Confessing Evangelical

John H November 13th, 2009

Flicking through John Stott’s The Contemporary Christian – one of the first books I bought following my return to faith in 1994 – I noticed I’d underlined the following quotation from J.J. von Allmen (ellipses in original):

The heart of the Scripture (what sums it up and makes it live) or the head of Scripture (…what explains it and justifies it) … is Jesus Christ. To read the Bible without meeting Jesus is to read it badly, and to preach the Bible without proclaiming him is to preach it falsely.

Yes. That was it…

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John H September 26th, 2007

As a follow-up to my posts on John Stott’s farewell sermon (1 | 2), my wife was talking to some friends of ours today whose pastor was at this year’s Keswick Convention, and who described how Stott ended his sermon.

At the conclusion of his sermon, Stott asked everyone to bow their heads for a few moments of silent prayer. Everyone did so, and when they lifted up their heads again and opened their eyes – the stage was empty.

No rousing send-off, no applause, no presentations of flowers – nothing, in short, to distract attention from the Christ whom Stott has proclaimed so effectively, and with such modesty and humility, for so long.

While we’re on this subject, a recording of Stott’s Keswick sermon can be downloaded as an MP3 for £3 here. Even better, the All Souls Langham Place website’s sermon archive contains hundreds of recordings of Stott’s sermons from the mid-60s onwards, available free-of-charge (though with free registration required).

Searching through the sermons is not for the faint-hearted – a better search facility wouldn’t hurt – but there’s a lifetime’s-worth of great preaching there. You could do worse than start with his 1971 series of sermons on Ephesians, which I’m currently working my way through.

(Note: you may find, as I have, that the All Souls MP3s don’t work very well. You’ll need to make sure you save them with a .mp3 extension (rather than “.kont”, whatever that is) and then use a program like Audacity to import them and re-export them as new MP3 files. Very frustrating, but worth the effort.)

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John H September 22nd, 2007

In my previous post, we saw how John Stott’s final message to the church he has served for so long is: “Be Christlike!” In the final section of his sermon at this year’s Keswick Convention, Stott looks at “three practical consequences of Christlikeness”.

First, Christlikeness and the mystery of suffering. Stott observes that of all the ways in which Christians try to understand suffering, “one way stands out”:

…that suffering is part of God’s process of making us like Christ. Whether we suffer from a disappointment, a frustration or some other painful tragedy, we need to try to see this in the light of Romans 8:28-29. According to Romans 8:28, God is always working for the good of his people, and according to Romans 8:29, this good purpose is to make us like Christ.

Second, Christlikeness and the challenge of evangelism. Why do our evangelistic efforts so often seem to fail? Stott suggests that “one main reason is that we don’t look like the Christ we are proclaiming”:

There was a Hindu professor in India who once identified one of his students as a Christian and said to him: “If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ, India would be at your feet tomorrow.” I think India would be at their feet today if we Christians lived like Christ.

From the Islamic world, the Reverend Iskandar Jadeed, a former Arab Muslim, has said “If all Christians were Christians – that is, Christlike – there would be no more Islam today.”

Finally, Christlikeness and the indwelling of the Spirit. It’s all very well saying we have to be Christlike, “but is it attainable?” As Stott goes on to remind us:

In our own strength it is clearly not attainable but God has given us his Holy Spirit to dwell within us, to change us from within.

And (having already quoted Michael Ramsay), Stott cites another former archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, who used an analogy from Shakespeare:

“It is no good giving me a play like Hamlet or King Lear and telling me to write a play like that. Shakespeare could do it – I can’t. And it is no good showing me a life like the life of Jesus and telling me to live a life like that. Jesus could do it – I can’t. But if the genius of Shakespeare could come and live in me, then I could write plays like this. And if the Spirit could come into me, then I could live a life like His.”

Stott then concludes his sermon with the following words, which could also function as a summary of what he has preached during his sixty years of ministry:

So I conclude, as a brief summary of what we have tried to say to one another: God’s purpose is to make us like Christ. God’s way to make us like Christ is to fill us with his Spirit. In other words, it is a Trinitarian conclusion, concerning the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And all the people said: Amen!

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John H September 22nd, 2007

I want to share with you where my mind has come to rest as I approach the end of my pilgrimage on earth…

When a saint and servant of Christ like John Stott says something like that, you sit up and take notice, especially when the words come from his final sermon. Dr Stott finally retired, after sixty years of ordained ministry, at this year’s Keswick Convention, with a sermon entitled The model – becoming more like Christ. It’s a sermon that shows why Stott has been such a blessing to the church over the past six decades, and why he will be sorely missed.

Stott begins by considering a question which “perplexed” him as a younger Christian: “what is God’s purpose for His people?” He considers the answer given by the Westminster Shorter Catechism (“to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever”) and briefer statements such as “love God, love your neighbour”, but declares none of these to be “wholly satisfactory”. He continues:

So I want to share with you where my mind has come to rest as I approach the end of my pilgrimage on earth and it is – God wants His people to become like Christ. Christlikeness is the will of God for the people of God.

Stott identifies three biblical texts which underline Christlikeness as God’s past, present and future will for his people: Romans 8:29 (God “predestined [us] to be conformed to the image of his Son”), 2 Corinthians 3:18 (we “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another”) and 1 John 3:2 (“when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is”).

“[I]f we claim to be a Christian, we must be Christlike,” Stott concludes, citing 1 John 2:6, before going on to look at five ways in which we are to be like Christ:

• First, we are to be like Christ in his incarnation, following the example of his “amazing self-humbling” (Philippians 2:5-8).
• Second, we are to be like Christ in his service: “just as Jesus [in washing the disciples' feet] performed what in His culture was the work of a slave, so we in our cultures must regard no task too menial or degrading to undertake for each other”.
• Third, we are to be like Christ in his love. Stott bases this on Ephesians 5:2, and observes that:

Paul is urging us to be like the Christ of the Incarnation, to be like the Christ of the foot washing and to be like the Christ of the cross. These three events of the life of Christ indicate clearly what Christlikeness means in practice.

• Fourth, we are to be like Christ in his patient endurance. 1 Peter, in particular, teaches us this truth:

Every chapter of the first letter of Peter contains an allusion to our suffering like Christ … This call to Christlikeness in suffering unjustly may well become increasingly relevant as persecution increases in many cultures in the world today.

• Finally, we are to be like Christ in his mission. As the Father sent Jesus into the world, so Jesus sent his disciples into the world (John 20:21, John 17:18). This means that “as Christ had entered our world, so we are to enter other people’s worlds”, and Stott quotes Archbishop Michael Ramsay in support of this:
  

  “We state and commend the faith only in so far as we go out and put ourselves with loving sympathy inside the doubts of the doubters, the questions of the questioners and the loneliness of those who have lost the way.“

  Hence “All authentic mission is incarnational mission” (a statement that will raise hackles in some quarters, and I suspect Stott well knows it).

Stott concludes his sermon by looking at “three practical consequences of Christlikeness”, which I hope to look at in a separate post.

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John H March 14th, 2007

The BHT masthead currently features a quotation from Sundar Singh, who was born in 1889 into a devout Indian Sikh family in the Punjab, but subsequently became a Christian following a vision of Christ. Following his conversion he became a Christian “sadhu” for the rest of his life.

This is as good an excuse as any to post the following story about Sundar Singh, as quoted by John Stott:

He was asked once by a Hindu professor what it was that he had found in Christianity, as he put it, that he had not found in his old religion. “I have found Christ,” said Sadhu Sundar Singh. “Oh yes, I know,” said the professor rather impatiently. “But what particular doctrine have you found or principle that you did not have before?”

“The particular thing I have found,” replied Sadhu Sundar Singh, “is Christ.”

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