Fueling mission's flame

Matt Redman has something right!

"Let worship be the fuel for mission's flame
We're going with a passion for Your name
We're going for we care about Your praise
Send us out

Let worship be the heart of mission's aim
To see the nations recognize Your fame
'Til every tribe and tongue voices Your praise
Send us out

You should be the praise of every tongue, Jesus
You should be the joy of every heart
But until the fullness of Your kingdom comes
Until the final revelation dawns
Send us out

Every tribe, every tongue
Every creature in the heavens and the earth
Every heart, every soul
Will sing Your praise, will sing Your praise
Every note, every strain
Every melody will be for You alone
Every harmony that flows from every tongue
We'll sing Your praise, we'll sing Your praise
We'll sing Your praise, we'll sing Your praise."

Not saying it's congregationally sing-able or anything, but not bad lyrics.

Shopping in UCCF style

My housemate's moving out so I'm shopping for much house stuff. And behold! IKEA is producing coasters in UCCF colours -

No, I'm not buying them. Unlike Pod, I'm not out to paint the world in the brand design colours of the Christian Unions!

Christmas pressies!

Ah, happy days.

PS Dave flags up some good books he's read in 2006.

Cantabile

Today started with taking a Christmas service at an old folks' home near church - for which we've taken the service once a month since I was a toddler. I started singing solos there each month as a cute-'un, an elderly lady from church accompanied the hymns on the battered old piano and my Dad preached; in more recent years my singing solos is not so cute but excellent to remind them of the gospel (and they love joining in), and I accompany the hymns on the nice electric piano with weighted keys and a lovely organ sound (my Dad still preaches, though I think he wants my brother to try it sometime). I miss it for most of the year when I'm not there any more!

Today ended with a family carol-sing at home. There is something wonderful about singing praise to God and encouragement of God's word to each other.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. [Col 3.16]

Grace through the fog

I do like Norn Irish culture after all. Some of it anyway - I can see the grace. On Thursday afternoon because of the fog, my 18:45 flight from Birmingham was delayed and we ended up at 20:30 (having been in the airport 3 hours) being checked onto coaches to Manchester where our plane was waiting to take us to Belfast International from whence we'd have a coach to Belfast City - our destination! (In the end I got to my parents' at 02:00.) Fun. But all the while the bunch of us was laughing and joking about it. Which is a refreshing perspective that I do my best to cultivate - I mean, in the grand scale of things, what's a few hours in an airport or coach? But I don't usually suceed at getting the English on board with this! Whereas it only took one joking comment and we were all away among the Norn Irish returnees. I do like this Norn Irish attitude: the laid-backness, the making a joke of everything, the not taking ourselves too seriously. In some areas anyway...

And I was very glad that I'd thought at the last minute to pop my mp3 player in my handbag - if one has to travel for 2 hours up the M6 after 3 hours in an airport, doing so to the sound of Lou Fellingham's Treasure album and Piper on Sustaining Grace has got to rock.

So, from the ridiculous to the sublime there is grace: from a measure of grace in each culture to sovereign sustaining grace in Christ. Piper's quatrian on sustaining grace is worth learning:

Not grace to bar what is not bliss,
Nor flight from all distress, but this:
The grace that orders our trouble and pain
and then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.

Understanding dispensationalists

For a while I've been reading Poythress' Understanding Dispensationalists, because I didn't understand how an evangelical could have a dispensationalist hermeneutic given the gospel insistance on the eternal unity of Jews and Gentiles achieved in Christ outlined in Paul's letters. So, I thought, if I don't understand how a Christian can be dispensational, I clearly don't understand dispensationalism well enough. And Poythress' book is marvellous.

Clear and gracious, Poythress helped me understand dispensationalists (does what it says on the tin and all that). He thinks dispies and covenant theologians aren't as far off now as we think, and picks out a few key issues which challenge dispensational theology or call for more study.

At the risk of giving the impression that Poythress' study is as narrow as the following, I was then interested to be reminded of Stephen Sizer's IVP book Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? by a friend who's going to be in the church Sizer pastors. I think I have it somewhere, but haven't read it yet. But I found he's got a few lectures of the same title summarising it here. Interesting stuff. I'm becoming increasingly convicted of the importance of historic theology, or studying theology in its chronological context, or knowing some of the history of the development of doctrine, hermeneutics, epistomology and so on. Sin so easily blinds us not only to certain areas in which we are currently wrong, or certain ways in which we each tend to sin according to a sinful personality, but also certain areas chronologically in which we are prone to error or sin different from those before and after us. We do well to read dead Christians and know the history of church & doctrine so to be corrected.

Which leads me nicely into what I'll study next, having dispensed with dispensationalism: Athanasius. I'm very excited.

In Christ

"The Christian faith has no geographical centre.
There is no one race that dominates it.
There is no preferred language for its expression.
There is no privileged culture for its home.

"There's no place, no race, no tongue or culture which is the centre that holds it all together.

"No, it is a person. And not just the founder of a religion. The incarnate, resurrected and reigning Christ whose death is the only ground for our forgiveness and whose resurrection inaurgurated that reign that is going to cleanse the entire universe of evil. ... Jesus Christ is not great. He is incomparable. He is in a category all of his own. He is unique."

[David Wells, The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern world]

We are a displaced, dispersed, disparate people, only defined and placed and gathered in Christ. We pray towards no city or temple but Jesus Christ, we are pilgrims to no place but that which will come down from heaven with Christ's coming, we insist on no one language for worship but anticipate the full healing of Babel's curse, we recognise no one human culture as Christian but recognise sin and grace in each and look to all things being united in Christ.