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Posts Tagged ‘God’

The Father of Men

Posted in Christian Life, God, Mentoring, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on 11/07/2023| 1 Comment »

There is a lot of talk about fatherhood and masculinity going around these days. Everyone is trying to define what makes or breaks a man. Sometimes it is unfortunate to see women having to define who a man should be. Not that they don’t have a say, especially in a country where most fathers are absent. But I doubt many men respect that. Other times it is men with very questionable backgrounds that take center stage on the issue. Some come across so strongly but you cannot follow them beyond their words. They hide behind keyboards because if you spent a day in their life you’d not really admire them. Unfortunately, some of the men we respect especially within the church never talk about this issue. Our churches also seem to make services and meetings that appeal more to women than they do men. So how do we talk the Gospel to men? How do we excite them to serve and be involved in kingdom work?

Now, if there’s a language that men understand it is that of respect.

One, I think we need to make a difference between men and women in our approach. We also need to accept that for the most part, our churches seem to appeal to women than they do men. We need to ask why? Now, if there’s a language that men understand it is that of respect. If you gave a man a choice between love and respect I believe many would choose respect. Men will walk together because there is respect among them. Not that men don’t need and appreciate love but love is best expressed in respect. We need to remember that as we reach and influence men for the work of the kingdom. There’s also no denying that our fathers influence us as men for good or worse. But the combination of a present father and one worthy of respect makes all the difference. That’s the kind of father that you want to point men to. He’s the kind of saviour that both those who had good fathers need and one for those who never had a present and respectable father. And you know what, the Bible being so balanced presents a Father that appeals to both men and women. Look at these words from Hebrews 12:

9 Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! 10 They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. Hebrews 12 NIV.

The language of discipline and respect is very manly. But before you brand it toxic masculinity look at the one who requires it and its ultimate intention. Like a good father, he’s one worthy of respect and the end goal of his discipline is to make us better. The verses before speak of him treating us as his legitimate and beloved children. The image is, therefore, not one of a father beating his children out of rage. Nor is it of the man who makes ridiculous demands from his little son. He’s also not an absent or indifferent father. Instead like a good father he is involved and seeking to make us better so that we may share in his holiness. If you like he wants us to be respectable men like he is. And because he’s worthy of our respect then we can endure his discipline.

If you like he wants us to be respectable men like he is.

This is the kind of father we need as we wrestle with sin. One we want to listen to because he cares about us and one we respect. He is a man we want to be close to and one we don’t want to disrespect with our sins. Being near him challenges us for the better but not in a way that makes us feel we can never please him. He welcomes the man who never had a father with open arms. He is a friend of the man whose father was present but not involved. He is a helpful resource to the man raised by a single mother who wants to be a better father. He also draws the man who grew up with a good father who knows the value of fatherhood. But this kind of father challenges the men around our churches. He tells them to be better men not only for their sake but also for the young boys growing up around them. He calls the older men to walk with younger men and show them the path of true Christian manhood. But he doesn’t neglect the women either.

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A powerful God with weak methods

Posted in 1 & 2 Corinthians, God, Gospel, Romans, tagged , , , on 05/24/2021| 1 Comment »

The powerful leaders of the world showcase their power by creating big armies, standing behind huge projects and big military investments. One, because they can and also because they’d love everyone else to see what they are capable of. But I think there’s something else that tells them they need to showcase how powerful they are. Perhaps it’s the reality of how fleeting power actually is and the need to enjoy it while it lasts. The big man needs people to see their might and in truth we are all drawn by a true showcase of power. We feel safe with a leader who’s strong and are reassured when we see his big army match infront. Human strength is measured by what we see and the methods at play. Power and wisdom is the true mark of human strength. At times you can even pretend to be powerful if you have the right gadgets. But those who are truly powerful don’t need to always showcase their power.

Our God is truly powerful, he made the heavens and the earth by a word and everything operates by his will. He doesn’t need to lift a finger to make things happen. But when it’s been appropriate to do so he’s proved to be able move mountains, to stop giants and change the course of history. The Bible story tells of a powerful God working for a weak people in impossible situations to save them for himself. So he doesn’t need to showcase his power everytime we demand it. Instead he usually shows his power not by a great show of might but mostly through seemingly weak methods. Here are 3 most powerful methods he uses which from a human eye looks so weak and ineffecctive: the cross, the Gospel and prayer.

The Cross
Think about the cross of Jesus. Nothing shows more weakness than the son of God dying on a wooden cross like a criminal. Actually that’s like the worst thing that can happen to someone who claims to be God’s son and the Lord of the world. Which powerful leader of the world would let his son suffer let alone die if they could rescue them? Humanly speaking you’d doubt the power of this God to help you if he couldn’t save his own child when he needed him most. But the Bible tells us it’s through this weakness that our salvation was born. God used weakness to showcase his greatest power and might at the cross. The power to deal with sin, to defeat Satan, the world and death. At the very center of the story of redemption, the very heart of human history is the weak sign of the cross.

But when it looked most weak, Jesus paid the ransom for our sins and won our eternal salvation. At the cross of Jesus we see God’s power most manifested. In Christ, a man deserted, denied and betrayed by his own is our victory won. At his death our penalty of sin is paid fully. And by his resurrection we are given hope for eternal life as Christ emerges as the firstborn in the new everlasting life. God used what looked so humanly weak for the most powerful act in history. He didn’t bulldoze his way but in weakness he did what seemed impossible. He didn’t call down angels to come showcase his might and force his way. Instead, he sent a man born in weakness to achieve the greatest act of redemption. The weak sign of the cross is the signature of the powerful God of the universe and the message we proclaim.

22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

1 Corinthians 1 NIV.

The Gospel
If you wanted the world to trust in your power and truly fear you you’d never go the Gospel way. I mean what would a bunch of weak disciples who’ve proved to fail so many times accomplish? Jesus wasn’t only entrusting the most important mission of the world to sinful men, he entrusted it to the most unlikely candidates. You ask any expert and that’s a mission bound to fail from the word go. And yet he continues to do so today using preachers and Gospel workers most of whom are uneducated, unqualified, weak and sinful. Why? Because they are just vessels for his life-changing message. It’s him and his word that does the work not them.

When this seemingly weak message takes hold of men it makes them do the impossible. Nothing changes people like the Gospel. Just look at the story of the 12 and see what God did through their witness of the Gospel. Through this message God is winning the world to himself and he’s been doing so all through history. It doesn’t always feel like it’s achieving much, sometimes we actually try to change and re-adapt it but when clearly taught the Gospel does the impossible. God works in unlikely ways, through weak unlikely people with a message that causes more offence than admiration to rescue humanity. I mean it’s a miracle that anyone would be willing to give up everything for the Gospel. But the Gospel captures, captivates and transforms unlikely people to believe and do unlikely things for God. Because the Gospel is God’s power and God at work. 

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.

Romans 1 NIV.

Prayer
One of the main reasons why we struggle so much with prayer is because humanly speaking it’s a very weak strategy. Here I am facing an impossible situation and someone has the audacity to say pray about it? Your friend is ailing in hospital and all you can do is pray? Here’s a deal of a lifetime and first thing you want to do is pray? It doesn’t even sound like a strategy it speaks more of lacking in options and of last resort. And yet there’s nothing more powerful for a believer than to commit themselves in the hands of the Almighty. The history of faith shows God working by prayer to achieve great milestones for the Gospel and intervening in impossible situations for his people.

When God’s people pray they are not saying we have no other option. Actually it’s by prayer that we open our options and access real help from our very able Father. Prayer says I can’t do it but I trust in the one who’s not only able but is available and willing to help us. Praying is calling in the big guns to come to our aid in a war we would otherwise never win on our own. Though seemingly weak, believers have never been able to achieve anything without prayer because without God we can do nothing. Any real Gospel progress has been born of God working through weak people by weak methods like the Gospel and prayer. That’s why we should commit fully to the ministry of the cross, the work of the Gospel by the power of prayer. Because the ministry of word and prayer is the power of God at work. 

1 I love the Lord, for he heard my voice; he heard my cry for mercy. 2 Because he turned his ear to me, I will call on him as long as I live.

Psalms 116 NIV.

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A Kenyan Preacher’s Hobbyhorse (part one)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on 11/20/2013| 2 Comments »

Preaching has become the easiest thing to do in this country, trust me. You can just wake up and pick on something you like and can connect with people, then off you go! It’s a plus if you add just a little bit of charisma… and don’t forget that Hebrew or Greek vocabulary! Some fancy topic will always do the trick.

I think the reason behind this is that we as preachers always want the easy way out. Why should I spend so much time working on a text preparing my sermon? Why should I dare preaching through a book or a chapter or a passage Sunday after Sunday? Especially of the passage is hard to understand! But if ever we are going to see congregations grow into maturity in Christ then the Word of God must be faithfully preached from our pulpits. And that will mean hard work.

The aim of preaching is gospel transformation—in as much as we aim at the hands (get people serving) and the head (knowledge), the main aim really is the heart (transformed into His likeness- maturity). This is really demanding because ‘heart work is hard work.’

But because we don’t want to labour much, what do we do, go for the easiest thing- our hobbyhorses!

Just walk into a Kenyan Church, these are the topics that will most likely be covered throughout the year:

  1. Relationships
  2. Spirit of Excellence- academics, business
  3. Prosperity- possess your possession
  4. Domination (Principles of)
  5. Positioned for Greatness
  6. Money and giving
  7. Spiritual growth
  8. Spiritual warfare
  9. Cults and occults
  10. Mission month- hear stories from missionaries in the field & congregants have that woow feeling!!
  11. Embracing our ‘Kenyanness’ (One love Ke, We are One)
  12. Discipleship; Read the Word more, Pray more, be good (do’s and don’ts)
  13. Leadership
  14. Faith
  15. Restoration, Rebuilding Broken walls!
  16. Moving to the next level… Turning a mess to a message
  17. Wealth Transfer- from the wicked to the righteous
  18. Forgiveness
  19. Spiritual gifts; tongues
  20. Motivation; you can be a better you
  21. Vision- Church Building Projects
  22. Victorious Christian Living
  23. Sowing on wings like an Eagle
  24. The year of Jubilee (this is a big one… but 2013 is coming to end and it isn’t a year of Jubilee really!)

Perfect! That is a two-year preaching calendar for you (thank me later!)

You realise that the emphasis on Christ is less and less. What we hear is more of me-centred preaching rather than Christ-centred preaching. Me (the preacher and the listener) determines what is to be preached… it’s no longer the Word that guides our message but our message determines the scripture we’ll turn to as a back-up to our message!

I am not saying that this isn’t the right thing to do but there’s a danger that when we do this, we set the agenda instead of the Word setting the agenda. In the end, we’re only addressing people’s felt needs & not the most crucial need for a Saviour! And as 1 Cor. 1:23 says

But we preach Christ crucified a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles

Christ crucified… that’s all we’ve got to preach. This isn’t the most appealing message that people wanna hear!

But because we aren’t doing that and we don’t want to be offensive, what happens is that the Bible (Word) is no longer in the driving seat, it’s been relegated to the back-left, or chucked out altogether. There’s a great danger here because a few years down the line, people’s ‘needs’ will have changed, their status improved but still they’ll be impoverished spiritually!

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The Good God: Enjoying Father, Son and Spirit

Posted in Christian Life, Gospel, Theology, Trinity, tagged , , , , , , , on 09/26/2013| 1 Comment »

In this short but rich book, Mike Reeves raises the question ‘What is it that makes the Christian God distinct from any other god- say Allah?’ Our understanding of the Trinity is the key to unlocking this. This doctrine of Trinity has been neglected yet it is core to our Christian belief.

He says “What makes Christianity absolutely distinct is the identity of our God. Which God we worship: that is the article of faith that stands before all others. I can believe in every other aspect of the gospel but if I don’t believe in the triune God, then simply put, I am not a Christian.”

I couldn’t agree more! In our own context, most of us would say we are Christians and we believe in God yet we actually don’t know the God we believe in. If we are to think Christian then we are to start by thinking Trinity! The temptation for us is to sculpt God in our own assumptions; we think He is a single-person God yet the God of the Bible is clearly a triune God- Father, Son and Spirit.

It’s only a clear understanding of the Trinity that will help us not to fall into doctrinal errors such as Arianism: thinking of the Son as being less of the Father and that there was a time when He never existed… or the error of Modalism: we think of God as a single person who takes on different modes or moods- sometimes as Father, other times as Son and still other times as Spirit. The H2O analogy we use is particularly not helpful; “the Father all icy until you warm Him up then He turns into the watery Son, who then vaporizes and becomes the steamy Spirit when you really crank up the heat!!”

What then would be the best way to describe God? Can’t we just say that He is Almighty? Or the Creator? Well, all these are the right attributes of God but in and of themselves are not sufficient. Mike points out that the very first feature is that our God is the Father. This is the God that Jesus, the Son reveals to us. As a Father, He has loved His Son before the creation of the world (John 17:24). This God is love (1 John 4:8). “Before anything else, for all eternity, this God was loving, giving life and delighting in the Son.”

Now, this is some profound truth; that the Father is never without the Son- the Son is the eternal Son, there was never a time when He didn’t exist. The Father loves the Son, the Son is the beloved of the Father and then the Son goes out to be the lover and the head of the Church. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you” the Son says (John 15:9).

 

baptismThe Father’s love for the Son is clearly seen at Jesus’ Baptism, the Spirit descends on Him like a dove and then we hear the Father’s voice “This is My Son whom I love; with Him I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:16-17). The Spirit stirs up the delight of the Father in the Son and the delight of the Son in the Father. In the very beginning, God creates by His Word (the Word that would later become flesh), and He does so by sending out His Word in the power of His Spirit or Breath.

John Calvin once wrote that if we try to think about God without thinking about the Father, Son and Spirit, then ‘only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God.’

Functionally, this is how the Trinity operates:

  • In creation, we see the Father’s love overflowing. Richard Sibbes says, “It is not that God needed to create the world in order to satisfy Himself or become Himself… The Father, Son and Spirit ‘were happy in themselves, and enjoyed one another before the world was’. But the Father so enjoyed fellowship with His Son that He wanted to have the goodness of it spread out and communicated or shared with others. The creation was a free choice borne out of nothing but love.”
  • In Salvation, we see the Son sharing what is His. “No-one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side has made Him known.” (John 1:18) The triune God gives us His very self, for the Son is the Word of God; God doesn’t just tell us about Himself, He gives us Himself.
  • The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of life; He gives us new birth into new life. Not only that but He gives us Himself so that we might know and enjoy Him and so enjoy His fellowship with the Father and Son. The Spirit enlightens us to know the love of God by opening our eyes to see the glory of Christ. Thus, in the Christian life, we see the Spirit beautifying it. Though we are sinful creatures, the Spirit cultivates in us a deepening taste for Christ, the epitome of beauty, the Spirit polishes a new humanity who begin to shine with His likeness.

Our personal and relational God is such that the Son is distinct from the Father and yet is of the very being of the Father and is eternally one with Him in the Spirit.

The theologian Karl Barth wrote: “The tri-unity of God is the secret of His beauty. If we deny this, we at once have a God without radiance and without joy (and without humour!); a God without beauty. Losing the dignity and power of real divinity, He also loses His beauty. But if we keep to this… that the one God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we cannot escape the fact either in general or in detail that apart from anything else God is also beautiful.”

The question now remains: which God will we have? Which God will we proclaim?

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MORE EXPOSITORY PREACHING PLEASE!

Posted in Preaching, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on 09/16/2013| 1 Comment »

Yesterday’s Church service was quite encouraging; not because the preacher had a Rhema word that spoke to my current prevailing situation or because we sung praise and worship until the heavens came down but because there was some faithful Bible teaching from the pulpit! In a country where we get less and less of the Bible being preached but more and more of preachers expressing their own agenda and using the Bible as a back-up, it’s only prudent that we marvel and rejoice when we see the Bible being taught faithfully!

The O.T text was Genesis 11:1-9 (The Tower of Babel) and the N.T text was Matthew 19:1-30 (The Rich Young Ruler). The ongoing series for this month are on ‘Discipleship’ and on this particular Sunday, the topic was ‘Misconceptions of Discipleship.’ The first good thing is that the preacher stuck to the texts given, he didn’t jump about from one thing to another.

From the Genesis passage, there were two main points that were drawn out;

  • Humanity seeking Self-Praise- All men uniting to build a tower whose top reaches the heavens with one aim of making a name for themselves!

This is what man-made religion does; seeking glory and praise for man instead of giving praise and glory to God. It was helpful here for the preacher to draw out some relevant illustrations from the contemporary scene where we see so many false teachers whose aim is nothing but making a name for themselves! The application being we need to be weary of seeking to make a name for ourselves and that every effort we make in trying to ‘reach heaven’ by our own means apart from Jesus Christ are only but futile.

  • Humanity seeking Self-sufficiency & Security- Here, they built a city in order that they won’t be scattered/dispersed in the face of the earth.

The problem with their thinking is that it is exactly in contravention of the command that God had given to ‘go and fill the whole earth.’
They have forgotten that this is the duty of man and now want to have a city of their own where they can be secure from the dispersion. And oh, how often we seek our sufficiency and security from other things apart from God! It could be our finances, our wealth, knowledge, education, family or even church. We easily drift off the purposes God intended for us and form our own goals that we seek to achieve.

He was clear and precise and in 25 minutes or so, he had driven his point home.

Can we have more of this please?

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