John Wesley's Accountability Questions

As an Elder's group at Plains we have entered into a mutual accountability framework, where hold each other accountable for our walk with the Lord. We have been running it for a few months now and I think we are feeling the benefit of it personally and corporately. It seems there is a long history of holding oneself accountable in an objective way. I came across these accountability questions of John Wesley's at Jehovah Shammah - The Lord who is Present

1. Am I consciously or unconsciously creating the impression that I am better than I am? In other words, am I a hypocrite?
2. Am I honest in all my acts and words, or do I exaggerate?
3. Do I confidentially pass onto another what was told me in confidence?
4. Am I a slave to dress, friends, work , or habits?
5. Am I self-conscious, self-pitying, or self-justifying?
6. Did the Bible live in me today?
7. Do I give it time to speak to me everyday?
8. Am I enjoying prayer?
9. When did I last speak to someone about my faith?
10. Do I pray about the money I spend?
11. Do I get to bed on time and get up on time?
12. Do I disobey God in anything?
13. Do I insist upon doing something about which my conscience is uneasy?
14. Am I defeated in any part of my life?
15. Am I jealous, impure, critical, irritable, touchy or distrustful?
16. How do I spend my spare time?
17. Am I proud?
18. Do I thank God that I am not as other people, especially as the Pharisee who despised the publican?
19. Is there anyone whom I fear, dislike, disown, criticize, hold resentment toward or disregard? If so, what am I going to do about it?
20. Do I grumble and complain constantly?
21. Is Christ real to me?

These are questions which cut to the heart of who we are as Christian believers. It seems the issues were just the same in the 18th Century as they are today.

Chris Moyles on the Church

Did you hear Chris Moyles speaking about the church on his radio show last month? I picked it up from Paul Rees at Gospel Growth . It is really interesting to hear the perceptions of the Radio 1 DJ on what he saw one Sunday morning on his television screen.

‘GOMA’ shows Scotland the Truth about itself!

The Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Glasgow is exhibiting an installation which features a video of a woman defacing a bible. She rips pages out of it and eats them; she stuffs pages from God’s precious word down her underwear. Next to this video installation is a bible, a box of pens and a notice which says, “If you feel you have been excluded from the Bible please write your way back into it.” People who visit this exhibition have been writing all sorts of offensive comments and many of them shaking their literary fists at what they call a ‘fascist God’.

I hate this installation with a passion. It makes me sick to think of the God of the entire universe who gave his own son to die for sinners being mocked and profaned in such an unbridled manner. It breaks my heart to think that the nation I was born and raised in and which I love is so hard hearted and hostile to God. And yet, despicable though this installation is, I can’t help but feel that it holds a mirror up to Scottish society and tells us some truths about ourselves.

As a society we began rejecting God’s Word decades before this disgusting installation. Divorce is endemic and children are being brought up in broken homes all over Scotland because we have ripped out what the bible has to say about marriage and family. Alcoholism and drug addiction touches every community in Scotland, not least the city of Glasgow, because we have torn up the good news of the gospel of salvation and replaced it with a materialistic philosophy which says you live, you make the best of it, you die and that’s it. People are crying out for hope, but we have erased that too. Teenage pregnancies are the highest in Western Europe because we have ripped up what the bible has to say about sex. Abortions are taking place in their thousands because we’ve flushed away what the bible says about life.

However, before we start decrying a ‘godless’ unbelieving world, as a church in Scotland we need to take some responsibility for the sick state we find ourselves in. After all, it was ministers of the church who, decades ago, decided to rip all traces of inerrancy from their bibles. It was so called church leaders who told us to tear out the supernatural bits from our bibles; and theologians told us that this precious book is no longer God’s Word, just a place where we might seek a word from God, no longer authoritative just a place where we might find some good advice.

Is there really a difference between theologians mutilating the Word of God to suit a liberal secularist agenda and punters at GOMA writing down their own take on the bible? I don’t think so. Is there really a difference between thousands of individuals all over Scotland saying ‘stuff the bible, I’ll do it my way’ and these art buffs having ‘fun’ with their godless mockery? I think not. God have mercy on Glasgow! God help this nation of Scotland.

Glasgow used to have a city motto. It read, “Let Glasgow Flourish by the preaching of His Word and the praising of His name”. It has been ripped up as well. It now reads, simply, ‘Let Glasgow Flourish’. But that’s the problem; Glasgow never will flourish unless it returns to the preaching of His Word and the praising of His name.

The mutilation of the Word of God so nauseously portrayed at GOMA is perhaps the most incisive, if unwitting, diagnosis of the problem with Scotland today. As a nation we need to get back to God’s Word; as individuals and families we need to get back to God’s Word. This is the only way we will ever flourish. God have mercy on us.

The Trouble With Envy

Here is an excellent excerpt from an article with Paul Trip:

1. Envy is a window on the true treasures of our heart. Oh sure, we would all like to think that we love God above all else. We all want to believe that his plan is more important to us than anything we would plan for ourselves. We would like to assume that what God promises us is more precious to us than anything we could ever set our eyes on. But envy reveals that these things are not yet completely true to us. Envy reveals that there is still a war of treasure raging in our hearts. Envy exposes the fact that the treasures of this physical, created world still have a powerful ability to seduce, tempt and side-track us. Envy tells us that we still look for satisfaction to things that do not have the organic capacity to satisfy the craving of our hearts. Who or What you envy tells you what you treasure.




2. Envy is a window on how easily and consistently we forget. We do have the amazing ability to stand in front of a closet that is bulging with clothes and say that we don't have a thing to wear. We do have the capacity to stand in front of a refrigerator filled with food and say there is nothing to eat. And we do have the ability to stand in the middle of lavish blessing and feel as if we are poor and needy. The sin of forgetfulness is one of the root sins of envy. We forget that, in God's grace, we have been given what we could not earn, achieve, or deserve. We forget that the Creator of all things and the Controller of all that is, is our Father and he is not only able to meet all our needs, he is willing to do so. Envy forgets blessing and in forgetting blessing assumes poverty and in assuming poverty gives way to hunger and this feeling of hunger tempts us to look to and long for what simply will not satisfy.



3. Envy is a window on the war within. Envy is a reminder. Envy is a warning. Envy is the sounding of an internal alarm. Envy tells you that you must not live with a peace-time mentality. Envy tells you that this is not the time to chill and relax. Envy reminds you that there really is a war that is still raging for the rulership of your heart. Envy calls you to be a humble and disciplined soldier. Envy calls you to examine your heart and interrogate your desires. Envy calls you to live watchfully and prayerfully. Envy warns you to reject assessments of arrival. To the degree that you crave what you Father has not chosen to given you, to that degree you heart is still out of step with him. The fight still goes on.



Now, maybe after reading this you're thinking, "Wow, Paul, that was really discouraging!" Here's what you and I need to remember. Our Savior walked on this earth where the war of envy rages, but he was envy free. Why? Not because he had it all, but because he was willing to forsake it all for you and for me. Think about this; rather than wanting all that was his right as God, Jesus was willing to forsake it all so that the battle for our hearts could and would be finally won. He walked away from glories our minds are to small to conceive in order to deliver to us these glories that our minds are to small to conceive. He was not propelled by envy. No he was propelled by love and that love is the most powerful reason for hope in the universe. So, we can affirm the struggle. We can confess when envy yanks us off his pathway. And we can know for sure that there will be a day when envy is no more and we will live forever in the kingdom of his love, fully and completely satisfied.

A New Church for Scotland?

John Ross, who is a prominent Free Church of Scotland Minister currently serving in South Africa recently wrote a very thoughtful essy posing the question of whether recent developments in the Kirk might herald a new church for Scotland. He argues that it might be time for a union between the 'Confessing Churches' congregations of Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland. Here is an extract of his essay....

"On Sunday morning, 24 May, a large number of Church of Scotland people awoke utterly perplexed by their Church’s decision the previous evening. The General Assembly, by a huge majority of 326 to 267, had taken an unprecedented, if not entirely unanticipated, decision to approve the Aberdeen Presbytery’s sustaining a call from the congregation of Queen’s Cross Church to Rev Scott Rennie, a 37 year old divorcee and father, who lives in an open homosexual relationship.

The following day the BBC website focused on the emotional upset suffered by Mr Rennie, running the headline “Gay minister ‘hurt’ by church row”, whilst the Scotsman reported “Gay minister humbled by Kirk’s backing.” Hurt or humbled, or both, and I would not want deny his emotions, nor minimise them, many others were also deeply wounded that night. The over 5,000 members of the Church of Scotland who had signed the on-line petition of the Fellowship of Confessing Churches were grieved to the core of their souls by what had transpired.

In its pre-assembly statement, the Fellowship of Confessing Churches made it very clear that, in its view, by inducting into its congregations those living in relationships other than heterosexual marriage, the Kirk would be crossing a Rubicon into a moral, spiritual and theological wasteland, thus positioning itself outside “the fellowship of orthodox, creedal Christianity worldwide.”

The issue now confronting all those good and godly Kirk ministers, elders and members who subscribed to the petition is simply this, how, for the glory of Christ and his cause in Scotland, can they remain where they are? Does not the logic of their own argument mean that their position within the Church has now become untenable?

Saturday’s decision is not, however, a sudden, erratic, departure from “orthodox, creedal Christianity,” to quote the Fellowship’s statement. It is but the latest staging post on a long road strewn with the debris of all that is valued by orthodox, confession Christians. For over a century confidence in the cardinal doctrines of the Faith has been eroded; denial of the Bible as itself the Word of God, attacks on the miraculous and supernatural, doubts about the Trinity, reservations over the resurrection, qualms over the twin eternal destinies of heaven and hell have all been voiced by Kirk ministers without fear of restraint. For some, the ordination of women elders and ministers was to be the final straw, but the camel’s back has proved to be remarkably strong and has not yet buckled. Now this latest Assembly decision is set to test once more the resilience of the evangelical conscience, and I fear it will prove to be a hardy old faculty, well up to the latest challenge. The reality is, time and again, evangelicals have complained about departures for orthodoxy, and have even mildly protested against them, but have concluded, in words I have heard repeated ad nauseum, that nothing but nothing would induce them to leave the Kirk. Well, we will see.

Even without this latest debacle, the moral and spiritual landscape of Scotland is as bleak as ever it has been. Does this mean all is lost? Is the spiritual decline of the Scottish church now terminal? Of what significance is it that the twentieth century was the first century since the Reformation without national religious revival? And is that a sign that the candlestick of Christian witness is being removed? Are we one of the last generations of Scottish Christians? Will it perhaps fall to our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren finally to turn out the lights, lock the doors and watch the dust settle on a derelict Church, abandoned both by God and man?

The scale of the challenge now confronting evangelical and Confessional Presbyterians calls for nothing less than the redrawing of the Christian map of Scotland. It calls for the creation of a new Presbyterian Church made up of the Free Church of Scotland and the confessional congregations of the Church of Scotland, along with all others who desire to be reunited in wholehearted commitment to Christ, Scripture and mission. Of course there will be difficulties to overcome. An obvious concern for some Presbyterian churches is worship, using as they do the metrical Psalms alone. But that is an issue they would do well to concede, rather than sacrifice the greater principles of confessional Christian unity and national mission.

I would like to think that a new confessional Presbyterian Church in Scotland is not a fantasy of imagination but a vision glimpsed with the eye of faith. There can be no doubt that the deplorably shattered and fragmented state of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland is contrary to God’s revealed will and Scripture’s unambiguous insistence on Christian unity.

We are all too prone to justify our separate denominational existence by an emotional attachment to our heritage and traditions, an attitude that leads us to disparage the Bible’s call to unity. May I remind you of something Professor John Murray once wrote?

Though the diversity which manifests itself in differentiating historical developments might appear to make ecclesiastical union inadvisable or even perilous in certain cases, yet the biblical evidence in support of union is so plain that any argument to the contrary, however plausible, must be false.

We must reject of the fractious tendencies inherent in our history and engage with other Christians in a movement towards Confessional unity, where the People of God work hand in hand to heal and reunite the fragments of a torn and disordered church.

A reunited Scottish Church would make possible Columba’s vision of Christ’s Good News being carried to a pagan nation and souls won to God. It could secure Knox’s desire for reformation enabling our nation to hear the Good News uncomplicated by aberrant theology, both liberal and fundamentalist. Such a Church would facilitate Melville’s dream of a nation united under the supreme but kind and gracious headship of Jesus Christ. How wonderful if a Church existed able to recover the Christ-like compassion for the marginalised and excluded that led Thomas Chalmers to care for the urban poor and inspired Thomas Guthrie to provide education, nutrition and career training for destitute children."

Let us pray that the current crisis within the Church of Scotland might give way to a greater unity among our Presbyterian brothers and sisters around orthodox biblical Christianity. Let us stand as one Church of Jesus Christ in Scotland today. John Ross's full article can be found here
http://johnstuartross.wordpress.com/redrawing-the-christian-map-of-scotland/