Streams of Living Water

Have Christ’s Mind in You!

Philippians 2:5
As most of you will know, my favourite pastime, although I don’t get much of a chance to practice it down here, is golf. After being a member of a golf club for a while, you begin to learn not just the technical aspects of the game, but also the social etiquette – the expected behaviour – most of which isn’t written down anywhere, you just learn as you go along. One of the more obscure pieces of golfing etiquette is the complete avoidance of a certain word whilst playing – you may never say this word or it may cause you to start hitting vicious slices – and if you do say this word, everyone glowers at you. That word is ‘shank’ – ‘shank’ is a complete sliced miss-hit, which you can start doing all the time – and when you can’t stop doing it, you just want to throw your golf clubs away. So next time you are playing golf, never say the word ‘shank’! In Christian circles we also have a bogey word – don’t say it, never use it – that word is ‘theology’. People think of theology as so dry and boring, theology as being the reason for splits and divisions, way above their heads, and of absolutely no practical value at all. Now admittedly, there can be nothing more dull or dry, nothing more divisive and nothing less practical than scholastic theology.

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The Fight for Unity

Philippians 2:3-4
If there is one kind of TV programme my wife absolutely hates, it is a program about snakes and other creepy-crawlies. But for some strange reason, I quite enjoy these programmes. The last one I saw was this crazy nature photographer who wanted to take pictures of a group of Western Diamond Back rattlesnakes during their hibernation. So what he did was to crawl down a long burrow – the burrow itself was only 15 inches or so wide and high – right to the very bottom where there were gathered around 30 rattlesnakes coiled around each other to keep themselves warm during the relatively cold desert winter months. Here were these ultra-poisonous snakes coiled around each other in a box sized space just so that they could survive the cold temperatures outside. Don’t take this the wrong way, but when I saw all these snakes together, it made me think of what Christian fellowship is like. Here we are, Christians coiled together in the bonds of fellowship, keeping each other warm against the spiritual coldness of the world outside – but all the time each of us has fangs with which we can hurt each other – each of us, as we draw closer to each other, is liable at times to bite.

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The Life of God in the Community of Men

Read: Philippians 1:27-2:11
There are some paintings too grand for the historian of art to begin to describe, there are some views and horizons too exquisite for the scientist to explain, some thoughts too profound for the poet to capture. There are some chapters of the Scripture that it would seem almost blasphemous to dissect and preach upon – some chapters and passages which we automatically want just to bow down and worship God in the light of. Philippians 2 is such a chapter, giving us as it does, almost unparalleled access to the very heart of God Himself.

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