Apr 26, 2021 | Wens Pen
The kiss of the Father is a like divine kiss planted on the cheek of humanity. It is a metaphorical idea that images the deep love and affection of the Father. God is a unique Father who is smitten with us, His children. He is not the stoic, impassive type father who keeps His children at arm’s length, requiring them to earn His favour. Rather He nurtures and cherishes us, drawing us close to His heart. Although the kiss of the Father is a figurative way of describing God’s affection, His kiss has been felt across the universal family of humanity.The kiss of the Father is like a million raindrops landing on our cheeks as He affectionately demonstrates His love. It is a kiss that signals we belong to this benevolent Father. The kiss of the Father is the most powerful kiss a Father can bestow upon a child. It is a sacred, present, and eternal kiss that is indelibly left on the cheek of our souls. Most importantly, the kiss of the Father is not a pointer to the child. The child is not the focus of the kiss. The child is the beneficiary. The kiss of the Father is a pointer to the Father. His kiss is an action that points right back at the perfect love and acceptance of this faultless Father, who places an unbreakable seal of love over our hearts, securing us as His children.
The entire story of Scripture captures how God has kissed humanity. The Father kissed us at creation, at the height of our rebellion, at the cross, in the resurrection, in our salvation and He kisses us as a daily expression of His devotion, tenderness and love. We see a beautiful picture of the impact of the kiss of the Father in Luke 15:20 when we read about the prodigal son. The father had been watching for his son and when he saw him at a distance, he didn’t just stand there, hands on hips thinking “I’m going to wait for that boy to crawl his way through the dirt to me and then I’m going to teach him the lesson of the century”. Rather, he was struck with compassion. That father ran like the wind to the son, embraced him, kissed him and restored him and his privileges as a son. The kiss of the father was a powerful expression of utter love and acceptance. It left the son in no doubt to the status of his sonship. We learn from this story that the kiss of the Father is never determined by circumstances or the state of the heart. It is a kiss we never need to solicit or at any moment become eligible for. The rebellious son in this story was never not the son of the father and the father was always going to embrace and kiss his son. So too, the kiss of the Father in our story will always be the expression of His unsurpassed love and adoration as He runs to us, gathers us up in His arms and kisses us. Can you feel it? Can you feel the kiss of the Fathertoday?
So, friends, get your “Father’s kiss” on today.
Best days to come.
Wen
Apr 26, 2021 | Care Conversations
12. Thinking about solutions.
We know from the research, our own experiences and that of family and friends as well as our observations that the drift from faith by young people is real and it causes us some anguish.
Recognition of the problems cannot be the end of our journey. What can we do? What should we do?
I would suggest that initially we consider:
- God’s purposes for family and education.
- The good thinking and research by Biblical Christian thinkers with regard to human and faith development.
The human family is a creation of God and determined by Him. But human family is not ultimate; the family of God – The Body of Christ – is the endgame.
Just like the purpose of human marriage is to see a picture of Christ’s relationship with His people; human family points to the Body of Christ that will be eternal.
So, the journey for children begins with dependence on parents – but it doesn’t end there. There is a sense in which children need to progress from dependence on family through independence to inter-dependence in community and dependence upon God.
Many Christians have tried to articulate a progression of faith development. No theory of faith development is complete and no person’s faith development follows a strict formula. However, some of the observations can be valuable. We will be considering the faith development theory of John Westerhoff.
What we can state so far is that:
The purpose of family is to progress to faith in Christ, a dependence upon the sovereign God and an interdependence with people.
The nature of faith is that it should progress, grow, and deepen – from imitating, or assuming, the faith of parents and others to a position of ownership.
More next time.
Blessings
Brian
Apr 21, 2021 | Teachers Talking
1 – Has God spoken?
Spirituality is in the cultural air that we breathe. According to the latest Census, people’s participation in organised religion continues to decline whilst interest in spirituality has increased. The Oxford dictionary defines spirituality as the quality of being connected with religion or the human spirit. This reflects that people are still searching for that which is lasting and eternal to give their lives meaning.
But in our post-truth culture, spirituality is seen as self-determined, a spirituality based on what suits a person. Our culture shuns truth because it is a barrier to unfettered individual autonomy. Free from any authority, personal choice and preference is at the heart of this worldview and the reason many describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious.
But post-truth, which captures the mood of our culture, is rebellion from the beginning. “Has God spoken?” (Genesis 3:1). This was the ultimate question in search of autonomy “Has God given us His Word?” The answer to that question meant life or death. Adam and Eve were driven from the garden because they reached for knowledge that distrusted God and sought to exclude Him. They wanted to determine their own destiny and so dishonoured the One who knew them first.
Through God’s revelation, we discover that all authority belongs to God. The Bible is authoritative because it is the trustworthy record of God’s self-disclosure that invites us into a life of communion with Him and participation in His eternal purpose. God’s authority is based on His character for He is a loving, wise and good Creator who is active in His world through Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit.
“The authority of Scripture when unpacked offers a picture of God’s sovereign and saving plan for the entire cosmos dramatically inaugurated by Jesus Himself and now to be implemented through the Spirit led life of the church precisely as the Scripture-reading community.” (Wright, 1991)
How can this ancient text be authoritative for our students in the 21st Century? Many of the influential voices in the lives of our students are master story-tellers. When you tell your students a story you invite them into a different world to see reality and themselves in new ways. Those who led revolutions told stories about the past, the present and future. They invited people to participate in their story and lives were changed. History reveals the pain and suffering of many who believed in those who led them astray.
How wonderful is it when God our Creator and Redeemer breathes through His Word. So it is important that in our role as teachers that we read and understand the Bible as many diverse stories, some very complex and surprising which come together in Christ. Our calling is to draw each generation into the plot of this story and inspire and equip our students to carry it forward.
“God’s Word places us in the timeline of a coherent history, delivering us from the deceptions of the enemy, telling us who we are, and where we came from, what is wrong with us, how we are made whole, and where we are going. We are placed within a story of which we know and celebrate the outcome, even as we wait for it through time and trial. In Christ, history’s outcome – its ultimate end is revealed. Dark days may follow, but the ending is known. It is a story neither deficient, nor untrustworthy.” (Carattini, 2012, p. 1)
What an amazing story. What a privilege to proclaim it to the students in our care.
Grace and Peace
The Excellence Centre
References
- Wright, N.T. (1991). How the Bible be authoritative. The Christian Faith & Action Trust.
- Carattini, J. (2012). Deficient Stories: A slice of Infinity RZIM
Apr 21, 2021 | Teachers Talking
Introduction
Welcome to Teachers Talking for Term 2. Last term we explored the different worldviews and how they seek to make sense of the world and our purpose in it. As our students engage in a culture that has largely rejected the God of the Bible from its imagination, we feel the pressure of the social dualism of Biblical truth when our culture and curriculum tells the story of a closed universe. At a time when the Christian mind is often being pressured to conform to the spirit of the age, it is imperative that the Scriptures be brought back from the margin to be re-established at the centre as the text for living the way of Jesus and implementing our educational task.
Like sentinels who kept vigil during the night on the ancient city walls, we are called by God to be gatekeepers who bring His truth to bear on the lives of our children who are being impacted by the decay and despair of the culture we inhabit.
GK Chesterton so aptly commented that because he felt his life was a story then there must be a story-teller. The first verse of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” boldly declares that we are not part of a meaningless cosmos that came into being by time and chance.
There is a true story that emerges from before time and we are part of it. The Bible, the written testimony of the divine revelation of God, is the true story of creation and salvation history and this glorious story, as we read, listen and meditate upon it, becomes our story. Our school communities are called to tell this story and model and teach life as discipleship that responds to the Lordship of Christ and builds a better world turning it upside-down (but in reality the right-side up). The theme for our Term 2 Teachers Talking is “Eat this Book” – the title of a book by Eugene Peterson on how to read God’s Word and to live in its story. For Christian teachers, there can be no false separation between our personal and professional lives. We teach who we are, for when “a student is fully trained he/she will be like their teacher.” (Luke 6:40)
As the Latin phrase says, ‘Nemo potest dare quad nonhabet’ – You can’t give what you don’t have. The very process of designing learning for our students that flows from one’s deeply held Biblical beliefs is a picture of redemption at work.
A key aim of the Excellence Centre is to bless and transform the thinking of teachers as they fulfil their God-given calling.
We trust these talks will assist you to explore with your students the wonder and riches of God’s Word with the goal that His Story will become their story.
“Stand at the crossroads and look, ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is and walk in it and you will find rest for your souls.” Jeremiah 6:16
Grace and Peace
The Excellence Centre
Apr 21, 2021 | Care Conversations
11. An Incomplete Understanding of God
For many young people who disconnect from faith and/or faith communities, the reason is an incomplete, or skewed, view of the Triune God.
I need to be super careful how I address this one. Readers need to carefully try to understand what I’m attempting to say.
Many young people disengage from faith or faith communities because they have misunderstood, or been led to misunderstand, the truth that “God is Love”. He is, but we are on dangerous ground when we reduce Him to a single-attribute God.
Undoubtedly, love is a very important attribute of God. John says “God is love”[1], it is A defining quality of God. However, this does not minimize His other qualities. Some people suggest that we must interpret all of God’s attributes in light of His love. In taking this perspective, we impose our limited understanding of love onto God, and recreate Him into our image.
By all means, we should rejoice in God’s mercy and love. But we must also recognize that He is uncompromisingly holy, righteous, and just.
“Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrong.”[2]
“The universe exists not for Love’s glory, but for God’s glory.”[3]
A W Tozer points out that when John says, “God is love”, he is not making a definitive and exclusive statement about the nature of God.
“John was by those words stating a fact, but he was not offering a definition.”
If love is equal to God then God is only equal to love, and God and love are identical. Thus, we destroy the concept of personality in God and deny outright all His attributes save one, and that one we substitute for God.
The words “God is love” mean that love is an essential attribute of God. Love is something true of God, but it is not God. It expresses the way God is in His unitary being, as do the words holiness, justice, faithfulness, and truth. Because God is immutable, He always acts like Himself, and because He is a unity, He never suspends one of His attributes in order to exercise another.[4]
I realise that this might sound a little complex at first reading. Why is this an important point? Because we can inadvertently communicate that “God is love” means that God must fit into our understanding of what love is; He must always be ensuring our comfort and relieving our pain.
It means that when tough situations occur, when we experience harm or pain, when tragedy strikes, we conclude that God has not met our definition of love. Thus, we reject Him as unfair, false, and unworthy of our allegiance.
This is significant and a perspective that we will address later.
Blessings
Brian
[1] 1 John 4:16
[2] Habakkuk 1:13
[3] Eternal Perspectives Blog. Randy Alcorn (2018) https://www.epm.org/blog/2018/Mar/19/love-not-god-aw-tozer
[4] Tozer, A.W., (1978) The Knowledge of the Holy. Harper Collins (p 68)
