The Suffering Servant

Ok picture the scene:

You’re a young boy playing with friends in the woods outside your village. Life is good, your family have a fruitful farm, where they are able to grow enough food for themselves and some harvests, they have enough to trade and sell to others, making some profit in the process. Today you’re free, with no thoughts about the military or political condition of the region in which you live. You are happy and unaware yet of the harsh realities of what life can mean in the Germanic province in which you live. Winters are difficult, but you are healthy and you have so much to thank your gods for. You’re playing with your friends in the woods, without a care in the world. 

Realising that it’s getting near to lunch time, you start to make your way in the direction of home, when you start to hear the sound of a commotion, as a group of riders has just returned to the village from the journey they set out on yesterday. Before you know what is happening the whole village is in uproar, with people running to and fro. The men of the village are gathering carts and pieces of farming machinery and are building makeshift barricades. As you wander towards your house in bemusement, your mother comes rushing out and screams at you to get in the house and to hide with your brother and sister, who are already in the grain pit under the house. Climbing down inside, you find your terrified siblings, who have no idea what the cause of this wave of panic is. All you can hear is the tense and hurried sounds of the people of your village as you sit down in the darkness. 

Time is beginning to pass, without being able to see the sun, you’re not too sure how long you’ve been down in the pit, but it seems like forever, when suddenly, in the distance, you hear the sound. It’s faint at first, which makes you wonder whether it’s actually the sound of your own heart beat, but slowly you start to hear the sound get louder…  

Dum Dum Doom – Dum Dum Doom

The sound of the villagers erupts into a frenzy as the sound begins to get louder and louder…

Dum Dum Doom – Dum dum Doom

Your younger brother grabs your arm in terror and asks you if the great dragons of old have returned to claim the land for themselves…

Dum Dum Doom – Dum Dum Doom

Now the ground itself is actually beginning to shake as the sound is getting closer and closer. You have never felt such a thick sense of fear in the air around the safe and secure place that your village is…

Dum Dum Doom – Dum Dum Doom!!

The next thing you know there is the sound of horses and screaming filling the air. You can hear the sounds of the men of your village picking up swords and preparing themselves for battle…

Dum Dum Doom – Dum Dum Doom 

Being able to take no more, you climb out of the pit, leaving behind the screaming children. Rushing out the back of the house, you see that the villagers are all gathered around a group of men who are getting ready to mount their horses, laden with weapons. The women of the village are crying and trying to comfort each other. 

Dum Dum Doom – Dum Dum Doom

The sound is nearly deafening now, as the ground beneath your feet is literally pulsating. Then right at the point that the men were about to set out from the village, suddenly the barricades are smashed to pieces as a huge group of soldiers come riding through the village, accompanied by a large pack of dogs, who have spiked steal collars slung around their necks. The dogs start to maul some of the women, as the men stand up to oppose them, the soldiers begin to hack at the men with their swords. They incapacitate the men of the village, by either sticking them with their swords, or beating them to the ground. The soldiers begin to attack and brutally rape the women. You see your own mother dragged into one of the houses by a group of the soldiers. Then another smaller party of men arrive on horse back, who dismount and demand that the elders of the village be assembled before them. The elders of the village are brought before the men, the most senior of whom is ordered by the chief spokesman to be crucified. The whole village is forced to watch. Everything is chaos and misery. Your whole world  is shattered in an instant. 

Dum Du Doom – Dum Dum Doom

This is the work of the Roman Empire, who have come to conquer your lands and proclaim them to be the property of the Emperor, the son of god himself. As a young and healthy boy, the army take you and use you to help service the ranks of the soldiers, destined one day yourself to become a member of the legion. You are taken from your land and out into the Empire. You work your entire young life, bringing water and fetching and carrying equipment for the army, as you are taught of the responsibilities and expectations of what it means to be a soldier of Rome, in the service of the Emperor. Caesar, the son of god, come down from heaven to establish a new kingdom of peace and prosperity for all those who were considered worthy enough to have been included in the plan. For all those who could call themselves to be citizens of Rome, Caesar was the light of the world; the Lord and Saviour. 

As you grow into a man and are forced into military service, you travel the length and breadth of the empire. You travel from England to India, fighting and killing anyone who dares resist the will of Caesar. You see more death, pain and misery than anyone should ever have to witness and you become a loyal and faithful servant of the Emperor, as you seek to establish the kingdom of the son of god himself. 

Then one day, after a particularly brutal campaign, your detachment receives new orders. You have been posted to a small province in the middle east known as Palestine. It’s an occupied territory, whose indigenous population are hideously outmatched militarily. This seems to be a welcome change, after the years of bloodshed, fighting to defend the Empire, bringing glory and honour to the Emperor’s name. 

After arriving in a god forsaken city called Jerusalem, your commanding officer appoints you to oversee the punishment of criminals, those who had been convicted of rape, murder, theft and perhaps the most villainous of all, those who had dared to act in sedition against the Emperor. The ones who have dared to lift a hand in rebellion to the son of god, the light, the hope of the world; the one who came to be known as lord and saviour. So you’re posted to a place called Golgotha, the place of executions that the locals call, the ‘place of the skull’. 

Over the next few years, you oversee the crucifixions of hundreds of men and women, with every one of them spitting down at you from their crosses and calling down curses upon you and your family, who now seem only a distant memory. The hatred and obscenities that you see and hear remind you everyday of the goodness and civility or the Empire and the divinity of the Emperor.  

Then one day, during one of the numerous religious festivals that the country seemed to celebrate every other day, a commotion broke out amongst the people of the city. There were huge crowds gathering around the palace of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, demanding him to pass sentence over a highly controversial figure, who apparently had some claim to be a king. Standing guard at your post, you see a crowd of people moving out of the city. Amongst the crowd, you see a man who is attempting to carry a huge cross. The people that surround him are spitting at him and beating him as he tries to make the walk up towards Golgotha. As the crowd approaches, the man falls to the ground, physically unable to carry his cross any further. Another man in the crowd was forced to pick up the cross and carry it for the condemned man, who as he stumbles and is kicked towards you, eventually gets close enough for you to see that he has been so badly beaten, that his face is beyond recognition. The blood that was pouring out of him gave signal of a horror, that in all your years of brutal military service, you had yet to see perpetrated upon another human being. 

Only once the maddened crowd have arrived, taunting and mocking the grief stricken man, whose body was in worse condition than his face, do you truly begin to feel the very real presence of evil. The man’s hair was matted with blood and scar tissue, that had begun to swell around a twisted crown of thorns that had been pressed down into his head. The sound of the onlookers was deafening, as you laid him down upon the rough and jagged wood of his cross, which must have caused agony to the mess of flesh and ripped open skin that had taken the place of his back. Yet in the midst of this carnage and chaos, the man, who wept bitterly from the obvious agonising pain and emotional torture,  seemed to have a regal and noble quality. He never once looked at you with hatred or disgust, but rather had a warmth and a tenderness in his eyes, which made the job you had of pulling apart his arms and nailing him to his cross, incredibly disturbing, which is not a sensation you have felt since you were a little boy, hiding down in the grain cellar of your parents village, before the Romans had taken you. Just about the time your grizzly work is done, one of the other centurions arrives on horseback from the palace of the governor, his mission was to bring a plaque which was to adorn the top of the man’s cross, which read:

Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

As the cross is hoisted up into position, the crowd goes wild, hurling insults and mockery at the man. Amidst the jeering and shouting you can hear the man praying, ‘Father, forgive them! They do not know what they are doing’. You can also hear the man comforting the others who have been sentenced to die with him that day, two thieves who displayed  the usual kind of savage behaviour, that you have come to expect of this uncivilised people. But the man, Jesus, he is so different! Even in the midst of such awful and terrible suffering, this man seems to shine, as if light was emanating from within him, changing the very atmosphere around him for the better. You can feel a sorrow growing in your heart for this man, who displays more grace and dignity, than any nobleman or governor than you have ever witnessed. In that moment, you think about the Emperor, the man you have spent your whole life fighting for. You’ve never seen him or this mythical place called Rome, which is at the centre of the whole world, but this man called Caesar, who is supposed to be the son of god himself, has only ever commanded you to spread fear and death, causing terror and panic. And here is this man, who has nothing about his appearance that would make you think him anything other than cursed, is inspiring you to believe that the world could be a better place. That there is hope and love to be found, but not in Caesar, in him!

Suddenly the atmosphere begins to change, a thick and brooding storm begins to fill the air. Looking up the man on his cross, it’s as if his life force is linked to the universe, as somehow the closer he comes to death, the darker and more malevolent the forces of nature become. Without warning, the man cries out:

‘IT IS FINISHED”! 

And with that, his head drops and you know that he is dead. There is no doubt in your mind as you turn to the crowd to speak, there is no question now, you have seen the truth. Even after a life spent is service of the Emperor, you now know the truth and somehow it has given you the freedom to declare the unescapable fact. With a clear voice you make what is probably the first public proclamation of the gospel by anyone:

‘Surely this Man was the Son of God!’…

 

What goes down, must come up!

10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

I remember the first  computer we ever bought. It was a ZX 48k Spectrum. What an awesome piece of technology! You had to load the different games and programmes from a cassette tape, which took 4 or 5 minutes sometimes and would often need 3 or 4 attempts to actually get it to work. The noise it made when the programmes were loading was loud and annoying, but it was such an amazing thing to have. Learning how to master what now seems such basic technology, was a simple enough task, especially for me and my sister. We were young, which for some obscure reason that I still haven’t figured out, gives you a massive advantage when it comes to figuring out how to use computers.

In the years that have passed since that landmark event in the world of home computing, the advancements that have been are quite staggering! The level of complexity that exists today is such that it really does take a lot for a person to actually know what you’re doing. The result of this is that most of the time, computers are rarely used to a tenth of their potential. If only we had the understanding to use the technology we already possess properly, the things that we could do would improve our lives no end!

On Sunday at CGC Chelmsford, we had a quite wonderful baptism service. There were six candidates, each one with their own story of how Jesus had set them free from the alienation of sin, by bringing them back into right relationship with God, through the power of his atoning death at Calvary. To hear those young people speak about their lives have been transformed by being in relationship with the Son of God, reminded me of the beginning of my own Christian life! The earth shattering revelation that God was so gracious to allow me to see, forever changing my understanding of this world and beyond.

One of the girls, shared in her testimony about how her life had been an absolute mess. She had gotten into drugs, alcohol, numerous bad relationships and had suffered with mental illness, before Jesus had broken through the darkness that surrounded her and set her free from the chains that bound her. It was so beautiful to listen as she described that, because of the death that Christ had died, she could be forgiven of her sins and have the chance to live a life free from the pain and misery of Sin’s mastery over her. As I listened to her story, I began to realise that it was a tale I had heard so many times before. It’s the gospel in its rawest form: Jesus died that he might pay the penalty for our sins. Jesus is the lamb of God, slain from the foundation of the world, destined to bring humanity back from the jaws of death. It was in his death that he paid all our debts, the debt that we could never have hoped to be able pay back for ourselves. What Christ achieved at Calvary is the cure to the sickness that humanity had been infected with at Eden. This is the good news that we have been sent to proclaim. Well at least that’s half of it.

It suddenly became very clear to me in that moment, that the gospel is not only about Jesus’ death, it’s also about his resurrection! The good news is not simply that Christ died to take away our sin, it’s that in his resurrection, we have been given the ability to leave that whole sinful existence behind and walk in newness of life! It says in Romans 5:10:

For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

The life that we lived before we came into a saving union with Jesus Christ, was all about weakness and our inability to overcome in our own strength. But we have been saved from that state of being now, as we have received the life of Jesus, with all of his strength, grace, love and forgiveness! We have a limitless supply of heavenly power, which is ours to live from.

The tragedy is however, like the technology we have, which goes largely unused, it seems that for many of us, we do not appreciate the extent of what we can achieve when we live up to the full potential of what it means to be in Christ. We have not only been saved from our sin, we have been given the ability to continually overcome the power of sin. We are no longer subject to the tyranny of our weakness and the fallen desire to commit such awful acts selfishness! We have become vessels of the divine life of God, walking, talking examples of the resurrection. Whenever it seems that our circumstances have over come us, we have the ability to rise again, by tapping into the heavenly technology and using its potential capability. We can shine in times of trouble, acting as a beacon of hope to others who have yet to see the amazing beauty of God’s saving grace.

For each of us, life will continue to test and to stretch us. We will be tempted; we will fail; we will feel as though we have let our saviour down and as though we have been beaten, but the resurrection will always be at work within us, lifting us from the depths of where we find ourselves and back up into the heavenly places, where we are destined to be seated with God.

My prayer is that we begin to learn how to use this amazing gift that we have been given! That we would walk in the power of the Holy Spirit, so that we may see the name of Jesus glorified through mighty acts of power, but also through acts of forgiveness and love. Let us each begin to walk in the fullness of the resurrection, because that is the whole truth of the gospel.

BREATHE with me!

When you work in the recovery community, you can be certain of a few things. Mostly, people don’t often make it. It’s very sad when you actually look at the statistics, how few people ever seem to get free from drug addiction and go on to live healthy, productive lives. What’s even sadder, is that the statistics are often false, which means that, in reality, far fewer people make it than we are told. During my time working with Teen Challenge, I would say it’s no overestimate to say that I must have seen somewhere between five to six hundred people come through the doors of their rehab centres, but I would be lucky to be able to name 50 of those people who are now drug free. What I am not so lucky to be able to tell you is that I could almost definitely name 50 of that 600, that are dead. It happens so often that, by now, you would think that it would become easy; that in some way your heart would begin to harden to the truth of what is a very real occupational hazard for the hard drug user. However, this is far from the case, as I was reminded again last night when scrolling through my news feed on Facebook, I was confronted with the tragic news that a lovely and yet very troubled friend, who walked out of rehab six months ago, had been found dead after overdosing on heroin. The pain is made so much more real by the fact that my story could have ended the same way, if not for the grace of God. For an addict, using is as natural as breathing. I was blessed with an opportunity to get help, which allowed me a way out of the immediate danger of my addiction. I found a way to keep breathing, despite the journey towards death that I was sailing on. My friend carried on down the road of addiction, trying to deal with his problems as best he could, until he just didn’t have the strength to keep breathing.

Breathing, a simple action that none of us ever think about, but instinctively, we all engage in  and without which, we wouldn’t survive for more than about 5 minutes. Breathing; breathing is something that comes so easily to us in the physical sense, no one has to teach us how to do it, we are just programmed to suck in oxygen and expel Co2. It’s amazing when you think about it because the process is such an integral piece of our planet’s eco system. The trees and the plants need Co2 to breathe and so we feed them with what we breathe out. The upshot of that is that the plants and trees breathe out oxygen and the cycle continues. Breathing is such a key part of, not just our survival, but the ongoing well being of everything and everyone around us.

 

My wife and I have been attending an amazing Church for the last 6 months now. It took us a while to feel like it was home, but we are happy to say that we now feel like we belong to a family at CGC Chelmsford. Recently, the Church unveiled a new model of discipleship, which has been developed by the awesome Nigel Langford, but was originally conceived of by our new Senior Leaders; the very wonderful and beautiful pairing of Nicki & Pete Simms. It’s called ‘BREATHE’ and part of the reason it seems to have taken such a strong hold of people’s imaginations, is because there probably couldn’t be a more apt analogy to describe what the Christian life looks like. The word BREATHE acts as an acrostic for the different principles that the model promotes.

BLESS 

RELATE

EAT

ABIDE

TELL

HEAR

ENGAGE 

Each of these seven activities are designed to bring the community of God into a deeper understanding of who there are in Christ, whilst actively bringing the real, living person of Jesus into the lives of those we interact with.

We need to be eat, sleep and meet Jesus, everyday and in every way. So that we are able to BLESS the world, with no prior agenda, simply because it’s an expression of who we are. We need to be able to RELATE to the people that we meet, because Christ became one of us in order to identify himself with the broken and those in need of the healing power of the gospel. We should EAT with others, celebrating our love for them through hospitality, as we remember that the only reason we can truly love, is because God first loved us.

The disciple of Christ is not only a follower of Christ, they are a dependent of Christ, because we live, BREATHE and find our being in Him. We can and should ABIDE in Christ, because he is the vine, the place from where we draw all our strength, the place where we find grace in times of need.

We need to TELL our story; the story of the people of God! About how in our weakness and brokeness, we find a saviour, who saw passed all our fears and failures, choosing instead to give us his life in order that we might become everything that God intended for us to be. We need to have the ears to HEAR what the Spirit of God is saying to us now, in our generation and in every social circle that we become a part of. We want God to touch our minds, our hearts, our wills by hearing and applying the word of God to our lives.

And we need to ENGAGE with a world which is so in need of a fully mature and life bringing Church, who have abandoned themselves completely to the will of God and the mission he has given us to spread the good news, that God so loved the world, that he was prepared to offer up his only Son, that through the cleansing power of the Cross and the life giving miracle of the resurrection, He might once again fully ENGAGE with us, through the living and active presence of His Spirit. We need to BREATHE, because when we do, we bring life to the world, we bring light to the world. When we BREATHE, not only are we at the peak of being alive, but everyone around us can feel the difference.

For my friend, may God rest his soul. He no longer had the strength to carry on and I grieve for his loss, because I miss his presence in the world, but I also rejoice, because he now abides with Christ. However, I feel a genuine inspiration  to allow God to mould me through the application of these principals. I want to BREATHE, so I can see my family saved. I want to BREATHE, so I can see the community I live in transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit. I want to BREATHE and see Chelmsford ablaze with the fire of the gospel, as people, young and old, male and female, of every colour and culture, come together and celebrate the goodness of a God whose grace is sufficient to redeem and transform all. I want to BREATHE, so I can see a culture that is so full of the love of God, that people are prepared to lay down their dreams of self satisfaction and come together with one purpose, to make this nation a place where everyone is valued, loved, honoured, accepted and respected. Where people are not seeking our own glory, but want to see the blazing light of God’s glory eclipsing everything.

If you’re tired and in need of divine energy… BREATHE. If you want to grow and mature into the things of God…BREATHE. If you want to see your community touched by the presence of Jesus, that you will bring through the presence of the Holy Spirit, that dwells within your heart by faith…BREATHE!!!!!

You know in the book of Acts, chapter 2, it says:

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

The word that Luke uses to describe the Spirit is the Greek word Pneuma. It’s the same word that the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) uses in Genesis 2, where it says that God breathed his life into Adam. The Spirit is quite literally the breath of God. When God BREATHES, the whole church is filled with the explosive power of the Spirit, which, within 300 years, had overturned the most powerful military machine the world has ever known, with the followers of Jesus filling ever corner of the Roman Empire. When God BREATHES all heaven breaks loose.

Now Church, let’s go do likewise… and BREATHE!!