John Piper is famous for the quotation “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” As obvious as it now seems, when I first heard it, it seriously challenged my way of thinking about worship. Before I had the idea that God was most glorified when I did something I really didn’t want to but I did it anyway just because he wanted me to do it. Indeed, the motive of doing something for pleasure was frowned upon by many Christians.

Those who complained of dull worship meetings were deemed unspiritual, because worship is about glorifying God, not about how we feel. This way of thinking, if taken to its logical conclusion would result in us making our worship meetings as miserable as possible, so that by participating anyway we would somehow signal a greater commitment to God.

But John Piper’s groundbreaking book Desiring God changed all that. Suddenly it became clear that passionless worship could never glorify God. In fact it dishonoured him. Churches that were afraid of making their worship more lively or contemporary no longer needed to fear that somehow this was a capitulation to selfish desires.

Twenty years on from the publication of that book, and John Piper’s argument is commonplace in evangelical and charismatic churches alike. We seek after vibrant, enthusiastic (even ‘extravagant’ and ‘undignified’) worship, knowing that the more our joy in God overflows, the more glory we bring him.

But there is a danger. What happens if John Piper’s quotation gets abbreviated very slightly?

“God is most glorified when we are most satisfied.”

I reckon you could say this in many churches and few people would notice the missing words. But it is heresy! And it is becoming the way many are thinking. If this is our guide, then the only criteria for judging a worship service is whether we enjoyed it. Did people dance? Was the worship band on top form?

But God is only glorified if our delight is found in him. Were people’s hearts directed towards him? Was the dancing merely because it was good music or because people were literally overjoyed at the wonder of their salvation?

God is looking for worshipers who will worship in spirit and in truth. Isaiah warned that it was possible to honour God with your lips while your heart was far from him.

Let us therefore not be satisfied with people having “fun” in our worship meetings. Let us press in to ensure that our joy is found in God himself. True worship consists of rejoicing in his truth and delighting in his presence. Good music helps, but can never be a substitute for true worship.

I had the chance to go as a day visitor to Together on a Mission yesterday and had a great time. Adrian Warnock and Andrew Fountain have been live-blogging the conference, so I won’t go into great depth, but here’s my report on the sessions I went to.

Matt Hatch – Spiritual Formation in Leaders

This was a fascinating seminar from Matt Hatch who planted Mosaic church in Leeds. He spoke of the crucial importance of developing character in leaders, rather than merely looking for gifting. He also warned of the danger of leaders getting to the place where they know the right things to say and do to make meetings go well, but neglect their own spiritual growth.

What I found most interesting was the way his church were going about helping people to develop. They place a strong emphasis on accountability pairs / triplets, and are ruthlessly honest with one another about their lives. There are also intensive discipleship groups for young men running over a 10 week period, as well as different groups for women and older men.

There were many other ways in which their church was seeking to make disciples, and I was impressed with the way they were focusing on developing character and spiritual maturity. Colin Baron pointed out in the question and answer session that this church were seeing tremendous growth in numbers – demonstrating that a focus on discipleship is not incompatible with growing a church (and may in fact be the best way to do it).

I was also very encouraged to see that there is a place in newfrontiers for an emphasis on spiritual formation – something that the emerging churches are very much into, but is sadly low on the agenda in many charismatic churches.

Dave Stroud – Main Session

Dave Stroud spoke in the first main session of the day and spoke of the values of newfrontiers, based on Acts 13. His five points were that we are to be:

• A people of the Spirit
• A people of the Word
• A people going into the world
• A people with anointed leadership (a reiteration of Eph 4 ministries)
• A people full of confidence

Check out Andrew Fountain’s notes or Adrian Warnock’s notes for more detail. It was a really good message, and I was glad to hear him again underscore the importance of the Word and Spirit together.

Rob Rufus – Main Session

Rob Rufus has become something of a celebrity in newfrontiers circles over recent years, but I must confess to still being unsure about him. Every time he speaks, the main emphasis seems to be on the “anointing” for miracles and power, and this was no exception. It started off with him making the important point that we should not seek God for his power, but for his presence. However, after some fooling around with a photographer he got the giggles and took a long time before being able to continue. He then went on to talk about many of the Pentecostal healing evangelists of last century, telling many stories from their ministries. While I don’t doubt that there were many great miracles, I felt uneasy with some of his stories, especially one involving the miraculous teleporting of jewelry, as it seemed to have the characteristics of an urban legend.

He then said that they had been given an “anointing” which they hadn’t fully used up, and so it was still available for us to use. We could go into the past and bring it into the present. I found this quite a strange concept. The meeting closed with him praying for healings and many people testified to being fully or partially healed. He prayed again for them, and the vast majority fell down immediately as he touched them. Andrew Fountain was one of those who was healed and touched by the Spirit (see his report here), so I’m looking forward to hearing from him about what he felt about that message and meeting.

Prayer Meeting and Offering

The evening prayer meeting was excellent. We had already had two great times of worship led by Matt Redman and Simon Brading, but as we expected, Evan Rogers was the worship leader for the evening event. We sang all the classic lively (& cheesy) worship songs, with lots of South African songs and lots of dancing. The prayer time was powerful, and I found it quite moving as we all listened to people from all over the world praying in their native languages. Terry Virgo then spoke briefly on the privilege of giving, before everyone danced forward to give into the offering and inflatable beach balls were batted around.

You can get a feel of what the evening was like courtesy of Adrian Warnock’s video (footage of the celebration is after the photos):

Newfrontiers have recently updated their website, and there are two exciting new developments. First is a section for theological papers. There are only four there at the moment, and some of them look more like notes for a talk, but I am hoping we will see a lot more coming in future months.

The other exciting development is that the talks from Together on a Mission 2007 will be made available for free download. This is very generous of them, and the first couple of main sessions are already available (even before the conference has ended!).

I recently preached on
Mark
12:28-31,
the famous passage where Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love
God and the second is to love your neighbour. As part of my preparation, I
spent some time thinking about what “love” means. The dictionary definition
was too generic to be of much use:

• Warm affection
• Benevolence
• Charity

The trouble is, we use the word love to describe everything from the type
of food we prefer to anyone we feel sexual attraction to. Pop culture
defines love mainly in terms of the feelings or emotions we have towards the
object of our love.

In his Systematic Theology, Wayne Grudem’s says that love is “self-giving
for the benefit of others”. I found this interesting because it moves the
focus of love onto action, and yet this definition is surely lacking in that
there is no mention of emotion.

So for my talk I came up with my own definition of love:

• Love is affection expressed through action
• Action without affection is merely duty
• Affection without action is sentimentalism

The next step was to define exactly what emotions or feelings must be
present for me to say I love someone. I thought of three things:

1. I desire their good (I want them to be happy, safe etc)
2. I desire their company (I want to be with them)
3. I desire their affection (I want them to feel the same way about me)

These three desires must then turn into action if our love is genuine:

1. I act for their good (I do and give what I can to help and please
   them)
2. I act to be with them (I make time for them)
3. I act to express my love for them (Verbally, physically etc as appropriate)

I’m sure much more could be added to these lists (feel free to add suggestions
in the comments). Together these lists provide a simple way of testing whether
we can truly say we love someone, or that we love God.

I’ve been evaluating the new Microsoft Silverlight technology recently, and have ported a game I wrote a while ago to run on it. Nibbles (sometimes called Snake) is the classic game where you guide a snake around collecting numbers and avoiding obstacles. You can play my version of it online here. It should run in IE or FireFox and can supposedly even run on a Mac. You will need to install the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha plugin first though. You can think of Silverlight as Microsoft’s equivalent to Flash, but it has the nice advantage that you can program it using .NET code.

If you ever read a systematic theology, one of the most technical parts is the explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity (or, as my four year old daughter Lily calls it, the “holy, blessed and glorious chimney”). Wayne Grudem has gone beyond mere words and attempted to use diagrams (Systematic Theology p253-255) to explain both what is not meant as well as what Christians believe. But as a computer programmer, I prefer to think in terms of classes and interfaces. So here I present the doctrine of God in C#.

First we need to define some interfaces, to give us the three persons of the Godhead. An interface allows us to define the properties and methods of an object, without having to specify how they are implemented (which is good because it is easier for us to say what God does than how he does it). Naturally, there will be some commonality, defined in IPerson, as well as certain activities unique to each member of the Trinity.

public interface IPerson {
…
}

public interface IFather : IPerson {

…

}

public interface ISon : IPerson {

…

}

public interface IHolySpirit : IPerson {

…

}

Now the temptation would be simply to finish this off by creating a class that implements all three interfaces:

// No! Heresy!

public class God : IFather, ISon, IHolySpirit {

…

}

But this would not do! We would have created the heresy of modalistic monarchianism, and defined a unitarian God – one God who can appear in three different forms. We need concrete classes to represent the fact that the three persons of the godhead are indeed real and distinct persons:

public partial class Father : IFather {

…

}

public partial class Son : ISon {

…

}

public partial class HolySpirit : IHolySpirit {

…

}

Notice we have defined these as partial classes. We will not be able to compile our code. This is because God is infinite and cannot be fully known. There is more to each person of the Trinity than we are able to comprehend. But God is not unknowable – he has revealed himself to us – hence we do have these partial classes. We of course must not stop here, for so far we have got another heresy – tritheism. We cannot simply have three objects kicking around – we need a container class to represent the Trinity. We must continue to construct our C# doctrine of God:

[LoveAttribute]

[HolinessAttribute]

public static final class God : IFather, ISon, IHolySpirit {

private static readonly List<IPerson> persons = new List<IPerson> {

Father.Instance, Son.Instance, HolySpirit.Instance

}

public override Equals(object other) {

return false;

}

…

}

A few things to notice:

• This is a static class – there is only one God. He is a singleton. We need not concern ourselves with race conditions on startup as he is also eternal (a new keyword perhaps for C# 4.0).
• This is a final class – we will not be adding any capabilities to God in the future – he is complete
• This is a public class – God is knowable because of his self-revelation
• The list of persons is private and readonly – the Trinity will not be accepting any external additions of new IPersons
• If we want to apply any custom attributes to our class (such as FaithfulnessAttribute, JusticeAttribute, LoveAttribute), we will apply them directly to the God class, as they apply equally to all three persons. I have not shown the definitions of these attributes but naturally some will inherit from CommunicableAttribute and some from IncommunicableAttribute.
• Despite my comments above on modalistic monarchianism, I have actually chosen to apply the IFather, ISon and IHolySpirit interfaces to this class. At the very least, IFather is necessary as the Bible quite interchangably refers to the Father simply as God. But also the Son and Spirit are not wrongly described as “God” either.
• This means that the God class implements IPerson. I leave it to your own understanding of ontological equality and economic subordination to determine how a call to a method or property of IPerson would be delegated to the appropriate member of the Trinity. Naturally you could make explicit calls to individual members of the Trinity by casting God into the appropriate Person’s interface, but they may choose to delegate back up to the godhead. Hence calling Jesus.Forgive(me), Father.Forgive(me) and God.Forgive(me) will achieve the same operation.
• We have chosen to call our class God, but Godhead, HolyTrinity or even Yahweh may have been a more appropriate naming choice (feel free to discuss in the comments).
• Notice we resisted the good C# programmer’s instinct to implement additional interfaces. God is not ISerializable, IClonable, and certainly not IComparable.
• We have found it quite easy to override the Equals method – nothing is his equal, so we shall return false.

Thank you for listening to my first installment in my forthcoming magnus opum – Theology .NET. Next up I will be explaining the algorithm behind the doctrine of election.

I have been studying the book of 1 Peter over recent months, and the cell group I lead is also working through it this term. I tend to keep notes as I work my way through a book, turning each section of a few verses into a mini exposition, which helps me to think through the theological issues it raises and apply it practically. After I have done this, I will then consult one or two commentaries, to check whether I have missed or misunderstood anything. I keep a collection of quotes and interesting observations on each passage as well, which help if I preach or lead a Bible study on that passage.

I’ve been using Google Docs & Spreadsheets recently, which allows me to very easily publish what I’ve done so far. The nice thing about Google Docs is that if I update these documents, they are automatically updated online, which is good, because I will probably update them in the future when I am working on passages from 1 Peter again. It also means I can update them from any computer with internet access.

1 Peter has been a great book to study. It has its share of complicated bits, but I’ve been helped through by the Baker Exegetical Commentary by Karen Jobes and the Revised Expositors Commentary by J Darryl Charles. I’ve also consulted my New American Commentary by Tom Schreiner from time to time as well.

So here is the index to my study notes on 1 Peter, which are now complete for the whole book.

• 1 Peter 1:1-2
• 1 Peter 1:3-5
• 1 Peter 1:6-9
• 1 Peter 1:10-12
• 1 Peter 1:13-16
• 1 Peter 1:17-21
• 1 Peter 1:22-25
• 1 Peter 2:1-3
• 1 Peter 2:4-5
• 1 Peter 2:6-8
• 1 Peter 2:9-10
• 1 Peter 2:11-12
• 1 Peter 2:13-15
• 1 Peter 2:16-20
• 1 Peter 2:21-25
• 1 Peter 3:1-7
• 1 Peter 3:8-12
• 1 Peter 3:13-17
• 1 Peter 3:18-22
• 1 Peter 4:1-6
• 1 Peter 4:7-11
• 1 Peter 4:12-19
• 1 Peter 5:1-4
• 1 Peter 5:5-7
• 1 Peter 5:8-11
• 1 Peter 5:12-14

A major theme of 1 Peter is how the Christian responds to suffering for their faith. The nature of the persecution Peter’s readers were facing included:

• Mocking (4:4)
• Slander (3:16)
• Injustice (2:19)
• Threats (2:14)
• Insults (4:14)
• Verbal Abuse (2:9, 23)

Slaves (2:18) and wives (3:1) who had converted to Christianity were particularly vulnerable due to their low social status. Peter calls all the believers to look to the example of Jesus who responded not by anger or cursing but with blessing (2:9). They also called to rejoice in the midst of their suffering (1:8, 4:13), for a number of reasons:

• They identify with Christ who suffered (1:11,2:21,4:13)
• Their gracious response serves as a powerful witness (3:1,16)
• Their faith is purified (1:7, 4:12)
• They will be vindicated, just as Jesus was (1:7)
• They will develop endurance (2:20)
• They experience victory in their battle against sin (4:1)
• They inherit a blessing and experience God’s presence with them (4:14)

Strikingly, Peter is willing to describe suffering for Christ as being “in God’s will” (4:19). Many Christians find the concept of suffering being God’s will for us very hard to accept, and inevitably the question will come as to what type of suffering Christians can embrace as God’s will for them. Is it only persecution for the gospel, or can other types of suffering, such as illness be embraced in the same way?

Jeremy Pierce reports in his excellent roundup of 1 Peter commentaries that Peter Davids “distinguishes between suffering from persecution and suffering from illness, taking [persecution] to be the only kind of suffering that Christians are being told to endure, since it’s the explicit context of the letter, but we should pray for God to remove illness of any sort.” Jeremy takes issue with this because it does not take into account 2 Cor 12:7-10 (Paul’s thorn in the flesh, resulting in him declaring “That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.”) and Acts 12:5 (“So Peter was kept in prison, but the church was earnestly praying to God for him.”). Not having Davids’ commentary I’m not sure exactly what he claims or exactly what Jeremy’s pronlem with it is. Praying for removal of suffering is not mutually exclusive to enduring through suffering, and the two will often be found together in the life of a believer.

To answer this question we must distinguish between a number of types of suffering that a Christian may experience. First is suffering for the sake of the gospel, which is the specific issue addressed in 1 Peter. Peter’s point is not that we may not pray for God to remove the suffering (after all, even Jesus prayed that the cup should be taken from him), but that we should not compromise on truth or righteous living in order to escape suffering (just as Jesus went on to pray that God’s will be done rather than his own). This type of suffering can be rejoiced in, because we know God’s blessing will come upon us for faithfulness.

There is also a type of suffering experienced as a consequence of our own sinful actions, whether being injured in some way, or perhaps being punished by the authorities. If a Christian commits a crime, or breaks the rules of their workplace, they cannot expect to be blessed in some way for this. Peter actually speaks to this kind of suffering a few times in his letter (3:20,4:15). We should not try to present ourselves as heroes of the faith if we are punished for something we did wrong. A church should not claim to be suffering for righteousness if it fails to comply with tax regulations, and a missionary should not claim to be persecuted if they are ejected from a country for failing to apply for a new visa.

A third type of suffering would be that described as the discipline of God, spoken of a number of times in the Bible (Ps 94:12, Prov 3:12, 1 Cor 11:32, Heb 12:4-11, Rev 3:19). This type of suffering is not so much to be rejoiced in as to be discerned as being God’s correction on our lives. We will reap the benefit of a transformed character. Praying for God to remove this type of suffering may be legitimate, but not if we simultaneously refuse to learn the lesson he is teaching us through it.

A fourth type of suffering is tragedy and loss. Examples include bereavement, being the victim of a crime or losing one’s job. This type of suffering is often about dealing with loss, and in many cases what is lost cannot be restored again. Again we would hardly call for rejoicing in this type of suffering, but it provides a test of our faith. We can either draw closer to God and lean on him for the resources to come to terms with what has happened and trust him for the future, or we can question and blame God, and distance ourselves from him. So this type of suffering can be an occasion to come closer to God.

The final type of suffering to consider is sickness. This is the controversial one, as Christians differ as to whether sickness can ever be in God’s will for the believer. Certainly there is an element of mystery as to why not all who pray for healing receive it, when others do. But just as we would never counsel someone to avoid the doctor if they were ill, so that they could benefit from the opportunity to grow in character that comes through suffering, neither should we discourage people from earnestly praying for healing. (In fact, the latest newfrontiers magazine is devoted to stirring faith for healing, something that the Western evangelical church is distinctly lacking in. Sadly not online yet, but check here for the April-June 2007 issue).

Sickness provides the same “test” of faith that other forms of suffering bring, and so it can be the occasion for our maturing in character and growing in the knowledge of God. But that does not mean that we should welcome sickness as a pathway to holiness. There are other means provided for us for our spiritual growth. So while a person who is ill can take comfort from the fact that God can use their unfortunate condition to bring about good in their life, this is not an excuse for passively accepting it. God can also bring glory to his name through healing you, and work through you to extend his kingdom as he gives you the health to serve him.

So I will summarise with the words of James 1:1,2: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.” This is the Christian response to all forms of suffering (including persecution and sickness). We know that we have a God who works all things together for our good, so we have confidence that in our suffering, he is transforming us to be more like Jesus. But at the same time we will not feel unable to petition God to remove our suffering, or to take practical steps to avoid it, as long as doing so does not involve moral compromise.

I thought I would draw your attention to a new blog I have started called Underlined Bits. It exists for one simple purpose – to collect great quotes from evangelical writings. The idea is that it will become a repository for me to quickly access the bits I have underlined in the books I have read. Each quote is tagged with author and keywords, allowing easy searching by topic.

Obviously it will take a while for it to develop into a useful resource, although you may find it beneficial to add it to your RSS reader as a source of daily inspiration. To help it grow with a nice variety of quotes, I have invited a few friends who have similar tastes in books to me to become contributers. They have responded really well and already have contributed some quotes.

I am very open to the idea of other people joining the effort, and will from time to time send out invites. But if the following list of authors contains many of your favourites, then you would be ideally suited to contribute, so feel free to drop me an email…

Charles Spurgeon, J C Ryle, Jonathan Edwards, John Owen, John Piper, Sam Storms, John Stott, Gordon Fee, Don Carson, R T Kendall, Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

In other words, evangelicals, mainly reformed or charismatic. I know that there are plenty of good quotes to be found outside the world of evangelicalism, and the odd one or two may well appear on the blog, but I didn’t want it to become too disparate with lots of quotes that contradict one another, or it will become as worthless as the Wikiquote Christianity page.