Recently I enjoyed preaching on Romans 16. Perhaps surprisingly, there was a lot to learn from the long list of names. One obvious feature was the many women mentioned.

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Gordon, how did you come to Christ?

A school friend told me that if I was a Christian and wrong, I would have just wasted a lot of Sundays with nice people. But if I was not a Christian and I was wrong, then I was going to hell! I realize there are logical flaws in that argument now. But it was enough to convince me to keep talking to him. He told me the gospel, and started me off going to church and reading the Bible.

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I’ve been asked for some reflections on Roman Catholic World Youth Day, held in Sydney last week. My reflections here are more about the ‘vibe’ than specific doctrinal interaction.

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In my last post, I mentioned the need to check for yourself the references supplied as ‘proof texts’ by preachers or writers. I gave the example of cross-references given by the Roman Catholic Catechism in support of its doctrine of purgatory. Today, I have two more examples of claims made by evangelical academics that were only disproved by checking the references myself. Both concern the gender debates.

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At the end of the current issue of The Briefing (July/August 2008), Nathan Walter mentioned some cautions on the trend of listening more and more to sermons downloaded from the internet (often from current evangelical heroes). But it was this piece of advice that I really want to echo:

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Today we ask Ben my same series of questions—thanks, mate! (Sorry I am not a more creative or investigative journalist)—SG.

Ben, how did you come to Christ?

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Peter, how did you come to Christ?

In my final year of high school, I came across some Christians who told me the gospel. I thought, “If that is true, that is the best news I have ever heard”. It took me about 12 months to work out that it was true.

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Like many churches around Sydney, we are about to preach a series on the Reformation solas, because Roman Catholic World Youth Day is arriving next month. One of the things I was thinking about was how to ensure that the sermons on grace and faith reinforce and complement each other, rather than simply repeating each other. That is, it’s not always easy to say what the ‘grace alone’ slogan means to distinguish it from the ‘faith alone’ slogan. Another little issue is that I think the ‘alone’ part of each slogan has a somewhat different sense in each phrase.

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Recently at my church we’ve concluded preaching through Nehemiah. My Sola Panellist colleague, Lionel, preached the last sermon from chapter 13. This details Nehemiah’s disappointment at the failure of his reforms to be effectively ‘bedded in’. In chapter 9:38, the people of Israel had made a solemn ‘binding agreement’ expressing their repentance from sin. We find the details in chapter 10 where

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In my last post, I said there were three options for Matthew 24:1-35: it could refer to Christ’s final return, it could be talking about the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD, or it could be discussing the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ. I said I swung between option 2 and 3: the temple destruction and Christ’s death. But even as I was preaching, I was conscious that I had dismissed the connection of earlier sections of the chapter with the second coming of Christ too easily.

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A few weeks ago, I was preaching through Matthew’s Gospel and got to the apocalyptic material in chapter 24 and following. In the first week I preached on Matthew 24:1-35. The context is Jesus’ prediction of the temple’s destruction (vv. 1-2). In response, the disciples raise a question of timing concerning three matters (which were, presumably, linked in their minds): “Tell us, when will this [i.e. every temple stone being cast down] happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (NIV). The section mentions a couple of other key events: verse 15’s abomination that causes desolation standing in the holy place and verse 30’s Son of Man coming on the clouds with great power. The big question is what does this chapter refers to? In particular, what event does the coming of the Son of Man refer to? There are three main options:

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One of the most helpful things I learned from my history teachers at school was this: read the primary documents!

One online university library helpfully defines primary documents (or sources) as:

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Today we interview Sola Panellist Gavin Perkins.

Gavin, how did you come to Christ?

From my point of view, although I attended Sunday school as a kid, by the middle of high school I had managed to wangle my way out of that. At the age of about 14, a group of my surfing friends were slowly infiltrated by people who not only went to church but actually seemed to believe that Jesus was alive and that he mattered. Slowly that group of friends—including me—came to believe the same thing.

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Recently, I wrote about the Easter Message of the Dean of St George’s Anglican Cathedral in Perth, in which he strongly asserted that the resurrection of Christ need not be understood as physical. I reported that I’d asked the Archbishop of Perth whether this was an acceptable view for a senior Anglican clergyman.

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