I had an interesting experience yesterday. I was wondering whether my original blog was still online somewhere, and I found it – here. Actually, all the posts have been migrated to this blog but I had forgotten about them. There was a strange pleasure in rereading some of my posts.

I started the “Doggie’s Breakfast” blog back in 2004. I was a student at what was then ETCW, now Union School of Theology. Blogging was just becoming a “thing” and some of my fellow-students were blogging and encouraged me to write as well. I planned it as a smorgasbord of things – commentary, thoughts, reflections on my studies, nonsense. Most of all it was to be fun.

It was an interesting time. The so-called emergent church movement was gathering pace, and a kind of young, restless and Reformed version of it was appearing which coalesced into organisations like Acts 29 and The Gospel Coalition. There was plenty to think and talk about. There was a lot of interaction between bloggers – commenting, responding to blog posts with more blog posts.

I don’t know what happened, but blogging became professionalised and probably monetised. Platforms like Patheos and The Gospel Coalition and Reformation21, to name a few, began hosting celebrated writers. It all became very serious. Grass roots blogging seemed to fall out of fashion. It wasn’t helped by the rise of Facebook and Twitter. Now these are somewhat passé unless you are an activist. For fun go to Instagram or Tik Tok. The visual has taken over.

This blog has been on life support for years now. I think my last post was 5 months ago. The one before that was five months before that. A little over two blog posts a year.

However, in my foray into old posts I was sufficiently energised to reconsider this enterprise and perhaps return to its roots. To write about this and that, hopefully with a wiser head than 16 years ago, sometimes writing serious things. Sometimes not. Times have changed since I started. The issues in our society have changed profoundly. But let’s have a go and see what happens.

The present pandemic has been a shock to the system of every church in the country as public meetings have been banned for the time being. Church ministers and elders have scrambled to work out how to keep ministering the word to their people in such straitened times, with varying degrees of success.

In the providence of God the church has been presented with new opportunities for witness and evangelism, and for this we give thanks. Parallel to that, the Lord in his wisdom has withdrawn the freedom for his church to meet to worship. It is not inappropriate to look on this as a chastisement on the church generally for reasons, perhaps, that we have still to work out. These are certainly extraordinary times. But one way to seek the Lord in this is to fast and pray.

Last Wednesday our presbytery (EPCEW) called our people and others to a day of prayer and fasting. It was hastily arranged and at short notice. Most of us ministers have never or rarely taught on the ins and outs of fasting as a spiritual discipline. We were certainly chastened to realise that!

In a ZOOM meeting of Presbytery last Friday we encouraged each other to consider doing so again this coming Wednesday (tomorrow), though this time not issue a general call. One of our number recommended reading in advance Wilhelmus A’Brakel on fasting. The chapter is the first in Volume 4 of his “A Christian’s Reasonable Service“, which you can find in PDF form at monergism.com.

To help us, I thought it might be helpful to produce a quick summary of A’Brakel’s chapter. (It helped me!) He obviously says much more in explanation – for that you need to look at the linked page above – but here’s my summary:

What is fasting?

A’Brakel’s definition:

Fasting is a special religious exercise in which a believer deprives himself for a day from all that invigorates the body, humbling himself in body and soul before God as a means to obtain what he desires.

Some notes on this definition:

• it is a religious exercise – poverty, avarice, illness, health reasons , prevention because of business are not applicable here.
• it is a special exercise – It is not a daily activity such as prayer, reading, thanksgiving, and singing. Rather, it is practiced at special seasons of need.
• it is a depriving one’s self of all that invigorates the body – to bring the body for that given day into a condition of withdrawal, distress, pliableness, and weakness.
  • it is the deprivation of food
  • deprivation of external ornamentation [i.e. the proverbial sackcloth and ashes]
  • deprivation of entertainment
  • refrain from the labours of our calling
  • refrain from sleep
  • guard against the commission of sins
• it is a humbling of ourselves of body and soul
  • soul and body are intimately related, so humbling the body humbles the soul.
  • “Sorrow over the deficiency of the soul engenders sorrow about that which the body is lacking, and a deficiency in the body engenders sorrow over the deficiency of the soul.“
  • humbling consists in:
    • The confession of sin, accompanied with grief and shame.
    • Declaring ourselves to be worthy of judgment and a subscribing to justice if the Lord were to execute those merited judgments upon us.
    • A supplicating for grace, frequently accompanied with weeping.
    • A renewal of the covenant with the wholehearted intent to forsake former sins and to live a godly life.
    • The giving of alms.

Duration

• for a 24-hour period.
  • We are not called to follow Jesus in his 40 days in the wilderness.
  • In the 7-day fasts in scripture , something was eaten in the evening.
  • The following qualification applies for those who are weak: “I desired mercy, and not sacrifice” (Hos 6:6)

Public and Private Fasting

• Public:
  • when the government calls it because of national need;
  • when a synod, classis, or elders of a particular congregation designate a day of fasting for the church under their supervision, doing so due to an extraordinary need in the church.
• Private:
  • when some individual friends agree to set apart a day;
  • when a father institutes a day of fasting for his family;
  • when an individual sets apart a day for himself.

Exhortation to fasting

Why?

• Hasn’t God commanded it?
• Have not the church and the saints of all ages practiced this and left us an example to be followed?

So,

• If a public fast has been proclaimed, conduct yourself well in doing so. God’s eye will be upon you in a special manner.
• If some of the godly have agreed to set apart a day, endeavor to join them, and stir up some other godly person to do likewise. The Lord will most certainly be among you; He will come to you and bless you. It will engender a sweet bond of mutual love. The Lord will manifest that this is pleasing to Him.
• Preparation
  • remove obstacles beforehand
  • confess your aversion for such a day of prayer as a sin before the Lord, and ask that you may be fit to conduct yourself well on this day of prayer.
• Afterward
  • Rejoice in the evening that you have food to eat, since you are not worthy of one bite of bread.
  • Thank the Lord that He gives it to you in His favour—as having been purchased with the blood of Christ.
  • Give close attention as to how God responds to your day of prayer, for God will respond to it.

I read a John Le Carré novel recently, my first. I really enjoyed The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Set in the 1960s Cold War, it drags you into the great spy “game”.

One character, Liz, is a British communist sympathiser. Through one thing and another she gets the opportunity to attend a meeting of the communist party in East Germany. It was a great disappointment to her. Le Carré writes:

It was like the meetings in Bayswater; it was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to church – the same dutiful little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John Le Carré

It got me thinking about church life. “A great idea in the hands of little people”? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

It could be either.

Obviously, Le Carré has in view the utopian ideals of communism which feed the imagination of many and in that sense are “great”. But it presents a false hope because it does not take into account the depth of the human condition and, as history teaches us, tends to offer up human, flawed saviours who end up as tyrants. On the other hand, the gospel takes the human condition into account, addressing it directly. We Christians are little people, small before our omnipotent God, powerless in the face of our sin and evil, desperately in need of a Someone to save and renew us. Out triune God is that Someone. The Father has planned our salvation in Christ, the Son, Jesus Christ, has come and effected it through his death and resurrection, the Holy Spirit has applied it to us in our experience of saving grace. The sense of helplessness and constant dependency upon God never changes. Any greatness is all his. We will forever remain a little people who benefit from God’s “great idea”.

But in ongoing church life, there is a way in which we can become a “little people” that is profoundly unhelpful, indeed sinful. Le Carré’s idea of “little people” are those who have “lost faces” and develop a “fussy self-consciousness”. I think I know what he means.

I remember once being part of a church that ran along congregational lines. Church meetings (eventually I chaired some of them) took hours because we had to deal with everything – including agreeing whether or not to pay the utility bills. Absurd. We had to deal with all sorts of things, and there was always at least one who thought their item was really important. Except that none of it was about the gospel or the Great Commission. The church was dying but there was a fussy self-consciousness about it all, where people took satisfaction in “making a point”, “making their voice heard” and “having influence”. In that sense the people were “little”, who every week had in their hands the Great Idea of the Bible, and yet their worldview was fundamentally egocentric. To be “little” in this sense is not to be taken up with the wonder of the gospel and the joy of fellowship with our great God and with one another in Christ. Instead it is to be taken up with self.

I think this can happen to evangelical Christians and, dare I say it, reformed Christians. Yes, assent to the doctrinal position of the church, stand for the truth! But in reality to be taken up with the mundane, looking after our little needs, with little thought for one’s part in the Kingdom’s progress and giving glory to God.

The quote has got me thinking. What is my heart really interested in? Is my work in the world permeated with a desire for the glory of God? that I have access to this “great idea”? Is that what I want my family to know? Has attending Sunday worship become routine – and alternative activity amongst many other possibles? What does it mean to grow in holiness? to be knit together in love (Col 2:2, ESV)? What does it mean to taken up by God’s great idea of the gospel and not be “little people” in the bad sense?

As a pastor you think many times about your own prayer life, and how it compares to your work life. If you are like me, you will find that your centre of gravity in these two matters is way off centre. Some words of Eric Alexander often come to me from a sermon he preached when I was a student in Glasgow in the 1980s, where he said, “Prayer is the work of the gospel.” Like many such snippets, I can’t remember the sermon out of which it came, but I remember the statement. So, many years later I was delighted find that he had put that statement into writing and expanded on it in his book, Prayer: A Biblical Perspective, which I heartily recommend. Here is the relevant passage, where he is referencing the ministry of the apostles in Acts 6:3,4:

… prayer is the basic form of Christian service. Of course we are not saying prayer is the only form of Christian service, but that it is the basic one. Look at the language they [the apostles] use: ‘We will reserve our best energies—our very bodily resources—for prayer’ [Acts 6:4]. It was not that they were avoiding the hardest work in the church. They were actually choosing it, because it is a consistent theme in Scripture that prayer is work. Paul cries out in Romans 15:30: ‘Strive together with me in your prayers to God for me’, and he uses the word which really means ‘to agonise’.

In the Christian church over the years, we have turned the truth upside down, and commonly speak of ‘praying for the work’ – the implication being that prayer is an additional ingredient to our Christian service. The truth is that prayer is the real work, and apart from it all other work is in vain. The reason for that is quite simple. It is that essentially this work in which we are engaged is God’s work, not man’s. There are endless lists of things that men and women can do: we can intellectually convince people, we can emotionally move them and we can materially improve them. But only God can spiritually resurrect them out of death into life in Christ; only God can convict their conscience and convince them of their need of a Saviour; only God can open the eyes of the spiritually blind and give them sight; and only God can transform their character and recreate them into the image of Christ. And, my dear friends who read this book, that is the essence of the work in which we are engaged. So Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 3:6, ‘I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow.’ Now if the conversion of sinners is God’s work, the simple question we must ask and answer is, ‘To whom do we apply to have this work done?’ The only answer logically as well as theologically is ‘to God’. That is why prayer is fundamental rather than supplemental in all our service. That is why the primary evangelistic method is prayer.

Eric J. Alexander, Prayer (Banner of Truth, 2012), pp.39,40. (Emphasis his.)

There is much to do, but prayer is the real work. Let’s get the centre of gravity in the right place.

The most effective heretics are Bible-quoting heretics.

I had a visit from some JWs today. I’m afraid I can’t resist entering into discussion with them and ended up spending 45 minutes discussing the nature of God’s grace that raises dead people to life (Ephesians 2).

Over the years I have noticed two biggies about JWs. The first is that they do not read the Bible (or even their Bible) very closely. They often quote verses, and usually they verbally misquote texts, and almost always take them out of context anyway. My strategy is therefore to get my Bible out and do a little Bible study with them: what’s the book about? who wrote it? who is it written to? then read a few verses before and after to get the context, then almost word for word get them to tell me what the words mean. It is only then I can try to get them to see that they are misreading, or reading into, the text. I hope it is helpful, but I have to say that their hearts are often blinded by the JW teaching and they cannot see the plain meaning of the text and how their own hearts are operating.

The other biggie is that they talk a lot. There are a couple of reasons for this, I think. One is that if you say you are a Christian, they will immediately start talking about the ills of the church (of England?), how it is full of hypocrites who do not live according to the commands of God, and criticise various dodgy practices. Most of that I agree with but I usually let them blow off their steam and then say, “Yup, I agree with most of that.” The other reason for talking a lot, is usually a relief mechanism from the detailed study I am forcing them to engage in in the first biggie above. To relieve the pressure they will start ranging over lots of other verses, most of them irrelevant to the discussion in hand. My job is to doggedly bring them back to the text we were looking at. But they are a bit like birds trying to escape danger.

There are a couple of takeaways for Christians that come out of these experiences.

One is to love the text of scripture. It is God’s word and if we love God, we will love his word. That means paying attention to it, by reading it, thinking about it, talking to other Christians about it, listening to good preachers explaining and applying it. In other words, learn how gracious God is, how deep and rich the gospel message is and how it is all over the pages of scripture. Then you are equipped to show people in love the wonders of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.

The other takeaway, is to resist the temptation in evangelism to fill the air with the noise of your voice. Some Christians can be as bad as JWs! Much better to spend a significant chunk of time understanding who you are talking to – who they are, why they think the way they do. Then you are in a much better position to start where they are and lead them to Jesus Christ. It is damaging, and maybe offensive, to assume you know how a person thinks. Winsomeness means listening as well as speaking (though there must be some speaking!)

“…in your hearts honour Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defence to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,…” – 1 Peter 3:15