MINISTER'S LETTER >

March 2010

Dear Friends,

We live under a command.

That’s a very weird idea to most people, particularly if they haven’t experienced life in the armed forces. In our society nowadays being truly alive, being a fully authentic human being, requires complete freedom; ‘freedom’ means being able to do what pleases us without oppressive limitations being imposed upon us. Or so the myths tell us.
Or perhaps we have suffered from overbearing and abusive authority figures that have exerted their will over us by intimidation, coldness or violating force. The whole notion of one who places our lives under a command is marred and we recoil from it.
But when we became Christians we entered the true freedom of God’s sons and daughters, of those who echo the Father’s loving delight to bless his children. So it becomes our echoing, answering delight to please the Father. In Christ, we do and we can. We are freed by Christ’s death and resurrection from captivity to sin’s self-obsession, sin’s self-rule, sin’s self-authentication. We are changed from those who, as in the language of Psalm 2, seek to ‘break apart and throw off God’s chains’, to those who delight to do his will – willing bondservants.
Living under a command when it comes to us through the Son from the all-wise Father whose heart is full of loving-kindness, is nothing but good.
So what is the command? It’s the 11th commandment:
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34&35 NIV)
It’s that 11th commandment which gives such a helpful summary of the passage in Deuteronomy that we were studying recently where Moses teaches about relationships from the 10 commandments. In chapter 24 Moses teaches the people what it will be like to love one another as they have been loved by their redeemer. He’s telling them the kind of thing that Jesus said when he summarised the social commandments as ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ in Matthew 22:39. He’s doing what the writer of Hebrews encouraged in Hebrews 10:24, which we took as a helpful comment on how we can take Moses’ teaching to heart.
“And let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds.”
So what does love do to relationships, according to Deuteronomy 24? It transforms the way the people look out for each other. In the instructions given people are to be treated in a way that protects their livelihoods, respects their dignity, shows them compassion, demonstrates righteousness, enacts justice and encourages personal responsibility. Personal ‘rights’ are set aside in favour of another’s dignity.
As God’s new society now we are to do the same. In Christ, who fulfilled all the law for us, offering to the Father for us all that we (and Israel) should offer to him, we should exemplify precisely the love that Deuteronomy 24 is about.
Gilc should be the place where your dignity is most clearly respected in little ways as well as big ones. Come into Gilc at any time, whoever you are, and you should be treated with kindly respect, courtesy, and understanding. As you walk through the door you should be entering an oasis of righteous, well-mannered thoughtfulness from people who love to be considerate. In Gilc, holding the door open for someone should be a joy. ‘After you.’ ‘Can I help?’ ‘What can I do for you? should trip off our tongues with a natural and easy sincerity that shows in the actions that follow the words. ‘Thank you’ should be one of the most common phrases we use.
The way we set up our ‘systems’ – the formal and informal procedures and protocols that ensure the smooth-running of the family – should be thought through with love. So we shouldn’t wait and thereby make people come and ask us for what they need: remove even the possibility of embarrassment by anticipating their needs and going to them first. We shouldn’t do things in a way that even ‘might’ demean brothers and sisters in the Lord. Carping and picky complaint is forbidden in the Bible (Philippians 2:14&15) so please don’t try and find a way to justify it. Who is above serving teas after the evening service? Why make a genuinely needy brother or sister feel like they’re grovelling when their last option is to ask for help? Does that please the Father? We don’t do it deliberately we just do things in a way that demonstrates our thoughtlessness. Who doesn’t understand how to use a Hoover? Who can leave the dishes to others on the assumption that the dishes are somehow bound to be done by someone? They will be, by someone who sees the need and lays aside their tiredness and with a servant’s heart puts down the coat they were about to put on to go home and rolls up their sleeves and stays an extra 15 minutes. That’s the 11th commandment—broken by one and kept by another. That’s the attitude encoded in Deuteronomy 24 – absent from one heart but flowing from another. That’s Hebrews 10:24 – denied by one Christian’s thoughtlessness, embraced by another’s action.
Here’s the rub. We have terrific examples of folk in the fellowship who, with a godly instinct, do the Old Covenant Deut 24 thing. But not because it’s pressed upon them as an external command. They do it as New Covenant children of the Father, in whom the Spirit is at work producing the likeness of the Son. Are you a Spirit-filled believer? Then it will show in what you do and the wisdom with which you take care to do it. If it’s not showing – and others might be the best judge of this – then you need more of the Spirit.
In Acts 6:3 we are given the qualification for those who will wait on tables when the believers get together every day in the ‘soup kitchen’. ‘Wait on tables’, mind: not ‘herd people into a neat queue as if you are superior to them and get to tell them where to stand in order to receive kindness’. No, it’s waiting on tables so that believers who are hard up are treated with dignity and respect, seated like diners in a restaurant, loved with true hospitality not canteen efficiency. What kind of people will spontaneously do a ‘menial’ but good work in a good way, with lovingly careful anticipation and kind reading of another’s situation? This is what the Apostles were looking for: those ‘who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them.’ God’s new covenant people have hearts of flesh not stone, the Spirit of God prompting them on the inside not the law discomforting them from the outside.
No wonder that when Paul instructs the Philippians in what it means to love one another, much as Moses was doing in Deuteronomy, he writes
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant,” (Philippians 2:3-7)
The true Son laid aside more than we will ever have so that we might receive more than we could ever deserve.

Your Minister and Friend

Dominic Smart