Author Archives: The Briefing
Preaching hell to depressed teens
Up front
I’ve been thinking about hell quite a bit recently—not because I enjoy it, because I’m obsessed with morbid subjects or because I’m reading Peter Bolt’s Living with the Underworld. I’ve been thinking about it because I was warned recently that we should beware of how we teach the subject of ‘hell’ and God’s wrath to teenagers. Many of them, so the argument goes, are prone to low self-esteem, depression and suicidal thoughts. They have no trouble believing that they are sinners, and that God is ‘mad’ at them. So we should beware of manipulating their feelings with lurid and excessive depictions of hell, which would compound their misery rather than helping them to understand God’s grace and love. In addition, the New Testament’s way is not to subject already shamed individuals to dreadful and imaginative descriptions of God’s wrath. (more…)
Wreck-conciliation or reconciliation?
Up front
Reconciliation is a hot topic. It always has been and it always will be. In the first century, Paul wrote about reconciling Jews and Gentiles (Eph 2:11-22). In the 20th-century, the nation of South Africa created the ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ to deal with the atrocities of apartheid. The Australian Government is only now ‘reconciling’ with the indigenous population. (more…)
Can Western Christians even think ethically any more?
Up front
To escape from drowning, you have to swim in what you are swallowing. Churches in the West are drowning in western values, drinking deeply without being able to swim in the muck they are drinking, let alone being able to escape. (more…)
Nodding off
Up front
There is a famous Australian television commercial which features a man in a nightclub. The punchline of the ad is “I’m so cool, I dance on the inside”. In the weeks and months following, this saying was adopted for all kinds of situations—for example, “I’m so cool, I hug on the inside”. (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…)
Ministry mind shifts
If we are going to develop people-focused ministries, certain shifts in our thinking must occur. The fundamental shift consists of moving away from an institutional view of gospel ministry towards a personal view of gospel ministry. We need to stop thinking how to build ministry around structures and start thinking about how to build ministry around people. (more…)
Duty first
Men: Firing Through All of Life
Al Stewart
Blue Bottle Books, Sydney, 2007, 168pp.
Available for ordering from Moore Books
02 9577 9966 (more…)
The Word Became Flesh
Review
The Word Became Flesh: Evangelicals and the incarnation
Edited by David Peterson
Paternoster Press, Carlisle, 2003, 216pp.
Available for ordering from Moore Books (more…)
The slow death of congregational singing
Interchange
iPod, iSermon, iRighteous?
“I was listening to a talk by Mark Driscoll the other day, and he said…” In my last two years of working with a congregation of mostly university students and young workers, I have lost count of the number of times I have heard this kind of statement. It represents an increasing trend among Christians — a trend that will only grow as our use of technology continues to expand. Whereas once I had to wait several years for a noted overseas Bible teacher to come to town and preach the word (say at a Katoomba convention), now the wonders of technology mean that, with a few clicks of the mouse, I can have a daily diet of sermons by about anyone from just about anywhere in the world: Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Mark Dever, John Stott, Don Carson, and so on. And I can listen to them not just while I’m sitting at my computer, but while I’m running, driving or sitting on the train. (more…)
Nothing in my hand I bring: Ray Galea talks to Peter Hastie
Ray Galea is an Anglican minister who leads the pastoral team at St Alban’s Multicultural Bible Ministry at Rooty Hill in western Sydney. His special brief is to work cross-culturally among second-generation Mediterranean and Middle Eastern people in the region.
Doing good: The shape of the Christian life (Part 2): Why we can
Doing good: The shape of the Christian life (Part 3): What it looks like
A reminder
People who are on slippery slopes don’t like slippery slope arguments.
The slippery slope argument says that once you allow ‘A’, you are at the top of a slippery slope which will sloppily and slippily carry you down the slidy thing you are on to ‘Z’. The people who are heading in the direction of ‘Z’ tend not to like being told they’re heading that way, presumably because they are ‘A’-type people.