How does the image of mission as healing affect the way we understand the mission of God?
So, after a long sabbatical it’s time to resume our Missional Viewpoints series. I almost let this series go, but I still think it’s something worth continuing so it’s time to revisit it and press on further. Just to jog your memory, here’s what I wrote as the brief for this series last Summer:
On the eighth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Eight maids a-milking,
Seven swans a-swimming,
Six geese a-laying,
Five golden rings,
Four calling birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves,
And a partridge in a pear tree
We’re now well into our quick and easy two week series on the Twelve Days of Christmas, following the religious symbolism (according to a piece of Catholic folklore) behind the song. Today, the eight maids a-milking symbolise the eight beatitudes in Matthew’s gospel.
Over July and August, on the blog I’ll be going through a series looking at our definition of mission, and particularly some specific keywords that inform our understanding.
With university work finally out of the way after the final push to get everything finished, and with The Lab beginning to quieten down for the summer, I thought it was about time to get back into blogging. So, in order to become more focused, and to get myself “back into shape” in terms of blogging, I thought it’d be good to work through a fairly simple, but quite interesting summer series.
So today is Blog Action Day – and whilst I haven't really had time to be able to work on a post, I felt I should contribute something. The point of it all is to raise awareness and hype around the issue of poverty – to get talking about it, to get thinking about stuff that we can do, to get fighting poverty together.
I hate all your show and pretense—
the hypocrisy of your religious festivals and solemn assemblies.
I will not accept your burnt offerings and grain offerings.
I won’t even notice all your choice peace offerings.
Away with your noisy hymns of praise!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice,
an endless river of righteous living.
- Amos 5:21-24
This is my talk from Time for Praise today. We had thought about recording it, but didn’t pull it off in the end so here are my notes for if anyone fancies reading over it. The passage is the Healing at the Pool from John 5:1-18.
I’ll be back to do a big update tomorrow when I get the chance.
Introduction
I am and always have been really competitive. Way back in primary school I had to be the best in my class academically and at sports as well. And even now if you put a ball in front of me or a tennis racket or a snooker cue I have to be the best. It takes a lot of willpower for me to carry on doing something, to keep doing my best, if I know that I have a disadvantage playing something or that the person I’m playing is better than me. It’s really bad!
That’s why I really feel for the man at the pool. Everyday he lies in wait for the pool to start bubbling, hoping that if it does he will be the first one in. But he’s slowed down because he can’t walk or run on his own, and as he tells Jesus, he has no friends or family to help him make it into the water first. So he lies there knowing pretty much that, unless there’s a miracle, he won’t ever be the first in as long as there are other men who are more fit than him around. And this goes on everyday for 38 years! 38 years! Can you think what you were doing 38 years ago? I would have been -20 years old, my Dad would have been in Primary School. It’s a long time to spend, sitting, waiting desperately, but knowing that unless there’s some major change, you will never quite win the race.
Think about how desperate this man must have been to be healed, to still be waiting hopefully after 38 years.
Then the lame man encounters Jesus – the real, living God and is changed forever. So as we quickly unpack this encounter with Jesus, what can we draw out that should affect the way we encounter Him now, in our lives?
1. The Point: Jesus is Lord
Here’s the first thing: Jesus is Lord. He has God’s power and he’s equal with God. We see really clearly that he has the power to heal.
We see in verses 3 and 4 what happens as Jesus begins to talk to the lame man:
We need to recognise that Jesus is God, and that we can’t do it without His help.
So, let’s look back to the passage. Jesus responds really simply to the lame man – he simply tells him to pick up his mat and walk. And he is healed. There are no magic words – no sparks of light, no heavenly choruses, no light shining down on Jesus’ face. All we’re told is that the man picked up his mat and walked. As simple as that, Jesus heals him. How awesome is it that our God doesn’t need huge sound effects or flashes of lightning to show how amazing he is – he doesn’t have to surround his miracles with smoke and pyrotechnics to show how good they are – it’s obvious. God is an awesome God who works in amazing ways! Jesus sees what the man needs, its right in front of Him, and responds to it by healing Him. And he can do the same for us today. Once we’ve admitted that we need Him that we want to live everyday of our lives His way and with His help, He will see our needs and respond to them.
2. Jesus responds to our needs
The healed man had an obvious major need in his life. It was really easy for Jesus to respond to the man’s need – even though it was such a big need – because Jesus is so amazing. If Jesus can respond to the needs of a man who had been lying, paralyzed, in the dust for 38 years, then surely he can respond to our needs as well. In verse 17, Jesus says: “My father is always at work to this very day, and I, too, am working.”
Sometimes, though, it can be hard to see what God is doing in our lives.
So what things can prevent us from noticing what God is doing? Sometimes we are focused on the wrong thing entirely. God calls us to make Him the Lord of our lives – to make Him our focus. It can be easy to get stuck on focusing on other things – being popular, our jobs, careers, sport, TV, even things that its really good to focus on like schoolwork and exams, our friends and families, even singing worship songs can stop us from seeing what God is doing if we’re focussed on them too hard. Imagine you’re life is like a car – Jesus needs to be in the driving seat, the most important place. There’s still room in the passenger seat, in the back and in the boot for everything else – but Jesus needs to be our main focus for us to see what he is doing in our lives and in the lives of those around us.
3. Results Matter – we change and we understand more about Jesus
Finally, as Jesus works in our lives, he wants us to change and he wants us to understand Him more through our experiences. Let’s look at verse 14 together. So after the man is healed, Jesus disappears before the man can even find out his name – but later at the temple, Jesus catches up with Him:
Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”
Now, these might seem like pretty harsh words, but they are the truth. What use is it that the man has been healed if he doesn’t then look after his new life and his newly healed body? Jesus just wants the best for him. Would the healed man be any better off by being able to walk if he goes off and uses his body to do wrong things than if he hadn’t been healed at all and was still lying by the pool? Probably not.
Conclusion
As we come to an end looking at this passage, let’s just take another look at the main things we can draw out of it. Here’s the point: Jesus is God – he’s God’s son, equal with Him, with the power to heal and the power to help us in our lives today. We need to let Him be Lord in our lives, so that he can respond to our needs and so that we can see Him working in us – then, as a result of Him working in our lives we need to change, change the way we live, the way the think and the way we talk.
I thought it was about time for another big update. I was hoping to sandwich this in between SMASH and choir, but it ran over so I had to save it and then come back to it afterwards (now). So here’s what I’ve been up to this week and last week, as well as what I’m doing this week and next week (if that makes sense).
The Refresher Course
I was away last week at the second Careforce Conference in the Quinta in Oswestry last week from Monday til Thursday, and it was really good. It was great to see people again, and to really get to talk with lots of people – much more than last time. Had great fun staying up til the early hours playing silly circle games with everyone.
On Wednesday morning (I think), we woke up to a small amount of snow on the ground which we carefully re-distributed (using airbourne propulsion techniques) before it all melted away around lunchtime. Then that afternoon we had the muddiest game of football ever – I could barely stand up let alone run around and keep control of the ball – which ended as an 11-1 massacre by the internationals against the UK volunteers (but if we had played on the hardcourt instead of in the mud our superior skill levels would obviously have meant that we’d have won ;-).
I had quite a reflective Tuesday all-in-all, which ended with me leading worship in the evening meeting. I spent a couple of hours in the prayer room at the conference in the afternoon, just really challenging myself and being critical of what my motivation was to lead worship, and I kindof realised that my prayer for most of that morning had been “Lord, please come tonight in power when we worship…” which seems pretty okay, “…so that I look like a really good worship leader” – which was the bad part. So I just really spent some time asking God to give me a passion for His name, rather than for mine – and that he’d give me a real passion for the guys I was going to lead in worship, so that I’d want them to encounter Him and to really be filled up to overflowing than for them to think that I was really good. It was a real release when I left the prayer room knowing in my heart that it wasn’t about me and that I didn’t matter – because then all the responsibility was lifted off my shoulders; it was all up to God.
That night there was just a real, tangible sense of God’s presence in the worship – it was phenominal. We sang:
Over all the earth (Also known as “James’ generic go-to praise song to begin a meeting with”)
Above all
Jesus, lover of my soul (All about You)
Halfway through All About You, I just felt it was right to stop at the end of the chorus and take a moment – I had a couple of lines in my head to speak out – so I turned around with a couple of lines to go and gave the instruction to the guy behind me playing keys to hold the D chord at the end of the chorus. As I began to speak out “It’s all about You, tonight, this week, this year, for our whole lives…” etc. a huge wage of voices hit me and nearly sent me flying backwards as this huge new song to God was rising up. So I did what any worship leader should do when God hijacks their worship block and stood back and just began to worship myself. That few minutes, coupled with the amazing sense of God’s presense and the sense of intimacy when we were singing “I will offer up my life” as a response to the talk.
The best thing is that musically I made so many mistakes in that worship time – God just really showed how much it’s not about me or what I do, but all about Him. I fumbled with plectrums, hit the wrong chords, forgot the chords halfway through that third song and had to stop playing to quickly switch around the chord sheets in front of me to the right song – but God came, and it was amazing.
Time for Praise
I arrived back on Thursday afternoon with a couple of hours to settle back home before Worship Group and then Youth Club, so this is the list of songs we prepared for Time for Praise on Sunday, which I led worship for.
Worship Block (I chose these):
- Come, now is the time to worship
- Blessed be Your name
- Friend of Sinners
and (chosen by the Time for Praise team):
- As the deer pants for the water (1983)
- Make me a channel of Your peace (1967)
Interesting… The service went well. One things of note was that this sunday there were more people in Time for Praise than in the formal 9.45 communion service so it will be interesting to see what numbers are like next week.
Youth Club
Youth Club was good last Thursday. This weekend is our Youth Club Trip to a random converted farm somewhere near Barry (The Amelia Trust Farm) so this week we’ve been busy preparing material for that as well as games and activities. It going to be a really good weekend. Then on Sunday, I’m flying back by helicopter (well, G’s car) to lead worship at Time for Praise since Sarah’s away before heading back for the end of camp.
24-7
24-7 was last night and we planned for our Youth Time for Praise service which will be a week on Sunday, and David has asked me to do the talk for. The service is going to be based around Jesus healing the man at the pool and finishes off our series looking at Jesus the friend. So basically the main point of the service is going to be that Jesus has God’s power to do the impossible and that he identifies our needs and responds to them in a way that’s best for us. But somehow, in between all that, two girls gave their lives to Jesus and made a commitment, which was awesome. That’s part of the reason I’m really looking forward to this weekend because we’re taking both of them away with us as well as a couple of others who could be quite close to making a commitment so it’s going to be great to have more time to talk to them and see where they are with God. The angels were having a mega-party last night.
SMASH
We were back at SMASH this afternoon continuing our series about how God is “Awesome!”, looking at how he healed the blind man.
Home
Half term in Newport is next week, so I’m coming home to Aberystwyth for a few days on Monday, then hading back to Newport on Saturday – so get in touch if you want to meet or anything, anyone.
So that’s about everything. I’m hoping to get the chance to put together a paper prayer newsletter for St. Mike’s whilst I’m at home, so watch out for that (if I get around to it). I might post again before the weekend but otherwise my next blog will probably be from home sometime during next week.
God bless,
J.
Prayer
Thankyous
- For a great time for everyone at the Refresher Course
- For the two girls who gave their lives to Christ
- For increased numbers (at least last week) at Time for Praise
Pray for
- The Youth Club Trip this weekend
- Time for Praise this weekend and for me leading worship
- The Youth Team’s Time for Praise and for me doing the talky bit
- A good week’s rest at home for me!
Welcome to the blog of James Henley. I'm a young church leader / youth worker and student based in Newport, South Wales.
Read more about me.
