There’s no doubt about it: this 21st birthday Briefing has put me in a nostalgic frame of mind. I’m finding myself daydreaming about the late 80s when New Zealand wore beige and brown body shirts in one day cricket, when U2 was a young, emerging supergroup, and when the book to give away to a non-Christian friend was John Chapman’s bestselling A Fresh Start. (more…)
Category Archives: Godliness
Review: “Living the Cross Centered Life”
Review
Living the Cross Centered Life: Keeping the gospel the main thing
CJ Mahaney
Multnomah, Sisters, 2006. 176pp.
Is there anything more important than the cross of Christ? Each of the Gospels centres on Jesus’ journey to the cross. Jesus’ wonderful mission statement in Mark 10:45 describes the goal of his ministry as the giving of his life as “a ransom for many”. The Apostle Paul resolved to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Cor 2:2). The cross is the centre of God’s plan for humanity. (more…)
Appreciation and approval
Life
From as far back as I can remember, I’ve been the kind of person who feels a strong desire to please people. I want their approval and praise for the things I do. Sometimes I’ve even wondered if I have a kind of addiction to the brain chemicals that come with receiving affirmation and acclaim! Mark Twain famously said that he could “live for two months on a good compliment”; I’m not sure I could last that long, but I can certainly relate to the sentiment. (more…)
Is it easy to love our neighbours?
Everyday Ministry
We’ve been reading the Sermon on the Mount around the dinner table over the last week or so, and it’s made for great discussion and interesting questions. (“Dad, why would someone want my tooth?”) A couple of nights ago, we were talking about the issues Jesus raises concerning loving your neighbours and praying for those who persecute you. The discussion went something like this:
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Do not judge!
Life
What do you think is the best known verse in the Bible? Without a second thought, most of us would say John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”. Almost every Christian knows this verse. There are organizations named after it. In the 1980s, there was a man named Rollen Stewart (aka Rainbow Man) who donned a rainbow wig, wrote the verse on a sign and held it up at various prominent American sporting events. (more…)
‘Just how sovereign is God?’ and ‘Doing little things well’
Interchange
A couple of things ‘got me started’ in Up Front (January 2009). Jean Williams (‘Just how sovereign is God?’) wrote a timely reminder of how vital it is to immerse oneself in the knowledge that God is sovereign, and I agree with most of what was written. I did find myself wondering, however, if there was a more nuanced way of understanding God’s sovereignty over the ‘big history’ events and over “the small, everyday occurrences of life”. God’s ultimate purposes cannot be thwarted, but God’s sovereignty does not necessarily mean that every event in our lives is pre-ordained (as seems to be suggested by the quote from Spurgeon with which the article begins). God’s sovereignty does mean, however, that he is able to work all things together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose (Rom 8:28). This applies equally to the ‘big’ and the ‘little’ things of life. Sometimes we mess up: we sin, we fall short, we rebel against his will, we find ourselves in a quandary, or out of fuel miles from a petrol station with young children in the car. We become ill (whether from a cold or cancer). Tragedy strikes. I take comfort not in knowing that God necessarily meant such things to be, but that he is able to make even these things work together for his glory and my eternal good. (more…)
Fiery and sharp images of hell
Life
The Bible is full of horrifying and lurid images of what divine judgement will be like. So Psalm 21, for example, begins innocuously enough. If, like me, you are a Psalm skimmer-overer, you will have skimmed this one many times without noticing it properly, lying as it does in the rainshadow of the majestic Psalm 22 and the world-famous Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my Shepherd”). The Psalmist writes:
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Fallen short
Thought
Psalm 19 is famous and rightly so:
The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
Love and the cost of change
Life
There’s a saying in corporate life that goes “change will only happen if the perceived benefit is greater than the perceived cost”. Like most sayings, it makes sense; you’ll only do something new if you think the effort is worth it. (more…)
The gospel and the quiet time
Life
Many years ago now I heard a sermon on Matthew 6—the section where Jesus tells his disciples to pray behind locked doors to ensure that they pray to God and not to men. It was, in many ways, an unremarkable sermon. It was clear, faithful and challenging, like much of the preaching that, in God’s kindness, I get to hear. But, like most sermons, it was destined for the dustbin of my mind. Except for one thing: it was the first time I had ever heard a preacher ask, “Have your deeds of righteousness become so secret that not even God can see them?” The question stopped me in my tracks. (more…)
Doing little things well
Up front
Recently I have observed this phenomenon: there is an inverse relationship between dreaming great visions and faithfulness in the little things. The people who have the grandest, most sweeping plans and strategies for the future are likely to be unreliable and untrustworthy in the smaller, short-term tasks and responsibilities. They talk about the great things they want to achieve for God in the years to come, but right now they tend to drop the ball in significant ways. (more…)
Virtues we dislike: dignity
Up front, Sola Panel
We shouldn’t be shocked when non-Christians find Christian virtues out of date, incomprehensible or just plain hateful. The natural person, Paul reminds us, “does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him” (1 Cor 2:14). (more…)
Fire in the bones: Truly meek
Then let me go further; the man who is meek is not even sensitive about himself. He is not always watching himself and his own interests. He is not always on the defensive. We all know about this, do we not? Is it not one of the greatest curses in life as a result of the fall—this sensitivity about self? We spend the whole of our lives watching ourselves. But when a man becomes meek he has finished with all that; he no longer worries about himself and what other people say. To be truly meek means we no longer protect ourselves, because we see there is nothing worth defending. So we are not on the defensive; all that is gone. The man who is truly meek never pities himself, he is never sorry for himself. He never talks to himself and says, ‘You are having a hard time, how unkind these people are not to understand you’. He never thinks: ‘How wonderful I really am, if only other people gave me a chance.’ Self-pity! What hours and years we waste in this! But the man who has become meek has finished with all that. To be meek, in other words, means that you have finished with yourself altogether, and you come to see you have no rights or deserts at all. You come to realize that nobody can harm you. John Bunyan puts it perfectly. ‘He that is down need fear no fall.’ When a man truly sees himself, he knows nobody can say anything about him that is too bad. You need not worry about what men may say or do; you know you deserve it all and more. Once again, therefore, I would define meekness like this. The man who is truly meek is the one who is amazed that God and man can think of him as well as they do and treat him as well as they do. That, it seems to me, is its essential quality.
From D Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount Vol. 1 (Matthew 5:1-48), Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1971, pp. 57-8. Originally published by Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester, 1959-60. Used with kind permission from Inter-Varsity Press. (more…)
Learning to drive
Couldn't Help Noticing
Chocolate and chips
Couldn't Help Noticing, Life, Sola Panel
If my kids were given the run of the place and were allowed to set the rules, what would their day look like? Apart from the absence of school, I’m guessing their activities would involve a copious diet of computer gaming, MSN (if you don’t know what this is, ask someone under 20), music downloads, TV, chocolate and chips.