Malcolm Potts June 19th 2016 ~ Working

The wedding was lovely, as was the weather, thanks be to God.The man who gave the talk was interesting.  He got David and Georgia to hold hands, look deep into each other's eyes and proceeded to tell them that, no matter how much they were in love and how hard they tried, they were shabby failures who would let each other down terribly.  The most foolish thing they could do, therefore, would be to hope to build their lives on each other's capacity to be enough.He unpacked what he said but it was confronting, not the usual dewy-eyed stuff you get at weddings.I was chatting to him at the reception and asked what was of interest to him in his counselling and theological work these days?He said, two things.  The first was, as he gave talks like the one he had just given, how he sees the Holy Spirit at work.  He said people either light up and embrace the implications of his message or, as someone actually said to me at the wedding, "What the heck was that speaker on about?"The second thing he said interested him was how we are living more and more in a church overwhelmed by practical Armenianism.  Now Joe Armenius was a wonderful and brilliant Reformation pastor and scholar who never actually believed what became known as Armenianism.  It's much more complicated than this, but Armenianism carries the idea that, having been saved by grace, our honouring of that grace is to keep working at self-improvement to the glory of God.Many of us would say, "Yep, that sounds right.  We need to show our appreciation for what God has done for us through Jesus, don't we?”  Well it’s a slippery thing, isn't it.  Are we doing this or that because we have been filled with gratitude for what God has given us as a free gift, or are we doing it to actually prove we are worthy of what God has given us?  In other words, it ain't really free!The whole working-hard-to-be-good-enough thing pervades the human condition; it is not just Christians.  People commonly accuse people like me of judging them.  They say, "In my opinion I am a good person; who are you to judge me?"  Good question.  I am no one’s judge but neither are we in the position to judge ourselves ‘good’ or otherwise.  The point is that trying to win approval on the goodness meter is just dumbly misguided, since the one true, just and compassionate judge of all things does not regard our goodness or badness as qualifying us for anything.It is like saying, "By digging this hole in my garden I will earn my way to heaven."  Now, trust me, digging holes and getting to heaven are unrelated.The thing is we all wrestle with feelings of inadequacy, insignificance and separation.  The mistake is that we make trying harder to be good, or peeling the layers off our condition in the hope of enlightenment, our remedy.  It doesn't work and never has.The speaker said he finds lots of Christian stuff plays the same game.  It describes your problem and offers solutions that are just forms of trying harder, iced with the authority of God and the bible.  He said that, when people go to the bible to get fixed, two things happen: firstly they get bored, secondly their faith dies.  Why?  Because it doesn't work. God is not interested in it.  He said that the way to read the bible is to ask the question, What does this say about God - who he is, what he is like, how he loves and deals and saves?  If we go there looking to meet God, to get more of God, not to be fixed, remarkably, in time, a lot of fixing happens along the way.Now this is a risk worth pondering.BlessingsMalcolm