I met Lewis in 2001 when I was a university student. I was sitting in one of the common eating areas. Exams were over and it was the last day of semester. He approached me with a smile, and asked me if I would like to talk about Christianity. People had asked me before, but I’d been busy then. However, since classes were over, I said yes. (more…)
Author Archives: The Briefing
Sloth: Is it our problem?
Out of all the seven deadly sins, we may think that sloth is the least concerning for us. But, as Ben Underwood shows, our busyness and toil is just evidence we’re caught within sloth’s grip.
At the outset of a sermon series on the seven deadly sins, I asked people to choose the two deadly sins they thought hampered them most. Of the seven—greed, anger, pride, gluttony, lust, sloth and envy—sloth came in dead last, receiving only one vote. Where I am, people don’t seem to have problem with sloth or ‘under-working’. They don’t believe there’s nothing like sitting in the sun on a Tuesday afternoon; rather, they think there’s nothing like working till 11pm on a Tuesday night, for that is what they often do. (more…)
Contextualization vs. chameleonization
Up front
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about contextualization—not so much the contextualization of language, but the contextualization of lifestyle: becoming “all things to all people” (1 Cor 9:22). (more…)
What kind of discussion is this?
Up front
I picked up and modified this helpful rubric:
- Fight for what is right (truth).
- Argue for what will work (tactics).
- Keep quiet about everything else (preference).
Fight for the God-given biblical principles, argue for how to put them into practice, and just leave all the personality or preference issues up to each person to work out for themselves. I can hesitate on preference—in a meeting, I can even back down on my view of tactics—but I must never back down on truth. (more…)
Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor
Review
Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson
DA Carson
Crossway, Wheaton,
2008, 160pp.
Available from Moore Books (more…)
Miraculous godliness
Up front
I was part of a group recently when a wonderful, faithful, godly older pastor told us about something that had happened in his church. During an important public meeting, a man had risen to his feet and started shouting abuse at him. It was a tirade full of invective and malice and hatred. How would you have responded? (more…)
Water
Up front
Some symbols are hard to understand and some are arbitrary, but the symbol of water has immediate and obvious impact—especially to a dry continent like Australia. It works as a symbol because it creates the reality that it symbolizes. (more…)
The nuts and bolts of forgiveness
Life
How do you know you have forgiven someone? How can you be certain that you’ve forgiven someone who has wronged you? (more…)
No hope without character
Life
I was in church on Sunday morning, listening to a sermon on Romans 5. In spite of having read it hundreds of times in my life, I was struck by my lack of understanding. Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character and character produces hope (Rom 5:3-4). Why have I never thought about how those things fit into the context of Paul’s argument in this chapter?
Conversion by law
Life
Leviticus, one of the Old Testament books of God’s law, seems, for some reason, to be the target for particular mockery both by non-Christians (who will invariably allude to the silliness of the food laws as they attempt to satirize its opposition to homosexual practice) and even some Christians (who will use it to empathize with some who feel that Bible reading is boring).
But Dave Bish over at the Blue Fish project reminded me of the wonderful story of how Charles Simeon, uber-preacher of Cambridge University during the late 18th and early 19th century, became a Christian:
Apostasy lit, non-lit and not-yet-lit
Everyday Ministry
Last December I read an article over at Reformation 21 that was (as they say in current affairs TV) “a story no parent can afford to miss”. It was a brilliant and frightening piece that Stephen Nichols had written about a genre of literature that he had christened (or de-christened!) ‘Apostasy Lit’—“a genre, usually taking the form of a memoir, in which the protagonist reflects on and recants her Christian, usually of the fundamentalist variety, upbringing”.
Jesus IS a Jew
Thought
Is this a modern scandal for Christians—a truth that some find hard to swallow? I don’t mean that that Jesus was a Jew, but that he is one now.
Learning from The Pretenders, or The case for church history, Part 3
Thought
As a middle-aged git, an aspiring baldy man, someone as uncool as you can get and a rock dinosaur, much of my wisdom is drawn from song lyrics from bands that most people under the age of 35 have never heard of. Thus, in this final blog post, I want to make the case for church history with reference to a line in a song by The Pretenders (called, I believe, ‘Hymn to Her’): “Some things change, some stay the same”. It’s not too profound, I guess, but it’s a critical element in the historical task, given that the very possibility of history requires some analogy between the present world in which the historian lives and the past that is being studied. Were they identical, history would be pointless, for the past would be the present; were they utterly different, history would be impossible, for there would be no way of analyzing, categorizing or describing the past. No, for history to be possible, there must be things about my world that are the same as those in the past.
What I learned from the Mormons
Everyday Ministry
My family and I have just returned from two weeks in Utah and Idaho—the areas in the USA (and possibly in the world) with the highest concentration of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons). While their theology is completely graceless and works-based, it was interesting to observe the way they do things. Perhaps there are things we can learn from them.
Sticking it to the man, or The case for church history, Part 2
Thought
It is almost a given today that history is oppressive. That is why there has been so much hoo-ha about how it is taught over the last 30 years. Everybody wants their say: if you’re a woman, you need a woman’s history; if you’re gay, you need a queer history; if you’re black, you need a black history, and so on and so forth. The making of many histories is itself a reflection of the priorities and, on occasion, the pathologies of modern society. How long, one wonders, before we get a history written from the perspective of Frank Sinatra impersonators, ginger haired people and compulsive hand-washers?