Authority

How did that word make you feel? According to post modern commentators on the world that we live in authority is not a feel good word. It is a negative, it is the antithesis of freedom, and freedom is the buzz word.

The big question is how does this affect those around me every minute of every day? And perhaps as pertinently if not more so how does it affect us and our churches?

We assume that we are free. Ask someone if they are free and they are most likely to say that they are, after all we live in a democracy, we can choose who to vote for, what to believe, whether to go to a religious service or not, how to bring up our children, what to watch on TV, what job to have, what hobbies to have, even what socks to wear! But actually are we really free or are those choices an illusion of freedom?

What is it that actually motivates me to do all those things? What motivates so much of it is the tyranny of approval. And that is not freedom I am enslaved to others. I wear what I wear because it is fashionable and fashion says... Or I do this because thereby I gain the approval of my peers or colleagues or family or whoever. When you actually examine our choices they are not choices made by free people. And the root of all of our choices is self, my need of approval, my need of acceptance, my need of popularity, my need to feel good about myself, my need to feel loved, valued, to feel worth it.

Now the follower of Jesus has been set free from this, but sometimes we find ourselves attracted back into living that way again however subtly. We struggle to live set free from self. But the Christian is not freed to live in a vacuum. Romans 6:18 says "You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness." We are freed from sin to live under God's rule, a rule of righteousness, of right relationship with God.

In our churches we need to reassert the authority of the word of God and teach that we are not free to live for self but to live as slaves of righteousness because only as such do we experience true freedom and life! Churches and Christians must live by revelation not experience. As David Wells says in Above all earthly powers people today are on a spiritual quest, it is personalised, individualised and eclectic. It is focused on making life happy, satisfying, fulfilled and meaningful.

The danger in the church is that we take the very real opportunity that brings and mishandle it. There is a tremendous opportunity there to explain the gospel but we must state that this is the Truth as God revealed, not a truth the we have worked out, or formulated, or have amended to feel comfortable with. We have experienced God but our experience of God is not something we determine but that is revealed in the Bible.

Postmodern society and people have been described as being 'allergic to truth claims' and we cannot surrender this idea of truth without losing the power of the gospel.