Utumishi Blog

The second day of the Lweza fellowship started before breakfast with Piers preaching – 1 Kings 18:20-40 Will the real God please stand up? We saw that false religion involves:

• A god who is impersonal and silent
• Ritual words and mantras
• Ritual procedures and customs
• Zeal and enthusiasm but without knowledge

It’s powerful because it’s permissive, pluralist and man-centred. A couple of other details in the passage that I’d never noticed before:

1. Elijah wanted the people to ‘come near’ (v30) – presumably because he wanted them to see there was no magic, no hocus pocus going on here (in contrast to the mystery of false religion).
2. Elijah is a man like us. It’s never hit me properly before but Elijah really was an ordinary man just praying ordinary prayers. No fireworks. No secret righteous energy. No special power in him at all. The great miracle of the fire is entirely by God’s sovereign power. Top down. The great miracle of the rain is entirely Yahweh fulfilling his Word.
3. God is interested in our hearts. Their hearts are divided (v21) and God’s great desire is to turn them back to desire him (v37).

After breakfast I led a session on Preaching the Gospel from Matthew. Is Matthew’s Gospel really about the gospel? I’ve become very excited over the last month or two as I see more and more that it really is!

Then Chris Yikii led us through the first step in getting from text to sermon – studying the ‘flesh’ of the passage – working hard, ‘burning candles’, reading, reading and reading again the passage to see what is actually there. It’s not rocket science but time-consuming and easily missed:

1. What does the passage say? Pay close attention to the details, things like tense and whether the pronouns are singular or plural. And don’t run to the dictionary – Bible words have Bible meanings.
2. Why does it say it here? We had an interesting discussion of context. Why is it that in life normally, we are understanding things in context all the time – reading emails and SMSs we don’t read a line out of context; turning on the TV we understand that we are joining a programme half way through and we try to make sense of what sort of programme it is, where we are in it and what’s being said. So why don’t we do that when it comes to the Bible? We seem to a) suspend normal rules of language; b) spiritualise and look for direct words to me; c) seek what we can use as a pre-text for what we want to do or say. When we ignore context there is no longer any control over meaning and the text can mean almost anything.
3. How does it say it? What is the tone, the feel, the emotion. I love this in the Psalms where you get an ‘unnecessary’ “Oh” which just expresses pure desire or longing or amazement.

After lunch, Loots Lambrechts (Preach the Word) took us through a great session looking for the structure of the passage – how does it all fit together? The big thing I got from this – which has really changed the way I look at a passage to preach it – was his insistence on finding the logic of the passage, or, as he put it another way, finding the route down the hillside. This is so helpful. It’s very easy to be like a dragonfly, skimming over the surface of the stream picking out two or three nice truths. A lot of old style evangelical preaching in the UK did that. It’s not exactly wrong but it doesn’t get the flow and force of a passage. It doesn’t see the vital connections, the dynamic, the ‘line through’ and harness that energy. We want to be not dragonflies but fish that get right into the stream and go with the flow of the passage.

Sammy (iServe Africa) finished off the day with an exposition of Matthew 22:15-22. He showed us that the issue was not really taxes to Caesar at all.

1. The conspiracy to silence Jesus
2. The conspiracy is about the Kingdom – Sammy very helpfully put the passage in its wider context in Matthew. The parables preceding the passage (22:28-22:14) are all about the Pharisees resisting and rejecting the kingdom of grace.
3. The conspirators are silenced – guilty as charged – They haven’t given to God what is God’s (cf. 21:34-36), they are seeking to kill God (cf. 22:38), they are left speechless (22:22) and set up for the great condemnation in chapter 23.