People who want to live their dreams cannot be Jesus' disciples

 These are very challenging words from the mouth of God's Son, recorded in Luke 14:25-33:

²⁵ Now great multitudes went with Him. And He turned and said to them, ²⁶ “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. ²⁷ And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. ²⁸ For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it— ²⁹ lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, ³⁰ saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish’? ³¹ Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? ³² Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace. ³³ So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple.

Note that Jesus is not talking about how to advance to a higher level of discipleship. He is not giving tips on growing as disciples, upon improving and maturing. He is talking about an absolute requirement to be a disciple at all. Those who fail this test are not simply those who are inferior disciples, or immature disciples; according to Jesus, they are just not disciples. If Jesus is not supreme above those with the greatest claim upon your love and devotion, be it parents, be it the one to you are united in the marriage union where God puts two together (and let not man part them), be it your own dear offspring: if what they claim from you clashes with what God demands from you (and we are thankful that in the ordinary paths of daily  duty, the  two usually coincide), then you cannot put any other claim above that of Jesus.

You cannot be his disciples unless you live the crucified life, taking the beams of wood to the place of death so that your own  desires for pleasure, for fame, for wealth, for success, for achievement, for pre-eminence, for recognition, for comfort, and whatever else, are put to a brutal and shameful death, and instead Jesus is served. Unless you forsake all that you have, and give it to Jesus, then you cannot be his disciple. You cannot gain your life unless you first give it away.

How quick we are to want to clarify this, and explain what it "really" means - which so often in effect seems to mean turning it on its head, and explaining that Jesus was wrong, and that we can seek and prioritise all of these things. How strong is the desire to domesticate and tame what Jesus has proclaimed, so that following him can be reduced to a nice orderly package, a collection of well-constructed and striking doctrines that we nod our heads to, whilst remembering that there are in fact  many ways to have the best of both worlds, to have our cake and eat it after all. How readily, in the service of having orderly churches, orderly programmes, orderly routines  that allow Christianity and its outward institutions to flourish peacefully in society, we reduce all that Jesus said with the caveat "but of course, if your pattern of life is something else, then Jesus is full of grace and will understand."

Jesus will understand? Will he? What do we mean by that? Why would we want to find out the answers to those questions anyway? Jesus tells us plainly, in advance, several times that there are many who are going to be surprised to hear the fearful words one day "I never knew you". 

The happiest man we know in the Bible after Jesus was the apostle Paul. As he tells us in Philippians, he had learned the secret of contentment in every situation. To him, to rejoice in the Lord was not an idea to be admired, but the reality of his experience. He lived with joyful hope, looking for the coming of his Lord. And he also said, 1 Corinthians 15:31, "I die daily".  Those two things aren't contradictions. They're the same thing. The person who dies daily to self, rises also with Christ.

If your Christianity is respectable and safe, a gentle routine, beautiful, elegant ideas and comfortable familiarity, then that's very sad. If you're building a church that looks beautiful to the world, polished music, finely nuanced doctrines, so orderly, but without the daily struggles of crucified people who can say they've gone through and are going through the war with the flesh as they again and again give away their own lives for the sake of Christ, then that's a sorry thing. You need to be converted. Then you can know what Paul meant when he said (Galatians 2:20) "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." If you are not yet crucified with Christ, and are not then responding by taking up your cross daily, then you are not yet Jesus' disciple; but if you'll go to Calvary with him, you can be.

If the Western church is full of disciples with Jesus, then why are there such a small proportion of its adherents whose lives resemble what Jesus said was fundamental to even being a disciple at all? Why does "my aim as a Christian is to give my life away, so that others can receive life" characterise us so little? Brothers and sisters, let us not take our standards from what passes as respectable around us. Let us listen to what Jesus actually said, and then do it.

Sell your possessions

From my Bible reading this morning in Luke 12: 

12:29 “And do not seek what you should eat or what you should drink, nor have an anxious mind. 30 For all these things the nations of the world seek after, and your Father knows that you need these things. 31 But seek the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added to you.

32 “Do not fear, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell what you have and give alms; provide yourselves money bags which do not grow old, a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches nor moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 

That's an interesting clause there in verse 33 which I've highlighted, isn't it? "Sell what you have".

We're accustomed in Western conservative evangelicalism to emphasise thinking about what proportion of "our" income we'll give to the kingdom. The way round this ought to be said, biblically, is thinking what proportion of God's money that he has decided to channel through us will be given directly and immediately to kingdom projects, and what proportion will serve God in other ways, including through our immediate needs. 

But let's leave that aside for now. Here, Jesus didn't speak to us about giving from our income. He spoke about giving from our possessions. He told his disciples to liquidate from their assets, and give specifically from that. He even told us what specifically to do with the liquidated assets.

How often, I wonder, have you or I heard about that? Memory is very unreliable when trying to review a lifetime of hearing, but frankly, I don't ever remember hearing it. I've read it a handful of times (book recommendation). But if I've ever heard it taught in church ministry - well, at the very least, it must have been very rare.

Our temptation is to immediately jump to caveats and questions such as "of course he didn't mean all of them so that you become a beggar yourself, of course some people are still dependants, students, spending other people's money, of course we must be wise, this, that and the other....". This temptation should be resisted. Let's not start with what we're not going to do, and what Jesus did not tell us to do. We might take in what we're not going to do along the way at the appropriate point: but that can never be the departure point.

The Son of God did tell us to do something, and did not clarify, immediately or otherwise, that it was in fact optional. What did he teach, what does the positive response look like for us? Do we actually want to receive the wonderful promise that he attached in the following verses? Or will we be quite content if he eternally chips the promise away into essentially nothing in the way that seems to be the norm for Christians in our setting and culture with his instruction?

The confusing world of BBC morality - "sex workers", or victims of exploitation?

"British soldiers using sex workers in Kenya despite ban, inquiry finds", proclaims the headline. And the piece continues along the same lines:

An investigation by the British army has found that some soldiers stationed at a controversial base in Kenya continue to use sex workers despite being banned from doing so.

Soldiers at the British Army Training Unit Kenya (Batuk) used sex workers "at a low or moderate" level, a report said, adding that more work was needed to stamp out the practice.

In the propaganda of our crazy Western societies, since any sexual activity between  consenting adults can never be immoral (self-determination, expressed most fundamentally in sexual self-expression being the most basic values of post-sexual-revolution thought), it follows, logically, that neither prostituting oneself nor exploiting prostitutes can be fundamentally wrong. The idea that sexual intercourse involves a union which far transcends bodily pleasure, and that our Creator designed it as part of an expression of whole-life-union, in that sense sacred, intimate, private, and impossible to conceive of as a commercial transaction just for sensual pleasure, has been abolished by secular humanists. It is utterly incompatible with their claims about the cosmos.

As such,  following the logic of their views, if bodily sexual pleasure is sold as a commodity, then that is legitimate - and the person selling it is a "sex worker". It's how they choose to earn their living, just like you or I may choose to earn ours by fixing electrics or adding up accounts. It is - that most sacred of things for the modern materialist - a career, and choosing it is a career choice. It is through our career choices that we (in the modern world) are supposed to find our true value and worth, and to prove ourselves as we make our way to discovering and expressing all our potential.

Negatively, then, according to this belief nobody should be stigmatised for their sexual choices; that smells of being an unenlightened Victorian reactionary. However you express yourself is good for you, and don't judge anyone else for expressing themselves otherwise. The only thing to be stigmatised is stigma itself (a position which, of course, cannot be ultimately held on to, since it's arbitrary  - why should only stigma be stigmatised? If no consensual bodily act someone else commits can be deserving of stigma, then why is someone else's expressed opinion be? Just why can words cross these boundaries when acts cannot?).

In this "enlightened" world-view, which the BBC very much approves of and promote, then, prostitutes are not prostitutes (how dare you stigmatise them); they are "sex workers". They are working, and should be allowed to do so without being shamed by reactionaries.

Do you spot the problem here, though? These things supposedly being so, why would any soldiers need to be investigated for employing these "workers"? If that is their chosen field of work, then it is, for one thing, one which cannot actually be worked in without someone else coming along to purchase the product; until purchased, there is no product. Even a baker can bake loaves when nobody buys them, as long as he has enough funds in reserve to keep providing the raw goods. A "sex worker", though, cannot exist at all unless someone else is buying. Until that point, they're merely a would-be sex-worker. Can I be a Formula 1 driver if I've not yet been in a car and done a lap? As such, then, it's only because there are soldiers who are "using" these "sex-workers" that there even are any "sex-workers" to begin with. And why that's a problem, is not explained at this point.

But later, it is.... not by the journalist's chosen framing but in the actual bona fide reportinng:

UK Chief of Defence Staff Gen Sir Roly Walker said in a statement that the army was committed to stopping sexual exploitation by those in its ranks.  ... There is absolutely no place for sexual exploitation and abuse by people in the British Army. It is at complete odds with what it means to be a British soldier. It preys on the vulnerable and benefits those who seek to profit from abuse and exploitation.

Ah. It's not work after all. It's exploitation. It is an abusive activity, with an abuser, and an abused person (who may or may not have consented to her own abuse). The women are not "workers"; they're financially (or physically) desperate people who have gone into prostitution, selling the "permission" to others to exploit them in consequence in order to alleviate their financial desperation. It's something dishonourable, wrong and to which zero tolerance should be applied. A woman's body is not, in fact, a work-place, and even if two adults consent to gross exploitation when one is in a desperate situation, it is still completely wrong; grossly wicked, in fact, at many levels.

Often the woman will have been trafficked; in this case she is more accurately called a "prostituted woman" than a "prostitute". That term can really do in all cases, since it can be understood to cover the cases where she willingly prostituted herself. But in many (most?) cases, she is herself a victim. Terminology of "worker" which suggests choice and agency then tells a lie. To call trafficked people and enslaved people "workers" is like calling a someone who is repeatedly assaulted a "sparring partner", or saying that a shop-keeper who gets burgled every night must presumably in their economics be a communist.

Financial desperation itself does not transform the tragic decision (whether voluntary or under coercion) to prostitute oneself into one of selecting the caerrer of "sex worker", any more than a financially desperate man who is persuaded to join a gang of bandits is now a "redistribution worker". Somewhere there is a line between choice and coercion/exploitation, and we are not always competent to judge - and wherever the line goes, there will be someone fractionally one side, and someone else fractionally the other. Nevertheless, nobody who is selling access to their body is a "sex worker", and calling them such is unhelpful and nonsensical. If a default assumption has to be made, then "prostituted woman" in Kenya in my judgment is likely to cover more cases than any other.

Shame on the BBC. This so-called "sex-positive" vocabulary is nothing of the kind. It is a word-game played by privileged people which covers up serious exploitation and serious depravity, to nobody's gain.

"British soldiers using sex workers", BBC ? No. "British soldiers exploiting prostituted women".

Christian Nationalism: becoming all things to no men

Christian Nationalists appear to believe, in practice, that the truism "in all things (including in the state) God should be obeyed" is a truth that trumps all others, and erases and obliterates all other considerations.

When Christ was on the earth, he was asked by a man (in Luke 12:13-14) to give him assistance with obtaining his rightful inheritance from his brother. Christ asked the man what this concern had to do with him.

When the Corinthian church wrote to Paul about marriage (1 Corinthians 7), amongst the many things Paul had to say, he reminded his readers that "the form of this world is passing away" and on this basis included the exhortation "that from now on even those who have wives should be as though they had none".

Jesus informed Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world (John 18) - one of the major themes of John's gospel is that it is of heaven, and thus is superior. Christians of a theocratic persuasion like to point this out if someone should mis-use the verse to imply that that the church has nothing to say to the world outside; but they seem to miss the corollary that Jesus drew from his own observation: "If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight." Since the kingdom is not of this world, it does not operate in a worldly way.

There are things which belong to Caesar, even though Caesar is a thorough-going pagan, and in this age, the correct response to that  is to render those things to Caesar. The small-print to that does not say, "whilst making clear your contempt for him, and giving him a lecture" (see Romans 13).

The fact that our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20) does not only affect the future; if affects our outlook on the present too. Paul wrote those words whilst unjustly a prisoner for the gospel's sake. Whilst he did on appropriate occasions call for his rights as a Roman citizen to be honoured, he entirely omitted to make a major, or even a minor, part of his apostolic ministry calling for the crown rights of King Jesus to have the laws altered to be more reflective of biblical law. Why is this fact treated as of no ultimate significance? What do Christian Nationalists know that Paul misunderstood?

When Paul wrote to Timothy, he gave him a word that would be profitable if considered with wisdom: "No one engaged in warfare entangles himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please him who enlisted him as a soldier." If you are called to be a pastor, or gospel worker who in some manner represents the kingdom of God, then you are warned to avoid being "[entangled] with the affairs of this life", on pain of displeasing the one who called you. No one should attempt to do this, even if they consider themselves very wise and astute political pundits.

The Corinthians (1 Corinthians chapter 6) were rebuked for their use of the secular courts. The rebuke did not entail that all such use was automatically ungodly. We must consider the reasons given. The reasons given are that the church is a superior kingdom which transcends those overseen by the ungodly. For the church to ask the ungodly to be our judges is to deny who we are. Christian Nationalists do not ask the ungodly to judge church disputes; but they do, in practice, testify through their actions and allocation of energy and resources that the great drama of this world is centred around who has gained the upper hand in the things of this life. There are the things we should fight over and be known for fighting over.

Paul knew a lot of things, and had the great privilege of being Christ's apostle. He had great spiritual gifts, and had received great revelations (see 2 Corinthians 12). Happily for him and for us, he was also a man who knew what his calling was. He was called to the work of calling, shepherding, teaching and guarding the flock of Christ. To this end, he became "all things to all men". Amongst Jews, though free from Jewish regulations, he lived as if he were a Jew, accepting things that were indifferent to him, so that the focus of his Jewish hearers could be drawn not to things of comparative indifference, but to Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah. Amongst Gentiles, though he was himself a Jew, he lived as if he were a Gentile, so that the focus of his Gentile hearers could not be drawn to the strangeness of Jewish things of indifference,  but to Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah.

If Paul were with us today, he would avoid like the plague being associated with a campaign to have pastors and churches telling law-makers how they should legislate the kingdoms of this world, and telling those kingdoms that they speak on behalf of Christ. He would, as he did when he was with us, be following his Master who, though actually being himself the Son of God and heir of all things, took the form of a humble servant so that sinners might understand how much God loves them.

Christian Nationalism is a prideful and repugnant doctrine which takes the words of men who gave up their rights and became all things to all men so that they might be saved, and instead takes a public stand, demanding our rights (supposedly in the name of Jesus), associating him with a stance and outlook utterly foreign to his actual servant mission and plan. As Christians, we may respectfully present our reasons to our rulers for considering wise and God-pleasing laws. What we may not do is have the church of Jesus Christ known as a place that thinks it should be running the present age, and falsely demanding or implying that this is the church's right or calling. Those who are called to take up the cross and follow Jesus may not also become Christian Nationalists.