Core magazine

How can you swim counter-culturally when the tide is flowing so strongly against you? Only by doing the sort of intensive daily training that a cross-channel swimmer does. Yes, it’s tough but who ever promised it would be easy? It’s obvious, but you need to practise being counter-cultural to be able to do it consistently.

Just knowing the ‘good that I should do’ is not good enough. We all know the worrying facts about our world - whether it’s the ever-growing divide between rich and poor, or the escalating racial and religious tensions. We all know the hurt and pain that is all around us in our communities. The gap seems to exist between knowing this and doing anything about it. Even Paul said, ‘I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.’ (Romans 7:18)

As a teenager, the quantum leaps that I made in learning French did not happen behind a desk in a classroom, but on family holidays in the campsites and villages of Brittany. The phrases I learnt and used regularly there are the ones that I can still recall now. It’s not that my time in the classroom was wasted. It formed a vital foundation of understanding. But without putting this concept into practice where it was subject to scrutiny, it remained a blunt tool. Real learning that lasts happens through experience. Many types of experiential learning are fast becoming acknowledged methods in various professional disciplines. Hang on. It feels as if I’ve heard all this before somewhere. Oh yeah

“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? I will show you what he is like who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice. He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When the flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built. But the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete”
(Luke 6:46-49).

You may think you cannot change the world but you do have some control over you. People ask me why the world is in the state it is and I usually reply like this. How much control of my life does God have? 40%, 50% perhaps? the truth is, as much as I let him and therein lie all the mixed motivations, selfish moments, and ensuing heartbreak. Just multiply that up by six billion and you actually get quite an accurate picture of the world all its hurts, conflicts and injustices. Why do we believe that, when you look at the big picture, everyone else will be different to us?

Through our devotional lives, we seek to get to know Jesus better day by day. For as long as this ‘getting to know’ is confined to academic study, historical recall or private prayer, we are only seeing certain aspects of who he is. Anyone who works in the deprived parts of this world will tell you that they meet Jesus there. They see him in the faces and hands of the poor and the oppressed. They see him healing the sick, releasing the oppressed, bringing sight to the blind and proclaiming good news to the poor. We meet him in the doing. I remember being asked by my dad to help him wash his car on a Saturday afternoon. I remember feeling so proud. It was only later I realised why he did it. God doesn’t ask us to help because he needs our help. He asks us to help him so we can be where he is. We get to know when we’re involved with him doing what he is doing.

John said that Jesus came ‘full of grace and truth.’ Jesus said ‘I am the truth.’ Learning the truth is not like learning an objective set of facts. We have shrunk it to be something smaller than the living, breathing thing that it is; truth is fleshed out in a person. To meet this truth, you have to meet it in the flesh. Without ‘fleshing out’ this incarnate truth in our communities, we aren’t really ‘knowing it’ either. As Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmat put it, ‘In this respect, seeing (experiencing, touching and feeling) is indeed believing.’

Andy Flannagan is a songwriter, author and speaker. He now lives in London, plays a lot of cricket and tries to avoid watching ‘the west wing’ in every waking moment. - www.andyflan.com

Andy’s book God360 is activating and changing the devotional lives of many people. You’ll find yourself praying with Moses in Exodus 17 from the top of your local multi-storey car park, or washing your neighbour’s car as some 21st century foot-washing!