Queen's Road Cell

As we shared our experiences of the Holy Spirit it seemed clear to me that we had a range of spiritual encounters - from relatively brief times of conviction of sin and awareness of God's presence, to a more sustained time of unusual closeness to God. I feel that the former types of experiences are somewhat usual in the experience of all of us, but the latter would be more of what I think constitutes 'filling' of the Spirit. These times are characterized by a desire for intimacy with God in renewed desire to pray, boldness in witness, victory over temptation and wanting to meet with other Christians. Sometimes (as in Joyce's and my experience), these were preceded by a time of unusual hunger for God's presence and power. Sometimes (as with Eugene), God worked somewhat suddenly. As we 'build the altar' while waiting for God's sovereign move of the Spirit in our lives and the life of our church, one of the ways that shows how we hunger for God is to fast...

We start a new section on the Person and work of the Holy Spirit today. Wayne Grudem in his book on Systematic Theology helpfully categorizes the work of the Spirit: He purifies, unifies, reveals and empowers ("P-U-R-E"). He is the Person of the Trinity who leads us to holiness, assures us of our standing as children of God, helps us understand scripture, gives us spiritual gifts and unites us with brothers and sisters in Christ all over the world. As we looked at Acts 1 and 2 my comment was that the book of Acts makes it clear that the Spirit enabled bold witness of a previously cowardly band of disciples. He enabled workings of miracles that authenticated their witness and opened the way for the truth of the gospel. The difficulty with the book of Acts is that it can be difficult to see which parts are meant to be normative for all Christians, and which are only one-off accounts of events. In Acts, truth and power are not divorced. We see in John 20:22 an event where Je...

As expected, we spent time talking about Trump's victory in the US elections. We noted that Scripture calls us to 1. Submit to civil authorities (Ro 13:1-7, 1 Pe 2:13) 2. Honour them (1 Pe 2:17, Ro 13:7) and 2. Pray for our political leaders (1 Ti 2:1) And yet, Acts 5:29 reminds us that the laws of God must always take precedence over the laws of men when there is a conflict. And yet, Christians must take pains to be the best citizens possible excepting when we are compelled and restricted by the laws of the land to go against Scripture. We moved on to address Kevin's question: how should we regard events and movements in the past like the Crusades, or the Inquisition, or the conquistadors who did what they did in the name of Christ? We said that their actions did not reflect Scriptural principles, and that we should be most careful when engaging in political action not to proceed on the basis of preference and expediency without clear Biblical warrant. What then of the...

Work pre-existed the Fall (Gen 2:15), and therefore is a good, God-given thing. Our mandate is to "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion...over every living thing (Gen 1:28). Work then, involves creative activity within God's creation. But part of the effect of the Fall on man was the cursing of the ground so that the earth would resist man's efforts (Gen 3:17-19), leading to drudgery and unrewarding effort. Our work then, like all of creation is cursed, and yet Christ's redeeming work has reversed and is continuing to reverse the effect of the curse on our work. We can find purpose in work, so that it becomes a vocation ("calling"), where we know that God has a purpose in our being where we are for that season in our lives. Work is to be done to the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31), and we glorify God through our character and good works (Mt 5:16), as well as through the excellence of our endeavor (Pr 22:29). We can witness...

We finished up the questions for Study 54 and reviewed the material we covered last week. I was asking how is it that nobody quoted Jn 14:28 at me when I asserted last week that all the three Persons of the Trinity were equally great, equally glorious and equally to be worshipped. Jesus clearly stated here that His Father was greater than He. One explanation of this is that Jesus emptied himself of glory (Phil 2:6) in the Incarnation, but this is insufficient to account that from all eternity Jesus is the Lamb slain for sinners (Rev 13:8, Eph 1:4-14), sent by the Father into the world. So 'greater' here is 'greater in authority', whereas it can be said that the Son is 'greater in submission'. We explored the fact that Christian couples are to submit to the Lordship of Christ in their marriages even though there are many difficulties in practice that are likely to arise. This will be marked especially when a wife is unsubmissive, or a husband unloving, or the...

Ephesians 5:21 "submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ" is followed by three examples of submission: of wives to husbands (5:22), children to parents (6:1) and bondservants to masters (6:5). The presence of three examples points out the fact that mutual submission is not primarily in view in these verses. Husbands to not primarily submit to wives, just as parents do not primarily submit to children and masters, to bondservants. In each example here Paul gives injunctions to the party being submitted to, so that there is  reassurance to those who are doing the submitting. Husbands must love their wives (5:25). Fathers must not provoke their children to anger (6:4), and masters must not threaten their bondservants (6:9). There is thus a complementarity in relationships, rather than a sameness/symmetry in how we relate to one another. This comes into sharpest focus when we consider the institution of Christian marriage. I said that Christian marriage is the uni...

I. Resource allocation The church has the mission to make disciples of all nations (Mt 28:18-20). This is our FFMC vision. We are to baptize people (a one-off event) and to teach them to observe all that Jesus has taught (a continuing work). All local churches therefore have ministries that focus on outreach to non-believers as well as ministries to disciple believers. In addition, there are ministries of the church that are administrative or operational in nature. We affirm that all these ministries are of value, although the importance of particular ministries may differ according to institutional factors (e.g. mandated ministries in the Methodist Book of Discipline) as well as with the needs of the moment (e.g. China CN ministry). We have previously said that all ministries must be aligned to the overall disciplemaking vision of the church (LCEC retreat May 2013). We said that: •           All activities and ministries m...