Never waste a good Advent season I say!  Never waste the opportunity that this slim time in the church calendar gives us to offer our people – and the watching world – a fully orbed biblical picture of God’s plan to save the world through his covenant relationship with his people Israel.

God has no Plan B. Only a Plan A. But for so many Christians, we forget that. You see, the average carol service at an evangelical church in the West these days is something of an aberration.

For a few brief weeks, a church culture that has often psychologised, therapeutised and individualised the core tenets of the gospel in so much of its music, starts singing deep biblical truths grounded in the “hopes and fears of all the years”.

What hopes? Well the hopes of the covenant people of God that he will send a rescuer to put the world right and usher in justice, that’s what hopes.  What fears? That God won’t!  The best Christmas carols are just another reminder that God has no Plan B and that every blessing he has ever planned is met and fulfilled in his Christ, the Lord Jesus.

Which means, for our increasingly biblically illiterate churches (never mind the culture), Advent season is a crucial teaching period. A chance to take a deeper dive into what the Bible is actually all about.

During Advent the most seeker-sensitive church that is all about felt-needs, or the most biblically-reductionistic church that cherry-picks its way through the Scriptures looking for proof texts, suddenly get all “biblical theology” as they focus on the key passages  in the gospel of Matthew and Luke, that speak of the coming Messiah.

Granted, that will all finish by the 26th December, but I live in hope that for some churches this season may be the start of asking deeper questions about what all that murky stuff in the Old Testament that rarely sees the light of day in most churches, is all about.

There’s a reason those first few chapters in the Gospel accounts are designed to sound so familiar to readers of the Old Testament. It’s because they are the cross-over chapters.  They are the bridge, and they’re written to ensure that we get that they are the bridge!

The language used, the format presented, the dovetailing with the prophetic hopes, and the undercurrent of hope, did not spring out of thin air. They are grounded in Israel’s hope and consolation. They are fulfilment theology. And we sing that theology, wittingly or unwittingly every Christmas.

Go through those carols you’ve been singing. See how steeped they are in the language of the Old Testament. The best carol writers knew their Bibles. They knew the end-focus of the promises as yet unfulfilled. And of course the New Testament writers, overwhelmingly Jewish, knew it also.

That’s why we read such promised soaked passages such as this:

“Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God—the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scripture sregarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power.” – Romans 1:1-4a

The promised gospel (the good news of God’s salvation), now brought to Gentiles who were outside the covenant of Israel, and as Ephesians 2 says, without God and without hope in the world.

But now…

But now…

The Advent season is the celebration of the “but now” of Ephesians 2:

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

And of course Ephesians 2 is not about the replacement of one people with another, but of the bringing together of two peoples at odds with each other (Jew and Gentle) in order to create the “one new human” that God has always intended for humanity to be. And to do so in his promised Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ.

This “bringing together” that we sing of and celebrate at Advent, struck me hard this past week visiting the St Peter’s Catholic Church in Jaffa in Tel Aviv.

There in that ancient port city (the place Jonah fled from in order to refuse God’s global mission, and the same place St Peter was gifted the vision that preceded the start of God’s global mission to Gentiles in Acts 10), the church itself has a timely reminder in striking visual and architectural form.

I walked into the church and was met with three striking pieces of art: First, facing the East was what seemed like an oddly placed set of doors. Then in the middle of the church was this striking pulpit that was shaped like a tree, with trunk and branches. And finally, facing West, was a painting of that famous Acts 10 scene, with Peter protesting the command by God to rise and kill and eat unclean foods.

I’ve added them in here even though my limited tech abilities leave a lot to be desired in terms of formatting!

And what’s the point of this architecture and art at St Peter’s on Jaffa (apart from reminding low-evangelical Protestants how they have wasted the opportunity to teach their people theological truths in passive ways by their rejection of architecture as a teaching method)?

It’s the pulpit shaped like a tree in the middle of the church. What sort of tree? Not just any tree. An olive tree!  It’s a reminder of Romans 11, and it’s both a warning and a promise:If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root,  do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches. If you do, consider this: you do not support the root, but the root supports you.  You will say then, ‘Branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in.’  Granted. But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but tremble.  For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either. (Romans 11:17-21)

Right there in St Peter’s Jaffa, the pulpit sits between the East and the temple of God, and the West and the global mission of God. It straddles the hopes expressed and the hopes realised that God is fulfilling his mission.

It announces that the New Testament is not replacing the Old Testament, but fulfilling it. And, more importantly, as Paul reminds the Roman Gentile Christians, they are not the start of God’s Plan B, but the fulfilment of God’s Plan A.

And what’s the point of Romans 11? Don’t fall into the mistake the Old Testament people of God fell into, that somehow their heritage rendered them superior. You’re not. The same sin will result in the same condemnation.

Indeed, it’s harder to graft us in than it will be to see the natural branches restored. Paul can say all of that with blushing. He would make for a terrible modern evangelical.

We would do well to consider St Peter’s Catholic Church in Jaffa and see, in striking visual form, God’s salvation plan for the whole world, planned before time, begun in seed form with his promises to Abraham, and fulfilled in the promised Messiah, the Lord Jesus.

Jaffa launched the grumpy mission to the world via Jonah. It launched the reluctant mission to the world via Peter. Jaffa is proof that God has no Plan B, but only a Plan A that encapsulates every human, indeed all of creation.

And we may not think about that enough, but at Advent we get the chance to sing about it enough. So let’s sing the truths about God’s fulfilment of Plan A with gusto!

Article supplied with thanks to Stephen McAlpine

About the Author: Stephen has been reading, writing and reflecting ever since he can remember. A former church pastor, he now trains church and ministry leaders, and in his writing dabbles in a number of fields, notably theology and culture.

Feature image: Canva

So a Canadian pastor got in touch with me a few days ago to say that he’d discovered my blog (always nice), and that he liked what I wrote (even nicer), and that it rang true for the Canadian scene as well (nicest of all!).

What “rang true”? Well many things, but increasingly the post-Christian frame in which a younger generation of never-churched people, with zero understanding of the Christian faith, are the new norm.

The technical term for not knowing that you don’t know something, is “unconscious incompetence”.  We move from not knowing that we don’t know, to knowing that we don’t know (conscious incompetence), to knowing that we know (conscious competence), to the final stage of “unconscious competence” where the thing is almost second nature to us. If you still don’t get it, recall the stages for how you learned to ride a bicycle.

When it comes to many things political and cultural, Canada and Australia have similar trajectories. And that means when it comes to Christianity many people – especially many younger people – are in the unconscious incompetence stage, they don’t know that they don’t know.

How are we like Canada here in Australia?  For one, like Canada, Australia is decidedly not the USA, even though many of us take reference points (rightly and wrongly) from the States.

But secondly, the progressive agenda that is antithetical to the Christian understanding of what it means to be human that Canada experiences (witness its huge uptick in euthanasia and the slackening of its boundaries) is also similar to ours in Australia.

And what about the big questions: What is a human? What is a human for? Who is a human for?  The whole anthropological tool-kit that the Christian frame gifted to the world is missing many of its tools in Canada and Australia. Meanwhile many of the tools that remain are mis-used for purposes the Christian frame did not intend. Read Glen Scrivener’s The Air We Breathe.

We have moved well beyond assuming that Christianity gave the West a framework that secularism can take from here on in. We have moved to a point that we are becoming completely ignorant about the faith.

What were some of the signs for this pastor? Well he dropped some examples:

The pizza delivery guy who asked me what that giant “t” in the parking lot stood for. Then my wife and I were out for dinner recently, and I noticed a gold crucifix around the neck of our server. I tried to strike up conversation with the roughly 20 year-old young lady: “Thats a lovely crucifix!” I remarked. The server was a bit baffled but polite. “Thank you…what is? What’s lovely?”, she asked.  “The cross…your necklace” “Oh!” She replied, “This?” I asked her what it meant to her, or what the man on it meant to her. She sort of blushed and just responded “I just bought it because I thought it was pretty.”

The big “t”!

“it was pretty!”

That’s wild eh? Well it’s wild for us marinated in the faith and who are equally ignorant about niche anime movements emanating from South Korea (though some of you may be unconsciously competent about such matters!).

How far has the gospel imagination left our culture, that the very instrument of torture that Jesus died upon, and which was famously lampooned in the celebrated Alexamanos graffito, should be so devoid of meaning to a post-Christian?

How little do the artefacts of Christianity bear any weight to modern young people that they should buy our most precious artefact because it was pretty to them.  Or that, with no guile, they should  ask why the lower-case letter “t” is placed upon a roof?

We’ve certainly come a long way since crucifixion was a no-go subject in polite Roman society. Now this Canadian pastor, living as he does in a more urban area, knows that such unconscious incompetence is not the norm everywhere, and is less likely to occur in the “prairie” towns (the equivalent I guess of our Bible Belts and smaller, conservative regionals). But it’s a thing!

With the increasing urbanisation of our young populations, it will also become a growing thing. But here’s another thing: this unconscious incompetence has an upside to it.  And I hope as people involved in – or at least interested in – Christian ministry, you can see it.

For just as the Quiet Revival has brought a trickle of “never churched” back to churches in the UK (and seen a corresponding jump in what we can call ‘full-fat-faith” rather than the lame, liberal offerings of the past thirty years), so too elsewhere.

And indeed, there’s something kinda cute and worthy of a gentle giggle (if eternity were not at stake), in what this Canadian pastor went on to tell me.  Here are some of his examples about how this “unconscious competence” – or what he calls in a less pejorative way “holy naivete” is doing in his part of Canada:

The University student who live-streamed her workout run to visit a church for the first time in her life, literally jogging into our lobby to try church.

Whole atheist families who through some realized but previously-unknown threshold for progressivism show up en-masse to convert to that which they barely understand.

The Wiccan woman who decides her whole family ought to convert to Christianity, shows up, front row, every week. Comes to saving knowledge and trust in Christ. Next thing you know she’s bringing complete strangers from Facebook Marketplace to church each week, because she’s trading her expensive occult supplies for church visits. 

That last anecdote is almost a mirror of Acts 19, where Paul brings the gospel to Ephesus, resulting in ignorance and superstition being evicted from the lives of so many. And like that Wiccan woman, the new converts in Ephesus burned their expensive magic books.

This Canadian pastor finishes with this:

It’s astounding how genuinely white the fields are for harvest, but the direction of the flow is so contrary to what we were ever told to expect in the West.

Yep. Something is definitely happening. And he’s right – so much of it has gone against the grain of how we thought we might reach the West again.   But that’s probably how God works, right? And we don’t want to overplay it and say that we are seeing wholesale revival.

The cloud on the horizon may only look like the size of a man’s fist. It could come and shower us in the West with revival’s refreshing rains, or it could dissipate altogether. But events in the world in recent years have pushed people to ask serious questions.

I believe that this was brewing just before COVID, and then the sheer scale of that event, the anguish and anger, and the deep politicisation it induced, moved things along rapidly. But we’ve also had the murder of an outspoken young Christian man, who for all the politics you don’t agree with, have a cheerful naivete about sharing the guts of the gospel to hostile crowds.

My mum told me just last week that a woman in her fifties turned up at mum’s tiny reformed, ageing, Baptist church after the Charle Kirk assassination. Turns out this woman has been going around the local churches in the weeks after that event, wondering if there is something to Christianity after all.

For those of you who didn’t like Charlie Kirk, then at least be like Paul in prison writing to the Philippians and rejoice that the gospel was preached whether for good intent or bad intent. If you can’t do that, then you may be more politicised and partisan than you care to admit.

So that’s unconscious incompetence.  That big “t” on your roof. That “pretty” pendant around someone’s neck. That Wiccan who suddenly realises there is a power beyond the dark arts that can liberate her. That fifty something Aussie woman suddenly wondering whether Christianity is real. Perhaps we should not be surprised though.   Isn’t this what we read in the Scriptures?

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:3-6)

Moving from unconscious competence is not a graft, it’s a gift!  Shifting from not knowing that you don’t know, to knowing, is about God’s gospel work. Always was. Always is. Always will be.

As the late Tim Keller would put it, “No one becomes a Christian, until they do.”  And when they do, they move from asking “What’s that big “t” on your roof?” to praising and glorifying God for what that big “t” has achieved for the cosmos.

Article supplied with thanks to Stephen McAlpine

About the Author: Stephen has been reading, writing and reflecting ever since he can remember. A former church pastor, he now trains church and ministry leaders, and in his writing dabbles in a number of fields, notably theology and culture.

Feature image: Canva

Depending on how your social media algorithm is configured – mine is a bewildering mix of conservative theology, Forrest Frank songs, and cats singing K-Pop (thanks to my eldest daughter for that one) – you’re unlikely to have scrolled for long before coming across evidence of what is being termed ‘The Quiet Revival.’ 

Article supplied with thanks to Stephen McAlpine

About the Author: Stephen has been reading, writing and reflecting ever since he can remember. A former church pastor, he now trains church and ministry leaders, and in his writing dabbles in a number of fields, notably theology and culture.

Feature image: Canva

Boys To Men?

The so-called whipping boys for our cultural sins these days are actual boys. We hear and read it all of the time. Boys are failing and men are wrong. So go the headlines. And there is much handwringing by the powers that be as they seek to address this.

Yet what if the solution is hidden in plain sight?  For every forced “consent class” that young men have to attend to in a school, it would seem there is another solution running parallel, but unremarked upon by the culture. So far at least.

Yet the anecdotal evidence is lining up with the stats. Failing boys and wrong men are turning up at our churches in increasing numbers across the West. As Jesus said, he didn’t come for the well, but for the sick. Those are the types that need a doctor.

And everywhere in the West for the past two decades, men – young men in particular – have been told that they are not simply sick, but that they are the disease.

Now it’s true, there’s terrible porn and there’s violence and what not. But there is terrible suicide and deep addictions and a “checking out” lifestyle that has seen young women streak far ahead of young men in a Western culture that is protected from much of the historical harshness that required young men.

Besides all of that, I meet many great young men, both Christian and non-Christian who are bombarded with this “you’re the problem” message almost every day. It’s as if we no longer believe the psychological reality that words spoken over us shape us in ways that we cannot imagine.

And then we put a smartphone in their hands in a way we would not put a rifle in their hands, and they subsequently put that phone to their heads and pull the trigger.

Yet if the Quiet Revival is true, then it would appear some sort of tipping point has been reached. So many articles in every major newspaper about how men were the problem, and about why men had distinct advantages over women was written in the context of middle class, inner city lawyer-land.  And very few solutions that actually work.

And if your mantra as a young man at school is that foundationally you are the problem, yet there is not grace or empowerment given to you other than to get in touch with more feminine qualities (whatever that actually means, given that gentleness etc is a fruit of the Spirit quality not a feminine one), then you might just start behaving according to typecast.

I remember being lectured about male privilege by a well educated young woman who had plenty going for her. I thought about her conversation as I lived my life in working class Perth watching blokes in hi-vis work gear drive middling to old cars to factories and production lines to sweat it out for average wages.  Didn’t look all that privileged to me.

Now of course, both things can be true at the same time. But when it comes to privilege itself, there is a whole lot more going on than mere gender. So it’s intriguing to see that a cohort of young men who have long been told they are not only privileged for being male, but are problematic for, well for being male, has started turning up at church.

The Tide of Men

Just yesterday I had a conversation with a Christian leader in England whose husband pastors a church. And once again I heard the same story I’m hearing all over the West – a significant influx of young men into their church in the past few years from zero Christian background.

This quiet revival thing is a thing.  The stats are linking up with the experiences. The experiences with the stats. And if the various tributaries start to flow into small rivers and then into water systems, this quiet revival may not remain so quiet.

There are many reasons for all of this, of course, not least of all the fact that the Holy Spirit – like the wind – blows where He wills. People are moving from death to life, darkness to light, not because of our programs or our agendas or our ways of structuring our churches, but because the Spirit is moving them.

Of course they need to hear the gospel and repent and believe. And that they are turning up to churches that teach the Bible, point to Jesus and offer a way of living that is in direct contrast to the world, is exciting to see.

I think about some of the tough young men with bad backgrounds who I know who became Christian 20 years ago. Their conversions broke long-term cycles of bad families, bad behaviour and bad outcomes. They now have families who are stable, jobs that are meaningful, and they live to serve others not themselves. It’s grassroots change.

Now of course I believe that top-down change is also important, and we see elite conversations about Christianity too. But the grassroots is equally important. And equally important for young men. It’s no secret that young men have been doing it worse than many other cohorts in recent years.

They’ve been going through major problems, yet the constant narrative is that they are the problem! So in The New York Times yesterday we get these two articles in the opinion pages next to each other:

And this one:

Perhaps those two opinion page writers could get together and compare notes. Figure out where it all started. But whatever the coming conversation in the media and among the secular players in the West in the coming decades, perhaps we are seeing this conversation being bypassed by young men who end up in our churches.

Perhaps we are seeing young men who end up having their lives, their goals, their desires turned around by the gospel which tells them that the problem is far deeper than The New York Times can diagnose, but that the solution is far better than The New York Times can offer.

Article supplied with thanks to Stephen McAlpine

About the Author: Stephen has been reading, writing and reflecting ever since he can remember. A former church pastor, he now trains church and ministry leaders, and in his writing dabbles in a number of fields, notably theology and culture.

Feature image: Photo by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash

Have you seen or heard that warning on a train system, “Mind the Gap”?

It’s usually written on the platform or announced from the station audio at older train stations where the gap between the train and the platform could swallow your leg. Or a toddler. I’ve seen it in London and there are a few here in Sydney.

Mind the gap!  Be careful!  Watch out!

That sort of gap is dangerous physically. We do well to “mind it”.

But what about the spiritual gap? Do we mind that?  And ministry leaders in particular.  The gap between our public assertions and our private actions. Because that gap can eventually swallow you whole.  There’s another type of platform where the gap is dangerous, and that’s the ministry platform.

Those in Reformed circles have been sobered by the Josh Buice scandal on social media, in which the founder of the G3 conference, who at the very time he often called out people online for hiding behind social media, was trolling and abusing other Christian leaders with anonymous accounts. And then denying it over the years until he was found out.

Trolling leaders in his own tradition. Friends he had once shared platforms with, in which the message to ministry people was often “Mind the gap!”

Of course if only he had known it’s okay with God to abuse and mistreat those from other Christian traditions online. God’s completely okay with vitriol and reviling others as long as … oh wait? You are saying God’s not okay with that?

All dark humour aside, there was a certain level of schadenfreude after Buice had shut down all his media accounts, and been stood down from his roles, at the tweeting of screenshots in which he called out anonymous online trolls.

King Saul and The Gap

The tragic tale of King Saul and his downward spiral reaches its nadir in the chapter before his death, 1 Samuel 28. And it’s a story of how Saul did not mind the gap. And how it took him down.

There he is, surrounded by the Philistines, and terrified of what is going to happen. Samuel the prophet is dead, and God no longer speaks to Saul. He is bereft, alone and frantic.

The start of the episode gives us a little hint as to the gap that Saul has not minded in his own life. In fact as it unfolds, we see that Saul’s refusal to mind the small gaps in his life early on in his reign, has led to chasm-sized gaps by the time he is in terminal decline.  Here’s what we read:

Now Samuel was dead, and all Israel had mourned for him and buried him in his own town of Ramah. Saul had expelled the mediums and spiritists from the land. The Philistines assembled and came and set up camp at Shunem, while Saul gathered all Israel and set up camp at Gilboa.  When Saul saw the Philistine army, he was afraid; terror filled his heart… (1 Samuel 28:3-5)

It’s an aside isn’t it? Why do we need to know that Saul had basically kicked out all of the witches? Because of what happens next:

He inquired of the Lord, but the Lord did not answer him by dreams or Urim or prophets.  Saul then said to his attendants, “Find me a woman who is a medium, so I may go and inquire of her.”

“Hey,” thinks Saul, “Why’s it so hard to find a witch around these parts? Oh that’s right – I killed them all!  Silly me!” I wonder if his own men were horrified by his request.

Now this episode raises all sorts of questions about witches, and whether the witch really brought up Samuel, given that Saul could not see the figure of Samuel, but only had Samuel’s words relayed by the witch. But that’s beside the point.  The point is that the gap in the king of Israel’s life had grown to a chasm. And that was going to bring him down. His public assertions “Get rid of the witches!” were thrown to the side when he needed some advice.

But it’s not like this was a one-off. A mere peccadillo. The problem with the gap in Saul’s life, and surely the problem of the gap in our own lives, is that the disobedience towards God that he exhibited right here at the end, was simply the trajectory of what had gone on earlier. The gap had grown. And he wasn’t minding it!

First he implicitly disobeys God by sacrificing before Samuel turns up, even though Samuel had said “wait for me” (1 Samuel 13).  At that point the prophet turns up – talk about timing! – and announces that Saul’s kingdom would not last.  Now you would think that that would be a warning shot across his bows.  But it isn’t enough! Saul ramps things up.

So two chapters later in 1 Samuel 15, Saul explicitly disobeys when told the dispense with every Amalekite and everything they own. He didn’t. He kept some back.  And then makes excuses as to why he did so. And Samuel tells him this time that not only will his kingdom not last (it might wither away in a few generations), it will actually be torn from him!  The buck – and his dynasty – stops with him!

And so we end up at a witch’s house, where in a parody of the Last Supper that would have made a Paris Olympics organising committee proud, Saul, the king of Israel, has a meal prepared for him the day before his death and he goes out into the night – cursed.

Us and The Gap

Sobering.  But a warning for us. Not for no good reason do we read in the New Testament to be careful not to be hardened by sin’s “deceitfulness”

“You know that gap in your life? The gap between your public assertions and your private actions? That doesn’t really matter. That won’t be unbridgeable should you try to leap back to safety. That is manageable for you. You can spin those plates without it all coming crashing down. Others have been caught out doing this – countless others – but you’re smarter than that!”

All delicious lies.  All designed to stop you seeing the growing gap that sin is carving out in your life. Yet time and time again when we see public Christian figures fall, it’s never because of one significant decision that flew in the face of every other decision that they had made. Perhaps publicly. But never privately.

The trouble with Saul – and with us – is that the sin behind the sin is what trips us up. In 1 Samuel 13 it is Saul’s fear – his lack of trust in God – that pushes him to conduct the sacrifice against Samuel’s instructions.  His subjects are melting away in the face of the enemy, and so he decides to take matters into his own hands.

And that fear drives him to keep alive a king who should have been killed. He wants him as a trophy, a subject perhaps. And why kill all those well-fed animals that are in better shape than our lot?  The gap in Saul’s life does not widen because he deeply desires to disobey God. The gap in Saul’s life widens because he does not trust that God will come through for him in the areas of his life that he most worries about.

How about us?  Especially us in leadership in light of the failures that are pretty much tripping over themselves to get onto social media platforms.

How about our difficult marriage? Our struggling ministry? Our poor finances? Our need to be justified in the eyes of others?  These are the areas of life that we worry about, and they are the places that sin’s deceitful comes in, and drives a gap between our public assertions and our private actions.

In all of these we need to mind the gap!  The Bible tells us that there are ways that seem right to us that end in death (Prof 14:12). That’s the wages of sin right there! And that’s Samuel’s message to Saul. You didn’t listen to me when I was alive, why are you bothering me now that I am dead? And oh, you’ll be dead soon too.

No More Gaps!

There’s a lot of darkness in that story. And not much light. Not much at all. But perhaps there is some. There’s another Last Supper that’s coming in which a king has a meal before his death, and who then goes out into the night, not doubting God, but entrusting himself to his Heavenly Father. The next day he is strung up outside a city.

It’s not a meal prepared by a witch, but as 1 Corinthians 11 reminds us, it’s a meal in which Jesus gives thanks to God, and then says “this is the new covenant in my blood” as he offers his disciples the cup.  A new covenant of obedience, because the old covenant was super-frayed and always broken through disobedience.  Jesus then goes out to face the enemy for our sakes, and is strung up outside a city.

But not because of the gap in his life. Because of the gaps in ours.  He could even look at his enemies and ask “Which of you accuses me of sin?” (John 8:45). When it comes to his public assertions and his private actions, Jesus is the ultimate equivalent of that building product “No More Gaps!” Finally a king whose life is completely sealed off from sin, insincerity, hypocrisy, disobedience, fear of man, you name it!

Here’s the Israelite king that Israel has always needed. That we have always needed. A “No More Gaps” kinda king who leads his people into battle, wins the victory for them, facing down the terror of death, and although buried by his mournful followers like King Saul was, is raised to life again, to rule and reign forever.

And he’s the king who, as we come to him, all too aware of the growing gaps in our lives, calls us to approach the throne of his kingly grace in time of need (Hebrews 4:16).

Perhaps that time of need is where you are at right now. If so, don’t let the gap grow so wide that the chasm swallows you whole. Your king has done everything for you to strengthen you to obey and close that gap. Pray for his strength today.

Article supplied with thanks to Stephen McAlpine

About the Author: Stephen has been reading, writing and reflecting ever since he can remember. A former church pastor, he now trains church and ministry leaders, and in his writing dabbles in a number of fields, notably theology and culture.

Feature image: Canva