Last Sunday's Thought: On personal accountability

‘We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry’ (2 Cor. 6:3). St Paul’s words to the Corinthians move from the negative to the positive: he goes on to say that he has worked with ‘purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; [and] with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left…’ There is, he says, ‘no restriction in our affections’.

Yet it is clear from what Paul says and implies that there has been only a limited response from the Corinthians in return. He appeals to them to ‘open wide your hearts also’. Affection and open heartedness are two signs of a church which is also open and receptive to God through the working of the Holy Spirit.

The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord (Isaiah 11:2). The 7 gifts are to be distinguished from the ‘fruits’ of the Holy Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23: these are ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control’. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are interior qualities, while the fruits of the Holy Spirit are external signs of the workings of the Spirit.

Receiving gifts of the Spirit as interior qualities and these being transformed into fruits, the external and visible signs, is evidence of the transformation that can happen in our Church as we deepen our discipleship and spirituality. Paul and the other apostles in Acts established new churches or brought the Gospel to fledgling churches which were struggling to know what the Gospel was and is. Remember that at the time, it was not yet written down. Now, it is claimed that 40% of born-again Christians don’t even know what the word ‘gospel’ means! (Neil Cole, Cultivating a life for God, 1999: 84).

Paul encountered difficulties at Corinth that he had not anticipated. As one commentator writes:

‘Emotionally they were the polar opposites of the converts Paul had made in Galatia. The Galatians were paralyzed by prudence, afraid to make any moral decision for fear that it might be wrong. They desperately wanted to live by a rulebook.

‘The Corinthians, on the contrary, were bursting with initiative, and joyfully welcomed Paul’s invitation to work out for themselves what Christian living meant. Their enthusiasm, however, was not matched by their sensitivity to the gospel, and their insights were regularly wrong…’

What Paul’s experiences with the early church at Corinth suggest to us is that, though debate and discussion enlivens a Church, there is a point at which it can degenerate into mere speculation and thus become destructive. Similarly, comments about Paul’s ministerial style and the effectiveness of his preaching seemed to serve no purpose other than to undermine his authority in dealing with a profound doctrinal challenge – facing off those who required converts to Christianity to become Jews first. Unity of purpose is essential to a young church or a developing church: there is no substitute for it. Fortunately we learn that in the end the Corinthians calmed down and accepted his authority once more, so that in the winter of 55-56 Paul was able to spend a second visit there, where he wrote his letter to the Romans.  

Making disciples – not just Christians, but disciples who bear fruit – is what being Church is about. Paul’s difficulties with the Corinthians also tell us that things do not work always out as they should. This is not what we want in our Church. But how do we ensure that we don’t backslide and end up with something that is less than we seek? Constant vigilance is one way. We are counselled to open up our definition of church to mean a way of life, not just a location or a timeslot on Sunday. We need to expand our understanding of discipleship. We must each and every one of us to seek to be Good News to someone in need. In prayer we need to offer our hearts and souls to Jesus Christ and recognize that this will involve sacrifice. It may be easier for us to be generous and compassionate than it is to be forgiving. But both issues lead to a contrast between God and ourselves. God is infinitely more generous than I can ever be; He is also far more forgiving.

Another way in which we can make progress is by holding ourselves accountable. This is a process by which we ask ourselves questions that are the relevant ones for each of us. How has God made his presence known to us this week? What is God teaching us? How are we responding to His prompting? Is there someone with whom we need to share Christ this week? Do we have a need to confess any sin? (Neil Cole, Cultivating a life for God, 1999: 65). If you identify in yourself a particular weakness or need, the questions can be specifically directed in that area; all that is required is honesty and frankness to God. For example, did I invest the proper quality and quantity of time in my most important relationships? Did my life reflect integrity? Did I express a forgiving attitude toward others? Did I talk with someone about Christ? (Cole: 128).

The technique of accountability is as old as the Bible itself. It was used by John Wesley in what became his ‘Methodist’ groups. ‘Am I a hypocrite?... Do I thank God that I am not as other people, especially as the Pharisee who despised the publican? Is there anyone whom I fear, dislike, disown, criticize, hold resentment toward or disregard? If so, what I am going to do about it? Do I grumble and complain constantly? Is Christ real to me?’ (Cole: 125-6).

The questions can be as precise or as open as we choose. The two basic questions that underlie everything else are these: What is God telling me to do? What am I going to do about it? (Cole: 131). If our own lives cannot be transformed first, we have no right to expect to transform another’s. There is a cost involved in seeking the multiplication of disciples in our Church.

Last Sunday's Thought: Prayer is the gift of the Spirit

         ‘…Everything is for your sake’, Paul writes to the somewhat difficult Corinthians, ‘so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal’ (2 Cor. 4:15-18).

Is our ‘inner nature’ being renewed day by day as Paul suggests? And if not, what can we do to ensure that it is so renewed? Well, in the newsletter last week and this I have carried an insert about listening to prayer, and contemplation in prayer, referring those of you who have the internet to www.pray-as-you-go.org. Lasting between ten and thirteen minutes, each day’s contribution combines music, scripture and some questions for reflection. The aim is to help you to become more aware of God’s presence in your life; to listen to and reflect on God’s word; and to grow in your relationship with God. It is produced by Jesuit Media Initiatives, with material written by a number of British Jesuits and other experts in the spirituality of St Ignatius of Loyola. The so-called ‘Ignatian method’ is a well-respected method of meditation and though Roman Catholic in origin, there are testimonials from non-Catholics on the website from enthusiasts who use the site’s materials every day in their prayer life. I have found it very peaceful and helpful. I hope that you do too. For those who have no access to the internet, ask a friend who has access to download the materials for you to play through I-tunes on an I-pod or the like. There are also regularly prayers, songs and readings from Taizé on another free webcast. Meditation on Scripture, it has been said, draws us more deeply into a loving relationship with the God whom we meet there, and a clearer knowledge of his purposes for us.

         We’ve been thinking about prayer at the PCC recently, and concluded that we needed a new group from the congregation to draw up our intercessions. Today is the first occasion when we are using the offerings from a member of the group. We pray that the Holy Spirit will inspire the thoughts, contemplations and meditations of the members of the group as they prepare these prayers for us. We are aiming at spiritual diversity and different styles of prayer: this reflects the wonderful diversity of the Christian experience throughout the world. If our prayer life is rich and deep, then so too will be our witness.

         In American parlance, a ‘breakout church’ is a congregation that has experienced at least five years of decline followed by at least five years of growth. Recently the common elements in 50,000 churches in the US, which had experienced a period of decline followed by one of growth, were analysed. In sum, the process described is one of gaining a newly found confidence and hope, or moving from an inwardly-focused to an outwardly-focused mind set. This story can become the story of our church. The first steps are to strengthen our life of prayer and our meditation upon the Word of God, in order, as Paul suggests, to renew our inner nature day by day. Once we are ourselves renewed we can turn to enquire of others whether they wish to join us on our journey because we can talk with a newly found confidence about the working of the Holy Spirit within our Church. Henceforth, ‘we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.’

I was looking for an additional closing thought. Where to look? What better place than Henri Nouwen’s Bread for the Journey. Reflections for Everyday of the Year? I happened upon the entry for 9 June in this, Nouwen’s last book, an entry which was called ‘empowered to pray’. Here it is:

‘Prayer is the gift of the Spirit. Often we wonder how to pray; when to pray and what to pray. We can become very concerned about methods and techniques of prayer. But finally it is not we who pray but the Spirit who prays in us.

‘Paul says: “The Spirit… comes to help us in our weakness, for, when we do not know how to pray properly, then the Spirit personally makes our petitions for us in groans that cannot be put into words; and he who can see into all hearts knows what the Spirit means because the prayers that the Spirit makes for God’s holy people are always in accordance with the mind of God” (Romans 8:26-28). These words explain why the Spirit is called the Consoler.’

And Nouwen’s entry for 8 June, on the theme of being ‘empowered to speak’, is also relevant in our prayerful support for our new group of intercession writers. He writes:

‘The Spirit that Jesus gives us empowers us to speak. Often when we are expected to speak in front of people who intimidate us, we are nervous and self-conscious. But if we live in the Spirit, we don’t have to worry about what to say. We will find ourselves ready to speak when the need is there. “When they take you before… [the] authorities, do not worry about how to defend yourselves or what to say, because when the time comes, the Holy Spirit will teach you what you should say” (Luke 12:11-12).’

‘We waste much of our time in anxious preparation’, Nouwen warns us. ‘Let’s claim the truth that the Spirit that Jesus gave us will speak in us and speak convincingly.’ Amen.

Thought from Trinity Sunday: Contemplation of the Holy Trinity

For the twentieth-century theologian Karl Rahner, the beatific vision is ‘God’s perfect self-communication’, ‘the perfect and ultimately the only absolute fulfilment of the spiritual creature’ (Rahner (ed.), Encyclopedia of Theology, 79). Where on this earth can we begin to feel something of this ‘absolute fulfilment of the spiritual creature’? For more than ten years off and on, I have been contemplating the icon of the Holy Trinity painted by St Andrei Rublev (1370-c.1430), and now I have found expression of my contemplation in the words of Gabriel Bunge’s profound meditation on the subject. ‘The meaning and end of Christian life [is] ... communion with the All-Holy Trinity in and through the Holy Spirit’, he writes. ‘What is experienced when this icon is contemplated is ‘my being, my salvation, as the subject of conversation between the Father, Son, and Spirit’  (Bunge, The Rublev Trinity, trans. Andrew Louth: 2007, 111).

The Rublev icon, or the Old Testament Trinity as it is often called, depicts the hospitality of Abraham to three strangers who turn out to be angels (Genesis 18:2–5). Yet the icon is also a depiction of the Trinity as God’s love towards the world, preeminently so according to a decision of the Russian Orthodox church at a synod in 1551: it’s a vision of unanimity and universal love. The spiritual beauty and timelessness of the scene is an image conceived of by a Christian to whom the Christian understanding of the Trinity has been revealed. The story may be from Genesis 18; but the vision is essentially one from the New Testament, not the Old.

Life in the Trinity–St. Sergius monastery emphasized ‘fraternity, calm, love (toward) God and spiritual self-improvement’. The work was painted in about 1410 for the abbot of the Trinity Monastery, Nikon of Radonezh, a disciple of St. Sergius. Russian icon painters before Rublev subscribed to the view that Abraham was visited by God (in Christ’s image) and two angels. Hence, Christ was represented in icons of the Trinity as the middle angel and was symbolically set apart either by a halo with a cross, by a considerable enlargement of his figure, by widely spread wings or by a scroll in His hand. In Rublev’s icon for the first time all the angels are equally important.


The icon is more than theology in paint. It is prayer in paint. This achievement was only possible because of Rublev’s ascetical discipline. Bunge notes that Rublev and his friend and ‘fellow faster’ Daniil, himself an accomplished icon painter, would sit for hours simply contemplating an icon of the Holy Trinity in St. Sergii’s Trinity Monastery. It was this devotion that nourished his soul and prepared Rublev for his greatest aesthetic achievement (Bunge, p. 109). The texts on Trinity talk about the love which fills the Trinity: ‘Trinity is love’, ‘the Son loves His Father, the Father loves His Son’, ‘the Love of the Heavenly Father is Given to the World through His Son’, and so on. Rublev’s Trinity is not only a representation of the three hypostases of God, the triune God, and the symbol of the Eucharist, but it is also an all-encompassing symbol of unity and an image of divine love. ‘There exists the icon of the Trinity by St. Andrei Rublev; therefore God exists’ (Bunge, p. 107). This remarkable statement by Fr. Pavel Florensky, Russian Orthodox priest, mathematician, art historian and martyr, is not the kind of comment that Christians in the West are used to, but it reveals the intensity of feeling that the icon draws out of those who have contemplated its beauty for a long period of time.


For Henri Nouwen, Rublev’s trinity is ‘a holy place to enter and stay within. As we place ourselves in front of the icon in prayer, we come to experience a gentle invitation to participate in the intimate conversation that is taking place among the three divine angels and to join them around the table. The movement from the Father [on the left] toward the Son [in the centre] and the movement of both Son and Spirit [on the right] toward the Father become a movement in which the one who prays is lifted up and held secure... Rublev’s icon gives us a glimpse of the house of perfect love.’


Contemplation of Rublev’s Holy Trinity can help fill the relative scarcity of peaceful images on which to meditate in our stressful lives. We need images that bring us peace; images that encircle us with love (we can be more than just witnesses, we can be participants, drawn into the circle of love); images that inspire our prayers and lift us up above the maelstrom and stress of life rather than bring us down to the ordinariness of institutional or personal conflict. If not quite the ‘absolute fulfilment of the spiritual creature’, as Karl Rahner envisaged the beatific vision, it is not far short of it. Thanks be to God.

Update: Rublev by Rowan Williams

One day, God walked in, pale from the grey steppe,
slit-eyed against the wind, and stopped,
said, Colour me, breathe your blood into my mouth.

I said, Here is the blood of all our people,
these are their bruises, blue and purple,
gold, brown, and pale green wash of death.

These (god) are the chromatic pains of flesh,
I said, I trust I shall make you blush,
O I shall stain you with the scars of birth.

For ever, I shall root you in the wood,
under the sun shall bake you bread
of beechmast, never let you forth.

To the white desert, to the starving sand.
But we shall sit and speak around
one table, share one food, one earth.

   

A New Language: the Revd Barry Hill's thoughts for Pentecost Sunday

If there is one point which the author Luke seems intent that the reader captures in this Pentecost account (Acts 2: 1-21), it is that the Galilean disciples, most without any formal training and certainly without far reaching linguistic skill, empowered by the Spirit of God, speak the wonders of God in a wide enough variety of languages that the many people in Jerusalem from a multitude of places all hear in their native tongue. Luke makes this point in several different ways in an attempt to underscore its significance.

What, we may ask, therefore is so significant? Miraculous, sure, but to what is it pointing? There is clearly much going on, but personally, I think the especial significance is that the first thing that happens when the Spirit of Jesus is sent to reside permanently in His disciples is that communication is redeemed. It stands in difference to communication in the early days of human life, where we read, in Genesis chapter 11, that the whole world is speaking one language and yet how is this common understanding used?  They try and build a tower – the tower of Babel – in attempt to reach heaven so that they might “make a name for themselves”. God’s punishment for this act of humans trying to usurp His power and strength was the confusion of language.

However, critically, at Pentecost God doesn’t change it back – creating a new super language known and understand by all. He doesn’t make a new thing, but makes all things new. He redeems language such that they can understand each other declaring the wonders of God in their own tongues.

I find this especially encouraging because I think one of the biggest problems in church growth today is vocabulary. In so many places we have lost a vocabulary to speak of the things of God. Often we want to be able to share our faith with others, but feel we don’t know what to say. We want to be able to reach out to all cultures, but the myriad of sub-cultures is daunting and we often feel we don’t have the vocab (in the widest sense). And yet the first thing that our God of understanding and revelation provides by His Spirit at Pentecost is a vocabulary to express the wonders of God.

We may be hesitant to speak of our faith, we may feel we don’t have a vocabulary, we may think we are not one of those extroverts for whom it seems so easy. But at Pentecost God offers us the kind of help that we cannot create in ourselves. He offers us a connection with others deeper than humankind can muster, a redeemed vocabulary. May we follow the disciples in trust and prayer (Pente (50)-cost reminds us of the 50 days of prayer and connection with the risen Christ the disciples had known before the giving of the Spirit). And, empowered and equipped by the Spirit of Jesus within us, may we take small steps in speaking more bolding of the things of God with others – not so pews, rotas or collections are fuller but so that many more may come to know the redemption, love and grace of our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Thoughts on Pentecost Sunday: gifts and fruits of the Spirit

What a splendid Pentecost Sunday! The sun shone all day, and we were pleased to welcome our preacher for the morning service, the Revd Barry Hill, Diocesan Mission Enabler, and his family to our church. Our prayers that the Holy Spirit would ensure that our service was truly memorable were answered. And in the evening, we had the musical delight of the joint choirs and their friends singing ‘Saints’ Alive!’ by Roger Jones. A truly uplifting day and thanks to all who contributed to making it so.

During the morning service we distributed the 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit among members of the congregation. The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord (Isaiah 11:2). The 7 gifts are to be distinguished from the ‘fruits’ of the Holy Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23: these are ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control’. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are interior qualities, the fruits of the Holy Spirit are external signs of the workings of the Spirit.

Thought from Ascension Day: a private house of prayer

I begin by recalling the Archbishop of Canterbury’s words in a sermon delivered last Ascension Day:

…today, Ascension Day, the friends of Jesus face the fact that they are going to have to get used to living in a world without Jesus – or at least, living in a world without the Jesus they have known. After those frightening and exhilarating few weeks of Easter, when – amazed and confused – they have almost got used to the possibility of meeting Jesus in unexpected faces and places, he is now saying to them, ‘It’s going to be different. Don’t expect to see me around in the old way.’ They must have felt deeply disoriented, even fearful.

…The friends of Jesus are called … to offer themselves as signs of God in the world – to live in such a way that the underlying all-pervading energy of God begins to come through them and make a difference.  If we are challenged as to where God is in the world, our answer must be to ask ourselves how we can live, pray and act so as to bring to light the energy at the heart of all things – to bring the face of Jesus to life in our faces, and to do this by turning again and again to the deep well of trust and prayer that the Spirit opens for us.

We are in a different position from the first disciples of Christ. They had got used to living with Christ personally, in an intimate and close relationship of sharing bread, prayer, and teaching. We do these things without the personal presence of Christ except in the spiritual sense: the Holy Spirit is with us, as Jesus promised, at all times. We know, as Peter’s sermon in the second chapter of Acts reminds us, that Jesus himself has been ‘exalted at the right hand of God’ (Acts 2:33). The right hand of God is the place of authority and power.

The Archbishop had begun his address with these words, which are particularly pertinent in Christian Aid week:

Plenty of people look around and say, ‘This is a world without God’. It’s a world where, moment by moment, children are dying in poverty of preventable diseases, where tyrants are planning to secure their power over suffering populations, where men and women are struggling to put their lives back together in the wake of natural disaster and where people are dying in loneliness and living in anxiety all around us. Any Christian with a shred of intelligence will surely understand why so many are driven to say, ‘Well, it feels like a world without God’ – and perhaps in secret they agree that, for quite a lot of the time, that is indeed how it feels for them too.

Reflecting this week on the place of prayer in the Church, I can see why it feels as though it may be a world without the presence of God working through the Holy Spirit. That it sometimes seems so is not just because of the role of structural poverty and evil in the world. It is also because of the weakness of our own prayer life.

Whenever I go through my own period of ‘spiritual dryness’, or difficulty in prayer, it is because I have forgotten to use that most wonderful of manuals of prayer, Leslie D. Weatherhead’s A Private House of Prayer (1958). What is so good about Weatherhead’s prayer technique is that is relatively simple, but divides up prayer into its separate aspects. If we clump these separate aspects of prayer together the result is that we will tend not to pray effectively, because these different aspects represent different things.  

Leslie Weatherhead imagines 7 rooms, each with a distinctive purpose. Do not rush through all the rooms looking for God, he tells us. He can be found in every one. The order is important. He wants to assert first the Divine Presence and realize the fact (and preferably the feeling) that there is ‘Someone there’ to pray to. All through the Bible, God asserts his presence with his people, and it is real prayer to remember the sentences which recall this to our mind. Our Lord not only promised ‘Lo I am with you always even until the end of the world’, but also the Holy Spirit ‘that He may be with you for ever’. In this first room I repeat those great words ‘with you’.

Having recognized that God is present, that there is ‘Someone really there’, in the second room we can move on to praise, thank and adore him. ‘It is a good thing’, Weatherhead encourages us, ‘to imagine this room full of morning sunshine: it is the room of thanksgiving. Each of us has something for which to praise and thank God. Indeed it is a revealing thing to write down a list of those things for which we should thank God. We should adore him for all he is in himself – and as we do so, we should call to mind his attributes and remember his love, his splendour, his power, his beauty, his wisdom, his holiness.’

Doing so makes us terribly conscious of our own unworthiness, so we turn then to forgiveness and the unburdening of our hearts. Room 3 is ‘rather dim and shadowy as we enter but brighter as we move across it to the window. It is the room of Confession, Forgiveness, and Unloading. Here we confess our sin, not just in a general way but really being honest. Most of us are sometimes jealous, malicious, unkind, proud, irritable, intolerant, impure. But God is always ready and willing to forgive us. We can move toward the window, pull up the blind, and let the streaming light of loving forgiveness and acceptance flood the room. We are loved, understood, forgiven, and accepted.’ Before we leave this room, too, we must make sure that we are ready to forgive others who may have sinned against us.

Cleansed by forgiveness we are ready now to receive from God in room 4, the room set aside for affirmation and reception. As Weatherhead puts it, ‘We are no longer to dwell on the depths to which we have fallen but on the heights to which God will lead us. God is waiting to give. Jesus put the matter in an unforgettable sentence: ‘What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.’ (Mark 11:24.) Psalm 23 is suitable furniture for this room. ‘It does not ask, “O Lord, be my Shepherd”. It affirms that he is. It does not ask for guidance. It rests in the affirmation that the soul is being guided.’

By the time we reach room 5, the place for purified desire and sincere petition, if our previous experience of the earlier rooms has been successful, then ‘we want to love more deeply both God and our fellows and promote God’s interests even more than our own. We stop saying, “Give me”, and start saying, “Make me” and “Show me” and “Use me”. This is the place where we ask for renewed trust and stronger faith and more tolerant love for those who differ from us.’

Room 6 is the room of prayer for others. ‘Some may think it odd to put intercessions for others so late’, Weatherhead observes, ‘but it is when [we] have [ourselves] got nearest to God and asked him in petition to do things for [us] and in [us] that [we] can be of maximum help to others.’ In our prayers for others it is enough ‘to say the name of the person slowly, calling him to mind in as vivid a picture as possible, and then imaginatively watching him or her emerging from his or her difficulties, being made well – if we are praying about his health – being made confident, courageous, serene, joyous, or whatever it may be.’ Avoid negative emotions such as pity or fear, which may hinder rather than help the prayer for others. ‘The conquest of grief lies not in suppressing it but in holding our minds still before the Lord (to use an old Quaker phrase) till we are filled with the realization of His Life and Power. Then, and only then, is our longing to help the other and lighten the burden made possible of fulfilment.’

The seventh and final room is imagined as a big room at the top of the house (or in a bungalow, a large room with a view of the garden), which is set aside for Meditation. ‘Here we sometimes take an incident in the Gospels and try to do what Ruskin said he did, ‘to be present as if in the body at each recorded act in the life of the Redeemer’. ‘In this way, imaginative communion with him can have – as nearly as possible – the results of being with him in Galilee. That communion is surely the strongest transforming power in the world. What it did for Peter and John, it can do for us.’

There is no one magic formula for prayer in each and every circumstance, or to meet the spiritual needs of all of us all of the time. I can only say two things in recommendation of the system advocated by Leslie Weatherhead. If you experience dryness in prayer, try it for yourselves. You will be refreshed. And when we have forgotten about it, as sooner or later we will, because our attention spans vary, then come back to it. Each time you experience it you will be renewed. Best of all, get hold a copy of his book yourself because his meditations on scriptural passages are often profound. For a reminder of God’s presence in the world, in spite of apparent evidence to the contrary, the prayer method advocated in A Private House of Prayer takes some beating. As one reader expresses it, ‘This has been my “Desert Island Discs” book for over 20 years, second only to the Bible in usage.’

Last Sunday's thought: on the distinction between believers and disciples

   ‘I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name’ (John 15:16).

         Are we just believers in Christ or are we disciples of Christ? There is an important distinction to be made between the ‘believer’ and the ‘disciple’. It is true that we would like there to be as many believers in Christ as possible. It is much preferable for there to be many genuine believers rather than just notional believers. St Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5, ‘Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new’ (2 Cor. 5:17). Or as the New Living Translation of 2007 has it, ‘The old life is gone; a new life has begun!’

         And yet Jesus makes this distinction between believers and disciples. Every disciple is a believer, we may claim. However, not every believer is a disciple. Being a disciple is something more. There is a greater maturity; there is a greater commitment; above all there is greater knowledge and with it, greater understanding of the issues at stake. There are, it has been suggested, at least four distinctions of a disciple: (1) abiding in the Word; (2) loving other disciples; (3) bearing fruit, and (4) being prepared to pay the price of following Jesus.

         ‘If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples’ (John 8:31). You must know and live in His Word to be His disciple. A Christian who does not know and abide in His word is a believer, but not a disciple. Some authorities (e.g. Andreas J. Köstenberger in The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization [2011], i. 694) emphasise that discipleship refers to ‘a person’s life commitment to a body of teaching as exemplified by the teacher [or rabbi] himself’. By being in a privileged group around Jesus, the first disciples came to know ‘the truth’, and that the truth would make the believer free (John 8:32). For a disciple of Jesus, profound knowledge of, and reflection upon, his teaching is the starting point.

         As for the second distinction of discipleship, many Christians love one another in word but not in deed: they pay lip service to the command that ‘all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’ (John 13:35). The self-giving or agape love taught by Jesus requires fidelity and sincerity. As Paul observed, we must ‘be devoted to one another in brotherly love’. We must ‘honour one another above ourselves’ (Rom. 12:10). Our attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus (Philippians 2:5). We must cease being self-centred and become Christ-centred.

         A believer in Christ may nevertheless be a fruitless believer. A fruitless disciple is a contradiction in terms. ‘By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so become – or prove to be – My disciples’ (John 15:8). The branch abiding in the vine and bearing fruit in John ch 15 is the believer becoming a disciple of Christ. Paul declared to the Romans that he wanted to ‘reap some harvest among’ them as he had ‘among the rest of the Gentiles’ (Rom. 1:13).

         The final distinction between a Christian and a disciple is a particularly hard one, and one where most of us fail: the Christian puts his family first, while the disciple puts Jesus first. Jesus made it clear that His disciples must put Him first above their own families or they could not be His disciples (e.g. Luke 18:29-30). There is no discipleship without cost, Paul says: we have to make ‘a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God’ (Rom 12:1). ‘…none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all’ (Luke 14:33) – that is, it is suggested, ‘all claims to human relationships, self, and possessions’. We are required to be good stewards of what God leaves us with, but we must remember it is on loan for His glory.

         For a time our primary duties may be to our families, because we have a duty of care for sick parents or we have to care for our children. As one pastor puts it, ‘... As God has added more children to my “quiver” (Psalm 127:5), it has become all the more important that I “redeem the time” – not merely “balance” time between family and work, but prioritize my family and in particular seek to share with my children the good and gracious things of the Lord.

But we are not called to do this all our lives. Our children grow up and leave the nest. In large measure we have discharged our duty of care. Then, we are no longer called to remain believers. Jesus calls each and every one of his believers to press on to meet that fourth test, willingness to accept sacrifices, in order to become His disciple.

‘Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing…’ ‘My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.’ In so doing, we receive Christ’s grace or love ourselves. A new life has begun and we move on to strengthen our common life in church, accepting one another’s failings in a spirit of love, and working towards change to the new life for the whole people of God. 

We remember that each one of us has been given a special gift. ‘Each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.’ The ‘measure of Christ’s gift’ in Eph. 4:7 is rendered in the Revised English Version as a ‘due portion in Christ’s bounty’. This is what we all receive through the love of Christ. It is not for us to hide that gift under a bushel. For us to ‘bear much fruit’ in becoming God’s disciples, it is for us to discern that special gift which each of us has and use it here and now in his service, in the mighty task of trying to build up God’s kingdom in this world and not the next.