There’s only one sacrifice that works, or is worth giving, and it’s already been given. Jesus did all that was needed, all that could possibly be done, to give us every kind of freedom with which to worship God and live lives with him as the cornerstone. That’s all there is to it. Any other kind of sacrifice, to any other kind of god, be it a deity, or a human institution, will not achieve what the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus did at a stroke. We are new creations, reconciled to God so that we can be people who exercise a ministry of reconciliation. This ministry is to show people that God has done the work of bringing us back together with him. We’re to be openers of hearts and minds to the glorious truth of freedom, of hope, of possibility.
I’ve not written any of these columns in 2016. Partly it’s because I’ve been exceedingly busy. Partly it’s because I wanted to change the focus of them. For a while there back last year I wrote about almost everything that I was sent by bands, artists and PR people. I totally respect the hard work it is to promote yourself as a band, and the hard work that PR people do on behalf of their clients, so I thought it was important to write as much as I could about as many artists as I could when they came my way. Which is noble, perhaps even laudable. Except that these columns started to go down well as people shared them and the sheer volume of music I was being sent became unmanageable. I had folders of stuff to review, organised by release date, then those got too big, and so I just gave up. I’ve been writing c1 review per week fro Drowned in Sound this year. You can find my writer’s profile there by clicking on this sentence.
And so I resolved after a fair bit of stress that I needed to be nicer to myself this year, and not feel quite so beholden to everyone and everything. I said to myself that I’d only write about things that truly gave float to my boat, that the title of this column would once again be apt.
And then I didn’t get round to writing any columns.
Sorry.
I’m trying to rectify this. There’ll be a couple of pieces in the next few days about some fantastic albums and EPs that have given me much joy this year. Some of them you’ll know about. Some you may not. That’s the fun of things like this. So, if you’re a PR person, the review you’re waiting for is probably coming. Unless I didn’t love the record you sent me. In which case it may very not be. Sorry about that.
To start things off again though, it’s a great joy, perhaps even a privilege, to share with you the new single and video from the fabulous TaRee. ‘The Way I Do’, as a song, is a sumptuous piece of soulful R&B. It has a great, sweeping chorus. TaRee’s vocal is a thing of wonder throughout. It’s pretty much the perfect soul single.
But there’s so much more to this piece than that.
When I recorded for the Ghostree EP in Nashville way back in 2011 (in what feels like another lifetime), our producers Kevin Bruchert and Brandon Perdue (who just won a Grammy, way to go Brandon!) had just finished recording the Crazy Love EP with TaRee. The first time I heard that EP was one of a few rare moments when music was not just something I enjoyed, or even loved, but something which touched me to the deepest extent imaginable. That voice, the power in the songwriting. That amazing voice (I know I’ve mentioned it more than once, it’s for effect). Even though the EP was a mere 5 tracks, and was designed as a demo, it stayed with me for near-on 5 years. I returned to it often. Once heard, ‘All We Are’ from that EP cannot be forgotten. It’s impossible.
And I waited. And waited and waited. Waited for TaRee’s inevitable domination of the world of Soul/RnB to come to pass. I was perplexed when it did not, even angry at the injustice of it all, that someone with such talent, so many great songs, could not find ears to hear.
But now, finally, things begin to come to pass, with this amazing project. I could talk about the video and its powerful storyline relating to police brutality and the oppression of Black people, but really you should just watch it, take its message to heart, download the single and support TaRee in her continuing artistic endeavours. There is, honestly, no more exciting a Soul singer in the world right now than TaRee. Don’t miss this.
‘…accordingly Jesus has also become the guarantee of a better covenant’.
The Christian life can be so hard, a series of tests and challenges, one after another. We can, if we’re not careful, spend a very large portion of our faith-lives seeking to ensure that the deposit God made in us with the gift of the Holy Spirit comes to fruition. If we just do this, do that, say this, say that, all will be well.
But then we fail and fall, we think the wrong things, say the wrong things, do the wrong things. Again, and again, and again and blasted again, and we know that the deposit is being wasted. Or worse, we essay along in blissful ignorance of what we’re doing, its consequences and the impact we are having on ourselves and others. We’ve all been there at times, I would wager.
Jesus, because of his obedience to God and the call that was placed on his life, has GUARANTEED a better covenant, a better relational contract, between God and his people. It isn’t a might or a maybe. It is a done deal. It is God’s promise, as our eternal pursuer that this new relational status, won for us by Jesus, will be honoured. We can live forgiven and free, spending our whole lives working out what that actually means, every time we come to a conclusion realising there is more forgiveness and more freedom to be had, all because of Jesus. I can’t do it alone, earn it alone, or satisfy the right demands of it all alone. Jesus has done it all. All glory to him.
A King of Peace and a King of Righteousness. Sound familiar? Melchizedek is a ‘type’, or a forerunner of Jesus, just as earlier in Hebrews (6:20) we are told that Jesus is our forerunner, entering in on our behalf. The writer of Hebrews is at pains to show us that Jesus follows after Melchizedek, is the only one to surpass his righteousness, and is therefore worthy of all the glory, honour and praise that is and should be given to him.
As we are in Christ, it is possible that we, too, can be people of peace and righteousness. Melchizedek was a ‘type’ for Jesus, In turn Jesus accomplished all that he did for us and showed us the way, the pattern for the life of faith. So we are to seek to honour God, love one another in the way that we love ourselves and take seriously our roles as forerunners pointing the way to Jesus and his life and love.
Time and time again with these pieces, I find myself drawn to the unchangeable truths of the promises of God found in scripture as opposed to the entirely changeable nature of my feelings and emotional responses to them. Again we find ourselves here today. The truth of the good news of Jesus Christ is that his victory enables him to be ‘a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul’. If I am find in and with him, I am surely and steadfastly in the place I need to be, and I can live from there. If I do not accept that Jesus is a sure and steadfast anchor, because of things that happen, how I feel about them, mistakes I make, thoughts I have which are more refined and evolved than those expressed in scripture, then I am not stepping beyond God. Instead, I am making my life, and the life of faith, more complicated than it actually is, was meant to be, or ever should be. We all need something, or someone to hold on to. Jesus is that something and that someone. It is simple. It is not complicated. He is sure and steadfast. I have never found anything else that is. And I’ve looked. Hard.
My anchor will hold in the storms of life, because my anchor is not me, it is Jesus. He can be yours too. Just ask him. Do it. Today
Writing about Hebrews these last few days has been something of a challenge. The language is so direct, so stark. The warnings are dire. And yet it is shot through with such grace and hope. As Christians, we should focus on the hope of a passage such as yesterday’s, without ever losing sight of the battle that we are engaged in, that is being waged around us, over us and within us. Even as Jesus has won the greatest victory, evil is all around us, trying to devour us, divert us from the path of following the way of the King.
We are hidden with Christ in God. This has become a powerful truth for me this year. On the (many) days when I have doubted myself, my calling, my abilities, whether my body or my mind are able to sustain what is required of me to be this person and do these things, I’ve returned again and again to this. All around, battles rage. In society, between nations, war is waged on the poor and needy, the elderly, the infirm, the widow and the orphan. At all these, and the many other wars that are seen and unseen, it appears that it is the hope of the enemy to distract, divert and devour, but we can stand firm on the truth of the love of God, the truth of the good news of Jesus Christ. But we shouldn’t just stand firm, prim and proper in splendid isolation. Everyone needs this. It’s not just for us who are aware that God loves us, it’s for everyone.
So don’t fall away. Don’t leave the path. Even if you’re stumbling, crawling along today, keep going. Let someone else carry you for a few steps if need be, but keep going, and keep your eyes, your heart, your mind, the core of what makes you you, focused on God. Being alive, right now, following Jesus, that’s what this is all about.
It doesn’t matter how many times we read the words in today’s reading, I pray they never become comfortable to us, or the kind of words that we read quickly, pass over and move on. These are words of such immense power, such grace, such a magnitude of force that we cannot afford to treat them with anything less than awe.
Because of who Jesus is, the life he lived, what he did on the Cross, that he was able to do because of how he lived, we can approach the ‘throne of grace’, we can approach God, with confidence. Confidence! If Jesus had been someone else, or lived a different kind of life, we would only be able to approach God with trepidation. But instead, we can go to God confidently.
Do you go to God confidently? I can’t say I do that often. I approach with timidity, fear often. I remember the things I’ve done which have fallen way short of God’s glory and way for my life. I panic when I enter into prayer. Thoughts rush by as I remember all the reasons I don’t deserve to be here, in this moment, doing this thing, conversing with God. But that’s the point. I am forgiven and free. Because of Jesus. So are you. That’s it. That’s everything. End of. We’ve been invited to approach God with confidence and then to go, to go with him wherever he may send us. So let’s approach, approach boldly.
I’m really pleased today to release the video blog for February’s A Song A Month, ‘Light Has Come’.
Most of you reading this will know that I’m a disabled person. I try not to bang on about it all the time, but being disabled is part of me, it’s not something I can easily avoid, and so instead I try and embrace it, without making a fuss.
Years ago now, I did a Disability Studies Masters by Distance Learning from the University of Leeds. One of the key people on the course, Colin Barnes, challenged me to write songs about my experience of disability. ‘We need more protest songs’, he said. I always fought shy of writing about disability, mostly because I didn’t feel I had the language to write about it well in a song. I haven’t wanted to be a protest songwriter. I’m no Martyn Joseph.
Over the last few years though, perhaps as I get older and some of the idealism of youth wears off, I’ve found myself finding the UK a harder and harder place to live as a disabled person. I personally am a very fortunate man. I have a family, a wife who I love and who loves me. I have a faith which sustains me, and I feel like I’m able to make a contribution to my community, and to society, in a variety of ways. The fact remains though that I am in physical pain of one sort or another all of every day (like a lot of people, a lot of whom have it worse than me) and more than this, mentally and emotionally, I face challenges and hurdles to overcome many times daily, because I use a wheelchair and am disabled. It’s hard to explain or quantify. It’s simply how it is. I hate being disabled. Much as I’m supposed to be well-adjusted to it all, I wish I wasn’t.
But I know full well that my life isn’t as hard as it is for a great many other people, whether they are disabled people, or whether they experience other things in life which marginalise them and make them part of minority groups they never asked to be in. I truly believe that, as people of social conscience, Christian or not, we are called to be prophetic, whether we’re off faith or not. I believe we’re called to stand and hold one another to account for how we treat each other, whether we are ‘successful’, functionally well, impaired, old, young, or anything else. It saddens me to sense a corporate, societal, hardening of heart towards people with disabilities. Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps I’m entirely mistaken, but that’s my sense.
February’s A Song A Month is a humble offering, inviting us to see that there is a better way to live, a better way to treat one another, to treat ourselves. A Light Has Come.
Thanks once again to Pete Thorn for playing on this song, and his help with the video.
I’ve often wondered about what kind of mood the writer of Hebrews was in when this letter was written. There’s just a sense to it of negativity and worry that I don’t perceive in a lot of the rest of the New Testament. Everything is cautious, tempered, careful. And so I wonder, how does how we are feeling about things change how we talk about God? ‘Salvation’ looks very different when things are going well, I suggest, compared to what it looks like when everything we are is threatened, even though ‘being saved’ and what that entails actually remains the same. We have an unchanging God, but our perspectives, our language, our experiences, these must change. For them to stay the same is, potentially at least, to deny that the ‘living and active’ element of his word, and his Word, Jesus. We can’t be made new, transformed by each encounter with the Spirit, and yet simultaneously remain the same. This is not feasible. Similarly, it seems to me that one of the main points of a life of faith is to be open to the Spirit’s prodding to the broadening of horizons and thoughts, so that we able to see and acknowledge more of God, his glory, and share it with those around us.
You can find all the videos from the A Song A Month Project in this playlist. It will be updated as each new video is uploaded. To skip to a particular month, click on the horizontal lines in the top left of the video player screen.