The Violin Guild
Parable taken from Tom Wright’s John for Everyone.
Jesus refers to himself as the ‘good’ shepherd. But our word ‘good’ doesn’t really catch the full meaning of the word John has written here… The word John uses can also mean ‘beautiful’. This doesn’t refer to what Jesus looked like. It’s about the sheer attractiveness of what, as the shepherd, he was doing. When he calls, people want to come. When they realize he has died for them, they want to even more. The point of calling Jesus ‘the good shepherd’ is to emphasise the strange, compelling power of his love.
The Story of Everything
A great video from showing the narrative arc of God’s story, from one of the students on the CMS Pioneer Leadership Course.
HT: Jonny (again…)
Missional Meals
With The Lab, we have always found food to be a great way to grow community. In this blog post at the Resurgence, Tim Chester agrees:
Jesus didn’t run projects, establish ministries, create programs, or put on events. He ate meals. If you routinely share meals and you have a passion for Jesus then you’ll be doing mission.
Read the whole post here.
The Pool of Siloam: Can a place hold spiritual power/significance?
Last week, for the first of our Lab summer series on John, we explored the story of Jesus healing the man born blind from John 9v1-12 (you can listen to it here). Here’s an offshoot of my thoughts/research that didn’t make the final version of my talk.
One of the really interesting elements of the story, is that Jesus doesn’t just tell the blind man to see - instead he goes through a strange process of making mud out of the dirt on the ground, rubbing it in the bloke’s eyes, and then telling him to go and wash at a very specific place - The Pool of Siloam - which at the time was considered a ’sacred place with healing power’.
The whole encounter draws us into asking some questions: Why not just simply heal the man? What was the significance of the ‘ritual’ that Jesus seems to go through? And was there a significance to that particular pool?
When we take the time to see and hear young people, most often we find compassion rising within us. When we see with the eyes of Jesus and hear with the ears of Jesus, we soon find ourselves feeling with the heart of Jesus… When we seek to be present to young people, we not only see and hear them, we also seek to let down the walls of our heart and allow ourselves to be moved by them. As ministers with youth, we seek to have soft hearts, hearts that can be touched by the joy, confusion, loneliness, anger or tears of young people.
What is the Gospel?
How would you describe the Gospel?
Every so often I go through a period of noticing people using the term, ‘the Gospel’. Recently I read an article online which used the phrase ‘Gospel fluency’, and asked ‘how fluent are you in the Gospel?’ More often than not, the G in Gospel is capitalised to indicate something important. Sometimes it is used to refer to something general to do with Jesus’ teachings, sometimes to a specific summing up of Jesus’ death and what it achieved.
What is the Gospel? How should it be defined or described?
Here’s some definitions which Google found me:
- the four books in the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) that tell the story of Christ’s life and teachings
- an unquestionable truth; “his word was gospel”
- folk music consisting of a genre of a cappella music originating with Black slaves in the United States and featuring call and response; influential on the development of other genres of popular music (especially soul)
- religious doctrine: the written body of teachings of a religious group that are generally accepted by that group
- a doctrine that is believed to be of great importance; “Newton’s writings were gospel for those who followed”
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
- A gospel (from Old English, gōd spell “good news”) is a writing that describes the life of Jesus. The word is primarily used to refer to the four canonical gospels: the Gospel of Matthew, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Luke and Gospel of John, probably written between AD 65 and 110. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel
How would you define the Gospel?
Are You Dangerous?
Just caught these challenging words on the Simply MIssional blog:
I think there comes a day, a moment, when each follower of Jesus has to ask themselves a simple question: “Am I dangerous?”
Every Christian, should pose an imminent threat to the enemy’s kingdom. We should live a life that endangers the darkness. A life that is molded and shaped by the gospel. A life that is lived for the things of light.
Are you dangerous?
