The Accreditation Helps Project

14. What is the Church?

As everyone already knows, the thing that really makes the Church the Church is not the building. That doesn’t mean that the building is always extraneous. Church buildings are powerful cultural symbols declaring the presence of the kingdom of God in our communities: they offer outsiders, and insiders, a clear, physical location where the gospel can be found and a place to turn to in a time of crisis or in beginning the search for God. Church buildings help make the gospel—in the hands of church people: us Christians—easier to find. Moreover, church buildings help to shape our histories as families, as the place where the significant stages of our lives have been marked. The births, weddings, and deaths of us and our loved ones are tied together into one story of God at work among us in part because those events—and many others—are celebrated in this place and as a part of the community that hangs out together here. Finally, church buildings, at their best, provide space for the non-utilitarian part of our existence. A church building is different than a bank or a home in that it doesn’t have to be utilized to the maximum to be really effective. In fact, if we find that our church buildings are operating in a way that is purely functional, even very effectively so, that probably means they are falling short of all that they could be and are failing to be all that they ought to be for us. (The same could probably be said of our pastors too.) A church building is supposed to be the kind of place where we can escape from the rest of our life in modern society, a life where we are always pushed to get the most return on the least investment. On the contrary, a church building should be a place that has different kinds of goals: worship, restoration, prayer, fellowship, relax, eternity. Especially in the city, almost all of life has been secularized; our church buildings are one of the few remaining places we have that are genuinely sacred, devoted to time spent with God and with one another in a way that doesn’t have to be maximized to be ‘worth it’.

Church buildings are fantastic, they are important, but they are not the Church.

So, what is the Church? The Church is not the church building; it’s the people. The Church is the body of Christ, and Christ himself is the head.

Of course the Bible uses many word pictures to talk about the Church, but the most common is this one, that we are in a real way the physical presence of Christ in the world, operating together as one body. His body. Paul says it most clearly: “You are the body of Christ,” he writes to the Corinthians, “and each one of you is part of it.” (1Co 12:27) The Church does not merely originate with Christ, in a significant way the Church itself is the tangible expression of Jesus Christ. And so, because we are his body, the best way for us to understand who, corporately, we are to be and how we are to engage the world around us is to look at who Jesus Christ was and how he engaged society when he himself was present among us in the body. The Church’s chief task is to be for the world in this day and age what the physical Christ was to it back then because, today, we are that body.

The body of Christ, then, is one thing, not many things. It is not even merely the compilation of many things all grouped together. We, like Jesus, are not the result of the assembly of a bunch of various parts. Jesus was conceived as a single human in the womb of his mother Mary and was born and grew and died as the inhabitant of one body. Likewise, the Church, fundamentally, is one thing. This is the primary reason why it is inadequate to think of the Church simply as the collection of all the Christians either in one local place or even throughout all of history. The Church’s essence is not a heap of individuals; the Church is the supernaturally constituted body of Christ in the world. Christ makes the Church exist. We individual Christians become members of the body as we are made members of Christ by God’s power, but we ourselves never make the body the body by gathering together in one place. The Church’s reality is grounded not upon you and me, but upon Christ himself, who is our head. The Church, the body, is one.

And of course right now it is shattered into pieces in all kinds of ways, and its broken-apart-ness seems impossible for us to overcome. That’s one of the reasons why every pastor should read Oscar Cullmann’s book A Message to Catholics and Protestants, not because it is a perfect book or that Cullmann’s proposal is the best of which we could possibly conceive. Not at all. Rather, Cullmann is remarkable because he honestly faces the divisions of the Church and admits that he thinks it is impossible to overcome them, but then he also confesses that these divisions are wrong, that they go against the grain of the New Testament and God’s plan for the Church, and then decides that he is going to be the kind of pastor who always works for the unity of the body of Christ, even in the face of the impossible task. We are limited, we cannot simply hold hands and unite all the churches together. That would be a disaster. We especially cannot unite together by abandoning our commitment to the truth of the gospel in the search for common ground, as some have tried in the past. But we can be men and women who recognize that Christ has only one body, that at the end of the age there will be only one bride of God the Son, and spend our lives working to make that future hope a reality in the present wherever God gives us the opportunity. The body of Christ is one body, not many.

As the one body, the Church is the primary plan by which God makes himself present to the world. Just as Jesus in his earthly life was called Immanuel, ‘God with us’, so too the Church is God with us: God himself, reaching out in love to the world in a way that can be touched and felt and experienced. Whenever the Church fails to make the presence of God real in the society around it, it begins to fail to truly be the Church. Like Christ, a central part of the purpose of having a body is to bring the presence of God into the world—into the midst of the lost—in a tangible way. The Church is the body of Christ.

And it is not always beautiful. The Bible says that neither was Jesus, although of course in his case we mean a lack of physical attractiveness, not the ugliness of sin that we can often see in the Church. But there is a parallel. When he became incarnate, Christ never gave up his identity as the eternal Son of God, and yet his whole earthly life was limited to one location, one time, and all the limitations—the strengths and weaknesses—that come with having a human body. It is the same with his body the Church. Like the incarnate Christ, the identity of the Church is universal—stretching across places and times—but its expression is particular. The local church is no less really the Church, really the full body of Christ, than the local Jesus Christ in Palestine is really the full Son of God, in spite of all his particularities. Being Christ’s body means being both universal and local, expansive and particular. This has meaning for me and my family too. In one sense, our membership is membership in Christ, in his universal body. But in another sense, just like the incarnate Jesus, there is no other body of Christ for us than the particular expression of the local Church. Besides all the pragmatic reasons—especially decision making, being committed to one another, and submitting to the direction and discipline of our leaders—we choose to be members of the local church because in doing so we declare our membership in the body of Christ, cosmically considered. I don’t have a universal family, I have a particular one: I need a particular church. That’s the place where my identity with the universal Christ finds local expression. I know that in some places church membership has been so cheapened that it seems to have almost no content; in this case, what others do doesn’t dissuade me. I am a local church member because the local church really is the body of Christ.

Further, as members together of one body, in a very real way we make each other who we are as the Church. No one part of the body is autonomous. Rather, each one contributes to making all of the parts together actually be a body, constituted with Christ as our head and our life. Sharing life together is a necessary part of being the Church because the Church was specially brought into being by Christ and bears the marks of his own Trinitarian life and craftsmanship. (Mt 16:18) The substance of the Church is a reflection of the substance of the Son, who its source and head. Remember: the essence of God the Son is not something that he possesses outright on his own; his substance—his being, or ousia—is the relationship of love that he shares with the Father and the Spirit. Three persons, one substance. This life of God is reflected in the Church. Each of us is a part, but none of us, or even some group of us, possess the essence of the Church on our own: the substance of the Church is our relationship together, and that of all of us together with Christ, our head. Not just the substance of the Church as a whole, but my substance as a church member: we make each other who we are. Many members, one body. The Church has substance not because we each individually bring a little bit and, pooled together, we have enough for Church. The Church is real because we mutually offer ourselves to one another in the presence of God.

There are two implications of this. First, the size of our local churches is not important, but the mutual love of the members is. The particular expression of the universal body of Christ can be big or small; what makes it the real Church is the way that its members offer themselves to one another in love, and together offer themselves to Christ. Being the Church is not achieved by accumulation, but by intensity of mutual love. Second, we should never let ourselves forget about members of our body who aren’t often present, because they are a part of what defines us together as the body. There are some people who—on account of work schedule, sickness, travel, missions, or a lot of other reasons—we don’t get to see very often in our services. Don’t forget them. I think that this is part of the meaning of corporate prayer, the very personal activity of declaring before God that this or that person is part of what makes us the Church, that we are not complete without them, and asking God’s favor and presence for them in their sickness or work or mission or whatever, just as we ask for God’s favor and presence on the rest of us gathered all together. Dear Lord God, that one, that friend, is a part of us, a part of me, a part of the same body, please care for them too this day, I am not the same without them.

The Church is the body of Christ, and so it looks like Christ.

It is also, of course, like Christ in the way that it acts. It constantly gives glory to God the Father, through obedience—holiness—and through worship. It socializes and enjoys God’s good creation, including the company of tax collectors and sinners. It is ready to suffer. It cares about, and works to meet, the physical needs of the people around it, and it especially cares about the spiritual needs of the lost. (Here we see how both missions and social action are not only required of the Church, but flow from the same source, care for others in Christ’s name.) The Church acts in the way that Christ acts by proclaiming as clearly as it can the good news of the forgiveness of sins, power over evil and death in the world (and in my life), and the arrival of God’s glorious kingdom—it preaches, teaches, evangelizes, and disciples. It is a shepherd both to the flock that God gives it and to the lost sheep that it extends itself to seek out and rescue. It stands ready to receive the insults of the world, but prays for God’s intervention to forgive the sinner and to change the world through its agency. The Church works out the plan of God for the world in a tangible way. The Church is the body of Christ.

By way of conclusion, a note to pastors. The Church is the body of Christ, but it is also his bride. And he’s in love. Part of what it means to be the pastor is to be a part of the Church’s preparations for the final glorious wedding: encouraging the Church in holiness, in evangelism, in understanding, and in readiness for the return of Christ the bridegroom. But also, like a best friend at the wedding, as church leaders we need to learn to lovethe bride just like Christ does, even if she sometimes makes us crazy and we have no idea why he chose her.

I probably read 2 Corinthians 11:28 dozens of times before I ever really appreciated what it was actually about. (I even memorized it Bible quizzing!) Paul, after listing all his troubles—like being beaten with rods, imprisoned, and shipwrecked—writes that “besides all this, I have the daily burden of my concern for all the churches.” How is that possible? How is ‘concern for the churches’ more serious than jail or starvation? For me, I never understood this verse until I became assistant pastor at a broken church and God taught me how to love the church like he loves it, the kind of love that rips you apart inside to think about all the grief it faces and how deeply you just want to see it succeed and flourish in the joy of life with God. God’s heart breaks when he sees hurting churches—and when he sees hurting people—and so he gives his pastors, his shepherds, the burden of sharing that love for his people, the kind of love Christ has for his bride. If you want to be a great pastor, one of the things you can do is memorize 2 Corinthians 11:28 and, when you pray for your church, pray that God will give you that kind of love, along with the strength to stand up under the weight of it. If we learn to love the Church like that, even though we will continue to make mistakes, I genuinely believe we will never go far wrong in helping to guard and prepare it for the day when Christ comes again and claims his bride, claims us, brimming himself with that great love.

 

If I was preparing for accreditation I would . . .

• Memorize 1 Corinthians 12:27 along with 2 Corinthians 11:28 and Matthew 16:18

• Read A Message to Catholics and Protestants by Oscar Cullmann, at least pages 11-19, and 26-36

• Be aware that sometimes in theological writing the word ‘Church’ is spelled with an upper-case ‘C’ to talk about the Church at all times and in all places, and is spelled with a lower-case ‘c’ to talk about the local church or about just one segment of the church.

13. What does it mean to be sanctified?

To really understand sanctification we need to gather together three related ideas: that sanctification is something accomplished by Christ, that it is something brought into effect by the Holy Spirit, and that it is something that can be seen in the way I live my life from day to day.

First, understanding sanctification means understanding where it comes from. Sanctification is a possibility for us only because Christ’s great victory over Sin is already accomplished; our holiness is grounded in his work on the cross. As Jesus said, “I give myself as a holy sacrifice for them so that they can be made holy.” (Jn 17:19) At Calvary, Jesus not only paid the penalty for our sins, but in fact defeated Sin itself. Romans 6:10 says that “when he died, he died once to break the power of sin.” That’s what we really needed. We know, don’t we, that we cannot break the power of sin in our own lives. We cannot stop doing life ‘on our own’, even if we recognize that doing it on our own always ends up in disaster one way or another. We cannot, but Christ can. He can step in and set us free from Sin in our own lives because for him, Sin is already a defeated enemy. For the Christian, being sanctified means sharing in this victory that Christ has already won, it means that the power of Sin is being broken in my life not by me, but by Jesus Christ. The atonement is the story of Christ’s victory over Sin in the world; sanctification is the story of Christ’s victory over Sin in me. He is able to accomplish it in me because the ultimate victory—his cosmic defeat of Sin, death and the Devil—has already been won by means of the cross. This is why Romans says that “when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin.” (6:7) Sanctification is something that is for us—it’s a changed life—but it something for us only inasmuch as it is something because of him. In the Alliance, we talk about this idea by saying that ‘sanctification is in the atonement’. It’s a way of expressing our belief that you simply cannot understand what sanctification is unless you see it in the light of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The possibility of our sanctification comes from the certainty of the atonement; the way I live my life today can look different because of that victory that Jesus won on the cross back then.

Second, sanctification is something that the Holy Spirit does inside of me. “This is the secret,” writes Paul, “Christ lives in you.” (Col 1:27) Being sanctified means that the Holy Spirit brings the victory of Christ into our lives by personally coming in and taking up residence within us. 1 Corinthians 3:16 presents it as the plainest truth of the Christian life: “Don't you realize that all of you together are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God lives in you?” Of course there is never a time when the believer is without the Spirit, but yet sanctification describes a life filled with the Holy Spirit in a way that is richer and fuller. This is what Jesus was teaching his disciples about the Holy Spirit in John 14:17: “you know him, because he lives with you now and later will be in you.” For the disciples, just like for us, there are two kinds of knowing the presence of the Spirit, with and in. The Holy Spirit is with every Christian from the moment of conversion, but there is a deeper kind of God’s presence in our lives that happens when we give ourselves over completely to him (the older word for this is ‘consecration’) and God responds by filling us with his Spirit. Being sanctified means, somehow, having God in us through the Holy Spirit. As we experience it, this coming in—this filling or baptizing which actually brings the presence of Christ and his victory over Sin into our lives—is the most important thing the Holy Spirit does for us. Sanctification is therefore not primarily a change in what I do, but a change in who I am, which then impacts how I live. I become a temple. It is not something I do–or try harder at—it is not even that God corrects or repairs some aspect of me, the broken bit. Sanctification is a supernatural recreating of me anew as the dwelling place of God. What does it mean to be sanctified? “This is the secret: Christ lives in you.”

Finally, although sanctification is something that happens inside of me, it’s a change that can be seen in the way I live. It’s a little like a healthy marriage. Even though you cannot see the marriage, you see the way that the love between husband and wife spills over and effects every other part of life. And so no one assesses the strength of a marriage by asking what the wedding ceremony was like; we look at the way that the marriage partners give themselves in love one for another right now. You can’t get to a marriage without a wedding, but at the same time, once you get there, the way that you live together as a married couple will continue to take on more and more significance than the day when it all started. So too the sanctified life. It is genuinely something that has happened, and that history is important, but sanctification is so much the more something that is happening. The sanctified living—the Christ life—is in the long run far more important than the sanctification event itself. And just like married life, even though you cannot see the sanctification, you can often see how this new way of being reaches into all the other corners of our day to day life—and changes how we act there—even when you cannot exactly explain how. Sanctification is something that happens inside of me—it’s a change in who I am—but the difference can be seen in the way that I live.

Holy Living and Effective Service

This last aspect of sanctification, this part that you can often see—maybe not always in others, but for sure in yourself—has two parts: holy living and effective service. ‘Holy living’ is perhaps both the most ‘common sense’ aspect of the Christian doctrine of sanctification as well as the biggest stumbling block to understanding it. Being sanctified genuinely means living differently, because God has implanted in me the desire to do right—to “live a life filled with love” (Eph 5:2)—and provided me with the power to actually choose to do it. It doesn’t however mean that I become immune to making mistakes or falling short. Rather, sanctification means that I am becoming the perfect specimen of right where I am at and that I am learning to obediently do just what God is asking of me right now. (Ps 19:12-13) Because Christ lives in me through the Holy Spirit, it has become possible for me to live a holy life. I cannot myself become God; and, thankfully, God doesn’t hold me to that standard. What I can do, moment by moment, is overcome temptations that I know are wrong—it is God who gives me the ability to do that—and choose to live my life God’s way. (1Co 10:13) Because God himself lives within me, every part of me is being changed into the likeness of the Son, and that’s a change you can see. (1Th 5:23) The first practical outworking of the sanctified life is holiness.

Sanctification also means gaining the ability to truly serve God effectively. It’s a little astonishing, but at the beginning of the book of Acts, the resurrected Jesus tells his disciples not to be involved in any ministry because they are not ready for it. Instead, they are to stay put and wait until they, “receive power when the Holy Spirit comes.” (1:4, 8) You see, the heart of the Christian message is not information about God, but actually Christ himself through the Holy Spirit, who comes with the power to set people free and restore broken lives. Genuinely Christian ministry—preaching, evangelism, caring for your neighbour, leading Sunday School, providing for needs, serving, modeling Jesus for your family, all these kinds of things—is not about method or skill. Fundamentally, ministry is not even about passing along the right information about God. It’s about sharing Christ himself, who is only rightly communicated if I allow him to express himself in me. Ministry is not a technique, it is the expression in words or actions of the reality of the Christ life in you and in me, of something that has happened and is happening in your and my own life. The ability to serve God can’t be learned by practice or by taking a course. Effective service like this is only ever the result of a life supernaturally changed from the inside. When Christ moves in through the Holy Spirit, life looks different. That’s when real ministry happens.

What does it mean to be sanctified?

So what does it mean to be sanctified? I think it means something like becoming ‘best friends’ with God. What I mean is this. When I look at the friendships in my life, it isn’t hard to see that there are some people in my life that are friends—good friends—and some that are truly best friends, friends no matter what. For me, sanctification means having that kind of deep, open, unconditional friendship with God. Doesn’t that seem like what Moses experienced, when “inside the Tent of Meeting, the LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend”? (Ex 33:11) Or consider Abraham, who James says “was even called a friend of God.” (2:23; cf. Isa 41:8) Becoming a Christian means becoming friends with God—genuinely friends—but sanctification involves that something more which transforms an ordinary friendship into a ‘best-friendship’. When I think of my best friends, with a couple I can pin down pretty precisely when our ordinary friendship took that big step forward, but with a couple others, it just seems to have happened and I can’t exactly say when. But ultimately, how the ‘best-friendship’ began is of a much smaller importance than how it continues. I think that describes the pretty widely varying experience of sanctification of Christians I know. Some can point to a specific moment when God moved in, and some cannot, or maybe only to a particular season in life. I fear that if we only ask about the beginnings of the sanctified life, we are asking the wrong question. Jesus never says you can tell a tree by asking about when it was planted, he says “you can identify a tree by its fruit.” (Mt 7:20)

The concept of ‘best-friendship with God’ further helps me to hold the pieces of the doctrine of sanctification together better. If sanctification is a best-friendship, it makes it a lot less cumbersome to understand how sanctification is both a crisis (something that happens all at once) and a process (something that happens a little at a time). That feels to me just how a best-friendship comes to be: if my best-friendships are deeper today, that doesn’t mean they were worse before. I was best-friends, I still am, but the best-friendship itself has grown (or even surged!) in a way that doesn’t take anything away from the way it was in the past. Moreover, being best friends with God gives me great security. With a best friend, you know you are always loved, always welcome, even if you have botched it. You can work things out with a best friend, even when you have somehow done them wrong. The assurance of our salvation will always remain fragile if it is not grounded in a rich experience of sanctification, of being best friends with God. (Jn 10:27-28; Rom 8:38-39)

When I was at seminary I read a little book called The Life of Moses by Gregory of Nyssa and it significantly impacted my perspective on the deeper life. Gregory wrote that:

This is true perfection: not to avoid a wicked life because like slaves we servilely fear punishment, nor to do good because we hope for rewards, as if cashing in on the virtuous life by some business-like and contractual arrangement. On the contrary, disregarding all those things for which we hope and which have been reserved by promise, we regard falling from God's friendship as the only thing dreadful and we consider becoming God's friend the only thing worthy of honor and desire. (137)

Where does our holiness come from? Why are we obedient? Fear? Hope of reward? No; the roots of true holiness run deeper than that. John says that “those who obey God's word truly show how completely they love him.” (1J 2:5) The root of obedience is the love of a friend. We are holy because we are like him, in the way that a friend is like friend. We follow him—we live our lives God’s way—because we love him as a friend. Our holiness is not itself our friendship with God, but it is one of the real results of that friendship. We obey, and we cut the things that hurt him out of our lives, because our friendship with him is more important than our freedom to do it on our own. Perfection in life doesn’t mean never getting it wrong, it means living our lives as best friends with God. That’s what I think it means to be sanctified.

 

If I was preparing for accreditation I would . . .

• Memorize I Thessalonians 5:23, Colossians 1:27, and Acts 1:8

• Read the first ten, and especially the last five, pages of Gregory of Nyssa’s excellent and unique book, The Life of Moses

• Be ready to talk about what sanctification looks like in my life

• Download and listen to “Break Every Chain” by Jesus Culture

11. How is physical healing related to the person and work of Jesus?

When we try to understand and explain the place of physical healing in the church today—especially as pastors—we need to be careful to remember that we are no longer living in the 1890's. In the 1890's the Alliance faced questions about the limits of divine healing, like whether or not Christians should take medicine or go to the doctor when they are sick, or whether or not to vaccinate their children. But no one is asking those kinds of questions today. Not because the healing power of God has changed, or his availability to heal in the name of Jesus Christ, but because just about everything else has, and that makes talking about healing a little complex for us. In particular, it means we have to learn to be flexible enough to offer answers to the questions that people really have, not the ones they used to have, even if that makes us feel a little distant from our predecessors and the kind of language they used to formulate our understanding of healing.

So. Is divine healing still a real possibility for me? It is. It genuinely is. But that’s the question people in our churches are really asking these days, if we are honest enough to state it so bluntly. In that context, how can we best understand healing in a way that makes sense to the modern Christian?

You see, in spite of our changing world, and especially the incredible advance of medical science in the last century or so, God still heals. There are three important reasons why we should still teach—and prayerfully expect—divine healing as a normal part of the Christian life: because God cares about our bodies, because Jesus has defeated death on the cross, and because the Bible teaches healing in a way that is comprehensible even to a modern person.

God cares about our bodies

The first reason why healing is a possibility for the church today is that God’s attitude towards our bodies remains unchanged. For God, our bodies are not the part of us he tolerates for the time being so long as they don’t get in the way of the bit is really interested in: the soul. God didn’t create us as souls, he created us as humans, as beings who have souls and bodies, and he cares just as much about the physical me as he does about the spiritual me.

Think back to the garden of Eden. Adam and Eve sinned and God was about to banish them from the garden forever. But before he did so, “the LORD God made clothing from animal skins for Adam and his wife.” (Ge 3:21) Why would he do that? Why make clothes? He did it because he knew that fig leaves wouldn’t cut it in the face of cold and heat and work and danger and everything else they were about to encounter. He did it to take care of their bodies. Remember: the first sign that God hasn’t given up on us and still has a plan to save us isn’t a sacrificial system or a covenant, it’s clothes. Right from the start, God was ready to show that he cared about our bodies.

Or think back to the ministry of Jesus and the apostles. On the one hand, the message of the kingdom is surely a ‘heart’ ministry. The gospel is a call to repent and believe. But on the other hand it is just as equally a ‘body’ ministry. The two go together. What are the marks of the kingdom? In Jesus words: “the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is being preached to the poor.” (Lk 7:22) Healing and preaching; the restoration of our bodies and our souls. The same Jesus Christ who took up and inhabited our real human flesh—and redeemed it at the cross—healed and fed and paid attention to physical people his whole ministry long. It was a part of the declaration of his coming kingdom: God still cares about your body.

And think forward to the resurrection. God’s plan isn’t for us to stop having bodies altogether, but to receive bodies that have been transformed and perfected. At the end of the age God will transform us into people who possess the kind of humanity that we see in Jesus himself after his resurrection: powerful and perfected to be sure, but recognizable people who walk, and eat, and touch, and talk. As Paul says, “we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies.” (2Co 5:3) To God, the body is not something extra that eventually gets done away with, but an important and permanent part of who we are. God’s plan for us is a plan that includes us having bodies. Forever.

Sickness, you see, is not a problem with how God has made our bodies, or a reflection of the value he places on them. Sickness is not a body problem, it’s a Sin problem.

Sickness is a part of this world because death is; it’s the foretaste of death that we battle as long as we are alive. And death itself, of course, is a part of our world because it is the partner and consequence of Sin. Sin, sickness, death: all of it together is the work of the devil, even on the days when he convinces us that it is just a part of the natural order of things. It is not. We suffer from sickness and brace ourselves for death because the devil has from the first convinced us to give ourselves over to living our lives our own way instead of God’s way. We are trapped in our sicknesses because we are trapped in our sins. Sickness is usually not the consequence of some specific sin, although it sometimes is, but the consequence of living in a world that is governed by Sin—by ‘not God’s plan’—as a guiding principle. We, collectively, are sick because we, collectively, are sinners. The experience of sickness is physical or psychological, but the foundation of sickness is Sin itself.

It wasn’t God’s plan for us to get sick and then to die; God’s plan was life. And so, his decision to rescue us from the dominion of Sin includes our bodies just as much as our souls. Matthew, quoting Isaiah, describes Jesus as the one who “took our sicknesses and removed our diseases.” (Mt 8:17) Of course, just like the other parts of his plan, we have to wait until the end of the age to see its full completion—the complete restoration of all our bodies will not occur until Jesus comes again—but we still get to see glimpses of that plan breaking in even now. That’s what healing is, it’s God’s impatience at waiting to give us all the benefits of living in his glorious kingdom. And so he reveals a bit here, and a bit there. Sometimes seemingly all in a bunch and sometimes more spread out. God heals us because he cares about our bodies; one day he will make them perfect.

God cares: it’s why he has commanded every Christian to be involved in taking care of the physical needs of the weak and the poor. God knows that their physical sorrow is real sorrow, and has given the Church to the poor so that he can make their suffering less. The Church’s mission is to act in the world like Christ acted—to really be the body of Christ—and that means consistent ministry to the physical needs of our neighbors. God cares about the problem of sickness just as much as we do. Healing is a real possibility for the church today because God cares about our bodies.

Jesus has defeated death

One of the great gifts that God has given humankind is medicine. Not only do our bodies have an incredible resiliency to heal themselves and recover from sickness and injury (like in the story of Epaphroditus in Philippians 2), but God has scattered throughout his creation all kinds of plants and herbs and minerals that can be refined and employed to alleviate pain and overcome the impact of sickness in society. Yet as marvelous as medicine is, we all know, don’t we, that its effects are ultimately temporary. We can be made well by antibiotics or surgical transplants, but we fall ill again, and all of us eventually die. This doesn’t mean that healthcare is bad or wrong; quite the opposite. It is God’s plan that we would use medicine—meaning both the skillful knowledge of doctors and the drugs that we develop from the world around us—to fight back against sickness, he just never intended, say, penicillin to be the limit of his ability to deliver victory over sickness and death to us. Medical care is good, truly good, and comes to us direct from the hand of God—it is he made us to be creative and attentive, who gave us a desire to investigate and solve the problems that face us, and who surrounded us with a world full of medicinal resources to explore—but it is not enough.

Fundamentally, sickness is a supernatural problem, and so it needs more of a solution than natural medicine can ever give. It needs a supernatural solution. As A. B. Simpson said, because “sickness has come into the world through sin . . . it must be got out of the world through God's great remedy for sin, the cross of Jesus Christ.” (CMA Weekly, Aug 1890, 122) And that is what has happened.

Healing is a possibility for the Church today because Jesus has defeated Sin and death on the cross. Jesus is God’s supernatural solution to the problem of sickness.

This doesn’t of course mean that everybody gets healed, or that sickness is never a problem for a Christian person living in faith. That doesn’t match either our own experience or the testimony of Scripture. What it does mean is that God has the power to heal right now, because the source of sickness—Sin and death—has already been crushed by Jesus Christ. This is what we mean in the Alliance when we say that ‘healing is in the atonement’. Power for healing in the Church today originates not from our own faith or from using just the right words when we pray; it comes to us from the cross and the empty tomb of Jesus Christ because that is the place where sickness and death met their ruin.

Although the victory of Christ is already complete, we don’t yet see its full effect, and we won’t until Jesus comes again as king. When that happens, Sin and death will be wiped out for ever: Paul says that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (1Co 15:26) Because God has willing to wait for you and me, and the others who will come and be a part, the full expression of his kingdom has not yet arrived, even though the decisive battle has already taken place. Sin is still in the world, and because of Sin, death. But, at the same time, the resurrection has already begun: Christ has been raised. And us Christians? We live sort of caught in between, already in the kingdom, but not yet seeing its final manifestation. The power to perfectly glorify our bodies already rests in Jesus’ hands, but he waits to express that power so that his whole family can be brought safely home first.

When healing happens in our Churches—and it does still happen—it happens because Jesus has already stripped death of its authority over us. Healing is like a foreshadowing of the coming kingdom. Then, when Christ’s kingdom finally arrives in full, our bodies will be made perfect. In the mean time, because Christ himself has already risen from the grave as the victor over death, he is able and available to reach into our lives and give us a partial taste of the life that we will all experience together in heaven. We continue to teach healing as one of the normal things that happen in the Church today because we believe that Christ the Victor lives among us.

The Bible’s teaching on healing is comprehensible

The Bible—and Church history—is full of all sorts of marvelous stories about God’s power to heal. Like when Peter healed Aeneas, “who had been paralyzed and bedridden for eight years. Peter said to him, ‘Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you! Get up, and roll up your sleeping mat!’ And he was healed instantly.” (Ac 9:33-4) And God still heals this way, in an instant.

Our experience, however, often feels much more mundane. We have prayed a lot of times, but met few people with a story like Aeneas. Which is why we do ourselves a disservice if the ‘Aeneas stories’ are the only ones we ever tell in the Church, because instantaneous healing is not the only way that God responds to sickness and to prayer for healing in the Bible. Nor is it the only way that our fathers and mothers in the Alliance experienced it: George Pardington’s incredible story is, for example, a testimony to God’s gradual healing. We don’t have to pretend that our experience is something that it is not in order to talk about the idea that God is still able to heal. We need to believe that God can still do the miraculous, but we don’t have to be intellectually dishonest with ourselves. Divine healing can still be taught to modern people because the story of healing in the Bible is actually not so far distant from our own modern experience.

Sometimes, instead of healing us instantaneously, God promises us healing, but the healing itself comes more slowly. This was the experience of Hezekiah. Fearing for his life in the face of sickness, he cried and prayed God sent him a message through Isaiah saying, “I will heal you . . . three days from now.” (2Ki 20:5) Hezekiah was healed, but he was not healed in an instant. Sometimes God works in our bodies this way. He gives us a peace that we will recover, even if it takes some time.

Sometimes God tells us ‘no’ when we ask for healing, but gives us his peace. In 2 Corinthians God tells Paul that although he has prayed, God will not heal him, and instead gives him the promise: “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” (2Co 12:9) This matches the experience of many Christians today too. God has said that he will not heal, but offers the comfort of his grace to strengthen the believer who has sought him for healing.

Sometimes God tells us nothing, responding to our prayers for healing with silence, like he did when David prayed for the healing of his son. Reflecting back, David talks about how he didn’t know what God was going to do. He says, “I fasted and wept while the child was alive, for I said, ‘Perhaps the LORD will be gracious to me and let the child live.’” (2Sa 12:22) The child died. There are times when we pray for healing for ourselves or others and God answers with silence.

Sometimes God answers us, but his answer is not what we want to hear. This happened to Ahaziah, king of Israel, after he was badly injured in an accident at home. God sent him a message through Elijah the prophet saying, “you will never leave the bed you are lying on; you will surely die.” (2K 1:16)

And sometimes, don’t miss this one, God responds to us by telling us to take the right kind of medicine to deal with our problem. God’s message to Timothy through Paul on account of the fact that he was “sick so often,” was not to pray more, or fast, but to realize that God had already provided for his healing by a natural means: “Don't drink only water. You ought to drink a little wine for the sake of your stomach.” (1Ti 5:23) For Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, going through a normal medical treatment wasn’t a mark of lack of faith, it was the mark of prudent intelligence. Remember, all the ‘natural’ tools for healthy living that we find around us—diet, exercise, water, medicine, driving safely, taking a day off once a week so that stress doesn’t build up—are ultimately ‘supernatural’. It is God himself who has filled this world with all these things that we can use to help our bodies flourish. Having faith means choosing a healthy lifestyle; being a Christian means taking care of your body.

At times, I feel that if I want to be a person who believes in divine healing I have to believe in it in only the first kind of way, the instantaneous way, but that is not correct. All of these are ways that God has responded in the past when people have prayed to him and asked for healing, and they represent some of the ways that he still responds. So keep asking! Keep believing! Always pray, and never give up. But as a pastor, or a friend, be sensitive too. Healing doesn’t always happen in an instant, and even if it never does, that doesn’t mean that God is not at work, or that he never heals. Don’t give up on your belief in God’s ability to restore our broken bodies, but don’t compartmentalize it either. Divine healing is still comprehensible, even in the light of our own very modern—and, often, very mundane feeling—experience. God is still available to answer when we seek him for divine healing, just not always in the way we expect it.

God still heals

So, if God always can, why does he not simply always heal? The most honest answer we can probably give is ‘I don’t know’. Maybe lack of faith, maybe. Maybe lack of asking. Certainly never the lack of using the right formula when we pray. That is magic, not Christianity. God cannot be, and does not need to be, forced by us to heal. God can heal you, or your situation—giving his healing touch to your mind or to your body—even if you have not seen his healing yet. And even if God does not heal us, it does not mean that he cannot, or that he does not any longer, or that we are too unholy or unsanctified to receive it. To be sure, if God has pointed out sin in our lives but we are unwilling to let go of it, that can definitely stand in the way of our being healed; sin and sickness go hand in hand. But God doesn’t heal as some kind of reward for good behavior. Remember, the apostle Paul himself was horribly sick when he first preached to the Galatians. Healing doesn’t come as the result of meticulously following some magic formula or by being a good enough Christian, it comes at God’s good pleasure and on account of the death and resurrection of his Son Jesus. Healing involves praying, it involves asking, and it involves rejecting Sin and submitting ourselves to God’s plan, but the ultimate ground of healing is never your or my own personal holiness or even the quantity of our faith. The ground of our healing is the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Healing is something we ought to consider to be a normal part of Christian experience—and ought to expect and to teach in our churches—because Christ has already won the victory. God still heals; God is still ready to share the great victory of Christ with us as a reminder of the promise of our life to come.

 

If I was preparing for accreditation I would . . .

• Make sure I understood the meaning of the phrase ‘healing in the atonement’

• Memorize 1 Peter 2:24 and James 5:17

• Exercise

10. Describe the process of salvation.

“Even before he made the world, God loved us” (Eph 1:4)

The first thing that happened in the process of your and my salvation was that God loved. God loved long before he created, with the kind of love that included making a plan to come and rescue us if we needed it, even if that meant his own suffering. Maybe there is a sense that true love always looks like this, that it is always accompanied by this kind of willingness to suffer for the good of one’s beloved; when we consider the love of God, it is certainly the case. God knew what he was doing when he created, he knew that our salvation would be necessary, but his decision to create anyway means that the delight of sharing his life with us was worth more to him than the cost he knew he would have to pay to save us. God saves us for the same reason he creates: because he loves us. The process of salvation begins long before the moment of salvation; the story of our salvation begins with love.

Because God loves us—has always loved us—he cares about what happens to us. And so, because on our own we are totally lost, God reaches out to us himself. He calls out to us by various means, puts significant people into our lives, protects us, places himself in our path, opens our eyes so that we can see him, gives us life’s blessings, and keeps working in our hearts in all sorts of ways we cannot see, even when we ourselves are unaware of his activity. Most importantly, it is God himself who gives us the ability (and the courage) to turn away from our sins and to call out to him in faith. All of this—all the ways that God reaches out to us even though our hearts are cold toward him—is wrapped up in the meaning of the word ‘grace’: the blessing and favor that God puts in our lives even though we don’t deserve it. In particular, the kind of grace that comes before the moment of our salvation is sometimes called ‘prevenient grace’ (prevenient means ‘coming before’), and it looks different in each of our lives. Some of us were born into Christian families where we heard the story about God’s love for us since . . . well, probably since before we could really even understand it. Some others of us have longer journeys that have led to God, or less direct ones. The important thing is not that we all take exactly the same road to faith, but that we learn to recognize that exactly the same God has been at work in the lives of each of us, on whichever road we have been on. Long before we ever considered him, he was calling us, guiding us, and making it possible for us to come home safely to him. You see, on our own we truly are lost; not one of us is able to find his or her own way or achieve his or her own salvation. It’s not just that we lack the power to fix our broken relationship with God; on our own we don’t want to. Truth be told, we don’t even really conceive of God or consider his friendship a possibility. But God, because he loves us, begins working in our lives while we are still a long way off. The process of our salvation doesn’t begin with our repentance; we can’t even manage that in our own strength. Salvation begins with a grace that comes long before that, a grace that woos us and waits for us, and that makes repentance and faith possible for our otherwise cold and dead hearts. It is God who makes our reconciliation with himself possible, and who wants it—and works for it—long before we ever do. The story of salvation begins with love.

“Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved” (Ac 16:31)

Following the long working of God’s love in our hearts, in the life of every Christian there comes one critical moment where we respond to God’s call and he graciously welcomes us in to his family. This decisive point in time—conversion, the moment of our salvation—has two essential halves, both empowered by God’s grace. The first half is our repentance and belief. We call it ‘ours’ not because we manage to achieve it all on our own; ‘our’ repentance and faith is something we can exercise only because God in his kindness gives us the strength to do so. But because God loves us—with a real love, a love that never forces—he never saves us against our own will. He calls us and waits for us; he woos us and puts himself in our path; he goes so far as to reach into our sinful and cold hearts and make them alive enough to respond to his call and aware enough to want to. In one sense, it is all God’s doing. But at the same time it is we who do the actual repenting and the actual returning to him. This is why Peter declares to his listeners on the day of Pentecost: “Each of you must repent of your sins, turn to God, and be baptized.” (Ac 2:38) God does the saving, God does the convicting, God even does the making us able to turn, but somehow he also makes room for us to be a part of the story of our own salvation. We must repent; we must turn to God and be baptized. God doesn’t save us against our will, even in the midst of being the one who makes us able to repent and believe. Following God’s love, the process of salvation continues with our repentance and our faith.

The second essential half of the moment of salvation is God’s response to our repentance and faith. At our conversion, four things come to us from the hand of God, not one after another, but all together as a piece, and all because of Jesus Christ: we are forgiven, we are justified, we are born again, and we are given the Holy Spirit. These four themes can be found together in 2 Corinthians 5, one of the great ‘salvation’ chapters of the Bible. In verse 19 we hear the good news that, in Christ, God no longer counts our sins against us: we are forgiven. In verse 21 Paul reminds us that we have been “made right with God through Christ”: we have been justified. God has fixed what was broken in the relationship between us and him, and counts us as righteous because of Christ. He counts us as his friends. Verse 17 says that “anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” What a great hope! God’s great salvation means I don’t have to live according to all those same patterns I used to live by, because I am not that person anymore; I have been born again as a citizen of the kingdom of God. (The technical term for this is ‘regeneration’.) In verse 5 we are reminded that as believers we are now never alone because “God himself . . . has given us his Spirit.”

Of course, because God works in each of our hearts in a unique and individual way, the experience of conversion is a little different for each of us, even if the underlying pattern of God’s work in us remains the same. What I mean is this. When Kari (who is now my wife) and I started dating, I was not in love. I was ‘crushed’ to be sure, but, truth be told, my feelings were probably closer simply to the delight of just hanging around with someone as pretty and interesting as she was (and still is!). Little by little, though, I did fall in love. I can’t exactly say when. I remember the moment when it struck me that I wanted to ask her to marry me, the moment she said ‘yes’, and many other moments along the way, but the moment of falling in love I can only really narrow down to a season of a few months in 1998 and ’99 when my heart went from ‘like’ to something much more.

In some ways, I think that the experience of salvation is a little like the moment of falling in love. Many Christians—and many who are in love—can decisively point to one day, or one hour when they knew for the first time. Others cannot. For them, it is a ‘longer moment’, like mine, that cannot be narrowed down or remembered so specifically, but is nevertheless just as real. Billy Graham, in one of the best and most straightforward books on salvation I have read, wrote about this reality saying that “becoming a Christian can be a crisis experience in your life, or it can be a process with a climactic moment of which you may or may not be conscious.” (Peace with God, 143) In the life of every Christian there is a moment of salvation, even if we do not remember or recognize precisely when it was. This is of course especially relevant for those believers who have grown up in the Church and maybe cannot even remember a time when they were outside of God’s family. In the life of a healthy and growing Christian, however, being unaware of the precise moment of our salvation doesn’t mean we are unsaved anymore than being unaware of the moment I fell in love with my wife means that she remains unloved. Salvation is a process, but it is a process that always reaches a central, climactic moment—that critical point where God brings us from death to life. It’s a moment that happens uniquely in the experience of every Christian whether they remember it or not.

But what really happens in this moment? Some Christian people say that the experience of salvation is like entering into a ‘personal relationship’ with God. In a lot of ways, that’s what it is like. But, as wonderful as this phrase is, we need to be careful how we use it, especially about stretching it’s meaning too far. Having a personal relationship with God doesn’t mean that Jesus takes you bowling or goes with you to the waterpark. That’s why he gave us the Church, so that we could really be flesh and blood friends to each other, the kind we all need, and would love and care for one another. Normal friendships are part of God’s plan, not something that gets replaced by becoming a Christian. Rather, the word ‘personal’, when we use it to talk about our relationship with God, is simply a way of saying that each of us are saved individually, by a divine Person—not by some sort of impersonal ‘force’ or ‘cosmic happening’—and that the result of our salvation is that God genuinely comes to know us, and care about us, in the kind of way our other friends do, and that we begin to get to know him too. ‘Personal relationship’ doesn’t mean that we stop having friends and start having God, but just this: although God himself is totally unique and unlike anything else we know, God’s way of relating to us in salvation looks more like the normal way that friends relate to friends than maybe it does to anything else that we have the ability to describe. In many ways, even though it has its limitations, ‘personal relationship’ is perhaps one of the best words we have to describe salvation, as long as we are careful not to overextend it.

“God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.” (Php 1:6)

Just as salvation does not begin out of the blue at the moment of our conversion, it does not end there either. Now to be sure, as far as the work of Christ on the cross is concerned, salvation is finished. Christ suffered once, and not one thing needs to be added to his death and resurrection—to his great victory over Sin and Death—to make it sufficient to break us free from the power of Sin and bring us home safely to God. In fact, nothing can be added to it. But at the same time, from our perspective as the ones being saved, salvation is not complete. Salvation is not a ‘one time’ work that God completes in us in an afternoon, but a long process whereby God reaches out to us, rescues us, and then patiently works in us to make us fit for an eternal life of enjoying one another’s company. This part of the story of salvation, where “the Lord—who is the Spirit—makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image,” is what is meant by the term sanctification, or perfection. (2Co 3:18) God has brought me safely home, but now he is making me perfect, just like his Son Jesus. The story of our salvation extends beyond that beautiful instant of our conversion in both directions. God’s grace works ahead of conversion making us ready, and continues to work after it by making us holy.

And one day the process of our salvation will be finished when Christ comes again and God, by his grace, makes us glorious.

You see, our salvation is something that has happened already—we genuinely have been saved—but if we really read our New Testament carefully, we see again and again how our salvation is presented as something in the future, something that we are still waiting for (two good examples are Ro 5:9 and 1 P 1:5). And this matches our experience, doesn’t it. We know that we have been saved, and as we look around it is easy to see how God has changed our situation, but we also see the ways that God has allowed our situation to remain the same, even when our situation is a bad one. And it’s not always to build our character, or to teach us a valuable lesson; sometimes it’s just because we live in a world that has been broken to pieces by Sin.

If we think about salvation as something that is already finished, it can be tempting to presume that we ought not to have these kind of deeply distressing experiences in our lives like non-Christians do. And in one sense, our salvation is finished: Christ’s victory over Sin and Death is totally complete and doesn’t need to have anything added to it. But in another really important sense, our salvation is hardly complete at all, but only really just beginning. You see, the story of salvation includes not just this life, but also our life to come, our glorification when Christ comes again as king. When we compare our lives right now to our hopes of heaven it is perhaps easier to see how much saving work God has decided to wait on before completing, both in and around us. For although God, in his kindness, places foretastes of the kind of experiences we are going to have then into our lives right now, a lot of times—maybe most of the time—God allows Christian people to live through really difficult situations. Not because they haven’t prayed enough or aren’t holy enough, but simply on account of the fact that our salvation is something that is very much still to come. 2 Corinthians 12 reminds us that this was certainly Paul’s experience; it has been so for very many others as well.

Pastorally, this means it is usually particularly insensitive to talk to Christian people about the long term problems in their life as if they had never had the idea to pray about them, or have never tried praying with real faith. And of course we ought always to pray for these kind of long term problems, the kind that people have been living with for years, but as pastors we also need to take seriously the fact that the process of our salvation has not yet been brought to a close and that, until it is, there will always be suffering and difficult situations in the Church. Of course, sometimes God will reach in and change a situation that has up until now caused intense suffering—God still does the miraculous!—and sometimes people need to be challenged to pray with greater faith. We ought never forget the instruction of Jesus in Luke 18:1 to “always pray and never give up.” If you are a pastor: pray. Pray for the people God has put under your care. But remember too that our salvation won’t ever be finished this side of our glorification. We live in a world that, in spite of Christ’s death on the cross, is still dominated by Sin. There is a lot of horrible suffering in our lives and the lives of people all around us, and there will always be a lot of horrible junk that true Christian people in our churches have to deal with. Some of it—lots of it—God will not take away before Jesus comes again: our salvation is something that is still coming, something still in the future. And so sometimes the place God has for you and me will be suffering alongside your Christian brother or sister in the midst of a situation that God will not make right until Jesus comes again, when he will truly wipe away every tear, even though from where we sit right now we can’t imagine how.

“And all of this is a gift from God.” (2 Co 5:18) All of salvation, not just what God does for us in that one climactic conversion moment in response to our repentance and faith, but all that he does all along the way, before and after, reaching out to us, causing us to hear his voice, convicting us of our sin, enabling our faith and our repentance, making us right with him and restoring our position in the family even though we don’t deserve it, creating us anew, and finally perfecting and completing his work in us. All of it, the whole process of salvation, is a gift from God. And he gives it happily because he loves us.

 

If I was preparing for accreditation I would . . .

•    Read chapters 9-13 of Billy Graham’s book Peace with God [http://www.gotothebible.com/HTML/peacewithGodtoc.html]

•    Memorize Romans 10:9 and 1 John 1:9

•    Learn the terms justification, regeneration, and prevenient grace

•    Be ready to discuss the process of salvation in my own life

 

9. What is the significance of Jesus' death and resurrection?

Jesus has set us free from our sins

As any Christian can tell you—even the newest or youngest one—the reason Jesus died on the cross was to take away our sins. Isn’t that great! Because of Christ you are forgiven. You really are. The ultimate significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection is that he has somehow made peace between us and God by the shedding of his blood. His act of obedient sacrifice has cleansed us of our sins and put an end to the state of hostility that existed between us and God; because of the cross, God counts our faith in Jesus as real righteousness. This is what Paul means when he says that “God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.” (2Co 5:21)

In theological language, this act of Christ on the cross to make peace between humanity and God—to ‘set us free from the penalty of sins we had committed’ and ‘bring us home safely to God’ by the shedding of his blood—is called the atonement. (Hb 9:15, 1P 3:18) Remember, the problem of Sin is death: death in this life all around us and eternal death in the life to come. When the Son of God became a man, he took this problem upon himself and made himself subject to death, just as we are. But because he never sinned, never chose to ‘do it on his own’ but to always submit to the Father’s plan, he death was a different kind of death than ours. For us, death is the ultimate and understandable consequence of a life filled with sinning. When Jesus Christ died on the cross, however, it was as “a sacrifice that would take away the sins of the people,” not as the enactment of a punishment that he himself deserved. (Hb 2:17)

Why did he do it? Why did he ‘offer himself as a sacrifice for us’? (Eph 5:2) He did it because he loves us. God, knowing that we were helpless on our own, but filled with love for us and deeply caring that our friendship with him should be restored, took it upon himself to do all of the work to make things right between us, to reconcile us to himself, even “while we were still sinners.” (Ro 5:8) It is the greatest theme of the Christian faith, that “God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” (Jn 3:16) The significance of the death and resurrection of Jesus is not merely the cosmic defeat of Sin by our mighty God so as to make the salvation of humanity possible, but, for the believer, a very personal demonstration of the love of God for me. Christ died not just for the sins of the world, but for me, and for my family, to atone for our sins and to bring us safely home to God.

Jesus truly is both son of man and Son of God

This very genuine and specific love of God for you and me, the kind of love that motivated his willingness to intervene in our situation even at great personal cost, is a reflection of his character. You see, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—what he did for us—is always the result of who he is as the God of love who became human for our sake. The atonement is therefore a crucial demonstration of his identity. In his death we are reminded that the Son of God genuinely became 100% human, just like us. The story of his life was of course not identical to the story of each of ours, that’s not what it means to be a human being. As Thomas Oden reminds us in his book The Word of Life, being human means being particular: having one place of birth, one gender, one set of experiences, one life’s journey, and one experience of death. Jesus was not like us because he was exactly the same as you or me or anyone else, but because he was a unique person just like each one of us is. Because of his death we are assured of the completeness of his humanity, that the incarnation really goes all the way down, right to the bottom of what it means to be human, and that Jesus really did take the totality of human experience upon himself. Not every possible experience, but the actual experience of a genuine human life, like ours, the kind that occurs in one place and at one time, and goes from a beginning to an end. But more than even that, his burial teaches us that we have nothing to fear from what comes after death (and before our own resurrection at the end of time) because, wherever it is that we go in the moment after death, our ‘elder brother’ Jesus has gone there ahead of us and emerged as Lord and victor over it.

So too, just as the death of Christ is the clearest marker of his full humanity, his resurrection means that without doubt he truly is the Son of God. As the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:4, “he was shown to be the Son of God when he was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit.” His resurrection to a glorified and perfected body—the kind of body we ourselves will one day possess—is the ultimate vindication of everything that he taught about who he is and why he had come. Because he was raised again we know that he really is ‘God with us’, really is one with the Father, and really is the Good Shepherd come to seek and save the lost. The resurrection means that God really “was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people's sins against them.” (2Co 5:19) And so, when Paul sums up the good news of Christianity in 2 Timothy 2:8, he simply challenges the reader to “always remember that Jesus Christ, a descendant of King David, was raised from the dead. This is the Good News I preach.” Jesus is the descendant of David, and he died: he truly is a human. And he has been raised from the dead: he truly is the divine Son of God he claimed to be. For Paul, this was enough to encapsulate the whole heart of the Gospel: the true God of love became a true human, and died and rose again, so that he could save us. The death and resurrection of Jesus—the climax of his mission to save us—is also the most important testimony to his identity as both the son of man and the Son of God.

Jesus is the victor over Sin and Death

Finally, his death and resurrection mean that Jesus has decisively triumphed over the power of Sin and Death in the world. It’s part of the reason he came: “to destroy the works of the devil.” (1J 3:8) Jesus is the victor over Sin, having put himself under the influence of our Sin dominated world his whole life long and yet never caving to its dominion. And he is the victor over Death, having died, but yet conquering the grave and returning to a full and glorified life. Jesus says of himself in Revelation 1:18, “I am the living one. I died, but look—I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and the grave.”

To say that Jesus has risen, then, means more than just saying that Jesus himself is alive, it means that the whole range of domination that Sin previously held over our lives has been taken away. In part, this means that the power which Sin had exerted over us, so that we could do nothing but keep on sinning, was broken at the cross. Because of Christ’s victory over Sin, we do not have to live according to that old pattern any more. Jesus Christ, our new Adam, has made a new way of being human, a way that does not have to live as a slave to sin. This is why in the Alliance we say that ‘sanctification is in the atonement’: at the cross, Jesus not only atoned for our sins, but also totally dismantled Sin’s control over us and made it possible for us to live lives that are pleasing to God.

Our healing too is ‘in the atonement’, not meaning something altogether too mystical or magical, but rather the simple truth that God still heals people in response to the prayers of his people, and that when he does so, his healing power is based in the authority that Jesus, because of his cosmic victory over Death, has over sickness and death in our present world. The power of Sin and Satan was to keep us as sinners and to direct all of our existence toward frailty and death; the power of the atonement—the power of Christ Jesus, the victor over Sin—is to set us free from the necessity of sinning and to give us the opportunity to place our health and our lives in the hands of the one who loves us, rather than into the fist of our enemy. Because Christ has died and risen—because the heritage of Sin’s control over humanity has been defeated—we are once again free to entrust ourselves to God’s plan rather than go it on our own. The cross and the empty tomb mean that Christ’s victory over Sin, Death, and the Devil is complete.

 

If I was preparing for accreditation I would . . .

• Read “The Grand Miracle” by C. S. Lewis, from his book God in the Dock, chapter nine

• Make sure I understood the term ‘atonement’ and could explain it to a person in my church

• Memorize 2 Corinthians 5:21 and either 1 Peter 3:18 or Hebrews 9:28