We have never travelled this Road
I was already running late for my staff meeting this week when I found myself looking into the honey eyes of my eldest daughter (12), watching them filling with tears. She looked at me and with a tremble in her voice she confessed,
“ I am afraid of growing up”
When asked why she said;
“I am scared that I will mess my future up, I feel like I am being given something precious like a … like a … a diamond! Up until now you and Mom have looked after it for me but soon I will have to look after it, and it scares me – that I could drop it, break it or lose it. ”
I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her a couple of times on the top of her head as she dried her tears in my jersey. Inwardly I looked for the right words to comfort her, to give her the confidence to face her future, to believe in herself. Growing up is about becoming powerful. It is having the power to determine your destiny, having the power to gain an inheritance or to squander it, to create wealth or spend it, to fall in love or break your heart, to build a family or to lose one and being responsible for your choices. The fact is that being powerful is scary. How does a good father prepare a child for adulthood, for the challenges of maturity?
Living a Parable
Last week sometime, one of my friends contacted me and said something that stuck in my head. He said “Nigel, you and Debbie are people who live parables” Lately it feels as if God is using my children to teach me far more than I can teach them. As I look at Jessica, sometimes I am overwhelmed with awe, aware of the transition that I see taking place. If I look over Time’s shoulder I can still see receding into the darkening horizon the pink swathed baby I proudly carried home from the hospital. A little nearer I watch the little princess who danced delighted with Barney and other friends but turning I follow the eyes of Time and see the other horizon, dappled by dawn, and squinting into the day to come I see the woman she is becoming; beautiful, confident, compassionate, prophetic, vivacious, intelligent and powerful. I know that somewhere in her future is an aisle I will walk her down, a wedding I will perform which will move me from number one man in her life to number two. (My Father in law says, “Yeah boy, what goes around comes around!”) In those moments I find myself choked up, longing to hold on a little longer to the innocence of the child I have known whilst simultaneously swelling with paternal pride for the lovely young woman being unveiled. Jess is one aspect of a parable Father has been recounting to me. Mystery is another.
The Mystery of God.
The Bible tells us that the Father, God, has been preparing a bride for her wedding and for maturity. Over the last few days I have found myself meditating on his preparations. So Jessica and I read 1 Corinthians 2 together.
1 And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the mystery (NU text) of God. 2 For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 3 I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. 4 And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.
6 However, we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. 7 But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, 8 which none of the rulers of this age knew; for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
9 But as it is written:
“ Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
Nor have entered into the heart of man
The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”10 But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit.
Preparing for the Unprecedented.
What God has prepared for the church is literally unprecedented! No one has ever seen the wonder of it. The testimonies of what is coming have not yet been told, in fact, it is so beyond any previous human experience that they have not even entered into the heart of man. However they are not meant to be hidden forever, God has hidden these things not from us but for us. Like an olden day father preparing a trousseau for his daughter, so the father has prepared a glorious future for the church.
Over the ages the Spirit of God has been working in the church to bring her to maturity, equipping and training her for those things that Father has prepared for her. In each succeeding age God releases another level of glory, we are moving from glory to glory, and in each age new things are released to the church. This is precisely the challenge we face because the new, the unfamiliar, always produces fear in those who have learned to live by principles and precedents. And yet God is not wanting to take us back to the “golden age” of the church’s infancy, as wonderful as it was, but He is drawing us on into the glorious age of the maturity of the church, dreaming of the time when, grown up the church will attain to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. I believe that the level of power and glory that we have seen until now is a mere fraction of what God has prepared us for us. The Bible declares that creation is groaning waiting for the glorious sons of God to be revealed that it may be liberated from it’s bondage to decay. As we move into the age of mystery, the Spirit of God is going to release new levels of power, wisdom and authority to undo decay and to make manifest the Kingdom of God in the earth. Along with this will come a revealing of the mind of God bringing solutions to old problems in each domain of society.Individual Christians will access unprecedented levels of power, revelation and glory. God’s original plan was that man would bring the dominion of God to the whole planet, he hasn’t changed his mind. There are some problems that we have waited for God to fix for centuries that God is leaving for the church, in her glory and maturity to take care of. That is a whole new level of power and responsibility.
Positioned for the Unprecedented.
How do we prepare ourselves then for things that we have neither seen, heard nor even dreamt of? The problem is that the principles, the rules and the privileges of the previous ages of the church applied to their time but were given precisely to lead us on into the age to come, but they may no longer be applied as we grow up into all that God has for us. As an example, even though I love each of my children the same, I treat them differently as they mature. There are some things I do for my four-year old that I no longer do for my 12-year-old. Each night before I go to bed I go into her room and pick up her unconscious rag doll form, carry her to the bathroom, put her onto the toilet and allow her to relieve the pressure building in her bladder then I carry her back to her bed, put on an extra top to keep her warm and then tuck her into bed again. Normally I accomplish the whole operation without her waking up. I love that moment – holding that little floppy body as she sleeps – but increasingly I realise that this moment is about to slip into history too, she is getting older and heavier and I will no longer need or want to do this for her. I don’t do this for my older children. I used to, but that day is long gone. If they shouted from their rooms as they did when they were younger “Dad, I need to make a wee weeeeeeeee!” My response would be, well go ahead! They face bigger challenges and have greater responsibilities but one thing has not changed Dad is still here to equip them, help them, encourage them, love them until they are able to do it for themselves.
Different Season, Different principles, Same God.
When we have a religious approach to God we can miss the new things that God has prepared for us because even though God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, how he behaves and acts towards us changes for two reasons. We have changed and the season has changed. This can provoke fear and even anger in people – even those who love God – because innovation is almost always resisted due to it’s strangeness and unfamiliarity. It is still God none the less. How do we not only cope with change whilst positioning ourselves to push into the new season?
Intimacy over Intellect
The greatest threat to what God is doing today is often the things that he did yesterday which is why study of revival history shows that most often the fiercest critics of a current revival are those who carried the torch of the previous one. When God begins a new move, at first the church is taken by surprise, and doesn’t understand what is going on or what God is doing. But by following him we begin to learn the rhythms and revelation of the revival, to get insight into what he is doing.Then what was once novel becomes normal and even familiar. We learn the principles underlying the move of God. This is good but it is important to remember that it was not our education that brought us into revival, it was our relationship with God. Once we begin to understand what God is doing we can easily fall into the error of doing the work of God without the presence of God, and this is the definition of religion. This is why Paul, one of the most educated biblical scholars of his time says, “when I came to you I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ…”. When God is revealing the new things, the wisdom of the previous season is not enough to navigate the new season. It is not the principles we have learned that keep us on track but the person we learned them from – Jesus Christ. No amount of true principles can substitute for a living, current, experiential relationship with the one who is the truth.
Confidence in his works, not mine.
Bill Johnson says that the greatest threat to revival is the busyness that revival produces. The second thing Paul emphasises is “….and him crucified”. Revival is born out of intimacy with God but once it is born like any new-born, the work that comes along with the joy of the new life can become the greatest threat to any further pregnancies, as activity crowds out time for intimacy.If we get our eyes off of his work and onto our work and draw a sense of significance from what we do for him rather than what he has done for us, we can naturally miss the things he is preparing that are yet to come. Like Jesus, our goal has to be doing what he is doing, and saying what he is saying and that is only possible when our eyes are focused on him alone and his work. Not that this means we do no works, rather we work from our relationship not for our relationship to God.
Pushing past our Fears, Embracing risk
When we begin to move into new territory with God and start experiencing the “greater things” that Jesus told us to expect, we find ourselves outside of the ambit of all previous human experience and therefore out of the scope of all human wisdom. There is no grid, no map, no principle that we know of that can securely guide us into the will of God. God himself is our guide, even though no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived of these things, God reveals them to us by his Spirit. By training ourselves to recognise his voice and his presence, we can continue on the journey he has marked out for us. Like Paul we may find ourselves suddenly confronted with our weakness, in a place where all our previous wisdom and eloquence cannot help us, we may suffer “fear and trembling” but the presence of the one we love and who loves us comforts us so we can push past our fears into a new level of experience with him. At this point many will counsel caution, that the wise thing to do is to fall back into the familiarity of our previous experience, both personal and corporate. When this happens those who have governed their faith by principles rather than the presence of Jesus will find themselves unable to move ahead and will often persecute those who go beyond their grid but those who have learned to love his presence follow him to pioneer new levels of glory for themselves and those coming behind them and even ironically for those who persecute their “recklessness”.
Pursuing the manifestation of the Spirit.
The mystery that God is revealing is one based on the demonstration of the Spirit. Many Christians are far more comfortable to talk about the Holy Spirit than to experience him. They have great theology but poor praxis. The problem is that arguments, ideas and human wisdom lack the power of faith drawn from an encounter with God. This is why Paul was eager that the Corinthians would not just be convinced by his preaching but that they would encounter the Spirit for themselves and see God’s power. This means the Paul had to contend for a supernatural faith, and demonstrate it too. Paul’s own experience showed him the power of an encounter with God. He was one of the leading minds of his generation, he was a leader in the previous “movement” so deeply convinced that his theology was right that he was persecuting the church and putting Christians in prison and sending others to their deaths. It was not an argument which changed him but an encounter. A face to face moment with God rearranged his life and his theology for ever. Before his encounter he was willing to kill for God, after it he died for Christ.
Expecting Power.
Power is part of the gospel, like it or not miracles are all over the bible. Power is scary but we had better get used to it because God has determined to raise a church that is filled to the measure with all the fullness of Christ. Some are afraid of the responsibility that comes with power and want to retreat to the comfort and security of powerlessness, and irresponsibility, but that is not God’s plan. He is maturing the church, equipping her for service, raising her up and giving her the authority to rule and reign in life through Christ Jesus. God has given us all things, and he wants us to grow up, so that together with him we have both the power and the authority that he is delegating to bring his kingdom in every area of life and every region of the planet. We are being raised to power.
A Glorious Future
As the Father looks on the church, he can already see the glorious bride he has prepared for his son. Many only remember the days of her infancy, innocence or immaturity but he already sees the finished product – without spot, wrinkle or any such blemish. We may not feel ready for the responsibility of the power that God wants to entrust to us, but we had better get used to the idea because time is not stopping for us. The best advice I can give you, if this frightens you, is do what my smart daughter did; talk to your father, let him hold you, calm your fears and dry any tears as you bury your face in his chest. It is going to be alright – better than alright because he is here and He is good.
