Prodigal Auction

My daughter came to me on Saturday evening, and put a paper in my hand saying “#### asked me to give you this”.

It was a letter from my 14 year old son.

In it he confessed that he had mindlessly put a bid on a famous auction website for a car, and against his expectations, he had won, and was now liable for money well in excess of his funds. Plus, it would be very inconvenient to fetch the said car in another town. It was a very self-deprecating letter, full of genuine grief and remorse as well as panic for his situation. He did not expert forgiveness, but offered to pay what he could in pocket money and by handing over his computer.

I was reeling with the impact of the whole thing and taken aback by the fact that I was now going to have to stump up the cash. But mostly, I felt sad for him, hiding in his basement bedroom, worked up into such a state of self-loathing that he felt he had to send his sister with a letter, rather than face me himself. It hurt me that he called himself “a screw-up of a son”.

I consulted with my wife, and we agreed the problem had three aspects:

• Re-affirmation of our son
• Careful discipline of our son
• Resolving the problem of the car

The discipline was relatively easy – it didn’t need anything heavy handed. We have been telling him for months he is not allowed a computer in his bedroom – now we could enforce that rule.

Re the car, we felt there was a binding contract and we would have to buy it with borrowed money, but then sell it straightaway to recover as much as we could.

Time for re-affirmation. I couldn’t go down to him straightaway – other kids going to bed, incoming phone calls, etc - but at the first break I went down, and found him flushed in the face and full of tears. (This is the rough tough footballing son.) I explained I would take the burden of dealing with the car, and that we would move his computer out, but mostly that the self-deprecating aspect of his letter was out of place for a son of God, a valued one for whom Christ died, and a son that made me proud. I could not shout – I could only hug him. And he received the hug, which normally he would not.

Cutting a long story short, we contacted the vendor and explained the situation. He was very understanding, and agreed to ‘mutually withdraw’ – which I hadn’t realised you could do on the auction website. All we had to do was refund him his listing fee, a small amount which my son agreed to pay.

The phrase ‘cutting a long story short’ includes all the prayer! Prayer which was answered.

So there we have it – a living prodigal son, a living parable of the undeserving who is loved not because of what he does but because of who he is (the son of the father), and whose repentance opens the floodgates of forgiveness.

The (scared) Oracle of God

Normally after I preach I get a good number of people saying nice things about my sermon. Mostly they are trying to be encouraging, some are simply being polite, and one or two do actually mean it.

This Sunday I had to preach at both our morning services. I have done the 9:30 before, but this was my first time speaking at the 11:00.

I didn’t feel I had prepared very well. I have not had a ‘spiritual’ week. The allocated passage didn’t lend itself to theological exegesis; it was a more practical thing, so I just had some pictures on a power point presentation and talked around the pictures. When I stood up to speak in the 9:30 my mind went completely blank, and I struggled to recover.

But afterwards, a whole stream of people came to me, not with the usual platitudes, but with a genuine sense of having been touched in the heart and convicted by the Holy Spirit. I was left with a strong sense that somehow I had actually spoken the word of God to these people.

For the second service, I knew before I said a word that it would not be so good, because it was clear by now that the message had been for the first service. So afterwards there were some people who had attended both services that said I was better the second time round. Technically, perhaps so. But I did not get the same stream of people who had been touched, just the usual numbers of encouraging/polite. Same sermon, delivered better, yet less impact.

To be honest, I am comfortable in a church where we go through the motions and have our nice ceremonies in a conventional way. But when God himself shows up, it really makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It literally scares me. I know that ‘my sermon’ was not very good in itself, but I also know that God himself somehow inhabited those words and had his way and communicated HIS message.

That is scary.

But….even more so….if people start to treat me as the oracle of God, and then I say something that is wrong and leads people into sin…then I really am in trouble.

Postscript….when I was young, I found people usually ignored me. So I started colouring my stories to make them interesting, and they became increasingly wild. Then people became interested and started to believe me…something new which I didn’t know how to handle. And it was also embarrassing because now I had to admit that I had exaggerated, so I ended up with even less credibility than I started with.

Hot Springs to Heresy

As I child I went to Rotorua in New Zealand. This is an area of geysers, hot springs, and boiling mud. The mud made an impression on me because you could see where a bubble was about to appear – the surface would slowly heave up, then it would seem to stretch and get thinner before finally the bubble would burst, splattering hot mud randomly in all directions.

The is how this post is coming – it has been brooding for some time, and now POP..here it is, sending stuff randomly all around.

Some bloke wrote a letter to the Church of England Newspaper, saying that in ‘Penal substitution’ the word penal doesn’t come in the legal sense but in terms of the penalty, ie consequences, of our actions. He argued that Jesus does not take our punishment, just the fallout from our deeds.

This is in line with a lot of other stuff I have read recently, all with his same theme that God is such a loving God that he couldn’t possibly dream of punishing us for our sins, and that God has not written any laws for us to break and so there is no need for punishment: its just a matter of trying to live without hurting anyone and facing natural cause-and-effect consequences of our mistakes. There is a suggestion that God himself is not wronged by our sins, its just our fellow man.

So why do we always repeat in the Lord’s prayer “Forgive us our trespasses…”?

If there is no law, there is no need for forgiveness.
If there is no punishment, there is not need for forgiveness.
If we have not wronged God, he does not need to forgive us.

Therefore, since we regularly beg for forgiveness as Christ taught us, there must be something to be forgiven for.

If there is no law, there is no trespass.
If there is no trespass, there is no need for forgiveness.

So what I am saying is that the Lords Prayer, recognised by every Christian in the world, embodies the concept of breaking God’s law and needing to be forgiven by him for it.

The Penalty is not just a natural consequence, it is punishment according to God’s law. (PS, to say Penalty just means consequences doesn’t make sense, either from the etymology of the word or from its use in common language. If the Police give me a fixed penalty notice for illegal parking, it is a punishment for breaking the law, not just a natural consequence of my action)

Now, without going into a whole "quote scripture" section which would take all day, the punishment for trespassing God’s law is death.

[NB I am not referring particularly to the OT ‘law’, more to God’s instructions and commands generally]

This takes us on to that verse in Hebrews – “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins”.

The punishment for sin is death. That is an absolute eternal principle that even God will not break. Every sin requires a death. Forgiveness is not a casual “oh well, never mind, don’t do it again’. Sin can’t be forgiven without death. If you think about it this makes sense – if I sin against God by injuring my brother, and God were to just dismiss it, my brother would say “Hey, what about me? Where’s my justice?” So my sin against my brother requires justice – it requires a death under the terms of God’s law.

So the only way that we can be forgiven, is for that punishment to be implemented, but not in a way that we feel.

And so, Jesus bore my sins in his body on the cross. In a sense I was in him, crucified with him, but he was the one that felt the pain.

When my victims turn to God and demand their justice, he replies “Yes, those sins have been punished, Simon died in Jesus”.

Yet when I present myself to God, he says, “Yes, you have lived a perfect life in Jesus”

This is the love of God. Not that he ignores sins, but that he deals with them properly in a way that ensures justice for the victim and freedom and forgiveness for me.

And it is only by taking that punishment onto his eternal self that he could bring these opposites together.

And so, I believe in Penal Substitution. I believe that I deserved to be punished because I have broken God’s commands. But I believe that I have been crucified with Christ, and that I live with Christ.

He has substituted himself for me and taken my Penalty.

And I can only say Hallelujah, and worship him with thanksgiving.

But the reason I say all this is that I am really worried that there is a deep, truly sinister heresy growing in the church.

If we deny that God makes laws, and if we deny that he will punish us for breaking them, then we are saying exactly the same as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And that is Very Dangerous!

And that is why I speak out for the true message of the cross.

Gather the broken pieces

This weekend I attended the final year group meeting of my training course prior to my licensing in April.

We each had to do a presentation on our three month placement. ie I had to listen to 17 sermons!.. well sixteen, actually, becasue numebr 6 was mine. It was of course the best and most enlighteneing and stimuleted the most discussion up to that point. I surprised them all by truning up in a cassock and surplice, and spoke about how much my views of vestments (and most things anglo-catholic) had changed during the placement.

But good though my talk was, it was totally outclasssed by the person after me. She was a lady in her 70s, short, clinging to the lecturn to control her nervous shaking, and yet she delivered a fantastically well-prepared talk, whihc he best stand-up comedians would have been proud of, and she had us rolling about in fits of laughter with tears rolling down our cheeks.

Another woman's talk also contained God's word for me for the time - based on the feeding of the five thousand, where the disciples are told to gather up the broken pieces, and of course find that these are more than there was to start with. she was speaking about a placement at a homeless charity, but for me it applied to our own circumstances, where we feel broken and can't understand why this has happened if we were in god's will. yet in the feeding, the bread started off in jesus's hands and it was good and perfcet, yet had to be broken by him so that more could be made of it. and so, i now felt, that we were in God's will, in a perfect place, and yet he had to break it to make it more. THis has helped me to understand some of why god has given us such a rough time of late.

And so I went home, and Mrs was gald to hear what I reported, especially since she could report to me that she had had some blod spotting - which almost certainly meant that she was pregnant again. And so we were ecstatic for 24 hours.

It helped that our youngest, riding his new bicycle on his 7th birthday, was cycling off into the distance on just his second day without trainer wheels!

But the joy was short-lived, since this morning her bleeding has expanded to a full gush and it turns out that it is just her cylce getting back into routine after the miscarriage, and not a pregnancy.

So why did God allow us to be told there was a ripe follicle when we went for the scan? Why did he lead her up the garden path with an appearance of a definite implantation blood-spotting, only for it to be a period? why does he give us these falkse dawns? why the rollercoaster of ecstasy is despondancy?

Why does he put me back in a leadership role for the workpace alpha, discussing "how does God guide us?", when I am really messsed up about these things? How can I preach when i barely believe?

And so I open up my blog to pour out his frustration and rage, and find that the verse of the day in the panel at the top left is “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.” (1 John 4:9)I have been missing the point. I want God's love to be expressed in him solving what I think are the problems, but he shows his love by adressing the REAL problem. And are not my trivia nothing in comparison to what he has done?