April 2008

Welcome to Closer to God for Newfrontiers online, brought to you in association with Scripture Union.

Closer to God is here to help you unlock the power of the Bible. If you want to see God move in power in your life and in the nations, keep reading! Closer to God is the Bible-reading guide that firmly believes that God is reaching out to his church through his Word and his Spirit with the message of his life-transforming love and all-surpassing glory. Closer to God's aim is to help you find out how God speaks to ordinary people: loving, freeing, changing and healing them in order to do incredible things for him.

When you’re a Christian it can sometimes feel as if you’re an isolated oddity in a brutal and godless world. All your energies have to be directed into preventing yourself from being undermined or compromised by the things of the world. We can get to thinking of our faith as one tiny little flame in an immense darkness, continually on the brink of being extinguished by the pressure to conform and give ourselves over to chasing pleasure and status. This month, Andy Tilsley (ChristChurch London) looks at the book of Daniel and shows us a man who lived out his faith in God while exiled in a foreign and pagan culture. Does it sound familiar?

In Daniel we have a man who refused to be seduced by the message of the majority – ‘Forget God. He’s irrelevant’ – and who was willing to refuse earthly comforts and put up with persecution because he had put his life and hope – lock, stock and barrel – into something better – someone better; the one person who truly matters, the one true God. Unlike us, Daniel could not retreat into a holy huddle, protecting himself from the God-free environment outside by spending as much time as possible in the company of inward-looking fellow believers. He lived his faith out before those who would accuse him, and what happened? He changed the environment he was in… Babylon’s pagan Kings Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, both of whom required their subjects to worship them, had experiences that convinced them that Daniel’s God was the real deal; and Darius even decreed that everyone in his kingdom must ‘fear and reverence the God of Daniel’ (6:26).

If this is what Daniel did by obeying God under the old covenant, how much more is possible as we honour God in our environments and relationships through the power of the Spirit that is in us? And we don’t work alone… If churches resist the urge to simply cater for the people already counted as members, and seek to be intentional about reaching the unreached in their community, then we will see changes. Like Daniel, we need to ‘live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God’ (1 Peter 2:12).

Now we might feel that this is just too hard for us. You might be thinking as you read this, you don’t know my circumstances. You don’t know how harsh people in my office are about my faith. How will they ever be convinced my me, when my life looks like this? If it were all up to us to singlehandedly bring non-Christians to faith by our own will power and charisma, I don’t think many people would come to Jesus. But that’s it exactly – it’s all about Jesus. He is working in people by his Holy Spirit and he will give us divine opportunities and divinely appointed words and ways of responding to people that will sow seeds in them that he bring to full growth.

It is an amazing truth that God chooses to work in partnership with sinful failures to achieve his purposes on the earth. As Ruth Deller points out in her series on Matthew, ‘Advancing the kingdom’, Jesus invites the ‘unacceptable into his kingdom’. So, what better way of reaching those who have not yet heard of the welcome Jesus offers to the unacceptable, than through those who were once unacceptable, who now know how much they are accepted and loved? The flame in the darkness is not weak because Jesus is the Light of the world…

Be blessed this month,

Phil Andrews

Editor, Closer to God