What Have We Got Wrong About the Cross?

I am gonna introduce Paul with just a little something.

A little nugget, a nugget, a nugget.

I went to university a long time ago and I didn't actually read

theology. I was tempted to, I actually was

choosing between theology, English and history as the three

subjects I wanted to read at uni.

And we prayed, me and my mum, and felt for a number of reasons

to read English. And I'm really, really pleased

that I did that because what I noticed at the university I went

to is that a lot of people who read theology lost their faith.

But a lot of people who did English didn't have faith, so

they had nothing to lose. It was absolutely brilliant

doing English because no one had any expectations of faith.

It's a very secular subject and as a person of faith I could

kind of navigate through. But I felt that was really

heartbreaking. It was, it was heartbreaking for

people to go to university having had this deeply rich,

emotional, often family inheritance, belief in God, and

then just have it shot down ruthlessly and brutally for

three years. And of course, some people got

through it, but the way they got through it was what we've talked

about before, something called cognitive dissonance.

They got through it by kind of parking that stuff they heard

and then going, I know I experienced God in worship.

I know he leads me. I know he provides for me.

But there was a disintegration between a kind of faith in God

that makes sense, a loving God with our mind, and then this

kind of gut instinct that God's real.

And then about 2025 years later, I went to a lecture by a man who

said, who talked about something called the synoptic problem.

This is a problem to do with the order and the historicity of the

four accounts of the person of Jesus and the synoptics being

same view synoptic of Matthew, Mark, Luke, that very similar

view of Jesus. And there's this academic issue

around those gospels, and this man delivered this lecture, and

it was exactly the same issue as had been the issue where people

lost their faith 20 to 30 years ago.

But the only difference was that this person believed in the

resurrection from the dead, and therefore he framed the synoptic

problem completely differently. It turns out it's not really a

problem at all. The issue is do we believe in

the resurrection from the dead? So I found this healing.

I began to find a healing in a theology that we would call is

both mystical, where it's an experience, a revelatory

experience of God, and then something you can then

articulate with your mind. We're designed to love God, but

it's never, it's not with our mind first.

It's heart, soul, mind and body. There's an order.

We have the revelation and at the beginning of 1 John, he

says, I'm trying to explain to you something I touched, I felt

I experienced. There was this person called

Jesus who was the incarnation, the Word made flesh.

And I am really struggling with the words to express that

incredibly profound reality. So this is kind of happening to

me and I realise that I am believing things that are

unbelievably mind blowing, and yet my experience of life isn't

mind blowing. I'm believing that the Christ

holds the cosmos together and holds me together and holds

history together and is the beginning and the end.

But I'm living as if death is bigger.

I'm living as if I'm crippled by who's going to pay the bills.

I'm living as if our illness is the final answer.

I'm living like Adam is bigger than Jesus.

So we're going to push into some stuff that's painful that we

might not agree with, we might never agree with, but I am sick

and tired of living in that world.

I want to live in a world of reality where Jesus is bigger

than Adam. Do you understand what I'm

saying by that? New creation is bigger than old

creation. Life is bigger than death.

The reality of union is bigger than than the worst case

scenario of what humans can come up with.

So in order to do that, we want two things in this church.

We want to be what we call psychologically safe.

So these are the boundaries of this conversation, which we've

I've had with Paul for about 7 years and we're going to have

for years, but we're really going to have it for this year.

What I mean by psychological safety is everyone is free

before God to believe what they like.

No one can ever violate or presume anyone else's conscience

or conviction. We believe what we believe.

It's a mystery, but we do. It's all sorts of influences in

what we believe, but we believe it.

And we never, ever want to be a culture where we violate that

fundamental I just believe this or I don't believe this or I

believe this, but I don't believe that.

That is a psychologically safe culture.

As soon as we get to the point where we feel we have to believe

something or we have to say something, that's exactly what's

gone wrong politically is no one has been able to be honest about

what they really believe. And we're literally beginning to

pay hell for that. And we won't be that in this

church. We're going to be a

psychologically safe church where people can literally say,

oh, that resonates, that doesn't, that's exciting, that

is really destabilising. We're going to be that

community. We are not going to be

polarised. We're going to love people who

think differently to us. We're going to have a family

that can hold. I have a very deep relationship

biologically with my biological family.

They will always be my family and I fundamentally disagree

with them on a lot of stuff. We have to get better as the

global church at being in agreement.

Can someone guess how many Protestant denominations there

are? Just Protestant 30 to 45,000,

Protestant demolitions because I had a revelation.

You didn't quite get it. I'm just going to start another

church now. I think there is a lot of unity

in partnership and love between us now.

And more and more with the Catholic.

I think what God is doing, and part of this conversation is I

think he's reuniting with the Orthodox, of which there was a

schism in 1054. So that's part of what this

journey's about. But we're not just going to be

psychologically safe. What is the other thing we're

going to be? We're going to be brave.

We're going to be brave. The only bravery we can have is

with our own fears. We can't be brave for someone,

we can't make someone be brave, but we can be brave for

ourselves. So we're safe for other people,

but we're brave for ourselves. That's the culture I want us to

be in. If people have not done any of

the Trinitarian videos, we are, there's an introduction and a

lecture 1 and a lecture 2, all three of them.

It would be great if you've seen by this Wednesday, because we're

actually having a whole evening every month with a complete meal

where all of us can start to process these deep things about

what we actually believe. It's really, really unusual for

a, for a church to actually put theology back into the church.

It's been split. It's been put in the Academy and

killed, and then the church has become superficial and

experiential. We're putting theology back into

the church because what we actually believe is how we

actually live. We live out of our beliefs

whether we like it or not. So we've got to understand what

we actually believe. So everyone, Wednesday a month,

we're going through it. We're going through content.

If you can't make the Wednesday pools available for a Zoom in

theology, we call these, we call these kind of conversations

where someone pushes the boundary as a conversation

partner. They are someone who has a

conviction that might be different to us.

And they are so helpful in helping us formulate what we

think because they're not thinking like everyone else.

They've gone through a process and they have a conviction.

That's all we can. That's, that's, that's very

safe, isn't it? They're just a conversation

partner and we are brave enough to go.

I'm going to really listen to what you're going to say.

So all that to say, I'm going to pray.

Now, I'd encourage anyone, we never ask Chris and I never ask

anyone to do anything. I hope, as you know, we're all

grown-ups, we all follow Jesus, blah, blah, blah.

But on this thing, we would love it if everyone could connect him

with this for a year, once a month, we get ditch on Netflix,

ditch your social media scrolling and watch one video,

one hour of theology once a month and come here for a

conversation once a month. You will never get this kind of

opportunity anywhere else. We're getting it for free, and

we probably won't. We may get it again every year,

but we probably won't get it again.

If we do get it again, it started this year.

The conversation started here this year.

This is a big global conversation in the Academy.

It's been going on for decades. We get to do it here.

So I'm going to pray now. I'm going to pray for Paul, but

I'm going to pray for us. There must be more.

Jesus must be bigger than Adam. Lord, I worship you and praise

you, Trinitarian, Godfather, Son and Spirit.

When you became Sark's flesh, you did something to the human

condition which took us all in yourself and reconstituted us.

You were fully human and fully divine, and it took 300 years

for first followers of you to wrestle through to that phrase.

We want our minds blown again with incarnation.

When we come to Christmas, this Christmas, we won't want it to

be like any other Christmas where we say the same quotes

from Isaiah, the same quotes from John, and it means nothing

to us. We want our minds blown by

incarnation. And then something happened when

you absorbed all the evil of the human condition and the

principalities and powers that oppose you on the cross, and you

were executed and dead and buried and you harrowed hell.

Something happened that fundamentally changed us all

forever because death couldn't hold you.

That's apparently what we believe.

Death couldn't hold you. You are life.

And so you were physically raised from the dead as a

vindication that when you said your reality in life, you are.

We want to be the kind of people that actually embody that

reality. We don't just pay Idlib service,

credo, credence. What we believe is what we

actually live out from our gut. Not something we say.

But the only way, and I think Paul talks about this a lot, the

only way we can get there is through revelation.

We need you literally to reveal the nature of the Godhead to us.

We need you to reveal the Christ who holds the cosmos together.

That's what Paul's prayers all the way through his letters

were. Simply we need to know you more.

We need to understand you more. We need to experience more.

We need to know the love you have for us.

Actually, everything changes when we literally just

experience the Godhead. And so we cry out to you.

We're not just going through another Sunday.

We cry out to you to birth in us a new fresh knowledge of you.

We cry out to you to protect this journey, this beautiful

community of people that that anything that isn't of you,

darkness just as easily exposed by light.

We don't have to worry the light, just it, it just clears

away. But we protect us.

Protect us as we go on this journey into reality.

And most of all, or may we be people that are marked by

inexpressible joy and people actually ask us what is the hope

that you have within you? Because we are so full of hope

that people actually ask that question.

Amen. Thanks.

Alice, that's great. So yeah, please do join us on

Wednesday. I've got I've got one simple

thing I'm wanting to do today and then I'll just throw some

sparkles around the outside and see where we land land with

those. But just just picking up on a on

a couple of those things as you were praying, Alice.

So just remembered Jesus promise, one of the one of the

beautiful promises of the New Testament.

He says, Father, I have made you known and I will continue to

make you known. So Jesus promise is that he will

continue to make known to us what he has made known to us,

which is the the true nature and character of the fathers.

He continues to make him known. So we, we've, we've got a good

promise, but it is absolutely right.

We can only know the unknowable by the unknowable revealing

themselves to us. You know, Paul's prayer that we

might know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge being

filled to all the fullness of God.

I love that prayer. I was also thinking, you know,

we, we're used to dealing with the Bible.

I was listening to A, to a podcast that was making me a

little bit cross. And so one of the things that I

thought, Oh yeah, yeah, I know why it's the guy who was being

interviewed said, well, you know, of course we've got the

Bible. And the Bible is a manual, like

the user manual for human life, which is exactly the opposite of

what the Holy Spirit told me is the Bible is absolutely not a

user manual. If you read it like a user

manual, you're going to be in big, big trouble.

But the church has, the church has read it that way.

But I think it's interesting, if you approach the Bible, just

think about the New Testament, approach it from the perspective

of how is it that these people got to say the things that they

said? Like how did they arrive at the

conviction and the conclusion? You know, when Paul says there

is nothing in all of creation that can separate us from the

love of God and he starts listing things, he says there's

no power, there's no principality.

So there's nothing in the present.

No, no, no phenomenon out there that has the capability to

separate us from the love of God.

And then he he says there's nothing in the future that has

the power or the capability to separate us from the love of

God. And the future is an interesting

one because the future is, you know, an an open door of endless

possibilities. We have absolutely no idea

what's coming. So he's saying, look, I'm trying

to say in an is in as emphatic terms as I possibly can.

There is absolutely nothing that can be conceived of that is able

to get between US and the love of God in Christ.

And we read that and think, well, that's great, that's cool.

But how did someone like Paul actually get to the point where

he was able to say that with the with the conviction?

And you know, he's a a God fearing man who doesn't want to

say the wrong things about God, right?

He's a truth teller. How does he come to be able to

be so certain in his convictions about that fact?

Where does he get it from? Because there are lots of things

that you can go through in life that will make you feel like,

yeah, maybe that could separate you or that this could or that

could. There are lots of things.

How can Paul be so emphatic? And I, I want to suggest is

because of what he has seen in the incarnation has said, well,

because of this, because of the revelation of God in Christ in

the incarnation, what we see there is so all-encompassing and

far reaching. I'm able to say beyond a shadow

of a doubt that if you believe in Jesus, you know that it is.

There is no hypothetical possibility in any of the

multiverse that can separate you from his love.

But Paul gets that from his experience and encounter with

Christ. He doesn't get it just because

he's waxing lyrical or being poetic.

He's he is Speaking of what he knows.

He's speaking out of knowledge. I mean real knowledge, not

hypothetical. So again, Alice referenced John.

You know, this is we are giving testimony to what we have

handled with our own hands. John is saying we have seen this

light with our own eyes. We've handled with our own

hands. We've been face to face with

him. And we are testifying to you

what we have come to know about who this person is and what this

means for everything else. And this is the basis of the

Apostolic witness. This is why we're writing these

things. This is why we're teaching these

things. This is why we're living the way

that we are because of an encounter.

And that encounter is informing everything else.

And we've we're still figuring that out, what the implication

of that is. And you can see that in the New

Testament, you can see chronologically as well, the

earlier books of the New Testament have less formed ideas

than the later books of the New Testament.

But these are these are experiences when, when Paul is

giving his prayer, like the one in Ephesians, I pray that I

kneel before the Father from whom all fatherhood or family in

heaven and earth derives his name.

And I pray that you being rooted and grounded in love, may have

power together with all the Saints to grasp the height,

depth, length and breadth to know the love of Christ that

surpasses knowledge and thereby brackets, thereby being filled

to all the fullness of God. Right, when he gives this

prayer, he's not just coming up with a prayer that that prayer

is drawn from the pattern of his experience.

He's saying, I'm, I'm saying there's a, a direct link between

each part, each of the parts of this prayer.

And it begins with the Father. So the revelation of the Father

and all that that implies is the beginning of this sequence in

Paul's prayer, which ends with having a revelation of the love

of Christ, knowing the love that surpasses knowledge, and then

going into being filled with all of the fullness.

And then he says the famous verse, you know, and now to him

to who is able to do immeasurably abundantly beyond

anything we could ask for or imagine according to the power

that is at work within us right now to him be glory in the

church for all generations. So Paul is taking us through a

sequence in his prayer. This is an experience.

He's he's saying I'm telling you what it looks like for a human

being to become awake to the reality of the fullness of God

in them through them and and in everything.

And this is how it happens. It begins with the revelation of

the Father. He says, that's why I bow the

knee before the Father so and you can go through that prayer

and you can see the different components to it.

What thing leads to another. This is supposed to be like a

little map, a little template where you say, all right, this

is something I can pray through. I can engage with in a real

experiential way that helps me to see, OK, what where is the

joy draining out? What is where is not things.

Where are things not actually connecting up for me?

Where are the where is the cognitive dissonance?

Where is the fuse being blown? So Baxter, you know, good

friend, he he, I like the statement.

He said. I wonder what would happen if we

just put a sign up in front of above the door post of every

church saying Jesus said I'm the way, the truth and the life.

Frankly, we have no idea what that means.

But if you want to help us figure out, then you're welcome,

right? Come and help us figure it out.

Come and bring your human experience into this

conversation and let's discover where Jesus is together in that.

Because frankly, we, we just don't really know, but we need

to find out. We want it.

We, we want to find him and what he's like and where he is and

what he's doing. So for me in engaging with the

scripture, I feel like I'm, I'm engaging with the, the, the, the

journalistic record of the Apostolic witness.

So these are people who are telling us what they have

discovered. It's, it's not just come as like

it just dropped out the sky. Like Joseph Smith had some

golden tablets on the ground, you know, in Utah or whatever it

was, you know, that, that that gave him apparently some new

revelation, right? It's not that or like the the

Quran where you know, Muhammad says I'm just getting a I'm just

automatic. Dictating, you know, this,

channelling this voice, these are the the apostles saying,

look, we have witnessed this, we've experienced it, we know

it's crazy, but this is the outcome and all, all of that's

there. It changes how you read the New

Testament when you read it that way, rather than trying to read

it like a manual, you know, thinking that it's a or a legal

document, which is even worse in my opinion.

So I want, I want to just throw that out.

We when we're engaging with the Scripture, it's this question of

what is it we're looking for? How are we looking at the

Scripture on the Wednesdays and in the courses we're doing the,

the lectures and things we're doing with ITTF, we're deep

diving on that. We're covering scriptural,

historical, philosophical, spiritual angles on all kinds of

core things to do with the Christian belief and the gospel.

I've got 20 minutes now, so I'm not not going to be

comprehensive, but I do want to draw some pictures and hopefully

the pictures may speak 1000 words.

And I don't know, it's probably Shakespeare who said that,

wasn't it? But I was thinking, Alice, you

know, you're much better off reading GK Chessis than the Nazi

sprawl. So, you know, choosing English

at university is probably a good decision if you want to actually

come to know Jesus. I mean, there's you, you, you at

least it's honest, you know, I mean, there's a lot of theology

is really very not honest. And I think that, you know, the

scripture says you desire truth in the inward parts.

I feel like the only me that God cannot bless is the fake me.

So as long as I'm turning up fake, then nothing's going to

happen or or worse, right? The bad thing is going to

happen. And the the word hypocrisy in

the New Testament is a drama word, right?

And it's, it's just to live behind the mask.

So the invitation of the gospel is towards truth and truth is

also towards OK, getting the facade out of the way, the

things that we think we're supposed to say do actually to

take that down. That was if we're play acting in

a certain way, let that go so that the truth can actually come

forward. And we need to do that until we

actually show up in truth. We don't ever really meet Jesus

once. Once we show up in truth, we

meet Jesus because he is the truth and he's present in the

truth. And I think one of the

unfortunate things in a lot of church or religious kind of

spiritual context is that there are lots of forces that exert a

pressure on us to not show up in the truth.

It's will show up with a Facade, conceal, hide, cover, don't be

honest. And one of the things I have

pieces of feedback I've had over over the years running the ITTF

course, consistent pieces of feedback is people saying I've

always had XYZ questions and I've never really felt like I

could bring those questions to the table in the church setting.

Those were not allowed. There were some questions that

were just off limits. And so I've kind of just muddled

around having those questions, but not really having anywhere

to go with them. And they, they're reflected on

the fact actually, this course has enabled me.

It's a, it's a safe place to be able to have the, the, the

questions. I mean, I'm not afraid of

questions. I don't mind you can ask

whatever. And I'm also not afraid of

anybody taking me out, buying me a coffee and also asking me

whatever, you know, I used to say again, those of you who know

me, no, I started out in St evangelism and sometimes, you

know, we would hear all kinds of choice and colourful terms and

you know, sometimes people would apologise.

I said, listen, there's literally nothing you can say to

me that I haven't already heard, right?

I've been doing this a long time.

Anything you have to ask about say or whatever, I've heard it

before. So I'm kind of thick skinned on

that. And that's also true as far as

the questions go. And I'm not, I'm not intimidated

by any question whatsoever. And my answer might be I have no

flipping clue, but I'm still not intimidated by by the question.

So please don't be in, don't be intimidated about asking

questions. It's just in general, our faith

is not at risk from questions. I think for a long time I

thought, and again, it was this mentality of all of you go to

university and study theology, you'll lose your faith.

I met a lot of those people doing Oxford theology courses

was it was a bit of a stereotype.

You know, people go and study theology at Oxford and lose

their faith. And I had a lot of

conversations. In fact, for me, you know,

again, being an evangelist, when I first went because Alice,

Chris and I, we crossed over at university just about and when I

arrived, I was praying, what do I do here?

And I just felt Holy Spirit say, just put up signs saying is God

supernatural? Come and find out in lecture and

whatever and pray for the sick. And I and I, I went and

suggested that to my church and they're like, no, we don't think

you should do that. You should do Alpha instead.

We're doing Alpha. You get on board with that.

So it's like, well, OK, I guess I've got to listen to my church,

right? Bad idea.

Sorry, don't listen, don't listen to the Church of the

church is wrong. The church was actually wrong.

I then spent sort of three years of the most unsuccessful

unfruitful alpha initiatives I've ever come across in my life

until in my 4th year, I came round to do you know what,

forget that what they say. Let me go with what God said.

So I went and put the signs up. Come to lecture 8, you know, and

find out whether or not God's supernatural had some of the

most, a couple of the most powerful supernatural sovereign

glory encounters with people coming in and getting completely

just annihilated on the floor by like you're walking into the

thick presence of God blown apart completely.

And then I got into finals and had to stop.

And I thought, gosh, it's a real shame.

I didn't listen to Holy Spirit 3-4 years ago because we could

have been doing this all this time.

And I came pretty late to the party.

So I came to the conclusion, you know, everyone thinks that you

need to be intellectual to reach intellectuals exactly wrong.

Like don't, don't try and do that.

You know, people need an, an, an encounter with the risen Jesus.

They, they certainly don't need us to be pulled down to the

level of, you know, trying to do this intellectual thing.

And, you know, I have no problem with doing the intellectual

thing exactly. But that's not where you're

going to meet Jesus, right? You're going to meet him on the

other side of that. And I think that it can also be

a bit of a deflection and a bit of a defence, you know, try and

hold Jesus at arm's length by just spinning your wheels with

theory. I was in a debate on a podcast

recently with a theologian who frankly, A theologian who I 98%

agree with, but we just ended up in a debate on the 2%.

We didn't. It was a fun, it was a fun

podcast. He, he's good humoured and all

the rest. But I said, you know, I said, I

think one of the things you need to learn to do is watch horror

movies. I said to him, so you don't,

you're a theologian. You're kind of, I have to say

you're a professional theologian.

You spend your, you spend your life in the ivory tower of the

Academy. And I lived in a theology school

for six years. I know, right?

You're there. And what you're speaking about

feels to me to be very divorced from reality.

And I get that, you know, we're in the sort of sanitised Western

world and all the rest. So, you know, you've got

Halloween's coming up. You know, you could watch some

horror movies and it might actually ground you and connect

you back with the, the real lived experience of people on

this planet, which for many of which is far worse than anything

you're going to see on any, on any horror movie, right?

And anyway, that was, he wasn't expecting me to say that, but we

had, we had a good kind of back and forward around it.

But my, my point is Jesus wants to meet us in the reality,

right? And the questions and the

arguments and all of this stuff is not intimidating at all to

him. And if you, if you're afraid of

those, you don't need to be. I understand why you might be

apprehensive about certain things.

I know there are people who refuse to come and meet with me.

They disagree with me from the from the safe distance of behind

their keyboard. They disagree with me there, but

they will never accept my invitation to meet in person.

And I know the reason they won't is because they know if they sit

down with me, they'll walk out and not be able to maintain the

views that they're holding. They know that and they're

afraid of that and they're worried about it because they

are desperately holding on to something that is giving them a

sense of security and they're afraid about letting go of it.

And I know that because that used to be me.

I, I used to exactly be there. So I'm trying to say to them,

listen, it's all right, you know, come, we'll have a nice

conversation. I'll, you know, but if you're

coming at me in public, I'm afraid I'm going to have to take

you down in public. And that's why they sort of hide

behind the keyboard, right? But, but that does happen.

You know, I know people are, are afraid of the, the questions.

They think, oh, it's going to make me confused.

It's going to make me lose my faith or something.

And then then they they might call me a call me a snake or

something. That's that's a fun one.

It's like, well, you know, cool. And I can go with that snake.

Snake is the word serif in the in the, in the Hebrew, you know,

I mean, the serif was the most senior of the angelic being.

So yeah, I'll take that one, you know.

But anyway, we don't need to be afraid, right?

There's No Fear in love. Perfect love casts out all fear.

In fact, I think it's very interesting that the Scripture

at one point, I think it's in the book of Hebrews, describes

the mission of Jesus in the following terms.

It says he came to destroy him, who by means of the fear of

death, kept us captive to death. It's interesting Jesus came to

destroy him. Brackets, the devil came to

destroy him, who by means of the fear of death, kept us captive

to death. Can you plug that back into the

four spiritual laws for me for a moment?

So fear of death holds us captive to death.

Satan holds the power of the fear.

So our attachment to death, which is the thing we, we don't

want, right. You go back to the story of the

garden. The curse comes in the form of

death and he doesn't it doesn't say he came to get us away from

death by judicially declaring us innocent in the judges courtroom

so that we don't get receive the penalty of death.

He said through fear of death we are held captive to death and

Jesus has come to destroy the one who influences us by means

of that fear. So when John says there is No

Fear in love, but perfect love casts out all fear, the one who

fears is not made perfect in love and God is love.

Fear has to do with punishment. Fear has to do with judgement.

You put those together, I think it you think, hang on a minute,

what gospel have I been thinking about?

You know, this is something that is very much rooted in in the

truth, the reality of our inner world that then manifests as in

our outer world through behaviour and action and culture

and all of these things too. And the stories we tell about

that really, really matter. And they're like coloured lenses

that we put on and they enable us to see through that

particular philtre. Only, you know, you wear blue

lenses, everything looks blue. You wear red lenses, everything

looks red. And one of the things we were

singing about in the worship today was about Jesus.

Give us vision, right? We want to see how you see, not

through the distorted lenses of the stories that we've been told

of the, the ideas that we've been holding onto.

You see, Paul had such a reconfiguration of his thinking

that he was able to say there is nothing that exists or could

exist that can separate you from the love of God.

He was able to say that with absolute conviction.

He he did not start out able to say that something happened to

him, a process happened to him whereby he was able to see that.

And that was a process called repentance, right metanoia, a

renewal or a transformation of the mind.

In fact, it was Paul also himself who said you will be

transformed by the renewing of your mind.

That's how this thing happens. As your mind gets straightened

out, the way that you think about things get straightened

out, then transformation follows.

This is a very inside out process, right?

It's from the inward to the outward.

So in my last few minutes, I want to try and put this in

picture form in a way that can whet your appetite for more and

feed in perhaps our discussion on Wednesday as well.

So I became a Christian at 15. I went straight into evangelism

on the street and spent eight years doing that.

At one point in an evangelistic mission, I had a little booklet

called Love is a Bridge. Do you remember that one?

Love is the Bridge, John's Gospel and some stuff at the

start. And when I read it, I suddenly

had this epiphany that I'd read it before and I'd read it when I

was about 5 or 6 years old and someone had given me one and I

suddenly was transported back to I had this.

I read it. I remember being in a room in my

house and praying the sinner's prayer and doing all these kind

of things when I was much younger.

So this is a kind of interesting moment for me because I had no

recollection of that until the point when I picked up this

thing and I realised I'd read it before.

And you know, great. We did, we did, we did a lot

with those tracks. Fantastic, you know, but there's

a there's a time to just run with it and there's a time to

stop and think, hang on, what is it we're running with and can we

do better? So we are often used to this

kind of this kind of perspective, right?

If you've seen this, you've seen this before, you've got God is

here on one side of the equation and we are here over here, us

and there's this chasm in between and how did we get here

on this side when God created us?

Well, there's something to do with snakes and apples and

whatever in the garden. What are we are we, do we

actually believe in that literally or is it symbolic?

Something happened to do with Adam and Eve, whatever that

means. Something happened to put us

here. And now if you're a human being

and if you're born, you're born on this side of the of the of

the chasm, right? You're born there and that's a

problem because God's over here and all these different ways

that we can conceptualise what that means depending on what

particular, you know, flavour of the tradition you're coming

from. Are you there because God is

wrathful with you over there? Are you there because, well, he

loves you, but he can't really do anything about it because

he's a consuming fire and you'll burn up if you come near him.

So he has to withdraw himself or, you know, all these kind of

different ways to think about it.

But then we say, OK, but isn't it great though?

Here comes Jesus and, and here's the cross and the cross kind of

goes like this and it, it bridges the gap like that so

that we happily can, you know, hop, skip in a jump, come back

over here to, to God, right? And, and maybe people write

Jesus there in the middle, you know, so there's this idea.

Love is the bridge, right? So here's Jesus and Jesus is the

bridge and the bridge is the cross because, oh, OK, well,

it's in the in the death of Jesus that the atonement happens

somehow. And that's often thought of in

punitive terms. OK, well, we all deserve to die

over here. Someone's got to pay.

Well, Jesus dies instead. So OK, that's good.

That's paid now. And so that's kind of closed the

gap and is meant we can then get back over to God.

And then of course, everyone argues about, well, what are the

steps to crossover from here to here?

What are the different things? Do you have to believe a certain

thing, confess a certain thing, pray in a certain way?

Do you need to be baptised? Do you need to take the

sacraments? Do you need to persevere or can

you go, can you go like the hokey cokey in and out, right.

All of these other questions, loads and loads of debates.

Well, were you predestined to come this way or is it your free

choice? You know, all, all of that is

there in the mix and with lots of different riffing that takes

place over this kind of picture. And it's quite, it's quite a

convenient picture because when particularly when you're going

out on the street, you're talking to people who know that

they're in a mess, right. It's not hard to convince them

that they're over here. Oh, yeah, definitely my life's

in a mess. Yeah.

Well, if God's around, definitely is not with me.

Not, not hard to speak to that and then sell them away to get

from here to here. Not it is.

It really isn't that hard. I spent a lot of time doing it.

In fact, you know, if you're good at selling, you can, you

can sell this one. Guys, listen, I know it sounds

really bad right now, but look, really, really good news.

All you really need to do is just pray this prayer, right?

Pray the prayer or the questionnaire thing.

Do you remember that when those guys came and they thought we

were having revival because they reinvented questionnaire

evangelism from the 1980s and they called it the turning.

And I said to Chris, my stomach's turning and they they

take them down. And at the end, you know, they

pretend like they're doing a survey.

It's like trick them in a bit like chuggers, you know, the

charity mode trick you in that you're having a conversation and

they want to close the deal at the end.

And if everybody knows where it's going, right.

And at the bottom, they say, now if you, if you were able to know

God personally, would you be interested?

And then they're ticking the box and saying, well, yeah, I

suppose I would like to know God personally.

Yeah, I suppose that sounds good.

So. OK, tick the box.

All right. Well, here's how you can do it.

You know, now I've closed you down on that.

You've said to me that you want to know him personally.

Here's how you can answer. Just pray this prayer after me.

Well, yeah, I guess. I suppose I can just pray that

prayer. I mean, I've just been out

shopping, but I don't know. I don't know of all the

implications of that. Yeah, I can pray the prayer.

Fine. Amazing.

Fantastic. Tick.

And then it goes back and gets reported.

Amazing. We had 57 people become

Christians today in Broadmead, you know, and then it gets

reported back into the, you know, the, the national sales

forecasts and sales and marketing forecasts.

Those, those numbers turn over quite nicely.

And then we can, we can have a good conference about it and we

can have a good speaking tour about how fantastic this method

is of getting people to sign up on the on the dotted line.

And meanwhile, the rest of us are looking around saying, has

anything changed in this in this environment because of this

activity, other than a whole bunch of people getting excited

about an activity that two weeks from now they're not going to be

doing anymore. And then they'll be a little bit

more disappointed than when it started, right?

My stomach's turning. Anyway.

I mean, that one, that was a bit faddish.

It disappeared quite quickly. And then again, some years from

now, someone else will unearth questionnaire evangelism as the

new latest amazing thing that's going to kind of bring revival

anyway. Lots of different ways.

If you really want this to work, then just really turn up the

heat on them. If you were to die tonight,

would you know where you're going to go?

What if you were to walk out and get hit by a truck right now?

I said that to a friend of mine in universe.

Look, I know, I know you're kind of sort of think this is a bit

funny, but if you were to walk out and get hit by a truck right

now and he just, he goes, yeah, yeah, that, that would be

unfortunate. He said, I said like, don't

wait, seal the deal right now. Like pray that pray you don't

know when a meteorite might fall out of the sky and like splat

you right. Anything could happen and you,

you could be gone. Like now is the day of the

salvation. The Bible says not tomorrow.

So get with the programme now. This might be your last chance.

Come on. I've done it.

I've done the crosswalking through the centre of town.

I've done the get up on the on the the PA system.

You know, in fact, other people I was on the PA system with, I

thought they were too soft core. I said no, I you're not being

hardcore enough. If you want the shoppers to to

really pay attention to you, you have to tell them about eternal

conscious torment in a blazing fire of hell.

That's the only way you're going to get them to listen because

they're busy doing their thing and they don't want to listen to

you. You absolutely have to terrify

them to get their attention. I'm speaking from experience.

Anyway, here's this now let me just give you a different, let

me give you a different picture and I'll leave it.

I'll leave you, leave it with you to.

Contemplate and then you can come and then be angry with me

on on Wednesday. I've taken the same to people.

You know, it's not OK if you're afraid by what I'm saying, but

it's absolutely fine if you're angry with what I'm saying.

One of the reasons we get angry is when we realised, you know

what, I've been really sold a crop for the last 30 years and

I've invested an awful lot of time in something.

And hang on a second. Wait a minute.

You mean I didn't need to alienate my whole family by the

fact that I was so afraid that they were going to go to hell?

Absolutely. Right.

Now that I at Christmas dinner, I stood up and I told them so.

And now nobody wants to talk to me.

You mean that 20 years ago I didn't need to do that and kind

of wrecked the wrecked the relationship?

I'm speaking from experienced people.

I'm not. I'm not talking hypotheticals

here. Right.

I'm not talking hypotheticals. Yeah.

So let me give you let me give you another, another version

that I think is a better version of the story.

I think it's better because I happen to think it's true and I

happen to think the other one isn't true.

But you know, if you're not ready to go with me there, at

least consider a better version of the story.

Also also looks like this, but I'm just for the sake of

argument, I'm going to put a bottom on that because it's not

really bottomless. It feels bottomless, but it's

not really right. And now I'm going to put God up

here again, but I'll just say Father, Son in spirit, so we're

not confused as to what God we're talking about.

Oh, but I'm going to put us down here.

All right? This is the biblical picture of

our problem. All God's on one side and we're

on the other side. You know, The thing is about

being on the other side. Well, OK, I stole a paper clip

when I was 11. That was a sin, so that's enough

to qualify me to be on the other side.

Did the paper clip, did the stealing of the paper clip harm

anybody? No.

Did anyone miss the paper clip? No.

Was I trying to be malicious with a paper clip?

No, doesn't matter. It was stealing.

You broke the 10 commandments, you're going to hell.

You're on that side, right? Ray Comfort style of you know

who that cat is. So that's, that's that picture

right here. How about this one again,

starting in the same place. Something happened.

I didn't really understand the details of it, but something

happened where we we did not begin here.

We've begun here in the heart of the, the, the oneness of the

father, son and spirit from time immemorial.

They dreamed us up and said it was very, very good with a good

purpose. Every individual knit together

in the mother's womb. This is where we begin.

Something happens. It's kind of mysterious.

In fact, the Bible calls it the mystery of lawlessness, right?

The, the chaos and sin and these things.

It is kind of irrational. I haven't really got a good

answer for it, but we've got some stories about it, right?

Something happened and that took us down here, right?

And down here we've got fear, we've got jealousy with an A in

it because I didn't study English.

Jealousy. We've got rage, we've got abuse,

we've got war, greed, we've got self hatred, we've got suicide,

addiction. All of these pathologies, right,

that come under the banner of, you know, you want, you want to

call it sin. All that we are down here in the

mess, right at the bottom, the bottom of the chasm.

God's rejected us. God's abandoned us.

We're, we're alone. We've got to figure this thing

out for ourselves. We've got to try and engineer

some way to make this mess down here a little bit better or the

cynical ones. Well, we can't make that better

for other people. So we're just going to try and

make it better for ourselves. Accumulate wealth, hoard power,

do whatever we can to just make this a little bit more tolerable

down here at the at the bottom of the pit, right?

We're all down here and in the middle of this, the Father, Son

and Spirit say we can not tolerate beloved children, our

creation, in the dissolution and dissipation that is down here.

They won't listen to us. In fact, they can't listen to us

because it's got so dark down there.

They can't even recognise who we are without the distortion of

their own issues, their own problems.

They project the abusive father onto US.

They project the absent mother onto US.

They look at earthquakes and disease and all of these things.

I think, well, that must be divine judgement for us doing

bad things. So then they sacrifice because

of fear. They're going to human sacrifice

or other kind of crazy nonsense. To think that maybe they could

do something to prove themselves worthy to climb back up to here,

because this is all about worthiness to them.

They're judging it as well. Who's who's got relative merit?

Which one's higher than the other?

Which one has proved themselves more worthy of this divine thing

up here? And they create these

hierarchies. And who can we follow?

Who can give us the way out down here?

All in the dark. And what does Jesus say?

He says all who came before me are thieves and liars.

They have no idea what they were talking about.

None of them. All who came before me, I don't

know what that says about the prophets, but he said all who

came before me, I don't know if you want to take Jesus literally

or not, but he said all who came before me are thieves and liars

right down here in the Mass. And here's what they're going to

do. They're going to say that the

Father, Son, and Spirit, by the way, live in eternal oneness.

They cannot be divided. They're indivisible,

inseparable. But the Son, the Word, becomes

flesh and dwells among us and within us as us.

The sun is going to go down right to the bottom of the

bottomless pit. The sun is going to make contact

with us in our suffering, dysfunction, and sin.

It's not just the Word became human, it's the Word became

flesh, right? Sarks.

It's the bad word for humanity, not the good Word, right?

He takes on and He doesn't become sarks the moment he's

crucified. He becomes Sox the moment he's

Incarnate in the womb of the Virgin.

And the angels declare peace on earth and goodwill to the human

race. That was the word that was

spoken over his birth right, the Annunciation of the angels.

Peace on earth and goodwill. How can it be peace on earth and

goodwill? Look at what's going on down

here. God, can't you see the horrific

mass that's taking place here? The angels are saying.

But look, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light

here. The light has dawned right in

the centre of the darkness. It's not that.

The lights over here beckoning us to crossover.

OK, I can see the lights over there.

I can kind of find my way to get to it.

The light has come right down into the bottom of the

bottomless pit. And not only that, that light

has gone all the way to death, even beyond earthly existence,

into the very grave itself. And not only death, but the most

horrific death. Because the question isn't why

did Jesus die? If it was about dying, He could

have just killed over and had a heart attack if it was about

that. So why does he?

Why did he die the way that he did?

He died the way that we did because that is what the sum

total of all of this down here inflicted upon him.

In that moment of the cross, every act of human sin and

suffering that ever was and ever would be was brought to Ground

Zero. The cross is the son of God's

connection and identification with every single piece of human

dysfunction and brokenness is when the when the, the, the, you

know, the addict is putting the needle in the arm, that's there.

When the the abusive husband is beating the wife within an inch

of her life, that's there. When the gas is turned on in the

gas chamber, that's there connected to the cross that he

is gathered. And Jesus says in John's gospel,

when I am lifted up, I will draw all to myself.

And it's interesting. He doesn't even qualify the all.

He doesn't even say all people. He says all, meaning all of all,

everything that is every atom in the universe, past, present and

future is being brought to the Ground Zero of the cross, which

is why the sun goes out, right? In Matthew's Gospel, you

remember the sun goes out. They used to say.

We used to say, well, the sun goes out because the Father

turns his face away, not realising we just committed

idolatry, right? That at that, at no point is the

sun in the sky, the shining sun connected with the face of the

Father in the Scripture. In fact, that's sun worship.

It's the opposite, right? We said, oh, well, the son is

the father turning his face away.

No, the sun goes out because the very word who upholds the

existence of the sun just died. So what happens to the sun when

its power source dies? Well, the sun dies too, until

it's raised again, right? So in the Son of God descending

into everything that we are, everything that we've done,

identifying himself with it fully in our experience, not

just in a in the sense of being up here telling us this is the

way out, but coming and fully taking it into his own body.

And he doesn't just take it in because he takes in he takes in

because we put it there right. We are the ones who nail him.

If you can see it. We nailed him to the cross.

Remember Mel Gibson's film The Passion and the hand that's

nailing Jesus's hand into the, the the the nail Mel Gibson was

like, that has to be my hand. I'm going to do it.

He was making a point. He was saying all of human sin

across all ages is what came onto the cross right there.

All of it was put on him. And what does he say at the very

peak of his suffering, which John calls his glorification or

his coronation, the very peak of his suffering, he says, father,

forgive them that they don't know what they do.

He pronounces absolution from the cross because Jesus doesn't

pray a prayer that doesn't get answered right.

When Jesus says father forgive them, the Father answers the

prayer. He doesn't not answer the

prayer. And by the way, the Son can only

do what he sees the Father doing and he can only say what he

hears. So when he says Father forgive

him, he is also perfectly reflecting the heart and the

will and the attitude of the Father because there's not a,

there's not some kind of schizophrenia going on here.

God brackets the Father was in Christ reconciling the world to

himself. The Father was here too.

Jesus says if you've seen me, you have seen the Father.

Wait a minute. We thought if we saw the face of

the Father, we'd spontaneously combust.

Apparently not. Because Philip, you've been face

to face with me the whole time. You haven't spontaneously

combusted. Think of the fear thing again.

I'm going to finish with this. When the apostle Peter first

meets Jesus, he says go away from me, Lord, you're a sinful,

I'm a sinful man. Go away from me, Lord.

Why? He's terrified.

He's terrified if he gets around the holy God or anyone who is

someone who's really close to God, that that might burn him,

right? Within months, Peter's arguing

and saying, who's going to be the greatest in the Kingdom of

heaven? Maybe I get to sit on the right

hand. What does 6-7 months do hanging

out with Jesus to a man who is so weighed down by guilt, fear,

and sin? He's like, I can't even get in

the presence of the holy Rabbi or I'm going to spontaneously

combust to. I might actually have a shot at

being the top, the top honcho in heaven's hierarchy.

That's what hanging out with Jesus does to him, right?

Hanging out, hanging out with Jesus creates A metanoia and

repentance, A transformation to the point that this guy's mind

is so completely blown. He's no longer like, Oh, I'm I'm

could go away from me, Lord of a simple man.

He's like, no, I'm going all the way you.

I will never abandoned you, Jesus.

And of course, we know how that ended up there, right?

But the, but the point is, look at the effect that hanging

around Jesus had on him. His yoke is easy.

His burden is light. It's liberating.

It's lifting off the years and the generation upon generation

of weight and guilt and shame and BS that's been put on these

guys, hanging around with Jesus, detoxing them, curing them.

He comes down not to suffer for us.

He comes down to suffer as us. For as much as you do to the

least of these, you do to me because I am in them and they in

me, because I, I was the one who had the thought of them in the

first place. And I'm the one who sustained

their life and I'm the one who dipped them together in their

womb and who who had a good purpose for them in creating

them. And I'm coming to show you that

there is nothing that exists down here that can create

separation. That's why Paul can say nothing

can separate us from the love of God because he understands that

what's going on in the cross is the sum total of all human

depravity directed at Jesus at that moment.

And at that very moment he says, Father, forgive them.

He pronounces the absolution. So he's able to say beyond a

shadow of a doubt, well, the worst thing you could ever do,

you already did it was crucify Jesus.

If you can recognise that and wake up to that, then welcome to

being a Christian. Thank you very much.

See you Wednesday. Thank you so much.

Welcome back. All the children you see more

clearly than the rest of us. So it's great to have you in

here. I am just going to lead us in a

prayer now. No, we're just, we're just so

grateful that you always want to.

You're always wanting to include us and draw us in.

You love our participation, You love reaching out in

relationship. And we just believe so many lies

and we resist it so often but we repent of that.

We have a change of mindset. We want to believe that nothing

in all creation, unseen and seen realm can separate us from your

love. And that we want a true

enlightenment that enlightens us as to the reality of that,

however young we are in this room, that we know deeply and

profoundly how loved we are and how old we are.

When you reveal to us the reality of what you're like, how

you see us. And I think that the natural

conclusion will be, and this is what we'll be wrestling with,

how you see everyone else. Help us to see clearly through

your lens, the lens of how you see people.

And we just continue to call into the light all the things

that need to come into the light in our own lives and hearts, in

our relationships with each other, in the ways we've been

with other people. We just continually, it's the

scariest prayer that that I pray regularly every day,

particularly around family, but Chris and I pray we just

continually call everything into the light.

It's the best way to live. And so we do that as a

community, as a church, we call everything into the light

because we know there's just so much goodness.

There's so much beauty, so much restoration, so much alignment

in the light. So we receive that absolution

that you declared on the cross, the Father, Son, and Spirit in

agreement, One God, three persons of the same substance.

We receive that absolution that says, Father, forgive all of us,

We don't know what we're doing. Amen.

So as I say, if there's anything that you're wrestling with or

struggling with, please have conversations with people you're

doing life with or come to me or Paul or Chris.

We're all like there. There's one conspiracy.

It's called the conspiracy of the Trinitarian love.

There is no conspiracy theory that there's a whole bunch of

people who think something and we want everyone to be on board.

We all are on different pages with this and we all are having

an open conversation. OK, It's really important.

Everyone knows this. Everyone is really brave to know

that our agreement is not on a kind of an intellectual

affirmation. It's because we love each other.

We're family. And so we can sit in different

spaces with, with some phrases, with some ways of thinking.

So please push back on anything, have conversations, please look

at the videos. We've got an introductory 1,

lecture 1 and lecture 2, and we want to look at lecture 2 this

Wednesday. Please prioritise this, I would

almost say over everything else in your life, which is a really

big thing to say. But I think this, this is a

really big way to see the world. It's a really different way.

And so I think we need to wrestle with it authentically

and deeply and richly. And I'm not even saying it's

live for me personally. I have to say the ocean song for

me is this is being in this position where as a community we

take a step of faith into areas that are uncertain.

That's that's where we step out of the boat.

But personally, I don't want to live any other way and I don't

want to follow Jesus any other way.

And, and most people about my stage are really bored in their

faith. And as John Tyson said, if

God's, if you're bored with your faith, God's probably bored with

your faith too. So let's take this step of faith

and go to these deep places and wrestle through them.

Brilliant. See you on Wednesday.

Sign up for the Curry and keep the conversation.

And this vegetarian. Thanks, Christy.