Mystery Explained: print and e-book available!

No book of the Bible is more misunderstood in our North American Christian world than Revelation. This is a tragedy, because its true meaning is not hard to discern. The key is to interpret it in light of the Old Testament, not the latest news reports from the Middle East. This book takes what has become a mystery to most of us, and explains it in language understandable to the average church member. I give an introduction and explanation of the main alternative interpretations, explain why I choose the one I believe is correct, and then take you on a tour of the text, hopefully explaining any questions you may have.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/160750108

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Coming home

I am writing this from Durham. There are Durhams in Canada, the United States and likely other countries, but there’s only one original, in the far north-eastern corner of England, just below a wall the Emperor Hadrian built to keep unwanted immigrants out.

Durham is notable for many things. It is one of the birthplaces of Christianity in this country, with an illustrious Christian history going back to the time of St Cuthbert in the seventh century, who is buried in the cathedral. The cathedral itself is almost a thousand years old and is one of the finest pieces of architecture in Britain, or anywhere in Europe for that matter. How they built it with nothing more than muscle power is beyond me. The castle is the oldest continuously inhabited castle in Europe, and I lived in it myself for a year several eons ago.

And for me, Durham was the place where God encountered me, gave me a true understanding of what the church should be, and afforded me the privilege of leading a small but radical group of young people who planted a local congregation which did not look like any other church in town. It was the place where I made many lifelong friends, and most importantly, met my wife Elaine.

It was a place where I learned obedience, where I refused to compromise my faith no matter what the cost (and there was one), and the place where my heart was stirred to pursue the kingdom of God relentlessly.

For me, coming to Durham is like coming home. And this in spite of the fact I was born in Canada and lived there for only six years. Why is that?

I think the answer is this. Home for the Christian is often the place where God most radically encountered you. It’s the place where your life was set on course and where you developed convictions that have carried you through since. It’s way more than a sentimental liking for a place that has fond memories for you.

And for me, it is reinforced by the fact that God is still working in the church I originally started. In fact, it has grown beyond recognition both in its local expression and in the impact it has had in planting churches and in sending out people around the world.

Coming back this week to help encourage the latest church planted out from Durham takes me back to the same foundations so much of my life has been built on. And it’s a great joy.

Where is home for you? My wife Elaine occasionally makes the observation that some people are born and raised and live their whole lives in the very same place, and wonders what that would be like given our own different experience.

But for the Christian, home is very frequently that place on earth where God encountered and shaped us. In a deeper sense, this points us to the fact that in truth home is the place where we will live and dwell with him forever.

Peter tells us we are only sojourners on earth. We are “resident aliens,” just like the government document said I was when I was a Canadian living in Chicago attending seminary.

Our true home is not on this earth at all. The only reason why an earthly place feels like a spiritual home is that the same God who met us there is waiting for us at the end of our earthly journey.

Sometimes we feel that our whole life has been a journey moving ever farther away from home. In fact, our whole life is a journey in which we draw ever closer to home. And those places God has met us on the way become reminders of this.

It’s pointless to try to cling on to earthly securities and the home we have here. But along the way, it’s still comforting to know there are places on this earth that remind us of the great reward that is yet to come.

The real meaning of faith

“Faith is not belief without proof. It is trust without reservation.” These wise words came from my good friend Steve Hepden the other day, and boy did they hit me hard.

The problem with so much teaching on faith is that faith becomes a commodity, something we are seeking to possess. And we want a large quantity of it to protect ourselves from all the dangers of the world around us. If only I had faith for this or faith for that, I could get everything I want to make my life peaceful and happy.

What is wrong with this picture?

Well for one thing, Jesus said we only needed a tiny quantity of faith to accomplish great things. And the reason is this: it’s not about how much faith I have, it’s about how much faithfulness God has.

Once we tap into the faithfulness of God, our tiny sliver -- mustard seed, to use Jesus’ word -- surfs on the wave of God’s great faithfulness to accomplish everything his Word promises for us and through us.

The power of faith lies not in our words, our emotions, our thoughts, or even in our “positive confession.” The power of faith lies in the promise of God. That power lies outside ourselves. It is not something to be possessed. It is someone to be trusted. It is part of the living relationship we have with the Lord.

But this points us to a more fundamental truth. Faith is not a commodity I possess. Faith is a relationship I have with God because of what Jesus did for me.

The Greek word for faith at its root means personal trust. And that takes us back to the statement at the beginning. Faith is trust in God. That’s what it is and that’s all it is.

And in its purest form, it is trust without reservation. Faith is not something we get to protect ourselves. It is the willingness to risk everything for Christ’s sake, trusting him for the consequences.

Faith is the entering into a relationship of trust where God calls us again and again to jump off cliffs and risk our security, in the knowledge that he will look after us, no matter what happens.

God has been challenging me lately on whether my faith is actually trust without reservation. Am I following him conditionally or unconditionally?

What I’ve found out is that I don’t have the right to point out to the Lord how many steps of faith I’ve taken in the past when I was much younger, as if that exempted me from taking radical steps of faith in the present.

But one thing I know. The same God who kept me and provided for me and looked after me when I was twenty and when I was thirty and forty and fifty is still looking after me now that I am sixty-four. And he will continue to do so until the day he decides to take me home and into that place where earthly faith is no longer needed.

It may be hard to trust without reservation, but let me tell you it’s a whole lot better than trying to self-protect, manipulate and connive to provide yourself with what you want out of life. Let me give you a hint. It never works.

There’s a better way.

Trust him. He won’t let you down.

How to blow a marathon

A couple of weeks ago, my young friend Mike ran the Toronto marathon. He’d been building up to this for months. We’d talked about it often. He had a time goal and was highly motivated to meet it.

When I saw him the other day for the first time since the race, he was not a happy camper.

Mike had run long distance races before, but this was his first marathon. In the excitement of the moment, as the various waves of runners were released, Mike made his first mistake. He forgot to set his stopwatch. Then when he did, it stopped working.

By this time, he had become enveloped in a large crowd of runners. The pace seemed to be decent, and he was reluctant to spend extra energy trying to break ahead of the pack.

But when he got to the halfway mark and saw the large clock, his heart sank. He was no less than twenty-eight minutes off his expected pace!

Dwelling on what had happened demoralized him. He picked up speed a bit, but still finished forty minutes off what he had hoped for. He walked away angry and disappointed with himself.

Paul talked to the Philippians about the original marathon race. He gave the potential runners in the church some pretty good advice. He told them to forget what lies behind and to strain desperately forward. That way they could edge out the next guy at the finish line, even if only by a nose!

Forgetting to set his watch left Mike in the default position of judging his pace by those around him. He judged that the pace everyone else was going at must be the right one if everyone else was doing it. It was a very costly mistake, and so badly distorted his judgment he wound up severely off his pace without even knowing it. And then he dwelt on the mistakes of the past and lost focus on the goal.

Paul tells us to ignore everyone and everything around us in the single-minded pursuit of victory. We are to keep our eyes on one thing only -- the goal marker, which is Christ. The goal marker was a large post erected to make sure the runners knew where the race ended and did not go off course.

I have never felt God calling me to do what the crowd around me was doing. I have never felt to judge the call on my life by what someone else wanted to do.

It can be costly to follow the call of God when everyone else is going at a different pace or in a different direction.

But it’s worth it.

Why? The last part of Paul’s athletic pep talk proves it. At the end of the race is the prize of the upward call. He’s referring to the high platform the judges sat on to discern who crossed the finish line first. The winner of the race got called up to where the judges sat to receive the prize. His name was called out, and everyone celebrated his triumph.

At the end of our race, we will be called upward to a higher court than that. God himself will call out our name. And in this race, thankfully, many can be winners.

But to win the race we have to follow the goal marker. We have to set our stopwatch to the will of God for our life. We have to stop looking around and letting others set the pace or determine the direction. We have to get past the past, and keep our eye on the goal.

After the race, Mike got a word of wisdom from an experienced runner. Mike had noticed a few runners making a sprint right at the beginning, which to him seemed counterproductive in such a long race. But his wise friend told that him the smart runners do that in order to get away from the crowd and set their own pace.

Your sprint is your time spent with God. It will give you a winning edge, and set you on the path to victory.

Run to win. The prize is worth it.

Does God have a plan?

One afternoon in July, I received an alarming phone call. My good friend Bob was up doing some repairs on a roof on one of his son’s farm buildings when he stepped through some rotten wood and fell twelve feet to the ground. Bob (who is supposed to be retired) is 74 years old, and I feared the worst.

What happened was a remarkable turn of events. His granddaughter, who was on the roof with him, was completely unhurt. His sons were both on the spot and called for an ambulance. And it so happened that the air ambulance was passing more or less overhead on its way back to our local hospital. The land ambulance arrived, the air ambulance landed in a nearby field, and between all the paramedics they got Bob into the helicopter and 45 minutes or so later he was in a teaching hospital in the city of London.

He broke pretty well all his ribs, plus an assortment of bones elsewhere, yet amazingly his head and spine were completely undamaged. The first few days, he looked pretty rough, to say the least, yet he quickly improved and now, only three months later, the only sign anything happened to him is the fact he’s shaking hands with his left, as the right hand is still sore.

And so my question is this: in those moments immediately before Bob fell, did God have a plan? It’s easy to see how God had a plan afterward, involving the ambulance and the outstanding medical care, and it’s easy to see how God protected Bob from what could otherwise have been fatal injuries.

Yet the question remains: did God have a plan before the accident? Why could he not have prevented it?

It’s really the same question asked of Jesus when he turned up way too late to save his friend Lazarus. “Couldn’t he who opened the eyes of the blind man have saved Lazarus from dying?” was what the people were saying.

And I think that story gives us the answer, or at least part of the answer, for things that happen to folk like Bob. The plan God had after Lazarus’ death sheds light on the plan he had before Lazarus’ death.

Jesus gave the clue with this simple statement: “It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4).

Understandably, you and I focus on asking God to protect us from harm and give us the happiest life possible. God is committed to protect us in the deepest, spiritual sense, but he is committed to his glory more than to our happiness.

So when bad things happen to us, we have the choice of blaming God and becoming angry or depressed, or asking God how he wants to work out his glory through our pain.

In Bob’s case, God was glorified in his protection of Bob from worse injury, in his provision of an air ambulance and terrific doctors, in his amazing recovery, and in the way Bob and his wife Joanne and family made the choice to honour and give thanks to him throughout the process.

Now they have a story to tell, to God’s glory.

There are times when it is impossible for us to figure out why God had done this or allowed that. There are times (please read the blogs posted on this website in the last couple of weeks from Jan Vickers) when all you can do is trust in God’s goodness amidst the battle, and know that in eternity, we always win.

But in the meantime, never, ever doubt that God has a plan.

And when his glory comes about even in the midst of your pain, the end result will be blessing for you far above and beyond what any earthly superficial happiness can ever bring.

So let us let his glory come in your life and mine.

A dangerous prayer, but the very best one to offer.

And remember this: no matter what, Jesus is always worth following.