Straight to the Heart

In the mid-1990s, I spent a year working as an evangelist in Paris. I was passionate, determined and hard-working, but I wasn’t very fruitful. Looking back, I had far too much confidence in myself and placed far too little value on God’s commitment to the local church. By the time I limped back home to England, I had only seen two or three individuals give their lives to Jesus in the course of a whole year.

Last Sunday was altogether different. I was back in Paris to minister for the first time in fifteen years, having learned some hard lessons in the meantime about the limits of my own strength. I spent the Saturday training the small Newfrontiers church plant in the city to share the Gospel more effectively with Parisians, and laid bare my own past failure and the importance of following Jesus with humility and faith. Then, on the Sunday morning, I preached the Gospel at a guest service to which the fifty-strong church had managed to bring around ten unbelieving friends. At the end of the sermon, more people responded to the Gospel than had done so during the course of my whole year in the mid-1990s. That’s the difference it makes when we confess our own weakness and learn to minister in the power of the Holy Spirit through Christ’s Church.

I’ve spent the past few days reflecting on the lessons I should draw from the events of last weekend. I’ve been talking to the God who can achieve more through us in a day than we can on our own in a year. As I have reflected, I have found myself inspired by a Christian writer who lived and died over two centuries ago.

John Fletcher of Madeley was a Swiss former-soldier who was deeply affected by John Wesley and Methodism. For a while, Wesley planned to name him as his successor as the leader of Methodism, but Fletcher died aged only 55 whilst Wesley was still very much alive. Yet when someone asked the French philosopher Voltaire to name someone who truly followed Jesus, he immediately pointed to John Fletcher of Madeley. So what was it that Fletcher did to arouse such admiration?

First, John Fletcher knew that God only uses people as much they value the local church. Many of my errors in Paris in the 1990s were based on my pursuing a ’Lone-Ranger Christianity’ which ignored God’s People as a whole. John Fletcher didn’t fall for that error. Although he was offered great leadership positions in colleges and synods, he poured out his life into one local church. From 1760 until his death in 1785, he pastored a parish church in the town of Madeley in Shropshire, convinced that the way to reach a nation was to build a vibrant local church.

Second, John Fletcher knew that God only uses people as much as they confess their own weakness. Back in the 1990s in Paris, I had yet to learn the lesson of 2 Corinthians 12, that God only pours out the fullness of his grace on our lives when we first admit our total weakness without him. Fletcher learned this lesson early on in his Christian life, and ministered so fruitfully because he was filled with the Holy Spirit each new day.

I’m still reeling from my vision last weekend of what a difference it makes when we stop relying on our own strength and start trusting in the power of the Holy Spirit as he works through a local church. I want to encourage you to join me in praying this prayer of John Fletcher of Madeley as you ask God to work through your own life today:-

“Lord, I stand in need of oil. My lamp burns dimly. It is more like a smoking flax than a burning and shining light. Oh, quench it not, raise it to a flame!

I want a ‘power from on high’; I want penetrating, lasting ‘unction of the Holy One’; I want my vessel full of oil; I want a lamp of heavenly illumination, and a fire of divine love burning day and night in my heart; I want a full application of the blood which cleanseth from all sin, and a strong faith in thy sanctifying word.

In a word, Lord, I want a plenitude of thy Spirit … I do now believe that thou canst and wilt thus baptise me with the Holy Ghost and with fire; help me against my unbelief; confirm and increase my faith. Lord I have need to be thus baptised by thee, and I am straightened till this baptism is accomplished.

Righteous Father, I hunger and thirst after thy righteousness; send thy Holy Spirit of promise to fill me herewith, to sanctify me throughout, and to seal me completely to the day of eternal redemption. Pour out thy Spirit on me till the fountain of living waters springs up abundantly in my soul, and I can say in the full sense of the words, that thou livest in me, and that my life is hid with Christ in God.

To thee, the first and the last, my Author and my end, my God and my all, be the praise and the glory forever and ever, Amen.”

Let’s pray that the same kind of prayers as John Fletcher of Madeley. It’s the kind of praying which helps us to achieve more with God in a day than we could on our own in a year.

 John Fletcher of Madeley (1729-1785)