Breakthrough series 9: No double jeopardy

Practical Christianity 10 - change is needed if we want to reach our spiritual potential

Who are you?

Immortal invisible god only wise

One of the hardest things for most Christians is the tussle between the literal account of scripture and the reality of God. It challenges us theologically, as in the creation story, and personally, as in the dissonance between what the bible says and what we experience. 

Many feel that anything less than a literal take on creation diminishes God and deducts from His power. I disagree.

Did Jesus call on ten thousands of angels to help Him at Calvary or marshal a massive show of force? No. Because, as Ephesians 2 confirms, He revealed His WISDOM to principalities and powers. Victory lay in the subtle march to the cross its outworking.

On the offensive

A friend referred to a football concept as a model for prayer, as in defensive versus offensive prayer.

It is a great notion. A lot of our prayer, maybe most of it, is defensive: as in, “Lord I am battling to stand, our defenses are failing, please send in reinforcements; please help me”. That is the cry of someone under siege, defending their existence or the castle they occupy.

Celebrate Life

Coldplay's iconic hit, Viva la Vida, means "celebration of life", yet is about death. However, it is not a dark celebration of death, but the triumph of life over death.

The album cover, features Delacroix's "liberty leading the people (into victory)", symbolising the triumph of new life over the old enemy, "I used to roll the dice, feel the fear in my enemies' eyes, listen as the crowd would sing, now the old king is dead, long live the king".

Death boasts, "One minute I held the key, next the walls were closed on me, and I discovered my castles stand upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand". The poet alludes to great biblical imagery about building on sand and the folly of Lot's wife who looked back to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Then the triumphal albeit tragic refrain, which echoes that fateful day of Calvary, when the King of Life met the ruler of death in the darkened canyons of hell, "I hear Jerusalem's bells a ringing, Roman cavalry choirs are singing, be my sword, my mirror, my shield, my missionaries in a foreign field."

The words continue with haunting lyrics about the cold winds of death and shatttered lives, but what happened on Calvary's windswept sides will live on forever, beyond the stars, beyond the fullness of time, beyond the end of the ages, long after the worlds as we know are gone and the universe is folded up like a garment. Even then the bells of heaven will ring as a perpetual reminder of that one, climactic moment that forever changed the destiny of men, angels and heaven above.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net
Image courtesy: www.mpam-tetelestai.org/mission.html