How to Achieve More in a Day than in a Year - Phil Moore

In the mid-1990s, I spent a year working as an evangelist in Paris. I was passionate, determined and hard-working, but I wasn’t very fruitful. Looking back, I had far too much confidence in myself and placed far too little value on God’s commitment to the local church. By the time I limped back home to England, I had only seen two or three individuals give their lives to Jesus in the course of a whole year.

Last Sunday was altogether different. I was back in Paris to minister for the first time in fifteen years, having learned some hard lessons in the meantime about the limits of my own strength. I spent the Saturday training the small Newfrontiers church plant in the city to share the Gospel more effectively with Parisians, and laid bare my own past failure and the importance of following Jesus with humility and faith. Then, on the Sunday morning, I preached the Gospel at a guest service to which the fifty-strong church had managed to bring around ten unbelieving friends. At the end of the sermon, more people responded to the Gospel than had done so during the course of my whole year in the mid-1990s. That’s the difference it makes when we confess our own weakness and learn to minister in the power of the Holy Spirit through Christ’s Church.

I’ve spent the past few days reflecting on the lessons I should draw from the events of last weekend. I’ve been talking to the God who can achieve more through us in a day than we can on our own in a year. As I have reflected, I have found myself inspired by a Christian writer who lived and died over two centuries ago.

John Fletcher of Madeley was a Swiss former-soldier who was deeply affected by John Wesley and Methodism. For a while, Wesley planned to name him as his successor as the leader of Methodism, but Fletcher died aged only 55 whilst Wesley was still very much alive. Yet when someone asked the French philosopher Voltaire to name someone who truly followed Jesus, he immediately pointed to John Fletcher of Madeley. So what was it that Fletcher did to arouse such admiration?

First, John Fletcher knew that God only uses people as much they value the local church. Many of my errors in Paris in the 1990s were based on my pursuing a ’Lone-Ranger Christianity’ which ignored God’s People as a whole. John Fletcher didn’t fall for that error. Although he was offered great leadership positions in colleges and synods, he poured out his life into one local church. From 1760 until his death in 1785, he pastored a parish church in the town of Madeley in Shropshire, convinced that the way to reach a nation was to build a vibrant local church.

Second, John Fletcher knew that God only uses people as much as they confess their own weakness. Back in the 1990s in Paris, I had yet to learn the lesson of 2 Corinthians 12, that God only pours out the fullness of his grace on our lives when we first admit our total weakness without him. Fletcher learned this lesson early on in his Christian life, and ministered so fruitfully because he was filled with the Holy Spirit each new day.

I’m still reeling from my vision last weekend of what a difference it makes when we stop relying on our own strength and start trusting in the power of the Holy Spirit as he works through a local church. I want to encourage you to join me in praying this prayer of John Fletcher of Madeley as you ask God to work through your own life today:-

“Lord, I stand in need of oil. My lamp burns dimly. It is more like a smoking flax than a burning and shining light. Oh, quench it not, raise it to a flame!

I want a ‘power from on high’; I want penetrating, lasting ‘unction of the Holy One’; I want my vessel full of oil; I want a lamp of heavenly illumination, and a fire of divine love burning day and night in my heart; I want a full application of the blood which cleanseth from all sin, and a strong faith in thy sanctifying word.

In a word, Lord, I want a plenitude of thy Spirit … I do now believe that thou canst and wilt thus baptise me with the Holy Ghost and with fire; help me against my unbelief; confirm and increase my faith. Lord I have need to be thus baptised by thee, and I am straightened till this baptism is accomplished.

Righteous Father, I hunger and thirst after thy righteousness; send thy Holy Spirit of promise to fill me herewith, to sanctify me throughout, and to seal me completely to the day of eternal redemption. Pour out thy Spirit on me till the fountain of living waters springs up abundantly in my soul, and I can say in the full sense of the words, that thou livest in me, and that my life is hid with Christ in God.

To thee, the first and the last, my Author and my end, my God and my all, be the praise and the glory forever and ever, Amen.”

Let’s pray that the same kind of prayers as John Fletcher of Madeley. It’s the kind of praying which helps us to achieve more with God in a day than we could on our own in a year.

John Fletcher of Madeley (1729-1785)

Making Jesus Known to People Who Don't Want to Know - Phil Moore

How to Connect with God - Phil Moore

Earlier this week, I sent the manuscripts for “Straight to the Heart of Romans” and “Straight to the Heart of Moses” to my publisher, ready to hit the bookshelves in the first week of July. To celebrate, I’m posting one of the chapters from Romans on this blog. I hope it helps you understand the promise of Romans 8 that God has provided all you need in order to experience him daily.



“We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us … Christ Jesus … is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.” (Romans 8:26&34)

 

On 14^th January 1878, Alexander Graham Bell gave a telephone to Queen Victoria. It wasn’t much use to her. She had no idea how to use the as-yet-unknown invention, and she was sceptical of the idea that a telephone could work at all. How could she use this wooden box and ivory handset in her summer palace on the Isle of Wight to speak to her staff in London? Yet the Scottish inventor was very excited about his present, so she trusted him enough to give the telephone a try.  Picture that scene in your mind for a moment. It will help you to understand what Paul says in Romans 8.

 

We are almost at the end of section one of Paul’s letter, and in particular the verses which talk about experiencing our salvation. Paul tells us that the Gospel gives us intimate friendship with God, but the truth is that many of us feel a bit like Queen Victoria. We don’t know how to experience this in practice. To help us, Paul uses a Greek word three times in these three verses which only occurs in three other places in the whole of the New Testament. Paul wants this key word to teach us how to experience this relationship, because God has provided us with two intercessors.

 

First, let’s look at verse 34, where Paul talks about Jesus as our first intercessor. He “is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us,” because the Gospel isn’t just about Jesus dying, but about him being raised to life as well. One of the other three occurrences of this word in the New Testament is when Hebrews 7:24-25 expands on what Paul is trying to say: “because Jesus lives forever … he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” The Gospel isn’t just the news that Jesus died to save us from death and judgment, but also that he rose to life and ascended to heaven in order to ‘save us completely’ by leading us into full experience of that salvation. It is a promise that at this very moment, Jesus is sitting with the Father and directing his favour towards you and me. He has gone on before us as our great intercessor to ensure that the prayers we pray never fail to get through.

 

Alexander Graham Bell gave Queen Victoria a wooden box with an ivory handset, but she trusted that what she saw was the evidence of much, much more. She believed that he had also laid cables from her palace across the seabed to the English mainland and then over eighty miles of fields to London. She had to trust him that his gift was not an ornament for display, but a promise that the infrastructure was in place to make her call.

 

It’s very difficult to experience our relationship with God without trusting that Jesus is our constant intercessor. Intercession means influencing someone’s attitude towards another, and both Romans 11:2 and Acts 25:24 use the word to describe someone making accusations of guilt. The context of verse 34 is Paul’s warning that there are plenty of accusers whose condemning voices want to cut the line between us and God. Satan literally means Accuser in Hebrew, and if we listen to his lies then we won’t pick up the phone. He specialises in making Christians run away from God’s presence by focusing them on their own shortcomings instead of on Christ’s intercession. The English Puritan, Thomas Brooks reminds us:

 

“God’s hearing of our prayers doth not depend upon sanctification, but upon Christ’s intercession; not upon what we are in ourselves, but upon what we are in the Lord Jesus; both our persons and our prayers are acceptable in the beloved. When God hears our prayers, it is neither for our own sakes nor yet for our prayers’ sake, but it is for his own sake, and his Son’s sake, and his glory’s sake, and his promise’s sake.”

 

But Paul tells us one intercessor is not enough. How could it be? If Alexander Graham Bell had merely laid the phone line between the Isle of Wight and London, and sent the phone by post to Queen Victoria, she would not have had the first idea how to make her call get through. He needed to travel to her palace and sit with her, and in verses 26 and 27 Paul uses the same Greek word to say God has: “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us … the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.” Don’t miss the point and start debating whether ‘groaning’ in these verses is a reference to speaking in tongues. Paul’s main point is that we need the Holy Spirit to come alongside us to enable us to pray in the manner which releases our experience of salvation.

 

Back in the palace on the Isle of Wight, Alexander Graham Bell contravened strict royal protocol. Queen Victoria was struggling to make her telephone work and complained that “It is rather faint and one must hold the tube rather close to one’s ear.” Instinctively, he put his hand on her arm to help, forgetting commoners and royalty were not allowed to touch. Paul breaks royal protocol himself in verse 26 by using the same Greek word to describe the Holy Spirit’s help as was used by Martha in Luke 10:40 to request her sister help her with the household chores. It was a servant’s word, a word which describes a person rolling up their sleeves to lend a hand. Paul wants us to grasp that it’s the humble way our second intercessor works, as he comes alongside us to help us experience the Father. Jesus has paved the way for our calls and is sitting with the Father to ensure our words get through, but the Spirit sits with us at the other end of the line to help us know what we should say.

 

So take some time today to enjoy your relationship with the Father through the help of the Spirit and the Son. Fix your thoughts on what Jesus says to the Father to bring you near, and not on the voices of condemnation which drive you away. Let the Holy Spirit help you as your assistant as you pray. When you do so, you will find that you have God on the line, fulfilling the promise he made back in Jeremiah 29:12-14:

 

“You will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you.”

 

Victory Wounds - Phil Moore

The following is the last chapter of “Straight to the Heart of 1&2 Corinthians”, the book is now available!

We all know what it is like to suffer. We have all cried out to God at some point in pain. Since he is all-powerful, why does he let us suffer? That’s the question which God answers in 2 Corinthians 1, when he talks to us about VICTORY WOUNDS.

“For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.” (2 Corinthians 1:5)

On the morning of 12th July 1794, disaster struck a 35-year-old English sailor as he commanded a battery of cannon at the siege of a Corsican city named Calvi. A French cannonball hit the wall behind which he was crouching and sent debris flying into his right eye. One-eyed and battle-scarred, he felt as though his life had ended. Semi-blindness was hardly an advantage for a naval officer.

Seven years later, that same sailor was leading a group of ships at the Battle of Copenhagen. When his overcautious admiral raised the signal for him to withdraw, he found himself in a terrible dilemma. From his position in the thick of the fighting, he could see that he needed just a few more minutes to win an outright victory, yet if he disobeyed a direct order in battle he would quite rightly be court-martialled. Suddenly, he had an idea. “I only have one eye. I have the right to be blind sometimes,” he told his officers as he raised the telescope to his useless eye to see the signal. “I see no such signal, press on with the attack!” That sailor, Lord Horatio Nelson, went on to destroy the Danish fleet that day and become a national hero. Yesterday’s tragedy at Calvi had in fact been the gateway to victory at Copenhagen.

Paul did not know about Lord Nelson, but he knew about this principle. It was one of the things which kept him cheerful in Macedonia despite his terrible year. In Acts 19, Luke tells us about the riot which forced him to flee from Ephesus in the summer of 55AD. A group of metalworkers led an anti-Christian riot, and soon gathered thousands of angry protestors. Unable to find Paul, they seized two of his team members named Gaius and Aristarchus, dragged them to the city’s 25,000-seater theatre, and threatened them for over two hours. Such was Paul’s evangelistic zeal that when he heard about the crowd his friends were forced to plead with him not to go there and preach the Gospel, but deep down he was very scared. “We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life,” he tells the Corinthians. “Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death.” He truly believed he was about to be martyred, yet he looks back on the incident as a victory wound.

He believed it had become for him a gateway to greater faith. His evaluation was that “This happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.” Nothing could have grown his faith like that moment when he knew that it was ‘trust in God or die’. By the time he and Timothy had reached the relative safety of Philippi, it had permanently shaped their perspective and trained them to handle whatever else lay ahead: “He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us.”

Paul did not know it yet, but this lesson was to prove crucial. Acts 21 tells us the sequel to the story. Paul arrives at the port of Caesarea, only one stop away from Jerusalem and the end of his Third Missionary Journey. He is planning and praying about a Fourth Journey westward to plant churches Italy, Spain and Southern Gaul. Suddenly, the prophet Agabus warns him that if he ventures to Jerusalem he will be taken prisoner by the Romans. His friends weigh the prophecy and urge him not to go. Paul instinctively replies with the faith which he learned through his ‘Calvi’ at Ephesus: “Why are you weeping and breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.”

Because Paul had faith to go to Jerusalem and be arrested, he was given opportunity to preach to almost every nobleman in Palestine and to Caesar’s own household and Praetorian Guard in Rome. He could not have reached such an audience through his own initiative, but simply through the faith which he learned the hard way at Ephesus. As Smith Wigglesworth used to teach: “Great faith is a product of great fights. Great testimonies are the outcome of great tests. Great triumphs can only come after great trials.”

Paul also believed that trouble was a gateway to fruitfulness. It forced him to rely even more than ever upon “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort.” Hudson Taylor, the nineteenth-century missionary to China, found the same thing to be true when a mob set fire to his house during the night. He, his wife and their children almost lost their lives, but he protested that “It doesn’t matter how great the pressure is. What really matters is where the pressure lies – whether it comes between you and God or whether it presses you nearer his heart.” Paul had let it press him nearer to God’s heart, and he had found in the process that God’s own heart began to express itself through him. The Lord “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God,” he explained, and he demonstrates this virtuous circle at work in 7:6-7. Because God comforted Paul, he was able to comfort the Corinthians, which meant the Corinthians could comfort Titus, Titus could comfort Paul, and Paul in turn could comfort the Corinthians in this letter!

As a result, Paul and Timothy rejoiced in their troubles as the gateway to victory. They could pray for and speak into situation at Corinth because they knew that God would help them lead the church through to a successful resolution. “Our hope for you is firm,” they write in verse 7, “because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.” How did Paul keep on trusting, keep on comforting and keep on investing his life in his disappointing rabble of converts at Corinth? Because God had taken the ‘Calvi’ of Ephesus and had turned it into a victory wound for Corinth.

Perhaps you are experiencing suffering, pain, disappointment or relationship breakdown in your own life. Perhaps, like Paul, you are under pressure far beyond your own ability to endure. God wants you to rejoice in such troubles as your ‘Calvi’ and to let him transform them into tomorrow’s ‘Copenhagen’.

The great English preacher Charles Spurgeon warns that this is always the pathway along which God’s leads his People as his gateway to faith, fruitfulness and victory:

“Reckon, then, that to acquire soul-winning power you will have to go through fire and water, through doubt and despair, through mental torment and soul distress … You must go into the fire if you are to pull others out of it, and you will have to dive into the floods if you are to draw others out of the water … In our beginnings we are too fine to be fit, or too great to be good … A blacklead pencil is of no use at all till it is cut; the fine cedar wood must be cut away; and then the inward metal which marks and writes will have fair play.”

God's Folly - Phil Moore

The following is from “Straight to the Heart of Genesis”. I hope you find it a real encouragement that God’s Folly is far wiser than our wisdom.

ABRAHAM: GOD’S FOLLY

“The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.” (Genesis 12:1)



In 1867, Secretary of State William Seward bought Alaska for the United States. Not everyone could see why he did so. Pilloried widely as “Seward’s icebox” and “Seward’s folly,” it was despised as nothing more than an over-hunted frozen wasteland. To William Seward, 600,000 square miles of territory was worth far more than the $7,200,000 dollars which he paid to the Russians, but few people in the nation could follow the direction of his gaze. In the midst of post-Civil War reconstruction, Seward’s use of public money seemed nothing short of madness.



Abraham was an even stranger choice for God to make than Alaska was for William Seward. He had very little to his credit with which to attract the Lord’s particular attention.



For a start, he was an idolater. The Lord told the Hebrews in Joshua 24:2 that “Long ago your forefathers, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the River and worshipped other gods.” Since Ur of the Chaldees was a city dominated by the moon-god Nanna, Abraham was probably brought up to worship the moon at the temple with his father. He was not looking for God when God came looking for him.



What was more, he was a sophisticated urbanite in a city like the one which the Lord had just thwarted at Babel. Ur of the Chaldees was famous for its ziggurat-tower and for its kings who liked to pretend that they were gods. The people of Ur were as wicked as the builders of Babel, and Abraham had grown up as part of that society. Married to his half-sister and raised with an instinct to lie and deceive, he was steeped in the sin of self-sufficient Mesopotamia.



What was more, Abraham was not even Terah’s firstborn. In our culture, this may not matter – my second-born son and third-born daughter will inherit as much of my estate as my firstborn son – but in the ancient Middle East it was a massive limitation. Abraham would not inherit his father Terah’s estate, because under Mesopotamian law those rights belonged entirely to his elder brother, Haran. The Hebrews in the desert had just seen all the firstborn sons of Egypt slaughtered in one night, so they knew that a second-born was worth nothing compared to his beloved older brother.



Finally, to finish off Abraham’s profile of natural inadequacy, he and his wife were childless and infertile. Whatever else God might be looking for in a patriarch for his Holy Nation, the ability to have children was an essential prerequisite. The Lord was looking for a couple who could found a mighty chosen race, but Abraham and Sarah were in their sixties and seventies, and even Abraham confessed that this disqualified him. When the “New York Tribune” wrote off Alaska as a “sucked orange” which had already seen its best days, it might as well have been talking about Abraham. The New Testament tells us twice that this idolatrous urbanite, who stood to inherit little and had no one to bequeath it to, was “as good as dead.” There can scarcely have been anyone in the ancient Middle East who looked less qualified to become God’s patriarch than him. Except for two important details, that is.



First, Abraham was descended from the line of God’s promise. He was the descendant of Shem, Noah’s second-born son whom the Lord had turned into his spiritual firstborn by grace. That made him part of the backslidden remnant of the Family of God.



Second, Abraham was a man of faith, who took God at his word and was prepared to do as he commanded. He may have been steeped in false religion and compromise in the city of Ur, but it only took one encounter with the Lord to convert him thoroughly. In the words of Hebrews 11, “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.” He traded in the civilised comfort of Ur to become a tent-dwelling foreigner in a land which he had never visited, because his eyes were fixed on the God who had appeared to him and the heavenly promises which he had heard from his mouth. He knew better than anyone that he was a spent and childless has-been, but he had faith in the power of the God who had called him to obey. Paul explained to the Galatians that the Lord “announced the Gospel in advance to Abraham,” when he told him that he would bless all nations through his offspring. That was what Abraham had stacked in his favour. He “believed the Lord, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”



This should encourage you when you look at your own life. If you feel about as useful to God as Seward’s hunk of frozen wasteland, then it should give you hope that our usefulness begins with God. The Lord did not choose Abraham to be the founder of the Hebrew nation because he was devout or virtuous, well-connected or fertile. He chose him because he was a weak man who had faith that God would be strong on his behalf. He chose him because he was a man who knew he could not chart his own way towards a glorious future, but who was painfully aware that it had to begin with God. He chose him because he was a man who would obey his words with childlike faith. The builders of Babel had longed to build a name for themselves through their own effort, but here was a man who would let God build a name for him through his undeserved favour. God is still on the look-out for modern-day Abrahams.



William Seward’s purchase of Alaska was actually an act of financial and strategic genius. Underneath its frozen surface lay reserves of oil and minerals, and its geography offered a priceless advantage when Cold War began with the Russians who sold it. The Lord’s choice of Abraham, as we will see in the rest of Genesis, was also vindicated time and time again. God has chosen us as well, and told us plainly the Gospel which Abraham merely heard as a distant echo from the future. It is time for you and me to respond to the Lord with the same faith as he did.



God is not looking for heroes who possess great natural promise. He is far too great to need the help of those he chooses. He is simply looking for nobodies who will believe his Gospel promises. Abraham heard God’s voice and believed what he said – and that was credit enough to find a place in God’s great story.