waters the tree of life that once stood in middle of the Garden of Eden. 

And best of all, this is what awaits us! We get so caught up in daily annoyances and petty disagreements, and yet our destiny is a Holy City where we will worship and serve a Holy God and live in His awesome presence for eternity! As God’s people today, the story of worship is our story. We can trace our history back to the Garden of Creation but we can look forward to our future in the City of re-Creation. Heaven is a place where God’s people worship and serve Him continually. And so, in the meantime, we should get in some practice!

Stifling the Spirit (2)

22/09/2019

This is part 2 of a short series on ‘Stifling the Spirit’.

Last week, we looked firstly at Resisting the Spirit, and we saw how there are different levels of resistance, from non-Christians who are completely closed to hearing the gospel all the way down to Christians who accept the Bible, but don’t do what it says.

Secondly, we looked at Grieving the Spirit and how this arises when we allow sinful things from our old life, to persist in our new life.  

So, after that catch up, we’re ready to move on to number 3: Quenching the Spirit and our key verse is 1 Thessalonians 5:19 which in the King James version says: “Quench not the Spirit”. The old 1984 version of the NIV says: “Do not put out the Spirit's fire.” And the Amplified Version of the Bible says: “Do not subdue or be unresponsive to the working and guidance of the Holy Spirit”. Either way, the idea is stifling or restricting the Spirit. 

It’s difficult to place this verse in an exact context because it comes in the middle of a whole list of instructions at the end of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. Just before this verse, Paul gives them “4 always”. You might have heard of the “4 Alls” of Methodism, well here we have “4 always”. In verses 15-18, he says: always be kind, always be joyful, always pray and always give thanks. Then he says: “Quench not the Spirit”. In trying to pick up his train of thought, a verse from Romans 12 comes to mind which says: “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervour.” And it’s also in the context of being kind and joyful and prayerful. 

And so it seems that Paul is describing a Spirit filled life where a person is so “on fire for God” that they are really experiencing the blessings of a Spirit filled and Spirit directed life. Where the Spirit has free reign with no blockages, you get continual joy, continual prayer, continual thanksgiving and for Paul, this is how things are supposed to be and if you accept anything less, then you are quenching the Spirit. 

How sad it is that we tend to regard Christians who are always joyful and always praising God as “a bit strange”, or “a bit gushy”, a bit “over the top”, taking God “a bit too seriously”. In actual fact, we could well be the ones who are quenching the Spirit while they are busy doing God’s will and living an abundant life.” When we accept mediocrity in our spiritual life and don’t pursue all that God has in store for us, then we are quenching the Holy Spirit. 

Now we move to the more serious stuff! The next one is insulting the Spirit. You might think to yourself, well at least I haven’t done this one!  Let’s find out, shall we? The context is Hebrews chapter 10. We don’t know who wrote the book of Hebrews. It may have been Paul but was can’t be sure. Anyway, in chapter 10, the writer compares the Old Testament animal sacrifices with Christ’s “once for all” sacrifice on the cross for our sins. He makes the point that the animal sacrifices only dealt with the sins committed up to the time of the sacrifice and so the next time you sinned, you had to have another sacrifice and it went on and on. On the other hand, Jesus’ sacrifice was far superior, in that it was for all your sins – past, present and future. At the time of writing, the Christians to whom this book was addressed were going through a tough time of persecution and so there’s a whole section from verse 19 to 39 entitled “a call to persevere”. In the middle of this section on perseverance, we have verses 26 - 31 which are pretty scary! They make for uncomfortable reading, but read them we will. We can’t just accept all the nice verses in the Bible and ignore the challenging ones.

Hebrews 10:26-31
If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," and again, "The Lord will judge his people." It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Now the book of Hebrews was written to Christians, not unbelievers. It’s written to those who have received the knowledge of the truth. It says: “The Lord will judge his people”. We really don’t what to let things get to the stage where we insult the Spirit - this is definitely one to avoid! The crux of it all is verse 26: “If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment…”

It sounds ominous, because we know we’re all sinners – nobody’s perfect. All Christians sin every day (even the Apostle Paul admitted his own struggles with sin) and we believe that Jesus’ death on the cross paid for our sins and makes us right with God. We are under grace, not law. But there’s more to it than that. Jesus’ death on the cross also broke the power of sin over us. We are no longer enslaved by it – we’ve been set free (redeemed) and so now we have a choice. We can choose not to sin, and the Holy Spirit will give us the power that we need to resist temptation. We won’t succeed every time, but we should see more victory than defeat and what’s most important is not whether we sin or not, but what our attitude to it is. Do we hate sin, or do we tolerate it, or do we even embrace it?

If we make a profession of faith but then ignore the Spirit’s promptings and deliberately, wilfully and persistently indulge in our favourite sins, then we make a mockery of the whole thing. It calls into question the sincerity of our commitment to Christ and ultimately it will lead to insulting the Spirit and all that goes with it.

But at least there’s still forgiveness for insulting the Spirit – we may have gone astray, but there’s a way back through repentance and rededication to Christ. Unlike our final point - the whole concept of blaspheming the Spirit. 

This is so serious that it is referred to as “the unforgivable sin”. The context is Jesus being accused by the Pharisees of various things and in particular, casting our demons by the power of Beelzebub who was the prince of all demons. So, the Pharisees did not recognise the power of the Holy Spirit at work in Jesus ministry, instead they attributed his power to demonic forces. And in Matthew 12:31-32, Jesus said to them: 

“And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.”

The very idea of doing something that will never be forgiven is so scary that many Christians actually live in fear of blaspheming the Spirit by accident and thereby condemning themselves to eternal damnation. Well I’ve got some good news here. Most Bible teachers would say that if you’re worried about whether you’ve committed this sin...then you haven’t!

The blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is a deliberate and continual rejection of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A person who commits this sin has so hardened their heart to God that they don’t care in the least whether they have offended Him. God always responds to repentance, and so this is for people who will never repent. It is an extreme case and so if you are worried about it, it shows that you are repentant and so you’ve nothing to fear.
 
To summarise, if we look at all five ways of stifling the Spirit, we’re probably all guilty of at least the first three to some extent or another, so what can we do about it? Let me suggest a few steps:
1. Be honest with God and acknowledge that you can’t do this Christian thing without His help.
2. Get the handout and work through the passages in your own time. Read around them, look at the context and ask the Holy Spirit to point out the areas in your life where you are stifling His work. Write them down.
3. Recommit your life to God sincerely, repenting of the sins and failures that the Holy Spirit has revealed to you.
4. Thank God for what He is doing in your life and trust Him for the future.

Let’s pray:
Heavenly Father, we thank you for all that you have done for us in Christ. We thank you for the promise and the reality of the Holy Spirit living inside us. We pray that you would reveal to us the various ways in which we hinder the work of the Spirit in us. We confess our failures, asking that we would become more sensitive to your Spirit and more obedient to your Word. All this we ask in the name of Jesus and for His sake. Amen.
 

Stiflling the Spirit (1)

15/09/19

In English grammar, the imperative mood is used for a command or request. A command becomes a request if you put the word ‘please’ in front of it!

The world is full of commands. Have a look at these for example:

Keep left, use the handrail, turn off the taps. None of these are requests! What is the purpose of all these commands? To protect us or to spoil our fun?

The world is also full of warnings. Here are some examples:

What is the purpose of all these warnings? To protect us or to spoil our fun? The world can be a dangerous place and nobody wants to get sued for negligence!

The Bible is also full of commands and warnings from God. Many people think that they are there to spoil our fun, when they are actually for our protection and for our good.

In recent weeks, I’ve been dealing with the person and the work of the Holy Spirit. The Bible has various commands as to how we should interact with the Holy Spirit, in order to have a fruitful Christian life. These are mainly in Galatians and Ephesians, for example:

The Bible also has various warnings about things we should avoid, so that we don’t inhibit the work of the Holy Spirit:

There are 5 specific areas that we need to avoid, so as not to stifle the work of the Holy Spirit in us and in the church, and that’s what we’re going to look at over the next 2 weeks.

This might sound like a very negative subject but let me encourage you to see this topic in a positive light. I deliberately focussed on God’s love in the kid’s talk because that’s our starting point. God give us commands and warnings because He loves us so much and wants the best for us and so we need to not just heed them but embrace them as God’s loving discipline.

If you had a blocked drain, then you’d want to get it fixed right? You’d make a call and a couple of guys in a very brightly coloured van would show up, identify the cause of the blockage and remove it. The process might be disruptive and inconvenient, but when drain functions well again, then it’s worth it! Same goes if you have a blocked blood vessel! You might need angioplasty or a stent or even bypass surgery, but if that’s what you need, then you’ll put up with the discomfort and the recovery time because your health is your wealth, as they say.

In the same way, there are things in our lives that block the flow of the Spirit. Things like certain attitudes or lifestyle choices, or maybe a lack of knowledge or understanding about God or the Bible. If we can identify these things and takes steps to work on them, then by God’s grace, we will have a positive outcome, even if it’s a somewhat painful process.

You see, we have the Holy Spirit, the most powerful person in the world, living inside us. Jesus tells us that with the Holy Spirit we should be able to do greater things than He did, but the reality is that we don’t. There are things preventing us from experiencing the power of the Spirit in and through us. The Bible tells us that we should have the fruit of the Spirit in abundance, but the reality is that we’re not as loving and joyful and peaceful and gentle and kind and faithful and patient as we’d like to be, especially when things don’t go our own way. We should be growing in grace and holiness, but many Christians find themselves ‘stuck in a rut’ spiritually, or even backsliding. I think we can safely assume that there is nothing lacking on God’s side, so the problem must be with you and me. Without realising it most of the time, we are stifling the work of the Holy Spirit. And in order to diagnose the problem, we don’t go to the plumber, or the surgeon, or even the minister – we go to the Bible. We have to read the Bible and then allow the Bible to read us.

If you can identify the areas in your life where you are stifling the spirit, and take steps to rectify them, then the result will be a fuller experience of the Holy Spirit. You will feel closer to God; you will have clearer guidance from Him, you will see more of the gifts of the Spirit at work in you and you will be a much nicer person to be around as you become more loving and gentle and patient and all those other good things associated with living out the fruit of the spirit.

Next week, I should have a handout with the key verses, the context of each and the application. I encourage you to take one and work through it yourself. A couple of sermons is not going to sort all this stuff out! I can only provide the tools that you and I need to do this and a few pointers; we all have to work through this on our own with God.

So let’s turn to the first way in which we can stifle the Spirit, and that is by resisting Him. In our reading from Luke 11:47-54, Jesus is denouncing the Jewish religious leaders both past and present for killing God’s prophets because they didn’t like their message. He prophesies that they will persecute and kill the next generation of Christian prophets and apostles, which of course they do. And we find the first example of this in Acts 7, where we come across the first Christian martyr, whose name was Stephen. Stephen is hauled up in front of the Sanhedrin, which was an intimidating assembly of 71 Jewish judges who constituted the Supreme Court and legislative body of the Jews. Stephen defends himself in a long sermon about the history of Israel and how every true prophet of God was persecuted by the religious authorities and then he tells the Sanhedrin that they are no better because they participated in killing Jesus.

Let’s look closely at verses 51 to 53 in the NIV.

51"You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! 52Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him - 53 you who have received the law that was put into effect through angels but have not obeyed it." 

Harsh words! And instead of listening to the Holy Spirit speaking through Stephen; instead of being convicted by the Spirit of their error, they continued to resist the Spirit by stoning Stephen. And who was minding their coats? Saul, the Pharisee of Pharisees, as he described himself.

In terms of applying the concept of “resisting the Holy Spirit” to today we can see three kinds of people. In verse 51, you have stubborn people who don’t have a heart to please God and are not open to what God wants to say to them. They are not necessarily obnoxious people, but as soon as you bring up God they switch off.
In verse 52, you have people who reject God’s messengers and God’s Word. Quite often today, you find people who say they have their own “spirituality” often it’s a New Age philosophy, and they’re not interested in going to church or reading the Bible. This is called a “home-spun theology”. It can sound quaint, but it’s a form of resisting the Spirit.
But resisting the spirit can be also me much more subtle. And in verse 53, you have those who accept the Bible but don’t obey it. People like you and me!

Mark Twain famously said: “It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”

So in these 3 verses we can see (1) non-Christians who are completely closed to hearing the gospel; (2) Agnostics who have their own ideas about God and life and reject the Bible and those who preach from it; (3) Christians who accept the Bible as the Word of God, but don’t do what it says. All three are resisting the Spirit of God.

Let’s move on - another way in which we can stifle the Holy Spirit is by grieving Him. We find this in Ephesians 4 verse 30:

"And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption."

So what does it mean to grieve the Holy Spirit? Well, the context leading up to this verse is a passage which the NIV entitles “Living as Children of Light”, where Paul contrasts the difference between a Christian’s “old life” (before they come to faith) and their “new life” (after being converted). You can see this on the chart:

He tells the Christians in Ephesians to “put off your old self” i.e. don’t lie or steal, or curse or gossip etc. Instead, he says “put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (v24).

This “new self” involves speaking truthfully, encouraging others, being kind and compassionate, forgiving each other etc.


So in this context, we can say that “grieving the Spirit” is when we allow sinful things from our old life, to persist in our new life. As Christians, the Holy Spirit is trying to work in us to bring out all the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace and all those good things, and so when we don’t co-operate with Him and persist with or fall back into our old way of living, we grieve Him.

It's like a young man who gets in trouble with the law and his parents say to themselves: “Where did we go wrong? We didn’t teach him to behave like that”. They are grieved because his behaviour is inconsistent with all their hopes and aspirations for him. Likewise, the Holy Spirit has big ambitions for our lives and He’s trying to steer us along the right path and so when we choose to go the opposite direction, then He is grieved, but thankfully He doesn’t give up on us. There is mercy and grace and forgiveness and a fresh start every day.

We’ll continue this study next week, but we’ll finish up with a response. Let’s take a moment to challenge ourselves with these 2 questions. The first is about resisting the Spirit, the second is about grieving the Spirit.

1. What clear teaching of Jesus am I not being obedient to?

2. What behaviour of mine is not consistent with my ‘new life’ in Christ?

Let’s Pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your Word, that comforts us, but also challenges and convicts. We thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit, our Comforter, our Companion and our Guide. Forgive us when we resist the Spirit by not putting your Word into practice. We thank you for the new life that you have given us in Christ. Forgive us when we refuse to move on from old habits. We know that your way is best, and so give us the grace that we need to live godly lives that please you, for we ask it in Jesus name. Amen.