Out of the Ashes – Peter Gladwin

I read this book in one sitting, not because it was a short book but because it is a facinating testimony. A true story of how God can turn around and even transform the most tragic of lives. From his birth, Peter’s life started to go downhill fast. He suffered horrific burns as a baby after being left in front of an open fire and permanently lost some fingers and toes as well as other horrible injuries. Growing up in a chaotic house he managed to overcome his disability. However, with his new found freedom he turned himself into a mini crimewave. Things went from bad to worse. In graphic detail he describes his slide toward rock bottom, where in a truly miraculous way God reached down and pulled him out of the mire and set his feet on solid ground.
The transformation is amazing and really heart warming. It’s a great read.

A book to exercise the little grey cells.

I’m reading Rob Bell’s new book at the moment. It’s called ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About God’ (which is a bit of a mouthful) and it flows in Rob’s unique writing style. The problem that he is tackling is that everyone who talks about God seems to have their own pre-conceived ideas and so it is easy for confusion to result. For some, God has failed to move into the 21st century and seems stuck in a pre-scientific mind-set . Therefore to believe in God is to step backwards. For others God doesn’t exist. For still others God is described in multitudes of ways depending on your religious belief and experience. So Bells asks if there are other ways that we can use to talk about God that will bring clarity and he comes at this with two aspects in mind. The first is that Rob says he is a Christian and so Jesus is how he understands God. The second is that people everywhere want to talk about God.

The next section of the book delves into science and an explanation of the universe and the strange way that it works. This is where it gets a bit deep with descriptions of particles, atoms, quantum theory, energy and the peculiar ability for sub-atomic particles to disappear in one place and appear in another without travelling the distance in-between. So once you get round to understanding that then miracles don’t seem so difficult to believe for a scientist. It’s all fascinating stuff.

Then having set some groundwork Rob goes on to talk about Holism. Rob says that if we dismantle our bodies atom by atom, particle by particle, sub particle by sub-particle then we won’t be able to isolate the real you in any one of them. He says ”Holism is the reality that emerges only when all the parts are put together but can’t be individually located, labelled or identifies at a smaller, component, parts level” That is – we are more than the sum parts.
And that’s where I am up to so far. It is an interesting read and I want to continue on to find out his conclusions.

“Go to the ant”

I watched a facinating programme on TV that I had recorded a few days ago. It was all about a Leaf-Cutter ant colony that had been established inside a Scottish research lab. A whole series of chambers connected with tubes was set up all linked to feeding areas above ground. Once an ant colony was introduced they set about monitoring the progress as the ants began to colonise and organise themselves into a production system. It was an amazing programme and behaviours were seen that had never been recorded before. They even radio tracked the soldier ants and watched them methodically patrol the various chambers that they were guarding. They watched as the standardised eggs produced by the queen were fed in different ways to produce different sizes and functions of ants. They watched as once a year the female eggs became male ants bred to mate with the new queens. They watched them dispose of their dead and waste and they watched them communicate the sources of food and danger and quickly mobilise forces to deal with both.

It was all an amazing evolutionary event – according to the programme makers. To me it just shouted out about the amazining creative hand of God.

Faith in a Time of Change

We often think that we live in a time of change where the pace of life means that new things are forever happening. When it comes to the Church the pace of change seems to be a bit slower. The Government rarely interferes (although recently it seems to be imposing unwanted changes on the church) and some churches still seem to be unchanged as years go by. So imagine what it must have been like going to church during the Reformation in England. Once Henry the 8th began his separation from Rome his government issued guideline after guideline to all the local parish churches across the land.

I have been enjoying reading a facinating book by Eric Ives called The Reformation Experience. The book is about the impact on local people of the vast number of changes that happened during the 16th Century. We all tend to know about Henry the 8th and his many wives and sometimes assume that it was all just an excuse for Henry to get into bed with Anne Boleyn. But there was a huge political and religious change taking place and a tide of Reformation was sweeping in from Europe helped by people like Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer. The book describes the various changes that took place and their impact on the lives of workers in the Parish. The physical architecture of the church changed (out went the statues, the carved screens, the stained glass windows and in came the whitewash, the wooden tables instead of stone altars etc), the language of the church changed (from Latin to English), the Bible changed (it became law for churches to purchase a Great Bible and to encourage people to hear it read), the prayers changed – in fact over the space of just a couple of years everything changed. Then when Henry died even more changes took place under Edward, and then when he died it all changed in the opposite direction under Mary (and finally back again under Elizabeth)

So spare a thought for the poor man and woman in the pew. It must have been a roller coaster ride.

This is a book that I can thoroughly recommend reading. It’s an eye-opener.

Follow the One who can breathe new life in us

In his book “Empty Promises”, Pete Ward begins with a challenge on the subject of Idolatry. He says that an idol will always leave us exhausted and drained and wanting more because, unlike God, an idol can never breathe new life into us.
That’s quite a perceptive concept because in some way or other we are all guilty of having idols in our life. In fact, Peter Ward says, that our heart is an idol factory, capable of drawing us and leading us away from God. He says that the real question is “which idol is God’s biggest rival in your life”.
We might take the intellectual high ground when we read the Bible and wonder how people in both the Old and New Testaments could worship a god carved in stone, but fail to recognise that we are just as susceptible to such things in a different form. So he says “The bottom line is that every single human being has an unbelievable capacity for self deception. It’s no wonder that we fall for empty promises over and over again” (pg 19)
King David in the Old Testament was no stranger to idolatry and so in Psalm 139 he reminds us that God knows us intimately. He knows our thoughts even before we think them and so in an act of recognition and helplessness he asks God to search and to know his anxious thoughts. It’s an invitation for God to help him (and us if we make the psalm our own).
So Pete Ward asks 4 questions (pg 21)
- What occupies my mind? (what do I spend time day dreaming about?)
- Who or what do I tend to be jealous of?
- What do I spend most of my time doing?
- Where does the majority of my money go?

So the challenge is:
- What you are doing
- What you are saying
- What are you thinking
- How are your actions
- Where are you coming from
- and what motivates you.

It’s challenging stuff.

Perfect Storm

I’ve learnt another word. First it was ‘noetic’ in the book Thinking. Loving. Doing. But now I’ve come across the word ‘ululating’. In Tom Wright’s book Simply Jesus he says “The first thing most people knew about Jesus was when he arrived in the village there was a party. A celebration – whoops of delight, people dancing, women ululating. The prophet’s in town, and its good news all around” (pg 59) (I think it means wailing, although presumably in the context it must mean happy wailing!)

Tom’s book is a very interesting approach to Jesus – Simply Jesus. He begins by looking at the analogy of a pure storm, When Jesus began preaching, three major factors came together: The Roman Storm, The Jewish Storm and The Wind of God.

It was a clash of systems that all collided together with the arrival of Jesus on the scene. Was Jesus going to conform to the Roman way of things? No. Was Jesus going to conform to the Jewish way of thinking? Surprisingly no, because by Jesus’s day they had interpreted events based on their own thinking rather than based on God’s revealed plans. And then there was the wind of change, blowing from God, sweeping a path for the true Messiah. It’s obvious which of these 3 was going to prevail.

But it wasn’t obvious at the time – hence the perfect storm.

It’s a very interesting book and well worth reading.

A true walk

In the Scandal of Christianity, the author, R.T. Kendall, is looking at the issue of standing up to our faith and the beliefs that we hold. In an age that is dominated by peer pressure it is very easy to take the easy option and allow our faith to slip to the background at work or with the people that we interact with. This is especially true when it comes to the claims of Jesus Christ who said “I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the father except through me”

So R.T has three principles that underpin his book.
1: It is a real privilege to follow Christ and to be seen by others to follow Christ despite the problems that might arise from standing up above the parapet.
2: If we allow peer pressure and what people think about us to hinder our obedience to Jesus Christ and to compromise our beliefs and our daily walk then we are the ultimate losers and will eventually regret our actions.
3: The blessing and benifits of living true to our principles and faith are a greater blessing from God and a greater reward from God at the judgement seat of Christ.

This book is certainly needed in these uncertain times where there is a growing alienation of society to the Christian gospel and where there is a replacement of the gospel with a vaguer more bland message that has dispensed with the centrality of the cross.

R.T. Kendall has written a number of very practical but very challenging books that need to be heeded by the church today. I have found his writing to be very helpful in my own walk with the Lord.

Three Degrees of Separation

If you read Genesis at face value (and why not, but thats another blog one day and not the purpose of this entry) then Methuselah died in the year of the Flood. Therefore he would have known Noah who survived the flood and would have passed on to him all his wisdom and experience. But if you look closer at Genesis then you also see that Methuselah would have also known Adam. So Noah could easily have been aware of Adam’s thoughts, warnings and wisdom because he could glean it from Methuselah. 3 degrees of separation.

Irenaeus was ministering around the 180s AD. However, when Irenaeus was a boy he knew the famous martyr Polycarp who was Bishop of Smyrna. And Polycarp knew John the apostle, who was a companion of Jesus Christ. 3 degrees of separation.

It’s a small world, but the thing about Irenaeus is that he was in a unique position to defend the gospel because he knew someone who knew one of the very gospel writers. He could therefore skilfully combat the Gnostics of the 2nd century by refuting their claims to secret knowledge passed on from the apostles.

Not only did Irenaeus know Polycarp (and therefore his recollections of John) he was also influenced by Justin Martyr who was able to skilfully show that Greek philosophy did not have all the answers. Justin had tried many philosophical ways but only found the truth and the peace that it brings by discovering Christ through the Old Testament scriptures. And then Irenaeus influenced others and so on.

Have you ever wondered how the New Testament came together? I’m convinced that most Christians think that somehow it just dropped out of heaven, neatly bound and ready for the back pocket. Crucially, Tony Lane’s book (The Lion Christian Classics Collection) shows the key people who bridge the gap between the first apostles and the great councils a couple of centuries later.

If you want an example of the amazing courage of the young church then read the account of Perpetua and Felicitas (a young Roman woman and her slave girl) who were martyred for their faith in Carthage in AD 203 (page 39-42). It truly shows the cost of a declaration for Christ.

A Blast from the Past

I have written in an earlier blog entry about the book Thinking. Loving. Doing and I was especially challenged by Rick Warren’s article on reading material. He gave a strong emphasis on spending some time reading from saints who have gone before us. So it challenged me to re-read the book The Lion Christian Classics Collection by Tony (now professor) Lane. This book focusses on 100 key writers starting from Ignatius who was martyred in 115 AD through to Therese of Lisieux (1897). Each writer chosen is given an overview of their life and writings and then a key passage from one of their writings.

What has really struck me right from the start was that the early subjects chosen were men who were leaders in a church that faced brutal persecution from the Roman authorities. Ignatius was martyred in 115AD in the capital city of Rome. Despite the opportunities that he could have taken to evade his death he is prepared to face up to it and doesn’t want anyone to try and alter his course. Because of this the letters that he wrote are full of courage and defiance and clearly state that despite a road marked with suffering he would soon be face to face with his Saviour in heaven. He met his fate in the arena, torn apart by lions.
Here is something that he wrote. “It is when my body should be no longer visible to the world that I shall truly be a disciple of Christ. Entreat Christ for me, that through these beasts I may become a sacrifice to God.”

I really do think that reading about these men and women who laid down their lives for their Lord will really encourage you in your own walk with the Lord.

One bite with so many consequences

It’s good to stretch your thinking from time to time. That’s why I’m finding it good to read Thinking, Loving, Doing. It is stretching my thinking and sometimes uses words that I haven’t come across before.
One such word that was new to me (but not anymore) is ‘Noetic’. Apparently it means – the intellectual consequences of sin. According to Albert Mohler (one of the authors) there are 14 such Noetic effects. These are: Ignorance: Distractedness: Forgetfulness: Prejudice: Faulty perspectives: Intellectual fatigue: Inconsistency: Failure to draw the right conclusions: Intellectual apathy: Dogmatism and closed mindedness: Intellectual pride: Vain imagination: Miscommunication and Partial Knowledge.

That’s quite a list to be getting on with, but it all makes sense and the author dwells on each effect and explains why it is a consequence of the fall.

Well it’s certainly stretching my thinking and I would encourage you to take a look at the book. I’m reading Francis Chan’s contribution next