Here is a quote from what I was reading on the bus yesterday.

I’m going to get straight to the point: YOU NEED MORE MONEY!

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I’ve appreciated reading the sermons of 19th-century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon over the years, and have quoted him on my blog a number of times (not as much as the Pyromaniacs, but still a bit).

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One of the reasons I so much like Colin Buchanan’s kid’s music is that he clearly agrees with me that no-one is ever too young to grasp the doctrine of the Trinity. My oldest daughter, now nine, is a bit past Colin these days, but my five-year-old and seven-year-old love listening to him. So the other day when our eldest was sick at home, I had the other two in the car and put on Colin’s Follow the Saviour. Track 15 says:

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Here at Matthias Media, we read and recommend the English Standard Version Bible (ESV) as a superior English translation of both Old and New Testaments. So it was with interest and some nervousness that I heard that there is coming, just around the corner now, a new ESV Bible: the ESV Study Bible. It was with interest because, well, it’s interesting; nervousness because Study Bibles, no matter how terrific they are, are the bane of every Bible study leader’s life. When you ask “What does the text say?”, there will always always be one nerdy member of the group who will say, “Well, it says here in the explanatory notes that …”. The faint thumping sound you hear next is me hitting myself upside of the head prior to saying, “Yes, that’s great, and thank you, but WHAT DOES THE TEXT SAY?!?!?”, veins bulging on my neck and eyes popping out of my head. My Bible studies, at least, can be intense affairs.

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To keep the detail of my memory fresh as possible, I got home from church a couple of Sundays ago and headed straight to the computer to update my blog. Here, then, is my quick and dirty summary and quote from Peter Jensen, Archbishop of Sydney, answering a question he was asked at my church about how he became a Christian as a teenager at the 1959 Billy Graham Crusade in Sydney. If you click through, you will see that the very first thing he chose to speak about was the judgement of God!

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It’s funny and not necessarily good how a view can lodge in your head and stay there unchallenged for years, even though you hold other views on the same subject that actually contradict the first view and, unlike the first view, are actually based on evidence.

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The approach of the Beijing Olympics is a worthwhile time to remember the persecution of Christians in China. According to this summary report from Voice of the Martyrs, “There are more Christians in prison in China than any other country in the world”.

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Here’s Acts 11:19-21:

Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Hellenists also, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord.

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A most excellent statement from a seemingly unlikely person, heard this morning. The speaker was a tall, retired man in a suit, addressing a younger bearded man who may or may not have had some religious interest, but who had a great deal to say about the Pope, the Roman Catholic church, and the recent Roman Catholic World Youth Day (WYD). They were talking about the re-enactment of the route to Jesus’ crucifixion that happened as part of the WYD celebrations. The older man, who spoke broken English with a heavy Armenian accent, had this to say about the re-enactment:

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In the most recent paper edition of our diocesan newspaper, Ross Cobb says, “We need to ask if our church music really is contemporary”. Ross is the music director at St Andrew’s Cathedral here in Sydney, and is across any genre you care to throw at him, whether it’s pipe organ or the credibility reducing Burt Bacharach. He says:

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For the last few months, I’ve been catching up weekly with my friend Alex. We meet to pray and read the Bible together, and, like a plague of two Egyptian locusts, to raid the contents of my fridge or the local takeaway (depending where we meet) for something resembling lunch.

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Elsewhere, I’ve described studying Zechariah as a bit like climbing a mountain: a great deal of effort, but well and truly worth it for the extraordinary view of God’s creation, through Jesus Christ. But whereas I thought I was just waxing poetical, Tim McMahon (and since then, other helpful friends) have helped me to see that there really is a mountain right there in the structure of Zechariah. It’s in Zechariah 1:7-6:8, and the best way to understand it is to climb over it!

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Sola panel readers will remember my first post on Zechariah where I expressed a certain degree of anxiety about understanding it, even with the wonderfully worthwhile help of Tim McMahon, whose studies on this book I’ve just been editing. Today, the story continues …

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The Council of Trent is a Roman Catholic Council that met in the middle of the 16th century specifically in order to condemn Protestant teaching on how we get right with God. In particular, they condemned the notion of ‘justification by faith alone’, an idea summarized and taught by Paul’s words in Romans 3:21-26:

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