I’ve done lots of things today, but the gospel has been on my mind. In particular, the doctrine of regeneration. Regeneration is kind of a lost doctrine, and in some ways, evangelicalism has led to its weakening. Sometimes the gospel has been preached just to collect ‘decisions’ for Christ. The truth is that you can make decisions all day, but if the Holy Spirit has not regenerated you, making you into a new creature in Christ through the applied blood of Christ, having come to the point of repentance and faith (also gifts of God), then no salvation occurs.

Again, I reflect on my own conversion. I can see a clear hand of God in and through the circumstances of my life that moved me to the point where the only logical and necessary thing was to surrender, repent and believe. The fruit of that repentance began to show itself in a changed heart, changed orientation towards God, love of God, love of Christ, encounter and love of the Holy Spirit, love for his church and its mission, and for lost people. More than this, characteristics known as the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ began to display themselves in increasing measure that were not fruit of my own attempts. These are not the things that saved me, but were the overflow of the things that come out of a regenerated life. By their fruit you shall know them, said Jesus!

You see, I know I’m saved. I was saved, I am being saved, and I will be saved – not because of anything at all I have done, but because of Christ, and Christ alone. It is not right to speak now of the things that I would have believed, enacted or persisted in before I knew Christ, but I know that when I got saved, I developed a clear and deep inner understanding of what was right and holy and what was not. The Spirit was leading me, and is leading me, in a more holy way.

Before Christ, I’d put my head in any trough of slop and have a bite. After Christ, the stuff in the trough became absolutely repulsive and my desires and appetites changed. There is no amount of ‘deciding’ that could have changed all of those orientations of the heart – only a complete renovation of the heart in the work of regeneration!

This is not to say that I am consistently in a state of holiness, but it does mean that I am quicker to repent of sin when it turns up at my door, and the growth in grace makes me a shade less likely to persist in what I know to be sinful.

What this all comes down to is that our contemporary church can create false converts because we lose sight of both the signs of a regenerate heart and process by which it takes place. Oh boy, I got into real trouble for preaching that in some places. I preached it because I saw it in scripture, and I saw it in reality. People who were Christians by name or by tradition, but displayed no change of appetite, desire, love for Christ…who were not in the battle striving for holiness in cooperation with the Holy Spirit.

This is even more offensive than preaching the gospel itself, just as Jesus found as he called out the religious authorities for their hypocrisy. Jesus also explicitly tells us that there are many who say ‘Lord, Lord – we did all this for you’, to whom he will reply, ‘depart from me, you workers of iniquity, I never knew you.’ That is terrifying (for them when they stand before him, and for us who realise a new responsibility to teach the gospel thoroughly).

So, I have a regular practice, which Paul recommends: ‘test yourself and see if you are in the faith’ (2 Cor 15: 5). Paul had been dealing with sin in the Corinthian church for a good while. He wanted to see genuine repentance. He didn’t want to come down hard on them and deliver the awful news to their face – he knew that if the Spirit of God was in them, he could trust them to be led to repentance. Moreover, rather than cross-examining each other, Paul is saying that the person possessing the Spirit has all the resource then need for holiness, and that if we did need another brother or sister to point our sin out to us, then we’d probably gone quite far down a road of disobedience.

How do we do this? Oh…whilst I could give a very practical instruction in detail, the reality is that the Holy Spirit will show us the condition of our heart if he isn’t already. David, only after he was caught in his sin, came before God and admitted that he knew his sin because it was always before him, that he was sinful from his conception and birth, and that it is a grievous thing before God (Psalm 51). David’s heart here is a good example to us all – and you don’t need to go much further into praying Psalm 51 before you’ll be in touch with the shape of your soul.

If anyone reads these words at an all, my plea to you would be to examine yourself openly before God. He’ll lead you on deeper into Christ. Know that he who begun a good work in you, if it has genuinely begun, will carry it on to completion. That’s a promise.

If you spent your life living out Romans 12: 9 – 21 you’d be doing a good thing. Here we have 13 verses of instruction on living the Christian life which stands on its own, but is supported by all of Paul’s other writings, and also bears true in his own story.

The key principle of being a person of peace and of love in the army of the God who is love, is that we live at peace with everyone, so far as it depends on us (v18). These ‘enemy-loving’ verses also remind us that our battle isn’t against flesh and blood, as Paul declares elsewhere. If Satan uses people – and he does – he uses them as captives who are in need of God’s freedom. This transforms our view of people – we no longer see them from a worldly point of view. We come seeking to draw people into our peace where the gospel can find a landing place, not to be dragged into their worldly drama.

This is not easy. Try looking in the eyes of a Glasgow pimp, for all his evil acts, and still believe that he’s also one for whom Christ died, and that he’d forgive in a second. In those encounters, if we exercise anger and rage it pushes the man further into his sin – it hardens him further. The key he needs is the gospel of Jesus Christ – this alone will unarm him from everything he clings to. Through the eyes of Christ, he becomes one with whom you plead to turn to Christ and live righteously. This is the scandal of the gospel – that even the vilest offender who truly believes can be a child of grace. I saw this play out many times when I was a chaplain at one of HM’s Prisons.

Paul had been the enemy of the Lord Jesus Christ and of his church. That is a dangerous position to be in, and Jesus deals with him decisively. Whilst the church were rightly unsure about Paul after his conversion, he’s welcomed in and eventually becomes one of the greatest assets the church of Jesus Christ has ever seen. Saul the persecutor becomes Paul the pastor, teacher, apostle and martyr of Jesus Christ. Redemption is the business of God, and in that, we are partners.

Notice, these Romans 12 verses do not demand that we overlook evil – we’re to hate it. Evil is not the people, it is the force that comes from the Evil One and puts others in its bondage. His days are numbered and he reels! The enemy rages as the church arises in love and truth. Separating the force of the enemy from men and women who are made in the image of God, and for whom there is the possibility of redemption, is crucial.

Paul does not negate the reality of the battle either. In Ephesians 6 and 2 Timothy 2:4, Paul leaves us in no doubt that we are in a spiritual battle. But we’re also told that the weapons of our warfare are not the same as the world’s – the are spiritual dynamite, and the same impact also plays out when we live practically in love. Worldly warfare methods are not in our arsenal – we belong to a different Kingdom.

Paul tells us to put on the whole armour of God: truth, righteousness, the Gospel, faith, the hope of our salvation, the Word of God, and prayer…plus all the actions in Romans 9. This living under God pours out ‘burning coals’ on heads of our enemies, but gives no-one a single thing that they can level against us.

The battle is fierce, but we are the soldiers of Christ who live to release the prisoners of war through steady person-to-person encounters. The gospel is the key.

The first appointment post-training for Salvation Army officers back in the day was a three year appointment. They sent us away from training after a year to our first appointment because we both had previous theological and ministry experience and, though we ended up being presented late to the appointments committee, a perfect little appointment arose for us in Pill, Bristol…on the banks of the Avon River, to three urban villages nestled under the M5 Avonmouth bridge. A wee bit more reminiscing…

Anyone reading who remembers those days knows several things: we were not perfect – far from it. We definitely didn’t get everything right. I arrived there at the age of 23! We were also in right at the deep end once again, dealing with some of the most shocking and complicated pastoral situations that I’ve faced in over 20 years of ministry. Even after moving on from there, we had to return to Bristol to give court evidence several times in the most shocking case of child sexual abuse that our ministry had uncovered in that community. We were dealing with those pressured situations confidentially whilst seeking to advance the gospel, and not without internal and external opposition. That was just the context, but even in all that, and some close personal bereavements in that time, there were some great opportunities and adventures! The early days of this blog started in those days, back in 2004! 20 years ago!! Oh boy..

As I look back, there were some key themes of that ministry there at Pill:

• we got the people out of the church building. We initiated a significant programme of outdoor worship and witness. We had a wee brass band, who were valiant, but we also saw the power of simply getting out and worshipping in the streets. We preached the gospel, but believed our worship of Jesus would also impact the spiritual atmosphere of the villages. My conviction was that The Salvation Army was born for the open air and we became colourfully visible. I look back at the photos of those days, and they’re awash with colourful presence and proclamation on the streets.
• we taught the principles of spiritual warfare and we got out to pray for our streets, our land, and its people. Prayer walks in our district, already being undertaken, were intensified: Pill, Ham Green, Easton in Gordono and Portishead…we went for it. We were seeking to demolish spiritual strongholds of the enemy that had persisted for generations. – even John Wesley once proclaimed that he’d never seen anywhere as sinful as Pill! We even had a conference called ‘The Aggressive Christianity Conference’ – we were at battle against Satan and all his schemes!
• we taught personal freedom from sin and the call to holiness of life as well as preaching the gospel – in our tradition, it’s called ‘full salvation’! Remember – my biggest influences at that time were 100 years dead – the Booths, Railton, Cadman, Brengle. I was just thoroughly and passionately convinced that ministry could not just be telling nice stories and regurgitating bible stories – God was a God who moved in power with power to save and cleanse

Our Corps Sergeant Major, Pete (senior local elder and wonderful, wise mentor), said to me when we left that he believed we’d look back on our time at Pill and see it as a great season in spite of the great pains. He said that because he’d been with us one-on-one through the trauma of wading through all the tough pastoral stuff which plunged me into a depression. And, surely enough, the benefit of years means you can see beyond the muck of humanity at its worst to find the treasure of those days.

It was the early 2000s and I’m starting out on the front line of mission in Glasgow’s East End. My ‘patch’ (or my allotted ‘corps district’ in Sally Army parlance) runs east from Buchanan Street in the city centre of Glasgow, and the communities of Townhead, Calton, The Barras, a bit of Bridgetown, centred in Dennistoun, but as far up as Royston and Riddrie, straddling the M8, but nothing east of Cumbernauld Road. Communities with significant challenges. If you know, you know.

It took this geography – my assignment – seriously. I drove it, walked it, prayed it, lived in it, seeking to advance the Kingdom by any means.

Typically, the work was a mixture of pastoring a small bunch of mainly elderly people, combatting the effects of poverty, and doing what we can to advance the gospel in outreach. We cooked meals for around 200 a week, including soup runs in the red light district. We started parent and toddler clubs, run social groups to share the gospel with the elderly, healing services, community cafes, attempted outreach to fairly wild local kids and youth, and generally just got stuck in. We were young and indefatigable.

We regularly had our windows smashed in with bricks, things stolen from our house, taken advantage of, and all the typical kind of stuff that comes with the territory. We offered hospitality to vulnerable people in our home, wept when they took their lives because life was too much for them, and played Santa to kids with devastated family lives every year.

Of all that time from just 2001 to 2003, there is one day I remember as a pivotal day. It was a hot Saturday in July and, in typical Glasgow style, my community was to be paraded through by hundreds of sectarian Orangemen. What they call, ‘The Big Walk’. I grew up with this movement in my family so I knew the score. Men and women who depict themselves as defenders of the Reformed Protestant faith but would likely have a very hard time explaining the Five Doctrines of Grace, let alone testifying to a saving relationship with Jesus.

Well, this was my patch, and I had to be present at least to pray. Tracy was at home with our new baby, so it was just going to be me. I donned my uniform, put on my peaked cap, grabbed the Trinitarian Salvation Army flag and headed down to take up my place along the parade route. I clearly knew that God was stirring me to do more than pray.

I stood on the corner of Duke Street and Armadale Street for at least two hours. I wept, I prayed, and I pleaded with people to turn to Christ. I mean, I knew I was amongst the toughest crowd in Glasgow. I endured their scorn, abuse, their blasphemies and more. These ‘committed Protestants’ hurled abuse for preaching Christ, and blasphemed him as ‘the Swinging Joiner’ – Jesus the Carpenter being crucified on a Cross, being ridiculed for his sacrificial death for them. I followed on to the place of their ‘religious service’ which consisted of a hymn, political rant about their Protestant freedom, and a rendition of God Save the Queen before they drowned themselves in beer before marching away.

That story has been in my mind for a few reasons in the last month or so as I reflect on life and ministry now. I’m remembering:

– the character of sectarian secular Scotland where so-called Protestants protest against the things they say they march and stand for. I’m thinking of some Christian brothers in ministry who are currently on the receiving end of persecution for taking a stand against Orangism in their community.

– aside from Orangism, the other expressions of cold religion which, even if appearing to be spiritual, lack any power and truth and so become a deception. It’s all around us.

– my foolish (in the eyes of the world) but Holy Spirit boldness which characterised much of my Salvation Army ministry years especially. Was hated, despised and sometimes rejected for it; ridiculed in-house among my ministry peers for being ‘too Army’, being spiritually and methodologically uncouth – ‘he’s a primitive fundamentalist and a trouble maker’. I sense I’d be even further beyond the pale these days.

– the call to repent of the ways and times I’ve allowed others voices to temper my passion and expression of the gospel, and recognising the schemes of the enemy to diminish gospel ministry.

Those two Glasgow years seemed to last for a lifetime. It was hard and exhausting, and yet a good number of the most powerful stories of God at work were from that time…stories I still recount to this day.

The bottom line, I guess, is that I need God to shake the building, empower by the Holy Spirit, and send me out again to proclaim his word with boldness (Acts 4:31).

One of the joys of Christian life over the long haul is the way that we begin to layer our understanding of God in light of new information and experience. Well – perhaps I should qualify that: if we are growing and invested in our discipleship that might be the case.

I’m 43; 27 years or so into following Jesus, 23 or so years in some form of ministry; several geographical locations into doing all of that. And the present joy in the midst are pleasant new rediscoveries.

I say rediscoveries because not all lanes I’ve walked down in pursuit of the novel idea have been fruitful or substantial, but they do play their part when you rest in a rich truth more beautifully illuminated.

Take, for example, repentance. We all know that repentance towards God is necessary but at times difficult and maybe even scary. But years reveal that repentance is also a beautiful gift to be grateful for and entered into without fear because of grace. So, you come to appreciate the gravity and the grace but know that it’s for our healing.

Or, take death as another example. You know that Christ somehow conquers it and yet you know you have to go through it. You theologically know you’ve nothing to fear and yet you fear. Then, perhaps, your horizon expands: you’re kinda middle aged and instead of being solely focussed on you’re present survival, you begin to see life in the context of love and eternity, and so increases your freedom to live fully because nothing needs to be clung to.

New joyful freedoms and new joyful constraints which give everything perspective.

Youth is wasted on the young, but you need to know what life’s container looks like before you know what’s really worth filling it with. Nothing is lost: our earlier formation just gives us a lay of the land. Every new journey reveals something you haven’t seen or loved before. New joys arise.

It was General William Booth who said,

“The chief dangers of the 20th century will be religion without the Holy Spirit, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration,
politics without God, and heaven without hell.”

‘Writing in the late 19th century, this was extremely insightful – prophetic. Prophetic in the sense of both seeing and understanding what was coming, and in the sense of calling it out ahead of time. If it was true in the course of the 20th century, which William Booth only saw 12 years of, it is certainly true, on steroids, in the 21st century’s ‘post-everything’ world.

What Booth probably didn’t see, however, is that these things would become true of the evangelical church as a whole, including his radical Salvation Army movement. If he did see it, he’d have given them what for in his own inimitable style! In fact, he also once said that, ‘when The Salvation Army ceases to be a militant body of red hot men and women whose supreme business is the saving of souls, I hope it will vanish utterly.’

I am borrowing Booth’s quote not to make comment about the contemporary Salvation Army, but about wider contemporary evangelicalism, which appears to me to be a mass of confusion in so many parts. The church is pressed down by the weight of the world’s opinions and the general oppression of truth.

As Isaiah says, ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter’ (Isaiah 5:20). So many things in our contemporary society are so unlike the values of the Kingdom of God and yet we’re told by Jesus to pray, ‘your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.’

I heard this question the other day in relation to this: how seriously do you think they take God’s will in Heaven?

It’s a question that doesn’t need an answer to be verbalised, does it? It’s self-evident that God’s will rules and reigns SUPREMELY in Heaven. It should do here too. That’s where the rub comes for anyone fearful of causing offence or standing for truth today. To cause offence is the number one social crime, but here’s the thing: it isn’t the ‘prophetic extremist’ who should pray, believe and live these words of the Lord’s Prayer. All disciples of Jesus are invited to pray and live this way in the midst of a world that often rejects the things of God.

This matters deeply to me because it matters deeply to God.

There is no mysterious, missing unknown message, prophetic word, or key that we’re waiting for to see transformation in the world. There is no missional strategy to unlock spectacular growth. There’s no programme which will guarantee success. There’s no amount of money, or buildings, or strobe lights, smoke machines, organs, guitars or any other physical thing which will trigger a move of God. There’s no extra-special teacher, preacher, pastor or evangelist that we’re all waiting for before the shift will be made.

We already have the message: ‘repent for the Kingdom of God is near’ (Mk 1: 15; Mk 6: 12; Matt 3:2, Matt 4:17, Luke 5:32; Luke 13: 3; Luke 15: 10; Acts 2:28; Acts 3:19, Acts 17:30, Acts 20: 21; Who is the messenger? Jesus’ intent was that ‘now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence (Eph 3: 10 – 12)’. I could go on and talk about the Great Commission, you know…taking the gospel and disciple making to the nations etc etc.

This seems too difficult, too basic, too ‘primitive’, somehow, and so we hang around waiting for goodness knows what rather than proclaiming the message. I’m not naive enough to believe that this will be popular. Nor am I inexperienced enough to know that it will not necessarily produce immediate results, but it is the way the gospel spreads from one mouth, one heart, one life to the next.

And let’s just be clear: the gospel is an offence to people. Note that I’m not saying that we need to be offensive people in our communication (be a twit, in other words), but the nature of the gospel even from the kindest, sweetest of mouths flies in the face of 21st century sensibilities and no-one likes to be called to repentance and yet, it is the gate to salvation that God opens up to those he has moved to do so. We preach repentance and those who are ready, respond. Those who don’t simply continue in their disobedience.

Paul speaks of the transfer from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of the Son he loves (Col 1: 13). Repentance and faith is the process of that transfer – there are no side gates to the Kingdom of God.

This is the basis message we need to rediscover the message to proclaim. It is rarer than it should be, disdained in the church more than you believe, shrunk away from like a plague, avoided as the greatest inconvenience and ultimately unknown. It will be debated by everyone who sees no need to repent, even in the church. Those who speak it or teach it will be labelled ‘fundamentalists’ and sidelined in order that the ineffectual ‘moral theraputic deism’ can reign to massage the modern ears. Paul said something about that…

There’s no particular reason why I haven’t preached through Hosea before through the course of 20+ years of ministry – there are other parts of the bible I haven’t covered either. The only reason I’m doing it now is the personal impact it has had on me in recent months and the way that is has ‘turned up’ everywhere. Sometimes passages, chapters and themes just do that: they turn up and your attention is drawn.

Hosea is a heart-punch to the reader. And if that’s how much it impacted me, the reader, imagine being the initial recipients of the message? Hosea is told to marry an unfaithful woman and Gomer fits the bill in many ways. God is making a living parable of the unity of his faithful man and an unfaithful woman. It is pointing us prophetically towards the perfect Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, and his one-day perfect Bride, the Church (see Rev 19; Eph 5).

I can only preach this out of a deep sense of conviction responding to the truth that I have not always been a pure, faithful part of the Bride of Christ. My heart has wandered and likely my actions in numerous ways again and again, and I’m pulled back into grace that I really don’t want to be cheapened by my weakness. I don’t want to tarnish the Bride’s pure white linen. God, have mercy in all the times where there should be none apart from grace.

Preaching on chapter one was easy in only one sense: God reiterates his promised to his covenant people. There is something stronger than the sin and spiritual whoredom: God’s mercy. But before he would come close to dispensing mercy, he tells them there is none in this particular moment – the only way through this situation is exile and some hard restorative justice.

Hand on heart, as I consider the collective life of the church in these days, I weep. I weep for my pathetic part in it, but I weep for the stains on its wedding garments. In a world where dirt is called clean and clean is called dirt, the church has in so many was capitulated to ‘the world’. I’ve seen the ways in which, millimetre by millimetre, centimetre by centimetre, I’ve experienced the ‘drag’ of the world too, and we do it without a consideration for the implications. Israel’s troubles didn’t start in the time of Hosea – it was a long slippery slope.

We need to ask serious corporate questions beyond the limits of our own individualist faith. We also have to get out from the denominational or congregational rut that says ‘well, we’re alright…but them down the road…!’ No – in the same way that there was only one covenant people of God in the Old Testament, there is only one genuine body of Christ hidden amongst so many things that go under the label ‘church’ or ‘Christian’. We’re in it together. We’re also the Church of Gomer in many ways although we’re supposed to be Christ’s.

For me this throws up lots of challenging questions. How do we stop using grace as a cover-up for worldliness? How do you play your part in calling out, healing and restoring corporate sin and corruption by God’s grace? How do you speak across denominational ‘lines’? If it calls itself a church, do we really have to believe that it is so when the evidence goes in a different direction? What exactly does ‘come out from among them’ mean in the context of our complex set of 21st century idolatries that set themselves up against God and his Word?

In addition, even if you have a sense that there’s something deeply wrong, it’s very unpopular to call it out. Like Hosea’s prophetic marriage, our weddedness to Christ should fly in the face of a compromised Gomer Church. Returning to the Lord in repentance is a key to the renewal of God’s people, and this has a direct relationship to the return of Christ and him taking his Bride.

Plus, every one expects that faithful and/or prophetic preaching will be ‘nice’, mainly because we’re caught in the nicey-nicey age where preaching of the gospel is reduced to nice stories or self-help massages of conscience, where we’ve all been de-radicalised into limp ineffectiveness where we are no longer a threat to the enemy of Christ.

It is so hard, humanly speaking, to be faithful and raise your head above the parapet. May the spirit of Hosea, Elijah, Joel, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist and of Jesus Christ be upon us as we ‘prepare the way for the Lord.’

I’m in my old bedroom at my mother’s tonight as I write, and this room is filled with all sorts of memories, but my mind is on none of those things tonight except when the Holy Spirit came and gave me such a deep assurance of his presence and my salvation in a way that only God could. It’s what I meditate upon when I sleep in this room now.

My other thought is the faces of the fellowship I was gathered with this last Sunday morning and that I’m privileged to serve. 50 or so believers of all ages and a few exploring faith, the gospel, and the presence of God among us. I understand in fresh ways how Paul could write with such longing to be with his people when away or detained.

I’ll tell you what I’m feeling in this moment. Deep joy, celebration, and love for all these people under my care. I also feel exhausted because I’ve preached from the heart – the only way I know. And I’ve preached with a sense of the weightiness of God’s word and its implications for us. And I’m excited at what God has done and is doing.

In myself, I feel both the weight of responsibility and the excitement and privilege of it. They are regular people, but they are also extraordinary. In over 20 years in ministry, I haven’t met the equal of their full-hearted devotion to God and the gospel, and to prayer.

It is a beautiful thing and the glory goes to God alone.