Promises

Over the bank holiday period (Friday to Tuesday), I was at Grapevine, a large Christian gathering on the Lincolnshire Showground. This was an encouraging time, with many coming to faith and a significant number miraculously healed. The theme for the year was 'Promise' and the 'theme verse' was 2 Corinthians 1:20:

"For no matter how many promises God has made, they are 'Yes' in Christ. And so through him the 'Amen' is spoken by us to the glory of God." (NIV)

"Whatever God has promised gets stamped with the Yes of Jesus." (The Message)

The idea of claiming the promises of God is one I've been thinking about recently in relation to the question of how we can have an accurate and contextualised understanding of Scripture without falling into the trap of explaining away the challenge of what the Bible says and losing the simple faith that whatever God says is true. One of the major issues I am trying to work through at the moment is that of hermeneutics, how to handle the Bible. It seems to me that we need to have a hermeneutic which is responsible (i.e. not reading into the Bible things that God doesn't intend us to find there) without being restrictive (i.e. not writing out of the Bible things that God does intend us to find there). Reflecting on these issues, I was interested to find this passage in a book by John Stott:

"We sometimes smile at the Victorians' 'promise-boxes'. Biblical promises were printed on small pieces of paper, rolled up like minature scrolls and stored in a wooden box for random selection in times of need. And, to be sure, that practice did wrench the divine promises from the context in which they were originally given. Nevertheless, I rather think that even such a naive trust in detached promises was better than the present-day accurate but unbelieving knowledge of the promises in their context."
(John Stott, Life in Christ, 1979, 1991, p.27)

I think the challenge in maturing both young Christians and the younger churches in the world with a lack of trained leadership is to discover how to develop a depth of understanding whilst holding onto and enhancing the zeal for God which often characterises both new Christians and the new churches in the non-Western world. These two things need to be held together for the church to attain maturity (see Ephesians 4). Simon Ponsonby's book More spends a long time expounding Ephesians, encouraging us to connect our understanding of our positional status in Christ with an ongoing experience of what we have in Christ.

Ness Wilson, of Open Heaven Church in Loughborough, spoke at a student meeting at Spring Harvest this year. She said, "People often say to me, 'Ness, you're so naive'. Well, maybe I am. But I'd rather be naive than be cynical." The ideal would seem to be to have a depth of understanding coupled with a bold faith that takes God at his word. Ultimately, a greater knowledge of God shouldn't cause us to settle down complacently but spur us on to greater faith and vision.

Simon Guillebaud's latest prayer letter from Burundi includes this quotation:
"The eyes of the Lord are still searching out those willing to live their lives above the gunnels of mediocrity and beyond the realms of inevitability. In our cynical age, God is looking for those naïve enough to believe that the world can still be changed, those simple fools whose vision is to live and die for Christ alone."