I love to tell the story of unseen things above
Of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love.
I love to tell the story because I know ’tis true
It satisfies my longing as nothing else can do.
I promise we will get to our topic “The Word Made Flesh” if you will bear with me for a few paragraphs.
You know there are a lot of gospels preached around the world. There always have been. The bulk of the New Testament letters were written to defend the true gospel from the false ones of that age. This caused me to ask, “Which gospel story was Katherine Hankey referring to her in her song?” I did some research. Most of what we can glean about her is through the community to which she belonged: the Clapham Sect.
This was a group of like-minded influential Christians living near Clapham Common in London at the beginning of the 19th century. They were a group of friends and families with William Wilberforce as their center of gravity. They were powerfully bound together by their love for each other and by their spiritual values, which overflowed into their vision of social activism. (Among many other things, they are credited as the primary force that overthrew slavery in England.) Many of their meetings were held in their houses. In their own day, the group used no particular name, but they were lampooned by outsiders as “the saints.” In modern parlance they were a missional community.
So, I concluded that the gospel story Mrs. Hankey loved to tell was the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. As you can derive from their fruits, her’s was more than the accept-Jesus-and-avoid-hell gospel (which predominates in the western Christian demographic). Her gospel, the gospel of the kingdom, is the story rooted in our passage today that transforms hearts, communities and cultures (in that order, I believe).
For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority…having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. When you were dead in your transgressions… He made you alive together with Him. (from Colossians 2:10-13 NAS)
The true gospel, the gospel of the kingdom, always yields transformational fruit; it always begins as revelation in the heart of man, the temple of God on earth. Where no transformation has taken place, it is necessary to ask which gospel was embraced. Here is my point: where the kingdom gospel story takes root, the Word continues to become flesh; an ongoing story is told and the life of Christ is manifested in communities.
To find that place of intimacy and transformation, so many of us professing believers in the west are going to conferences, praying like mad, reading books, studying the scriptures more intently, trying to gain that next essential piece of truth, find the experience that will put us over the top: we’re trying to spiritually arrive. Others of us are laboring in the fields of performance Christianity where our activity and service rarely produce a sprig of new life, but our works are salve to our uneasy consciences and a sacrifice that (we quietly calculate) must surely be pleasing to God. Sadly, many of us have also just given up, having exhausted ourselves on these religious hamster wheels. Listen to one sentence from the Message’s version of our passage:
Entering into this fullness is not something you figure out or achieve…you’re already in—insiders…. (from Colossians 2:11 MSG)
Until our hearts are firmly rooted in the reality that, as those born of the Spirit, we are already insiders, we will be working and our working, whether it is expressed in reading, fasting, praying, serving, or attending, will undermine, rather than facilitate, the intimacy our hearts were created to know in Christ. Much of this Middle with Mystery blog is my story as one who was delivered from a spirit of fretful-seeking. It’s passion and sobriety looked great in religious circles but it was not transformational. It was mostly just insecure religious flesh. I believe it reflected poorly on my Father in heaven.
Katherine Hanky is now in the great cloud of witnesses that is cheering us on. Looking back on her story, I think she could have as easily penned these words:
In Christ I am the story of the mysterious kingdom of God
Of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love.
In Christ, I am the story because I know ’tis true,
Christ has satisfied my longing as no one else can do.
My prayer is that the earth will once again see the birth of communities of friends and families with their own transformational DNA that equips them to infect their networks with the kingdom of God—the original gospel lived out by Jesus and His disciples. I pray that we believers may somehow find the kindred spirits we were called to live among. I pray that spiritual fathers will arise and become the centers of gravity for these communities; that their homes would become safe houses and magnets for those the Father is drawing to Himself. Even if they do not have a corporate label, even if they are mocked as “saints,” I pray that these cells would multiply, connect and become known for their powerful bonds of love for each other. So be it.
Father, breathe on the cellular structure of Your church, transforming her chaos and clay into the resplendent Body You have envisioned and destined to one day take dominion over this planet. May the dreams of old men merge with the visions of the young to inspire redemptive activity in our hearts, in our communities, and in our culture. May Your Word continue to be made flesh. Tell your story through us. Amen.