Planted by Water

Those who read my comments on the Channel 4 programme, The New Fundamentalists?, can read a very good official response from the Evangelical Alliance’s Head of Theology, David Hilborn, here.

But now for my last couple of points on sacrifice:

1. Messy - quite frankly, there would be blood, guts, fat and stuff all over the place! Especially when extravangantly slaughtering thousands of animals. If I’m right about the sacrifice every six steps when they brought the Ark to Jerusalem, those guys would have been covered!! But as Tommy Tenney writes, ‘’the robes of the passionate will be stained with the marks of sacrifice." It’s not that we deliberately set out to have messy meetings, but praise and prayer that is too nice, respectable, controlled, tidy and polite does not reflect the heart of sacrifice! Our worship should be gutsy, passionate, raw and visceral. If we are passionate and extravagant like this, things will get a bit messy!
2. In the Spirit - alongside the above, we should also note that the OT instructions regarding sacrifice where very particular about where, who and how! You could be cut offf from the community if you sacrificed in the wrong place and killed by God’s fire if you did it in the wrong way!! What does that mean for new covenant people? We offer spiritual sacrifice in a spiritual temple (1 Pet.2:5). The where for us is ‘in the Spirit;’ the how for us is ‘by the Spirit.’ This is what keeps the messiness from just being the result of indulgent, human enthusiasm. Where the Spirit is there is life and there is wonderful ‘messy’ diversity and creativity to life but that has a ’spiritual order’ to it - not the religious, deathly order - like you find in a cemetry - but the order that comes from the creative Holy Spirit as he orchestrates things his way and according to his plans. As worshippers we must get used to the lively, messy, creative diversity of Spirit-led gatherings.