Good Day?

I came across this poem in the book Hearing the Stranger by retired Bishop Michael Hare Duke (1994) and I wanted to share it.  It makes me think especially as it has been a hard week in some ways, taking me at times through hard conversations...it encouraged me and I hope it does you.

Was it a good day?
That depends on the shape of the ideal.
What I’d set my heart on,
slipped out of my grasp.
The meeting I planned was cancelled;
I wanted to impress someone
and he looked the other way.
“No access” blocked
the road I hoped to travel.
The weather was just the sort
that makes my head ache.
Definitely no the blueprint                  
for a red-letter day.

But if I turn the calendar,
with a frustrated flip
or scrumple the date
and throw it in the bin,
rubbishing the day,
I’ve missed the point.

It did not fill my fantasy.
It gave instead space to discover
new dimensions;
a chance to change direction
and not get hung up with resentment.
Not a perfect day - but good enough to grow in.

I hope you have a good day but even if you don’t there are silver linings somewhere.  Look for them!
God bless,
Love Sarah

Living Spirit Filled Lives - Week 4 of 4

Last week we talked about the fact that Paul is fully cognisant of the Spirit, and the Spirit’s role in his life.  The Holy Spirit is the key in his ministry, and keeps him fully connected in the ministry of Jesus Christ.  I was very honest at the beginning of these series to say that I am not good at this Holy Spirit stuff, but the more I have read and studied, the more I am convinced that we cannot operate fully in the ministry of the Gospel, of Jesus without living Spirit-filled lives.  I know fine well that the Spirit has been far more faithful to me than I have been to him.  Every fork in my path, every choice made, every closed door and opened portal has been the Spirit working in my life.  I’m not arrogant enough to think I stand here today in my own strength.  The Holy Spirit is in the centre, but I live skirting round the edges rather than embracing him.

Joyce Meyer talks about having trickles of the Spirit rather than being flooded.  She says ‘As the Holy Spirit floods your life, the Holy Spirit wants to move in and permeate every room.  He wants to live in every room of your heart.  Before he can do that, you must be willing to move out.’

Whatever image you use, or however you understand what it means to live Spirit-filled lives, I think that phrase – Before he/she can do that, you must be willing to move out’ is worth holding onto.  I think this is where Paul is going with the Church in Rome.  The reading we looked at begins by contrasting two types of life –
• Life dominated by sinful human nature
• Life dominated by the Spirit of God
And if I was to ask you which life you had we all know the answer is life dominated by the Spirit of God.  But if I asked which is it in reality could we truly answer life dominated by the Spirit of God?

I am not judging you – not in the slightest, because the Lord calls me out as well.  I believe that what happened to me last year was God challenging me regarding my priorities.  Paul is blunt and in other lists quite explicit as to what he means.  Jesus said we could not serve two masters – we can’t serve God and money.  We must choose.  This world is constantly vying for our attention – whether it crushes our spirits by telling us we are too fat or too skinny, poor or rich, stupid blonde, too old to contribute, too young to understand, job stealing immigrant and more….or building us up to sit on false pedestals of idolatry because we are top of our grade, our career, feeding our arrogance, singing our praise…if the world gives us our affirmation, our sense of identity or purpose, our home – we are lost.  Paul says we are on the road to death without the gift of eternity.

But to live a life dominated by the Spirit of God is to be constantly changing to become more and more like Christ himself.  We will all die, but when we are in Christ, death here is a step on the pathway of life.  Paul never feared death because he knew that Jesus was faithful and nothing in this world could take Christ or his promises away from him.  That is what it means to live a life dominated by the Spirit of God.  Nothing is to be feared because as Jesus said we should not fear those who can kill the body because they can’t kill the soul.  Peter in his first sermon tells the people that they need to repent, to be born again and receive the Holy Spirit.  

God meets us where we are, not where we think we should be.  This isn’t a question of how much faith we have but whether we are willing to choose Him.  Paul uses the image of adoption in this passage, and it is a powerful image for the Romans.  It was a tough process. If you are adopted, have adopted or have gone through the adoption process you will know it is not easy.  It is a minefield and it is a long process, but finally when those adoption papers are signed and all is legal, it is a time of rejoicing and permanent.

We enter the family of God, even though we did nothing to deserve it.  And in Roman culture, a son never came of age.  They were always under their father, their absolute possession and under his absolute control.  So when you were adopted in the Roman culture, and to an extent in ours the following happened.
• You lost all rights to the old family, and gained all rights in the new family.
• You were an equal heir to the estate, regardless of how many sons were born after you.
• Your old life was wiped out including debts.  You were seen as a new person with a new life.
• In the eyes of the law you were absolutely the son of the father, regardless of blood so no marrying your sister even if not blood related!

There were 7 witnesses should anyone question the veracity of the adoption, such as sharing the estate after the father died.  Paul says that the Holy Spirit is our witness to the adoption.  So to live in a Spirit-filled life is to accept that we are adopted into the family of God – we are children of God.

We were held by our sinful nature but God brought us into his possession.  Our old life has no more rights over us, our debts are wiped and our past is cancelled.  We have a new life and we are heirs like Christ.  If Christ suffers, we suffer, and when Christ receives glory, so do we.

In your baptism by water, and by the Spirit, you are absolutely a child of the Father.  And through the process of sanctification in the Spirit we are being transformed more and more into the likeness of God.  The world doesn’t have to shape you or dictate the terms upon how you live your life.  No matter how insignificant you think your daily work is, or how much money is in your bank, or how many followers you have on social media – all you need is to live a Spirit-filled life.  Everything else is window dressing…or as some put it we are to live in this world, but not of this world.

Thank you for joining us in this series.  New material coming soon.

Gifts of the Holy Spirit (week 3 of 4)

Good morning!
Here is the shortened version of Sunday 18th’s reflection.  We explored Numbers 11:24-30 and whether we might be jealous or protective of others gifts.  Hence why we say ‘it’s the ministers job’ or why people might hide their gifts for fear of jealousy or standing out in the crowd.  Our main focus was on 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, exploring how the Holy Spirit gifts us more than love, kindness, empathy, strength...

Next week we are exploring what it might mean to live empowered by the Spirit...

I want us to have a closer look at this passage from 1 Corinthians 12:1-11.  Paul, who we know is an intelligent man, trained as a Rabbi and very focussed in his calling then and later as a missionary for the Lord, believes in the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Firstly, Paul is dealing with a church that is firmly set in a pagan culture, where miracles of healing, of alternative forms of worship, and massive data dumps of knowledge and philosophy happened all the time.  It wasn’t so much a secular society as a society where actually anything was possible and divine influences were common place.  The Christian church was one in hundreds of religious thought, and given that Corinth was key trading location, variety was most definitely the spice of life.  If anything, the church in Corinth, was counter-culture because it was such a self-less way of living, in a predominantly hedonistic society.

So Paul is keen for them to understand what is of the Holy Spirit and what is not.  A common fear even today for Christians, and an underlying reason why we avoid too much Holy Spirit stuff.  How do we know what is of God and what is delusion or self-belief or indeed of the devil?

He tackles the key problem by talking about ‘Jesus is Lord’.  This was an early creed in the Christian Church.  The Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed that we use nowadays built upon this simple creed.  To say that Jesus is Lord is to give Jesus the supreme loyalty of your life, and the supreme worship.  In Paul’s time this was said of Caesar, and so people understood that to say Jesus is Lord was to make Jesus even greater than Caesar.  To curse Jesus was to recant your faith.  Yet to truly mean it when you say Jesus is Lord, you must have the Spirit of the Lord within you.  It is through the grace of God that we can know God.

So Paul brings to life the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but he doesn’t see them as owned by individuals but given to the body of Christ.  These gifts are not for the glory of the individual member of the Church for the good of the whole.  We are not just strangers gathering once a week to worship God – we are family and we are disciples.  Nor are these gifts just intellectual but they are practical as well, all to be used for God’s service.  So whether you are a Professor or a plumber, an accountant or app builder, a journalist or a jack of all trades, you are valued and part of God’s ultimate team.

So, lets look at the gifts Paul talks about here–
Wisdom – the greek is sophia – wisdom comes from communion with God.  It is wisdom that knows God, hence how the Holy Spirit is also called the spirit of wisdom as we looked at last week.

Knowledge – the greek is gnosis is much more practical.  It is knowledge that knows what to do in any given situation, plus puts wisdom into practice.

So although wisdom and knowledge are connected there are differences.  A wise person is a knowledgeable person, but somehow their wisdom is beyond simply knowing something.

Faith is the ability to believe God for something that is otherwise impossible.  That is how Joyce Meyer puts it.  The gift of faith could be given for special circumstances, but faith also produces results.  Faith the size of mustard seeds can move mountains.  So it is more than intellectual conviction – the evidence I have found proves Jesus is real!  Faith is the passionate belief that makes one put everything you have into it!  ‘Faith steels the will and nerves the sinew of one into action, turns vision into deeds’. (Barclay).

Healing is a hard one today because we are not so sure how real it is and there has been such bad press around it.  Too often the accusation has been passed about that a person hasn’t been healed due to lack of faith.  I am not going into healing as a gift too deeply at the moment, but I do believe it is a gift of the Spirit that exists today.  And we do have a duty and a desire to pray for healing for others.  But I want to give you a little context for it from Paul’s time.  Acts of healing was a natural part of religious life in his time.  Indeed a Jewish person would ordinarily go to a Rabbi than a doctor for healing, and be healed.  In the early Church we know there were healing miracles –

Remember the story and song:
Peter and John went to pray, they met a lame man on the way…And he went walking and leaping and praising God…

The gift of healing is being rediscovered in the Church, as we see body and soul as one, rather than seeing the soul as the important element.

The gift of healing leads us nicely into what Paul means by ‘miraculous powers’ – which is exorcism.  Now for some of you the film the Exorcist is in your mind, but I promise no pea soup as I remember Leslie Nielsen using in his comedy re-take of it.  In Paul’s time all illness, and in particular, mental illness was attributed to demons and a continuing function of the church is to exorcise them.  Not many volunteers for this gift I suspect but as Paul reminds us there are more powers at work that are seen by human beings…

From there he goes into prophecy.  Barclay suggests that this should be interpreted as preaching, but to a point both translations work.  A prophet has to be close with God, as should anyone brave enough to preach, as both prophet and preacher must listen and share.  However, some messages are for the future but need to be heard in the now, and some are for now.  Prophets lives so close to God that they know the heart, mind and will of God and can make it known. Prophets and preachers bring rebuke and warnings from God and they also bring advice and guidance.  The Church has long ignored prophets and boy are we paying the price for it!

In his long list of 9 he talks about distinguishing between spirits – when something is beyond our normal, how do we tell the difference.  We have to understand before we condemn.  Interestingly that leads into speaking in tongues.

Like the gift of healing, or exorcism, the gift of speaking in tongues is readily dismissed or feared.  Even in the Church in Corinth it caused a lot of perplexity.  It was highly coveted because it was supposed to be due to direct influence of God’s Spirit.  I guess because it is an obvious one, and makes it look like you are very close to God.  It is the language of the Holy Spirit, and it unintelligible to the human ear, unless someone is given the gift of interpretation.  Paul believed in it and other texts throughout his letters suggests he values it, and embraces the gift.  However, it can be the gift of private prayer, where the Holy Spirit speaks to God through you.  Joyce Meyer believes that this is open to anyone and everyone who is filled with the Holy Spirit.  Others would say it is no longer relevant.  I have heard the language of heaven, and it is beautiful, but I haven’t heard it translated!

When we talk about gifts of the Holy Spirit, and see lists like this, we do well to heed the closing words of the section we read –
‘All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one, just as he determines.’

These gifts are not a shopping list or indeed items on a shelf to be purchased.  They are gifts and not burdens.  The challenge is – are we putting the gifts of the Spirit in a cupboard unopened because we are scared of what might be?  I love the fact that are gifts are meant to work together in the service of God, and we are not meant to carry the mission of God by ourselves.  We are, dare I say it, in this together. Even with our brothers and sisters in the Baptist Church, the Catholic Church, and more.


We can let him know that we are open to his giftings and that we will honour them. Next week we will look at what it means to live empowered in the Spirit. But this week know that you are gifted by the Spirit – perhaps you just need to take the bow off!

God bless…

Live and Love in the Spirit of Jesus Christ to the Glory of the Father.  Sx

Role and Purpose of the Holy Spirit (Week 2 of 4)

(Based on John 15:26-16:15)
Have you ever been to court?  Perhaps Jury duty or as a witness or perhaps as a defendant?  Maybe you watch all the crime dramas – I was a big Perry Mason fan back in the day and wanted to be a lawyer.  Didn’t have the smarts for that! Or are you into Judge Rinder or Judge Judy or some other ‘reality’ tv court?

I have only been to court once as a witness against a man accused of crimes against children. So it was a serious situation and I was a very nervous individual and not very good at the ‘your honour’ part.  The judge, attempting to help me find my voice, commented on the fact I was at university.  He asked me how long I had been there?  My response was a very honest ‘two days!’ which made the court laugh including himself.  Despite all my court room television nothing prepared me for the reality of sitting in Glasgow High Court.

There is a risk in our faith that we think we know it all.  We have been through Sunday School, through more sermons than some have had cooked dinners, and read our Bibles front to back. We can believe that our faith is deep but then we find ourselves in the court of secularism and suddenly we are not as prepared as we thought we were.  Christian discipleship as Richard Burridge puts it is a journey of life long learning in the guidance of the Spirit of truth.

As I said last week there are a number of words used to describe the Holy Spirit.  Paraclete is a common one and is used for legal counsel or advocate.  And in this passage we had from John’s Gospel we are in the land of the High Court – not of Glasgow but God’s court.  In this passage the Spirit’s role is to prove wrong, convict, reprove – in a manner of speaking to do the work of the cross-examination in a trial.

The question is who are the defendants?
We are.  The world.  We are the ones being convicted of sin.  John always has a spiritual dimension to his text so when he says we are being convicted of a mistake or crime it is sin he is talking about.
The primary role of the Holy Spirit is to convince men and women of their sin and lack of faith in Jesus Christ.  It is not about breaking some set of laws but about rejecting Jesus.

If we believe that God sent his Son for us then to reject him is to reject God himself.  The theme of this is repeated throughout Scripture, and in particular the following parable came to mind.  If you want to read it you can in Luke 20:9 onwards…   The parable of the tenants:

In the story it is the religious leaders who walk away crushed – not the ordinary people.  We have a choice – do we embrace Jesus or do we reject him?  We have to be careful that we don’t use this text to beat up people.  Rather it is directed at us because we know Jesus and yet we readily reject him with our selfishness, greed, envy and ignorance.  We all have a choice to choose Jesus, but folks have to hear about him first…

Often people believe that God can’t love them for who they are, because they are not good enough.  
So secondly, John tells us that the Spirit convicts us of justice or righteousness using once a word Paul uses numerously – dikaisoune.  Jesus’ death was not a just condemnation but through it God has his ‘righteousness’ and it is no longer about our ‘worthiness’ or ‘goodness’.  

Remember Jesus came into the world – not to condemn it but to save it.  We are guilty, we are guilty of condemning an innocent man to death. But through his death all righteousness has been fulfilled.  That ultimate rejection of Jesus has been turned around and now the Spirit convinces the world that Jesus’ death is actually judgement against the ruler of this world.  Jesus defeats Satan.  Only God could do that, and he did that for us.  So the Spirit comes to convince the world of the truth of Jesus death and resurrection.

And he does that through us. There is so much that Jesus wants to teach his disciples but they are not ready for it yet.  If anything they will learn as they live, and the lives they lead will not be easy.  They will miss Jesus and in their grief and sorrow at this they are not able to process any more learning.  But the Spirit will guide them, teaching them everything that Jesus and the Father shares.  Spirit of truth, indeed the Spirit of wisdom thereby connecting the Old and the New Covenants.

Jesus knew that the disciples would struggle when he left them.  All the hatred he had faced would be directed at them.  They would be ostracised, put out of the synagogue, seen as trouble makers.  And whilst the Spirit convinces the world of its sin and rejection of Christ, the Spirit guides and leads the disciples, and thereby us, to stand firm under hostile questioning and to testify faithfully about Jesus to their persecutors.  The Spirit’s ministry to believers is help them not give up their faith when everything around them makes them want to.

The Spirit’s conviction of the world will only happen through us – through our testimony in the course of our mission, which is God’s mission, which is to go into all the world making disciples, teaching to obey everything Jesus gave us, baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And so we go full cycle…in order to make disciples, we need to become disciples.  And to be disciples we need to accept the Spirit of truth and wisdom, and allow the Spirit to direct our faith.  The teaching ministry of the Spirit builds on and develops is the teaching ministry of Jesus himself.

We must accept the fact that at times, this will put us on a collision course with the world.  We may be persecuted or shunned, people might think we are goody two shoes or boring, or indeed in some places put us in prison or torture us.  There are Christians who face great trouble for their faith.

I suspect the Spirit is convicting the church of her apathy and being lukewarm.  Are we still proclaiming Jesus is Lord and able to testify to our faith in word and action..? If the Church was to stand before the Lord with the Holy Spirit as paraclete – advocate, lawyer – what would be said?  And remember Revelation is full of churches held to account…let’s grow spiritually.  Let’s be disciples. Please.

Jesus said:  Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

The Spirit challenges us today not with condemnation but offers us the Spirit of life that will breathe new life in dry old bones.  Are you ready?

Who is the Holy Spirit?

Below is an excerpt from today’s reflection in worship as we consider the Holy Spirit for the month of August.  The congregation have been given permission to write their questions and hopefully over the next three weeks I’ll be able to answer them (or at least try). 

Who is the Holy Spirit?  (Reading was John 14: 15-26)

I rarely focus on the Spirit because my personal faith journey has been focussed on Christ.  My definitive shaping of faith came from the Salvation Army where Jesus Christ was central – ‘washed in the blood of the lamb’ and so on, and absolutely the Spirit was part of the trinity but not the focus.  Moving into the Church of Scotland, the main influences were Paul and Father.  Now that just happened to be the Church I attended.  I did once ask the minister why Paul was on every Sunday – but my preacher was expository and started at the beginning of a book and kept going to the end.  Sermons were regularly 45mins long especially in the evening service.  And preachers tend to stick with what they know.  

But the Spirit has a way of making his presence felt.  The church I attended went through the Toronto Blessing, prior to our arrival in it and it changed the church.  In fact a number of people left because of the impact the Toronto Blessing events had on a number of individuals.  This was the first time in modern times I had really had heard anything of a spirit-led revival.  I did know there were over-enthusiastic Christians who liked to bounce about like they’d been on the go-go juice too long. Of course with knowledge comes wisdom and I love the charismatic element of our faith.  

What we really know about the Spirit is that when he or she puts in an appearance nothing stays the same.  We are worried that we might lose control, be made to speak words in a strange language or dance in the aisles or fall over.  And so rather than engage with the Spirit we kinda ignore or pay lip service to the Spirit.  At least, I know I am guilty of that.  I don’t want to fall over in Church, and apparently give me the right cocktail of painkillers and I can talk a lot of nonsense, but over the years I have wondered if the neglect of the Holy Spirit is or has been detrimental to the Church and the growth of Christianity. 

Now before you think I don’t connect with the Spirit at all – of course I do.  The Spirit is a part of my life and my faith, present at my baptism, my ordinations and a regular helper in many situations.  But I wonder if it is enough.  Joyce Meyer in her book – Filled with the Holy Spirit said I was a believer in Jesus Christ, so the Holy Spirit was in me, but I knew I was a Christian who had no victory and was looking for a deeper walk with God.  

I am being honest with you not because I want somehow to show off, but I think because I am not alone in my uncertainty and doubts.  When I was finishing my probation a lady I had got to know quite well and was part of my support team tried to help me!  She asked me gently and without pressure if I would like her to pray for the Spirit to give me the gift of tongues.  I refused.  I wasn’t ready for that – God was already big enough for me and he didn’t need to get any bigger.  He had taken an introverted lass with limited self-esteem and put her in a patriarchal institution as an upfront speaker and people lover.  To be honest I had enough God in my life.  But as I mature in faith and as the world around me loses its faith in anything bigger than the individual – such as politicians, role models and gods, I think as a church, as a community and indeed for many of us as Christians we don’t have enough God in our life.  

We need Jesus and I will never not be Christocentric but Christ needed the Spirit. And if he needed the Spirit, and he said his disciples needed the Spirit, then I am in no doubt that we need the Spirit.  However, what does this mean? 

Handley Moule writing in 1890 on the subject of the Holy Spirit writes ‘Upon his divinity, his deity, there is little practical need that I should dwell, so plain it is on the very surface of Scripture that the Holy Spirit, whether personal or not, is divine, is a Power of the divine Order.  But is it he, or it?  Is it a divine faculty, influence, phase, mode or a divine person?  

Earlier we explored the different images and understandings we have of the Holy Spirit.  And I wanted to do that because God is definable and yet not definable.  Original words for the Holy Spirit scattered throughout Scripture including breath of God, wisdom, dove, advocate, helper, comforter, truth teller, and so on are found both in the feminine form and masculine form and neuter.  So our English translations are often limited in scope.  It is fair to say the Holy Spirit is male or female or neither but never it.  In the passage we heard the Holy Spirit is referred to as a male although both male and gender neutral terms are used in the Greek.  To treat the Holy Spirit as an ‘it’ is disrespectful and a huge risk to our faith.  It is said in Scripture that none of us can call Jesus Lord without having the Spirit, and Jesus said that the unforgivable sin was to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit.  

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—  the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. John 14:16-17

Strangely repetitive of what John wrote about Jesus in the opening chapter of his Gospel – he came into the world but his own did not receive him.  

The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.  He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John 1:9-14

Look at the varied imagery even used of Jesus but also the idea that we must receive him. And so it is with the Spirit.  We need to be willing to receive the Spirit, to welcome the Spirit into our lives, into our faith and into our Church.  I need to be willing to do that even if it means dancing in the aisles, speaking in tongues, healing the sick, challenging the status quo, being prophetic, or indeed humbling myself and letting God take the drivers seat.  

As you go through this week, as you read your Bibles and ponder God, who is the Spirit to you? As you reflect on your life, where has God the Spirit moved in your life, guiding your feet in the right path.  Remember our ignorance or neglect of the Spirit does not mean that the Spirit has neglected or ignored us.  But maybe we could begin a beautiful rich powerful friendship…

We will explore further the Holy Spirit, looking next week at role and purpose in more detail, followed by gifts and then empowerment in the last week of August. 

I hope you can join us on this journey.  

God bless

Love in Christ 

Sarah