Straight to the Heart

Yesterday I began to celebrate the launch of volumes 6 and 7 of the “Straight to the Heart” series of devotional commentaries on Friday 1st July. I posted the first chapter of “Straight to the Heart of Romans” to give you a sneak preview. Today I’m continuing by posting the opening chapter of “Straight to the Heart of Moses”. This is the volume which covers some of the most ancient books in the Bible - Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy - but as you’ll see, the message of those books is as relevant today as it ever was in the Egyptian desert.

INTRODUCTION: GOD WANTS TO BE SEEN THROUGH HIS PEOPLE

“Then the Lord said: ‘I am making a covenant with you. Before all your people I will do wonders never before done in any nation in all the world. The people you live among will see how awesome is the work that I, the Lord, will do for you.” (Exodus 34:10) 

God is invisible. That’s a problem. It was a problem in ancient Egypt and it’s still a problem today. In a world where people tend to worship what they can see and feel and taste and touch, an invisible God is all too easy to ignore.

Take, for example, John Lennon’s boast to a reporter in March 1966 that “We’re more popular than Jesus now”. Although many Christians found his tactless comment quite offensive, it was difficult for them to deny the raw facts behind his claim. The Beatles had just held the largest music concert in human history, filling a New York City stadium with 55,000 screaming fans. In the nine days since the release of their new album they had sold 1.2 million copies in America alone. In contrast five weeks later, ‘Time Magazine’ ran a cover story which asked the provocative question “Is God Dead?” Quoting from a spoof obituary, it speculated from the shrinking congregations of most Western churches that: “God, creator of the universe, principal deity of the world’s Jews, ultimate reality of Christians and most eminent of all divinities, died late yesterday during major surgery undertaken to correct a massive diminishing influence.” That’s the basic problem: Even a visible human can draw more worship than an invisible God. 

Got that? Then you are ready for the books which Moses wrote in the desert. The Pentateuch (the word is simply Greek for five-volumed story) recounts the invisible God’s master plan to make himself seen. More glorious than the gods of Egypt; more powerful than the gods of Canaan; more satisfying than the gods of the twenty-first-century Western world – the invisible God would be seen through his People.  

Another book in this series covers volume one of the Pentateuch, Genesis, in which the Lord began to make himself visible. Paul reflects on those early chapters in Romans 1: “What may be known about God is plain to [all people], because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Yet because humans sin and close their eyes to this revelation, the Lord executes a plan which makes him impossible to ignore. He chooses Abraham and his family to make the rulers of the nations exclaim that “God is with you in everything you do”, and “Can we find anyone like this man, one in whom is the Spirit of God?” The great finale of Genesis sees him moving the seventy members of Abraham’s family to Egypt with a missionary calling to make him visible to greatest superpower nation of their day. Sure enough, many Egyptians are saved through Israel’s God, and the curtain falls for a three-hundred-year-long interval before the start of volume two. 

Exodus chapter one therefore comes as a colossal disappointment. The Egyptians are still worshipping their idols as before, and have so oppressed Abraham’s family that their faith in Yahweh starts to fail. The distant promises of Israel’s patriarchal past are so at odds with the painful realities of the present that the Hebrews are either worshipping their invisible God in private or else giving up on him entirely to serve the bold, brash and visible gods of the Egyptians they were sent to save. By the time Moses challenges Pharaoh to let God’s People go, the Lord has become so invisible that Pharaoh sneers, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go.” The scene is set for the greatest showdown of the Old Testament. The invisible God is about to be seen through his People.

In Exodus 1 to 18 the Lord displays that he is God the Saviour, laughing at overwhelming odds to free his down-and-out Hebrews from the stranglehold of slavery. In Exodus 19 to 40 he reveals that he did this because he is God the Indweller, who brought them to Mount Sinai in order to camp among them in his Tabernacle home. This leads into the message of Leviticus that he is God the Holy One who wants to be seen through his Holy People and, when they refuse to live up to this calling in Numbers, into the revelation that he is God the Faithful One as he leads and protects them for forty years in the hostile desert. In Deuteronomy he displays that he is God the Covenant Keeper, who remains true to the promises he made to their fathers even when they fail him and provoke him to anger. The Lord wants to be seen through his People, and Moses tells us that nothing can thwart him in his plan. 

I have written this book because God still pursues the same strategy with us as he did in the pages of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In a world where ‘The Beatles’ are still Googled more often than ‘Jesus’, God wants to be seen through his People. In a world which still echoes with the cry of Psalm 42 – “My foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’” – God wants to be seen through his People. In a world which largely ignores the true yet invisible God, we must not skim read these books as if they were written for somebody other than ourselves.

I want to bring the pages of the Pentateuch to life for you, so that you can be like the Hebrews who “saw the great power the Lord displayed … and put their trust in him.” I want to help you reveal the invisible God to those around you, so that they exclaim like the foreigners in the Pentateuch that “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all other gods”.  

So let’s journey through the pages of the Pentateuch together, learning how the Lord wants to use us to capture the attention of the world. The same invisible God who was seen through the Israelites has not changed his strategy today. It is three and a half thousand years since Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but God still wants to be seen through his People.

You can read more sample chapters by visiting www.philmoorebooks.com

Books available at www.amazon.co.uk and all good book stockists!

Friday 1st July sees the launch of volumes 6 and 7 of the “Straight to the Heart” series. It’s all very exciting.

For loyal blog-followers, I’m posting an insider’s sneak preview of the opening chapter of “Straight to the Heart of Romans”. I hope you enjoy this first chapter. I think I enjoyed writing this book more than any other in the series, and am more convinced than ever that the message of this most missional of letters holds the answer to so many of the questions facing us today. Enjoy!

INTRODUCTION: THERE’S A NEW KING IN TOWN

“Paul, a servant of … Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 1:1&4)

Paul’s letter to the Romans is not just the longest surviving letter from the ancient world. It was also the most dangerous. It was written to a city where a murderer built his reign on the corpses of his rivals. Ten years later, because of the message of Romans, Paul’s own corpse would be added to his ever-growing pile.

The Emperor Nero had come to the throne in October 54AD when his mother assassinated his step-father, the Emperor Claudius. She had heard rumours that Claudius was about to disinherit Nero in favour of his son from a previous marriage, so she persuaded court officials to poison him before he could. Nothing must stand in the way of her sixteen-year-old son’s aspirations to the throne.

Nero quickly followed his mother’s example and made murder the hallmark of his insecure reign. Only weeks after becoming the most powerful ruler in the world, he consolidated his position by poisoning his step-brother. In the years which followed, he murdered his mother, two of his wives, and any nobleman who posed a threat. The Roman historian Suetonius tells us that Nero “showed neither discrimination nor moderation in putting to death whoever he pleased on any pretext whatever.” That’s why when Paul wrote from Corinth to the Christians at Rome in the spring of 57AD, his letter was as dangerous as throwing a flaming torch into a room filled with gunpowder.

Paul claimed that there was one true King and that it wasn’t Nero. Many of us miss this because we skim over Paul’s choice of words in his opening verses, but three key words cannot have failed to capture the attention of his original Roman readers.

First, he used the Greek word euangelion, which means gospel. This was a technical word used by the Caesars themselves to proclaim the news that they had fathered an heir or had won a great victory on the battlefield. An inscription in the ruins of the Greek city Priene which dates back to 9BC declares that “When Caesar appeared he exceeded the hopes of all who received the gospel … The birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the gospel regarding him for the world.” Paul therefore uses the word euangelion as a deliberate challenge to Caesar’s vain boast. The real Gospel was not the good news of Rome regarding Nero, but “the gospel of God … regarding his Son.”

Second, Paul used the word kurios, or Lord. This was the word used by the translators of the Old Testament into Greek to translate God’s name Yahweh, but it was also a title which the Roman Emperors used of themselves. One of Nero’s officials illustrates this by referring to him as the Kurios in Acts 25:26, so Paul’s letter told the Romans a dangerously different story. He announced the reign of “Jesus Christ our Lord” and promised in Romans 10:9 that “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Kurios,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

Third, Paul used the word christos, meaning Christ or Messiah. This was the word used in the Greek Old Testament to refer to King David’s heir who would one day take his throne and establish God’s Kingdom which would last forever. Daniel 7 had even prophesied that this Messiah would face up to the iron-toothed Roman Empire and destroy it along with its boastful ruler. Now Paul claimed that this Messiah had come: Jesus of Nazareth. He was telling the Romans there was a new King in town.

Stop for a moment and think how risky that was. Jesus had been dragged before a Roman judge under the charge that “he opposes payment of taxes to Caesar and claims to be Christ, a king.” When the Roman judge hesitated, Jesus’ enemies reminded him that “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.” The judge had therefore ordered that Jesus be crucified by a team of Roman soldiers, wearing a mocking crown of thorns and under a sign which told everyone what Rome thought of his claim to be “the King of the Jews”. Now Paul was claiming that God had raised this same Jesus to life, and in doing so had revealed him as the true Lord and King of the universe.

Nero was Emperor because the Praetorian Guard had supported him when he stood over the dead body of his adoptive father. Paul responded that Jesus was the true King because God had supported him when he raised his dead body back to life. Nero’s first act as Emperor had been to deify Claudius and claim to be divi filius, Latin for the son of a god. Paul responded that it was actually Jesus who “through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God.” This threat was not lost on Paul’s enemies, who accused him of “defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.”

Paul begins his letter to the Romans by telling them that the new King saves, both objectively and in day-to-day experience (chapters 1 to 5 and 6 to 8). He then settles the conflict between Jewish and Gentile Christians by explaining to both groups that the new King has a plan (chapters 9 to 11). Next, in light of this, he gets specific about what it means for both groups to accept that the new King is Lord (12:1 to 15:13). Finally, he outlines his plans to preach the Gospel across the Western Mediterranean and warns his Roman readers that the new King is advancing (15:14 to 16:27).

That’s why we mustn’t view Romans as a theological treatise which calls people to make a private response to an offer of personal salvation. Nero’s ambassadors did not cross the Empire to encourage his subjects to experience the benefits of choosing him as their Lord. They simply announced that Nero was Emperor, whether their hearers liked it or not, and that they needed to submit to his rule or face the deadly consequences. In the same way, Paul wrote this letter and sent it into Nero’s backyard to proclaim that Jesus Christ was Lord, and they needed to surrender. Nero could execute Paul ten years later in Rome as one of the last desperate acts of his disintegrating reign, but he couldn’t resist his all-conquering message. Even today, when people read Romans, they discover that King Jesus really is Lord and that his plan to save all nations is nearing its grand finale.

So let’s get ready to experience the message of Romans for ourselves. Whatever the world may have told us and whatever false gospels we may have believed, it is time for us to experience God’s Gospel concerning his Son. It is time for us to wake up to what it means when Paul tells us that there is a new King in town.

You can read more sample chapters by visiting www.philmoorebooks.com

Books available at www.amazon.co.uk and all good book stockists!

Churches aren’t perfect. If you haven’t worked that out yet, then stick around church long enough and you will. Churches are only as perfect as the repentant sinners that Jesus uses to build them. And let you down they certainly will.

Don’t get me wrong. As a church leader, I’m anything but complacent about this. God saves people with messy lives and then starts ironing out the wrinkles and removing the mucky stains. He didn’t just send his Son to die and rise again to free us them the hellish penalty of sin, but also to deliver us from the enduring power of sin. He did it, in the words of Ephesians 5:26-27, “to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”

In the meantime, if you have been disappointed by people in your church, or if you know your actions have made you a disappointment to others, then I want to encourage you with a few words which were first published as the opening chapter to a book I dedicated to Queens Road Church, Wimbledon, when it was published at the end of last year. Whatever your own experience of the Church - God’s work in progress - I hope it helps you to see it with the same eyes as the apostle Paul. I hope it helps you to See God At Work Amidst The Mess:-

“I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Corinthians 1:4)

Two of my relatives are former church leaders who have stepped out of ministry and turned their backs on the Church. If you heard their stories, you probably wouldn’t blame them. They saw church life at its worst and the disappointment crushed their spirits. Someone once said, “To dwell above with saints we love, well that will be such glory; but to dwell below with saints we know, now that’s a different story!” If you have ever found hurt instead of healing as part of a local church, then you will know that it takes more than a sense of humour to survive.

That’s why the first verses of 1 Corinthians are so surprising and so challenging. Paul doesn’t begin his letter with complaint or rebuke or disappointed finger-pointing. Instead, he tells the wayward Corinthians that “I always thank God for you.”

Hold on a minute. Always thank God for you?! Always thank God for the sinful bunch of rebels who had betrayed his trust in Corinth? Thank God for the church which was riddled with division, pride and puffed-up human wisdom? Thank God for Christians who were suing one another in the law-courts and shocking even their non-Christian neighbours with their acts of sexual perversion? Who were disorderly in worship, dishonouring the gifts of the Spirit, and drunk at the Lord’s Supper? Who were led astray by false teachers and had started doubting the reality of Jesus’ resurrection? How on earth can Paul begin his letter by telling the Corinthians that “I always thank God for you”? He explains in the second half of the verse: “because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.”

I am not very good at Magic Eye pictures. Frankly, they look like a jumbled-up mess to me. My wife, on the other hand, can do strange things with her eyes and can always see a beautiful 3D picture hidden behind all the mess. Paul did the same when he looked at the sinful church at Corinth. Instead of feeling angry and giving up in disillusion, Paul saw God’s grace at work amidst the mess.

Paul wasn’t just a wishful thinker. He didn’t try to pretend that the Corinthians were doing better than they really were. “I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches,” he tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:28, and his intense concern is what makes these two letters so passionate. He looked sin full in the face within the messy church at Corinth, but then chose to focus his eyes on God’s gracious 3D picture. He learned to dwell on God’s grace more than he did on human failure, and he let the truth of the Gospel save his heart from disappointment.

The Gospel reminded Paul of God’s work in the past, and this more than offset the bitter pill of the present. Every single one of those believers had once been dead in their sins and enemies of God, until God’s grace sought them out and raised them to life through his Spirit. They had not become church members because Paul convinced them it might help them to pray a sinner’s prayer, as Paul stresses by filling these opening nine verses with a series of passive verbs. They had been called by God’s initiative, sanctified through the shed blood of Jesus, and given grace in spite of their sin. They may look like a sorry bunch of washed-up, has-been Christians, but in truth they had been enriched through the Gospel. Paul had learned to focus on God at work amidst the mess, and he refused to write off anyone whom the Lord had written in.

The Gospel also reminded Paul of God’s promises for the future. He must have felt punch-drunk when he listened to Chloe, Stephanas and a long line of other visitors with bad news from Corinth, but one great fact kept him buoyant through it all. “God, who has called you … is faithful,” he rejoices in verse 9, confident that this means “he will keep you strong to the end.” The same God who had called the Corinthians to follow him in the past would also keep them following him right until the end, because human unfaithfulness does not nullify God’s faithfulness. That’s what stopped Paul from giving up at the start of 55AD, from giving up in the spring when his emergency visit ended in heartbreak, and from giving up in the autumn when he wrote to them again. Ultimately, it was because Paul kept sight of God’s future grace for the Corinthians that he won them to repentance and helped them to see it too.

The Gospel also helped Paul to see God’s work in the present. Fault-finding is easy but grace-spotting requires faith. Paul needed it to see God’s fingerprints at Corinth, still at work amidst the mess. In spite of their sin, the Corinthians were still calling on the name of the Lord Jesus, and no one ever does that but for the working of God’s grace. Compared to their out-and-out paganism less than five years earlier, the changes to their speech and knowledge were living proof that the Gospel had saved them. Even the disorderly way in which they exercised the gifts of the Spirit bore testimony to the fact that God was present in their midst and had not given up on them. It is easy to focus on the negatives and disappointments, but those who understand the Gospel can see God at work in the midst of the mess.

Magic Eye pictures may not come naturally to you, but make sure that you see the 3D picture of God’s grace in the Church. If you don’t, you will find yourself complaining, church-hopping, and falling out of love with the Bride for whom Christ died. Your heart will eventually grow cold towards God’s People, and your joy in Christian ministry will begin to falter and die.

But if seeing God at work could give Paul strength to love, persevere and give thanks for the troublesome Corinthians in 55AD, then it is more than able to give us strength to cope with our own setbacks and disappointments today. I am amazed at how Paul won back the church at Corinth when they realised that he was more aware of God’s grace than he was of their failure. I am still amazed at the potential released in churches today whenever people learn to see God at work amidst the mess.

Last week I took a very special guest away on holiday with my family. I needed to be refreshed spiritually as well as physically, so I took the biography of one of Wimbledon’s most famous residents with me. Converted at his home on the south side of Wimbledon Common, walking distance from my own house, William Wilberforce took up the fight against slavery and persevered till it was abolished.

After he was elected as an MP, he brought his first bill to abolish the slave trade to the British House of Commons in 1789. He delivered what was hailed as one of the greatest speeches in parliamentary history, and looked poised to succeed, but his enemies regrouped and managed to sideline the bill into committee for two whole years. During that time, a general election returned a much more conservative House of Commons against the backdrop of the French Revolution, and by the time he finally forced a vote on his bill in 1791 he was defeated by 163 votes to 88.

Undeterred, William Wilberforce published a best-selling pamphlet exposing the horrors of slavery, and reintroduced his bill in 1792. His speech was hailed by colleagues as “the greatest eloquence ever displayed in the House”, and he managed to pass it by 230 votes to 85. However, his enemies inserted the word ‘gradually’ into the bill to make it toothless, and the House of Lords threw it into committee and refused to even vote on it. He was defeated again in 1793, 1794 and 1795, after which his closest ally died a broken man. William Wilberforce, however, resolved to persevere. John Wesley had written to him only days before his death to urge him: “Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils; but if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them stronger than God? Oh, be not weary of well-doing!”

In 1796, Wilberforce came very close to victory and had a big enough majority to outlaw the slave trade for good. However, on the evening of the vote a new Italian opera came to London, and five or six of his supporters ducked out of Parliament to watch it. When his bill was defeated by only four votes, he simply wrote in his diary: “Enough at the Opera to have carried it. Very much vexed and incensed at our opponents.” He was either a very patient man or else the master of understatement.

William Wilberforce was defeated in 1797, in 1798 and 1799, and was so discouraged that he didn’t even propose his annual bill for the few years which followed. He resumed in 1804 and got his law passed in the House of Commons, but the House of Lords refused to ratify it. In 1805 his bill fared even worse, and was defeated by a resurgence of his enemies within the House of Commons. Finally in 1807 he succeeded in passing his bill banning the British slave trade through both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The superpower which had led the way in the slave trade was now committed to eradicating its curse from the seven seas.

What was it that gave Wilberforce the courage to persevere against failure after failure in the face of bitter and determined opposition? He wrote in his diary that “I confess to you, so enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did its wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for the abolition … Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition.” He shared the secret of his dogged perseverance in one of his books in 1797: “Accustom yourself to look first to the dreadful consequences of failure; then fix your eye on the glorious prize which is before you; and when your strength begins to fail, and your spirits are well nigh exhausted, let the animating view rekindle your resolution, and call forth in renewed vigour the fainting energies of your soul.”

If you are part of Queens Road Church - the church I lead in south-west London - then join me in making William Wilberforce’s thoughts your own. We have many obstacles ahead as we love Jesus and live his mission in our sinful city, but God has called us, God has promised us, God empowers us, and God will give us the victory. The dreadful consequences of failure are so dire for our friends and neighbours in London, and for the nations we can reach together, that we must never, never, never give up.

And if you are a believer in Wilberforce’s God, but not in Wimbledon, then join us in making William Wilberforce’s thoughts your own too. Wherever you live, and whatever God has called you to, the God who saved and emboldened Wilberforce to push through to victory comes alongside you as you read this, and encourages you: “Don’t give up!”

It’s been a fantastic weekend to live in London. Over a billion pairs of eyes all around the world have been fixed on the church a few miles from my house where Prince William married his long-term girlfriend Kate Middleton. After an incredible day of pomp, pageantry and parties, they are now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

The highlight of the whole royal wedding for me was the moment when Kate finished her walk down the aisle and stood next to William. He took one look at his bride and you leant over to encourage her. His words were easy to lip-read: “You look beautiful!” It was a touching moment.

After the wedding, I spent some time reading Psalm 45, the magnificent wedding song which describes the wedding between Jesus and the believers who make up his Church. Although originally written for the marriage of one of the kings of Judah and his foreign bride, the book of Hebrews quotes it in the New Testament and gives a commentary on what it truly conveys. We read in Hebrews 1:8-9 that it is a celebration of the holiness and perfection of Jesus the Bridegroom. It speaks not of the empty pomp and pageantry of a British constitutional monarch, but of the pure power and potency of the mighty King of the universe. It speaks not of a celebrity bride miles away on a television screen, but about you and about anyone else who says yes to Christ’s proposal.

There in Psalm 45 and verse 11, Jesus leans over to you and speaks the equivalent of William’s words to Kate. “The King is enthralled by your beauty,” the Psalmist writes. He declares: “The princess is all glorious on the inside; the clothing she wears is interwoven with gold.”

Jesus wants you to read those words today and to respond with the same evident delight as Kate did when she heard William’s. She didn’t refuse the compliment or try to please him by protesting that she was a commoner unworthy of his love. She didn’t point out her blemishes in a false show of humility. She just accepted his statement that he found her utterly beautiful, both inside and out.

You may protest that Kate is naturally beautiful, whereas there is little in your life which appears worthy of Jesus’ love. That sounds humble, but stop and think what that reaction implies about God’s message of salvation. It means that Sarah Burton, the chief designer at Alexander McQueen, is better at covering blemishes than God is through his Holy Spirit. It means that Sarah Burton’s pricey wedding dress does a better job than the priceless blood of Jesus.

No. When we close our mouths and simply listen to what Jesus tells us, we realise that the Gospel outclasses London’s fashion houses hands down. Because Jesus the Bridegroom has died for your sin and returned from the tomb to bring you new life through the Gospel, he can look at you right now and see the beauty of his holiness dwelling in you.

It’s time to stop protesting and it’s time to start listening. Jesus leans over to you as you read this and tells you, “You look beautiful!”

Now that’s what I call a royal wedding worth shouting about.

Easter was bad news for Mary’s son James. It meant his big brother had been right all along and he had been wrong. Nobody ever likes to admit that.

I’m a younger brother, so I know what it’s like to grow up in the shadow of a big brother, but it was nothing compared to James’ childhood as the younger half-brother of Jesus of Nazareth. Ever felt like you could never attain to the achievements of your brother or sister? Welcome to James’ everyday world. So it’s not all that surprising that James and his other brothers grew up resenting perfect Jesus. John 7:5 tells us that “even his own brothers did not believe in him.” Mark 3:21 tells us that they said “he is out of his mind” and did everything they could to distract him from his ministry.

All things considered, none of that was surprising. But what happened next was.

In the days immediately following the crucifixion of Jesus, his half-brother James performed a U-turn and became one of the most outspoken believers in Christianity. Acts 1:14 tells us that Jesus’ followers “all joined together constantly in prayer … with his brothers.” James had become so convinced that his half-brother was the Son of God that he had persuaded his other brothers to join him in worshipping Jesus as the Messiah. Something amazing had happened which made it very good news that his half-brother had been right and he had been wrong. For all the sudden turnaround, James couldn’t possibly have had a happier Easter.

Jesus had appeared to James after his death on the cross and after his body disappeared from a tomb guarded by a squad of soldiers. James’ close friend Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15 - “What I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve … then he appeared to James.” The facts of Easter changed James’ life completely, and by God’s grace they can change ours too if we consider what he learned.

James found in Jesus’ resurrection complete proof that God had come to earth as a human being. James hadn’t been there in Matthew 12:38-42 when Jesus prophesied to his sceptics that he would die and rise again as irrefutable proof that his teachings were true. He simply heard what Jesus said and knew that all dead men stay dead unless God performs a mighty miracle. It’s really very silly when people say today that they don’t believe the Easter story because dead people don’t come back to life. James knew that as well as we do - but accepted God’s proof when he saw it.

James found in Jesus’ resurrection something worth living his whole life for. If his half-brother’s promises had been true that “I am the Life” and “I have come to give you life to the full”, then nothing in this world could compare to this New Life. James gave away his property to help the poor and became the overall leader of the church in Jerusalem. He led the church in that city for over twenty-five years, defying centuries of Jewish tradition because of his devotion to the risen Jesus. He led Sabbath worship services on Sunday instead of the Jewish Saturday, and stood up to the Jewish authorities by baptising new converts and serving communion as symbols of our death and resurrection with Christ. The rest of James’ life was dominated by one simple fact: He had seen the Lord Jesus risen again, and believed as a result that his Gospel was true.

Ultimately, James found in Jesus’ resurrection something worth dying for. In 62AD the Roman governor Festus died suddenly in office, only weeks after preventing the Jewish high priest from murdering Paul. The priest seized his chance and arrested the leader of the church in Jerusalem, ordering James on pain of death to deny the resurrection of his Lord. When James refused and preferred to be brutally decapitated with a sword, he shouted a testimony to the world which still echoes throughout history. Blaise Pascal attributed his own conversion to Christ to the fact that “I believe witnesses who get their throats cut.” James’ willingness to die in 62AD is still compelling proof that the resurrection accounts are all true.

So if you are not an active follower of Jesus, I want to encourage you this week to have a Happy Easter. Have courage, like James, to perform a U-turn in order to follow the one who died, was buried and rose from the dead as the ultimate proof that he is God in human form.

And if you are a follower of Jesus, I want to encourage you this week to have a Happy Easter too. You will have one by having the same courage as James to live every day of your life in full obedience to the Lord Jesus. As James’ friend Paul puts it at the start of his letter to the Romans:

“Jesus Christ our Lord was declared with power thorugh the Holy Spirit to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead … And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.”

Have a truly Happy Easter!

It doesn’t matter whatever else you think about the BBC. You’ve got to admit they know how to make great documentaries. I thought that David Attenborough’s nature programmes were unbeatable until I watched Professor Brian Cox’s “Wonders of the Universe”.

If you don’t know who Professor Brian Cox is, then imagine that somebody took Patrick Moore’s brain and transplanted it into Vernon Kay’s body. He isn’t just intelligent, having worked at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, but he’s also very cool, having been the keyboard player in the band D:Ream. If you don’t know your music, they’re the band who sang “Things Can Only Get Better”. If you really don’t know your music, you’ll know it as the theme tune which Tony Blair used in his election campaign to become Prime Minister in 1997.

Brian Cox is a worshipper. He may be a humanist, but he’s a better worship leader than most of the people you will find on ”Songs of Praise” on the other channel. He enthuses over the wonders of the universe, captivated by what he sees and infectious in his call for us to praise. “We are all children of the stars,” he enthuses with glistening eyes. “All this was created billions of years ago,” he raves, using a word which would make David Attenborough splutter his coffee. It’s no wonder that Brian Cox worships this way, when the images of space which he presents are completely unrivalled in their pioneering celestial photography. But here’s the really funny thing: The images are state-of-the-art, but the gods he worships are very primitive.

Ur of the Chaldees, perhaps the world’s first great civilisation, was a city which worshipped the moon-god Nanna. Its citizens looked up at the great celestial orb which ruled the night-time and they bowed down in worship to the object which they saw.

Ancient Egypt, the greatest civilisation of the second millennium BC, was a kingdom which worshipped the sun-god Ra. The Egyptians also worshipped the moon but they reserved their greatest praise for the light which ruled the daytime. They were fascinated by the burning, Middle Eastern sun, and built temples and wrote hymns to the flaming star which lies at the heart of our solar system.

The Ancient Greeks, in similar fashion, worshipped the earth-goddess Gaia from whom they believed all terrestrial life flowed. This was simply what people did right across the BC era. They looked at the wonders of the universe and worshipped in wide-eyed wonder. Brian Cox. BC. They’ve got more in common than just their initials.

Yet there was one group of people during the BC era who saw past the wonders of the universe to the wonderful Creator about whom those created bodies testified. The Israelite king David wrote in about 1000BC that “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heart. Their voice goes out into all the earth.” (Psalm 19:1-4). The Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans dubbed the Jews and the Christians atheists because they refused to worship the created things which they themselves worshipped as the wonders of the universe. The Christians said those things were not gods at all. They saw past the the wonders of the universe to worship the God who made them all.

When you spend much of your life looking down a microscope, it’s difficult not to become a bit shortsighted, but the best scientists have always managed to maintain their longer vision. Francis Bacon wrote in the sixteenth century that “It is true that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.”

I love the images Brian Cox has gathered, and I find them making me want to join him in worship, but we mustn’t let him infect us with his forgetfulness towards Francis Bacon’s bigger picture. We must remember what Albert Einstein said that science was truly all about: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.”

So let’s enjoy Professor Brian Cox, and thank God for providing us with such an excited worship leader. But let’s not settle for his worship of sun-gods and moon-gods and earth-goddesses like short-sighted BC men and women. Let’s remember that all of these wonders of the universe are mere details which point to the even more wonderful God who put them to proclaim his glory.

You don’t need to be Albert Einstein to watch your television and find reason after reason to fall down before the Lord in worship.

Last night and the night before, Queens Road Church exploded and then caught fire. Sound pretty dangerous? I think it really is.

If you are part of the church I lead in Wimbledon, south-west London, then you will already know some of the background behind this week’s controlled explosion. If you are not, then you will enjoy this blog anyway, because I’m setting out why we have scattered across south-west London. Although what I share is specific to Queens Road Church, its challenge should resonate far beyond the limits of our city.

We have scattered across south-west London because it is the vision which Jesus set for any local church. He commissioned the first church in Jerusalem by saying in Acts 1:8 that “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Queens Road Church has long been famous in the UK as a place to come and encounter the Holy Spirit. It hasn’t always been as famous as a place from which to scatter as his witnesses.

We have scattered across south-west London because it is the vision upon which Queens Road Church was originally founded. Charles Spurgeon sent one of his students to Wimbledon in 1880 in the midst of a London revival with a challenge that “Near to you at Wimbledon you will find Mitcham and Merton and Morden all needing Gospel work. As soon as you have got your own little church in working order, start something at each of these places … Go and blaze away!” As we establish QRC Local meetings across the London borough of Merton - Wimbledon Village in the north, Morden in the south, Raynes Park in the west and Colliers Wood in the east - we are simply continuing a 131-year-old vision. These little bands of seventy missionaries are each carrying on the great commission which birthed Queens Road Church as part of one of England’s most significant revivals.

We have scattered across south-west London because it is the way that Christians become wholehearted lovers of Jesus. The Christian life was never meant to be a spectator sport, but it all too often is, as people desperately in need of spiritual exercise sit back and watch a handful of tired players. By setting up four QRC Local meetings, everybody gets to play. Last night I was at the Colour House Theatre in Colliers Wood to see this dynamic in play as believers were set on fire. As someone who doesn’t lead worship on a Sunday led worship brilliantly, as people who rarely share publicly prayed out and prophesied, as someone who doesn’t preach on Sundays shared his heart for unreached Londoners, and as people who love the Christian Church in general started loving one another in particular - I saw what the Church was always meant to be. A community of believers who love Jesus and live his mission.

We have scattered across south-west London because it is the best way to care for one another. George Whitefield was probably the most gifted evangelist of the eighteenth century, and saw hundreds of thousands of Englishmen and women converted. However, he didn’t know how to care for them and disciple them, and confessed towards the end of his life that “The seed has fallen by the highwayside. There is scarce any fruit remaining.” John Wesley was less gifted but was far more effective, because he organised his converts into classes (akin to our Life Groups), into societies (larger groups akin to our QRC Locals), and into bands (friendship groups to promote accountability, akin to our Connect Evenings). They were dubbed ‘Methodists’ because of their passion for these organised meetings, but William Beckham observes that these three meetings “turned out to be the primary means of bringing millions of England’s most desperate people into the liberating discipline of Christian faith … Wesley’s effectiveness in harvest was not just at the point of winning converts. After Wesley added his classes, his movement was able to assimilate the converts that were won. This assimilation accounts for the uniqueness of Wesley’s movement.” Queens Road Church has grown by almost 40% across the past year. We have gone local because we want to steward this growth like Wesleys, not like Whitefields.

We have scattered across south-west London because it gives God more glory. We produce some fairly good Sunday meetings, but few of us feel scared or on-the-edge as we do so. Like most Christians, we can find it easy to do church without relying on God. QRC Local meetings aren’t like that at all. Each one of us carries the deep consciousness that what we are doing is destined for failure unless God springs to our aid. As we go, we display the same attitude as Esther when she threw caution to wind for the sake of saving God’s chosen People. We glorify God when we say with her in Esther 4:16, that “If we perish, we perish.” We glorify him when we set out to do what only he can do, because we truly believe that the Holy Spirit gives us power to be God’s witnesses.

Finally, we have scattered across south-west London because it will lead to many more people being saved. Only 7% of Londoners go to church on any given Sunday, and this number drops to 4% for Londoners in their twenties. Simply put, the reason we must scatter across south-west London is that nine out of ten Londoners currently don’t choose to gather to any Christian meetings being held centrally. Last night I was thrilled at the Colliers Wood QRC Local to see a guest who had been dragged there by one of the believers. Whilst he cut her hair in his salon in Tooting, she had told him about Jesus and invited him to come and see Jesus in action on her doorstep. He was the first guest on the first night of QRC Local, but he offers us a taster of what is yet to come. Christianity was never meant to be lived in a quiet corner behind closed doors. We’re scattering across south-west London to make the name of Jesus known.

So if you are part of Queens Road Church, I encourage you to give yourself fully to your QRC Local and to the Life Groups we are establishing in homes across the city. Give yourself to the Connect Evenings in a few days’ time, and to the friendship and accountability which turns steady believers into red-hot disciples.

If you are not part of Queens Road Church, please pray for us on our mission. Don’t copy us in your own church, but seek God for yourself. How can your church explode and catch fire too?

John Wesley saw the equivalent of our QRC Locals and exclaimed: “This is the thing, the very thing we have wanted so long!”