Thursday 30 June

2 Kings 1:1-2:25

I will never mock a bald man again.  Henceforth the word slaphead will never part from my lips.  O Lord, I deeply repent of all my utterances regarding the follically challenged nature of Neil’s pate.  Please would you spare me from the flames.

There sure is a lot of weird stuff in this passage.  I don’t know if 2 Kings was written by the same bloke as 1 Kings but if it was, he sure seems to have ramped things up a notch or two.  Suddenly the Spirit is vividly springing up not just through the directional words of prophets but through dramatic actions of judgement and wonder.  In many ways this feels like one of those taster nibbles you get offered when you are wandering round the supermarket, given away free to try to lure you into buying the whole thing.  Or like a 10-second preview of a song that you can download on itunes.  The Age of the Spirit is showing itself ahead of time, through the lives of Elijah and Elisha.  The Age of the Spirit has not yet dawned - that will come with the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus and with the subsequent outpouring of Pentecost but it is showing itself now to whet appetites and advocate on behalf of the Father.  To the people who are ignoring and disrespecting God at every turn the Spirit’s message is clear - there is something coming - call it the Kingdom of God if you like - and it is far stronger than this present evil age.  If you have any sense you will buy into it.  If you don’t you will suffer the consequences.  And for those of us who have bought into it.  For those of us who have the Spirit living inside of our souls?  Well, we join the cry of the Twickenham faithful, but with more poignancy and more joy than I suspect they ever can muster - “Swwiiiiiiiing loww, sweeeet chaariiiottt, coming forth to carry meeee hooooooooooome......”

Acts 20:1-38

Hahahaha.  I believe the term the ‘youth of today’ might use is LMAO.  As someone who is asked to preach every now and then, I utterly utterly love the fact that Paul, one of the greatest preachers of all time, bored someone so much that they literally dropped dead.  I honestly can’t stop chuckling about it.  I bet Luke and Timothy and Sopater (you don’t hear that name much these days do you??) must have had a fantastic time ribbing Paul about it every time he got up to speak.  It really is priceless.  But for me, even greater than my hilarity over the side-effects of Paul’s verbosity is my amazement at the fact that Paul still continued to speak for another 5 or 6 hours even after Eutychus had died.  As we see from this episode and from his leaving speech to the Ephesian church, Paul really really believed that preaching had a power unrivaled by nearly anything else.  By preaching Paul discharged his duty.  By preaching Paul helped and built up the church.  By preaching Paul safeguarded the people from the challenges to come.  By preaching Paul made himself innocent of people’s blood.  Preaching the bible is absolutely, completely and utterly crucial to life in the kingdom.  Worship is wonderful and essential, ministry is wonderful and essential, praying for healing and caring for the poor are wonderful and essential.  But church we have to get this.  We have to reclaim and never lose the absolute centrality and critically, foundational nature of preaching the word.  We need to increase our faith in preaching.  We need to awaken ourselves to the beauty and the power and the grace-imparting gloriousness of teaching the bible to each other.  It is God’s precious precious gift to us and we would do well to devour it and explore it and speak of it over and over and over again - even if it kills us to do so...

Psalm 78:40-55

It’s interesting how often the Israelites used songs to remind themselves of God’s past works for them.