Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, August 27, 2022
Receiving from God is what happens when we hear the word preached, when we worship him as the gathered church, when we eat bread and drink wine. Our pride, and our never-ending avaricious taking, has to die if we want to receive from God. It’s like hacking weeds so a tree can grow. But we must receive, because that’s the path of life.

Jesus told us to enter the kingdom like children. In fact, he was stronger than that, saying that if we did not receive the kingdom of God like a little child, we would not enter it (Luke 18). We’re familiar enough with it, and it conjures up doe-eyed sentiments of pudgy-cheeked children.
Except, should it? What was Jesus actually getting at?
We could make some “be childlike, but not childish” statements and say some helpful and true things while missing what he was saying.
Jesus was surrounded by a crowd pressing in on him and the disciples are starting to get concerned for his time and perhaps his welfare. Parents are bringing young children to him to bless, and quite likely sick children in the hope that he would heal them. The disciples rebuke them, and Jesus utters the famous remark.
This is not sentiment, because these aren’t cute kids gathering around his knees and the disciples acting like absolute killjoys. This is scared and noisy parents, all concerned that their child needs Jesus’ help, creating a racket. It’s not hard to speculate that it was starting to escalate into something entirely unmanageable. I would probably have made a similar ministry decision to the disciples.
So, what is Jesus trying to teach us? First notice that Jesus is surrounded by babes-in-arms, that’s what the Greek word translated ‘infants’ at the start of the passage means. They’re helpless. They’re needy. They have nothing to offer.
Larry Crabb in his book Shattered Dreams points out that babies are fundamentally recipients, they don’t give anyone anything, nor can they take it for themselves. I’m sure they would take if they could—we come out of the womb selfish. They’re like this not simply because they’re selfish but because they’re helpless. To approach Jesus like little children is to approach him as one who is helpless and needs to receive. Crabb suggests that Jesus was recommending what we generally avoid: brokenness.
By brokenness he means an acceptance of the reality of our position, a desperate need to receive help, and a desire to ask for it. It often takes being broken by circumstances for these things to arise in us—that’s what Crabb’s book is about. The Bible talks about it a lot, though not using this language. I’d suggest a good, Biblical word for it (if we need one) would be thirst.
Which doesn’t sound like I’m saying anything beyond the usual run-of-the-mill Christian proposition: you cannot save yourself.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, August 20, 2022
There is no pressure in Christianity to be happy. There is instead an invitation to feel. To truly enter into the reality of the things that life throws at you, good and bad. To discover the emotions of God, what he loves and what he hates. We are invited to live life to the full. And that may look more like your life than you realised as you read through tear-stained eyes. Or it may not, and you may have to truly enter the joy and the sorrow of the situations that you find yourself in. Jesus did, and he invites us to follow him, with a cross on our shoulder.

Jesus came to give us life, and life to the full. Life that is abundant, excessive in quantity. We know the words of John chapter 10 well enough, but I think it’s difficult for us to picture what that means.
I hear the phrase “life to the full,” and I inevitably picture someone into extreme sports—perhaps a surfer—who is living their life to the full by chasing the thrill of adrenaline coursing through their body.
Or, if we look at the culture of our churches rather than the things we say, we might wonder if ‘life to the full’ had more to do with being Middle-Classed and living a nice well-adjusted life where our psychological drama is kept to a minimum and we earn a good salary and live in a nice-looking house with our 2.4 children. You might scoff at the characterisation, but when 70% of the British church is degree educated, something is off, even if this is unlikely to be the cause.
Life to the full cannot mean living like a beach bum. It cannot mean living like an upwardly mobile knowledge-worker in the suburbs. It cannot mean being employed by a church. And, it must be possible for people in all three of those situations.
Why can’t it? It must include Jesus’ own life. If his life cannot be described as ‘to the full’ or ‘abundant’ then we are defining our terms wrongly. When Jesus said ‘life to the full’ he must, as Alain Emerson points out in his beautiful memoir Luminous Dark, surely have meant a life like his own.
At this point I suspect you’re still with me. Most of us know this implicitly, even when our cultures speak differently. We imagine instead that life to the full is a life replete with joy, with friendship with God, and with demonstrations of God’s power dogging our footsteps.
A fully charismatic ‘naturally supernatural’ lifestyle, that sounds more like it! That lines up with Jesus’ own ministry and sounds like ‘life in abundance’ as well. That’ll be it, right?
A life like his own. Marked by suffering as well as joy. We should imagine that our abundant life will be as marked by struggles, disappointment and pain as his was.
What is life in its fullness?
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, July 30, 2022
It is suffering that forms character (Romans 5), and it is our character that God got into this business for in the first place. There’s a lesson, a treasure, for each of us to find. And here’s the secret that they rarely tell you in church: it can only be found at the bottom of the pit. What’s the secret? There’s a better gift than the one you lost. And it’s God himself, given to us in Christ. Not such a big secret, but the bit we sometimes miss is that we only grasp this in the muck at the bottom of the pit.

We all know how the world should be run. It’s simply obvious to us: the best people should run things, and everyone should get what they deserve. If you put that to 100 people, I suspect you would find the vast majority would agree that this an innately good idea.
They call it a meritocracy—a country ruled by those who merit the positions. Beyond politics too we would like most things to run this way. It’s attractive to most of us, but of course there is a sticking point we rarely think through: who gets to define the ‘best’?
For lots of things from ruling countries to who should organise the village fete, it is not simple to distil the definition of greatness to such a degree that we could objectively declare that Dave is invariably the best possible person to do this activity—if Dave fails then it simply couldn’t be done, no recriminations required.
To peel our hearts back another layer, it’s difficult for a deeper reason: we all inherently think we’re the best. Or, because it’s hard to sustain the cognitive dissonance required to assert that you’re the best at something without material evidence, we assume we’re distinctly above average. Of course, some of us are right—that’s how averages work—and some of us are not. Most of us are above average at some skill or ability we possess. There are a lot of people in the world so that isn’t necessarily saying a lot. We assume, without voicing it loud enough that we can hear ourselves in the quiet of our minds, that the world would be better if they let us run it.
This is what we really mean when we think the world should be run by the ‘best.’ This is why we think that meritocracies would be better: we, or someone even better than us who shares our opinions, could fix it.
Here’s the thing, friends—whether you happen to indulge in the same disgusting level of pride as I clearly do, or not—it is very good news that the world is not set up this way.
As Andrew Wilson points out in his book God of All Things: the world is not a meritocracy. The best do not get the best. The most beautiful places are not inhabited by the most morally pure or more capable people. Good food does not only get served to the pure. The rain does not only fall on those who do good.
Which is good news. As Jesus put it:
For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
Matthew 5.45b
We get the gift of rain and the gift of sunshine however righteous or unrighteous we are. Which, since without the gift of righteousness from the hand of Christ none of us would get a passing grade, is phenomenally good news.
The world does not run on a principle of merit. I’m glad, because I would never have seen a sunrise, enjoyed a rainstorm, tasted bread fresh from the oven, or smelled sweet peas in bloom, if it did.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, July 17, 2022
God made all this with a word. Think how much bigger he is than me. Imagine the biggest thing possible, God is bigger. In every way you could possibly imagine and many we could not. Marvel at the God who spun the stars on his tapestry. And then realise he’s grander than that. And bigger than that. And more wonderful than that. And be drawn into the worship of the one who Anselm called That Than Which None Greater Can Be Conceived.

Have you ever stood next to something truly huge? The typical examples are the Grand Canyon or a giant Redwood tree, but I’ve not been to North America. My huge things are smaller—in part because my green and pleasant nation is.
I remember how small Edinburgh looks from the top of Arthur’s Seat, or the dramatic view up Dovedale in the winter, or how big the sky is in Yorkshire, or Durdle Door rising from the sea by Lulworth Cove.
When you see something naturally big, or beautiful, or dramatic, or just find a standpoint that makes what our hands have made look small, it’s easier to reflect on the Lord who made them. There’s something worshipful about it. We think about how big Yahweh must be that he made these beautiful things with his voice as he spoke them into being. We start to write our own version of Isaiah 40—he scooped Dovedale with his fingers, he stoops to find Arthur’s Seat.
Here’s the thing. He’s a lot bigger than that. We’re like grasshoppers to him (Isaiah 40). Except the difference is much bigger. Ok, we think, like he scooped Dovedale but times a thousand, wow! Except that’s not it either, we’re making a category mistake.
Before I go on, I want to head off a thought. This reads at the moment like a well ackshually comment from that kind of theologically informed but emotionally dead person you find on the internet who wants to ruin your faith with all their minutiae. I should know, I’ve been that guy. I don’t want this to be that. Please keep gazing at trees and mountains and thinking “wow!” about the God who made them. That’s absolutely the right thing to do, and the Old Testament is chock full of it.
What I’m hoping to do is make your apprehension of God bigger, but we should still have our mind blown by the stars.
We could scale this up, look at what we know about the Universe and think “God made that! He must be huge!”
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, July 16, 2022
Everything but our closest friendships shattered, and we’ve forgotten how to regain them in a culture that was already suffering greatly from the demise of friendship. Honestly, in part it’s the apocalyptic nature of plagues at work here, it’s unveiled a whole host of things that were present under the surface. So, what can we do?

A little over two years ago the Prime Minister got on our TV screens and told us we had to stay at home. We crashed into our first lockdown that we all thought would last a few months and then slowly began to realise was a two-year waking nightmare.
If you don’t live in the UK your experiences of the details of this were likely to be a little different, but the broad thrust of the emotions will be the same.
I remember early on making semi-serious jokes about plagues historically tending to last for around two years. Though most often that would be, as I understand it, because they had burned themselves out by killing a substantial number of people.
In the UK Covid-19 is officially over and has been since mid-March. Or, more accurately we’ve been told that the new phase is about adapting to living with the plague. Whether you think that was a reasonable move probably reveals a fair bit about your political commitments, but it’s where we find ourselves, for now at least.
The major tone from people I know is one of relief. People are glad it’s all over. We’re beginning to reflect on what those couple of years taught us or cost us.
Churches are taking stock. Some, while it was painful, have weathered the pandemic well. I know a church that has grown in attendance and whose giving has gone up. They would say—I think, I may be putting words in their mouths—that they have thrived through the pandemic.
Many churches, perhaps most, have not faired so well. Today I read an account from a pastor I know of his church closing, largely due to the last few years of lockdowns. He was gracious and godly rather than bitter, but it has been bruising, and he was acknowledging it as such.
The thing is, I think those of us who have largely weathered the pandemic ‘well’—and I could include myself in this—have missed a key reality that those who have struggled have witnessed up close in all its brutality.
None of Us Have Thrived
I understand why some might want to say we’ve thrived, and perhaps some key metrics are looking healthy, but that just exposes some of the problems with metrics. Under the surface none of us are doing as well as we think.
We’ve been through what I think we can only describe as a collective trauma; it only doesn’t feel like one because it’s happened to everyone.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, June 25, 2022
I think we should see our churches today as like the Sons of the Prophets: semi-monastic communities that interact with the wider culture, including the corridors of power when required, but largely do our own thing while living within it. We are, as Peter would have it, exiles even within the land (1 Peter 1).

In the past I’ve described evnagelical churches as living in an anticulture, have suggested that we are in an ebb of history, which can make us think Christendom was a terrible thing, which it wasn’t.
Assuming you’re with me, and convicted that we don’t build anything, but that we also live at what feels like a civilisational ebb, what can we do about it?
I think it’s helpful to start by looking at others in the Bible who sat at a similar point in history. Take, for example, the Sons of the Prophets in 2 Kings. Elijah functioned as a solo prophet who despaired of there even being anyone else who followed Yahweh in Israel—though he was wrong (1 Kings 19). Elisha, by contrast, worked with and lived with a community of lesser prophets called the Sons of the Prophets (they first pop up in 1 Kings 20, seemingly sprouting from the ground).
Which, by the by, follows the Biblical typological pattern of the lone man followed by the man and his ‘bride’ that we see repeated time and time again. It is, in its final form, John the Baptist followed by Jesus.
The Sons of the Prophets were a reform movement from within Israel. They had no real cultural power, for all Elisha occasionally spoke with the king in a much less combative role than Elijah had, he also seems much less interested in the monarchy than Elijah was. Which is another of the Bible’s grand patterns, from priest (servant) to king (ruler) to prophet (member of the divine council). Why would you be interested in kings when there are prophets to speak with?
They remain a faithful community within Israel, without leaving it. A faithful community that has clear borders but still lives in and among the rest of the culture. Which sounds remarkably like that old cliché, “in the world but not of the world.”
They seem to be semi-monastic, with their own place to live (2 Kings 6), but that also receives others into the community at need. They seem to disappear from the narrative when Elisha does, which is simply because the focus of the storytelling moves elsewhere, and we are left to ponder what their impact on the grand sweep of history was. It may well have been minimal.
“What a terrible model for us!” I hear you cry! Or not, as the case may be. I’m certain that the impact they had in continuing the faith of Yahweh in the land and on the people that they helped was significant.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, June 17, 2022
Early on in the Torah we find “land” referring to all that God has made unless it is modified, for example, the “land of Egypt.” Later the “land” without reference is more likely to refer to Israel as originally given to the Hebrews by Yahweh, “The Land” as though it has capital letters. It’s almost a proper name.

“He’s no longer in the land of the living,” we say with great solemnity as we pronounce that our friend has fallen asleep on the sofa.
It’s a phrase we use fairly commonly, either to mean prosaically, “they’re dead”—which is actually uncommon because we prefer cleaner euphemisms that hide the reality entirely—or to refer to someone who is asleep.
We get that idiom of death and sleep being related from the Bible, though it plays the other way around in the Old Testament, with the dead being referred to as asleep. Like all idioms it hints at more than it shows, because only a culture with a profound ungirding belief in the resurrection of the dead would refer to the dead as sleeping.
We also get the phrase the “land of the living” from the Bible. I count 15 Old Testament occurrences of the word land (אֶ֫רֶץ) with the word living or alive (חַי). Which is not that surprising, the Authorised Version, which most of us know as the KJV, has had an incredibly large impact on the English language over the last 400 years.
Here’s the kicker, I’m not convinced the phrase “land of the living” means the same thing in Hebrew as we take it to mean in English.
Which is always a thought worth exploring. In fact, as those 15 references cross five different books of the Bible it’s possible that they don’t all use the term the same way, but we should always assume that those written later would be very aware of how the term was used in earlier parts of the Bible.
Why am I not convinced?
Hebrew has plenty of ways to say ‘alive,’ without the poetic flourish about the land added in. Which on its own we could dismiss as poetic language, especially in the Psalms, that is then picked up by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. We could, but we shouldn’t. The Bible’s authors are often poetic and use the heights of rhetoric available to them to express the heart of God in beautiful language, and every flourish has purpose and meaning. There are no spare words.
So, what does it mean? My contention is that the land of the living is the New Jerusalem, and that it is us who live in the land of the dying.
We will need to nuance this a little along the way, but the first thing that should clue us in is the use of the word land. A very common word in the Old Testament, from the first sentence onwards (literally: from the head God created the sky and the land), and a word that as the story develops seems to change meaning.
Early on in the Torah we find ‘land’ referring to all that God has made unless it is modified, for example, the ‘land of Egypt.’ Later the ‘land’ without reference is more likely to refer to Israel as originally given to the Hebrews by Yahweh, “The Land” as though it has capital letters. It’s almost a proper name.
So, we have it modified by ‘living,’ where is this place? The place of the dead in the Old Testament is never referred to as a ‘land,’ which is of course because it’s under the ground. It’s the grave, even if ‘Abraham’s bosom,’ while the part of it for the righteous dead is not specifically unpleasant, even that is a place of waiting.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 12, 2022
When we choose to worship, we fight our own sin. When we choose to believe that God knows what he’s doing and declare so in song, we help to bolster our soul’s conviction that to fight temptation and embrace holiness is worth is. We fight the lie that all the ways we’ve fallen short disqualify us in any way from the embrace of the Father who loves us.

Jericho falls after a band march around it (Joshua 6)—perhaps leading us to imagine they finally after seven days figured out the modular frequency of mortar so their trumpets tumble stones from atop one another. Jehoshaphat places the choir on the frontline (2 Chronicles 20)—perhaps making us wonder just how bad their last performance was that the King ‘rewarded’ them with a position in the vanguard.
We could find many more examples. Music, and more broadly the worship of God, play a decisive role in the warfare of Israel. Is it the same for us as New Testament believers?
I think it is—we usually need a reason to think something isn’t continuing as a principle from the Old to the New Covenants, but when things do continue, they are usually transformed.
Think of it like this: as I write the most prominent war in the world is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The current invasion has been going on for about six weeks (as I write—as this is published over three months), though we tend to forget that this war between Russia and Ukraine has been waging quietly on the frontiers of Europe for over eight years. Here’s the question, can our worship stop Russian aggression? Can we intervene in this conflict through what we might do as a gathered church directed towards God in heaven?
It’s pretty obvious that the answer is “no.” Our worship cannot stop the war. Though, let us never forget, our prayers can.
That being said, if the principle works the same way for us, what is our warfare against? As is so often the case, what is physical in the Old Testament is spiritual for us.
So, we’re waging war ‘spiritually’ as we worship God. But who, or what, are we actually fighting?
Or to frame the question a different way: I’ve been reading the Psalms a lot recently. I’m trying to learn how to pray them. One of the challenges I’ve encountered, especially in Books 1 & 2, is the proliferation of enemies. I’m always coming up against them. It’s easy enough to see who David’s enemies were, but if I’m supposed to then appropriate these prayers as my own, I need to know who mine are.
And, tempting though it is, I don’t think other humans who have upset or hurt me personally fit the bill very well—especially not that other guy in your church who upset you. There’s a different remedy here than asking God to smash the teeth in his mouth (Psalm 58).
Not that some people who’ve wounded me personally haven’t made themselves my enemies—I’m quite comfortable thinking that the cowboy builder who ran away with my savings and left me with a home on the verge of burning down is my enemy, but my warfare against him has to at least begin with forgiving him (Matthew 5).
We struggle with this, in part because we’ve drunk of niceness until we’re sick, but mostly because our lives are comfortable. The church has enemies. But, we are told, our real fight is not against flesh and blood (1 Corinthians 10). So, what are we fighting? Here are five initial suggestions.
1. To believe the church is the bride
Sometimes getting to church on a Sunday to worship God is an absolute mission. I don’t mean the challenges of getting everyone you need to out of the house in vaguely appropriate clothing on time to make it before the meeting actually starts.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, June 8, 2022
There comes a point in the Christian life when you brush the sugar-coating off your Bible. I pray it comes early, it makes things easier. That moment or series of moments when you realise that the faith is not supposed to make your life easier or more comfortable, and that the Bible never promised it would. 

Life hurts. Or at least it does sometimes. If we’re honest, it hurts more often than most of us hear in church.

Following Jesus is hard work. It is, in some sense, a way of pain.
If you’re feeling that right now, the incomparable cuts of choosing to give up your rights again and again, the painful stabs of making choices that are Godly but make your life infinitely harder than if you had chosen otherwise—if you’re feeling that then you need to know that you aren’t an aberration. You aren’t crazy. You aren’t the bargain bin Christian that somehow snuck in. You aren’t doing less well than everyone else. This is the way. Abandon all self-reliance ye who enter here.
To be a Christian is to share in Christ’s suffering and to count it a privilege.
Which could sound awfully maudlin if we gave in to self-pity. Self-pity is about the least attractive character trait humans can develop and tends to find its source in comparison. Experiencing pain is normal, telling yourself that your pain is worse, or engaging in the ultimate pitying act: deciding that God doesn’t love you because of your pain—is deciding that because your leg hurts, you’ll stab yourself in the eye.
Comparing pain has always felt like an impossible thing to do, until I realised that psychologists actually come up with tools to allow that to done diagnostically. Which means that I’d be happy to bet that my scars are bigger than yours—assuming you also live in the post-industrialised ‘west’. I’d lose plenty of those bets, but on balance I reckon I’d come out ahead.
Which I tell you to suggest that I have some authority to say that self-pity doesn’t get you anywhere. Trust me, I’ve tried it. Even on those occasions when people who really ought to know better don’t recognise the sheer weight of the scars you bear, and you feel like you must delve into the pools of pity to shake them out of their repose—it still isn’t worth it.
Having received what seemed like the worst news I’d had in my life, I remember sobbing myself to sleep the next night. I tried to pray. All I could get out was “come quickly Lord Jesus” through choked sobs. I wanted to pray for what was going on, but the currency I needed was hope and I was flat broke. All I could do was ask Jesus to come back, wrap it all up and finally end the pain.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, June 1, 2022
It’s almost impossible to live the Christian life without deep, abiding friendships, as well as a web of wider friendships. How do we know that? Jesus had these kind of friendships. If he didn’t try to do it without them, why do we?

The pandemic has damaged our friendships. There was a recent Atlantic Op Ed that opined that all but the closest friendships we might have are slipping away. But things were broken before that, back in 2018 the US Surgeon General announced a “loneliness epidemic”, especially facing middle-aged men. So, while the pandemic has made thing significantly worse, we weren’t starting from a place of strength.
Sixty years before that C. S. Lewis bemoaned the lack of friendship in his The Four Loves. This is not a new problem. We can trace a problem with a lack of friendships—especially for men—back a few hundred years, but it’s been getting gradually worse as community slowly degrades around us.
I read on Twitter a few months back:
The greatest miracle in the Bible was a man in his late 30s having 12 close friends.—Some bloke on Twitter I can’t find again
Which is worryingly relatable.
What is a Friend Anyway?
One of our problems when talking about this stems from our use of the term to apply to everything from our contacts on Facebook to our work colleagues, to people we hang out with, to others at church, to those brothers-in-arms that we would willingly die for. It’s a slippery term, and each of the three sources that bemoaned friendship that I mentioned at the top of this piece used the word to mean something slightly different.
Sociologists talk about different levels of relationships as strong, middle and weak ‘ties’. The weak ones are those on the periphery of your life, from that person you see commuting on the train every day, to someone who works in another department who you make small talk with while waiting for the lift, to that friend of a friend you see at parties.
We wouldn’t call all of those people friends—if I called the guy I sometimes see on the train who gets on and off at the same stops as me my friend that would be creepy, we’ve never spoken and I know nothing about him—but some of them are our friends.
They are also where our closer rings of friends come from. Our middle ring—the people we talk about as our friends who we choose to spend time with. And our inner ring (not exactly the same as the famous C. S. Lewis essay of the same name, but not not that either), the very closest friends who we talk to all the time and share all of our lives with.
It would be ideal if we had a different term for each of these. I normally use ‘friends’ to refer to the ‘strong ties’ or ‘inner ring,’ which bamboozles people who use the term more broadly. Saying that, I also call my readers friends, and do the same when addressing the church as a whole while speaking—that’s invitational as much as anything, but we use the word to mean a thousand different things.
Those closest of friends naturally start as someone at a less close level of intimacy. The sociologists agree that we desperately need webs of friendships at all these levels and everything in between.
Jesus and Friends
I’ve written before on how Jesus wants to be our friend, but we can also learn about having friends by watching him. Jesus had friends at all these levels: the crowds, the 72 disciples, the twelve, the three, and then John his closest friend.

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