Category Archives: Uncategorized

“God makes our forward momentum his business. That’s why so much of Scripture is dedicated to getting us walking, keeping us moving, and ensuring that we finish our course. But if God truly desires our forward momentum, why does it sometimes feel like I’m banging my glass head against a stone wall? My longings for impact are confusing and fragile; I just don’t know what I should do. Or maybe I’m not the ambitious type. I hunger for nothing more than a good magazine and a peaceful place to read it.God has an agenda: it’s to change us into the image of his Son. And one way he brings about this change is through our dreams and ambitions. God works in us through that to which we aspire.Sometimes God brings our dreams to life; sometimes he doesn’t. But how we respond to his work becomes an important intersection for change in our lives. As we cooperate with him, we discover that it’s not ultimately about nailing the promotion,or raising well‐behaved kids, or wining the Daytona 500 – as good as all those things may be. It’s about something much bigger: how I become like Christ while I pursue those dreams.Do you understand your relationship with God that way? He doesn’t need us to get things done, but he delights to use us, so he must shape us for his service. That’s exactly what creates godly ambition – the activity of God in us and around us to ultimately work through us.”Dave Harvey, Rescuing Ambition (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 90‐1.

Let Me Introduce You – Q1 from St Pauls Castle Hill on Vimeo.

“Western cultures are notriously averse to pain and tragedy. We spend an extraordinary amount of money and effort seeking to insulate ourselves against life’s vicissitudes. All kinds of precautions are taken to ensure the maximal safety of the environments we must inhabit – our homes, our worksplaces, our schools, our social space, our transport, our public places – and, just about every type of insurance one could dream of. We do not want sorrow to knock at our doors and, when it does, we do not know what to do with it. Our default mode is to keep it out of sight and pretend that it is not there.

Unlike our Victorian forebears, we are no longer shy about sex, and we have innumerable ways to speak about sexual intercourse but we are hopelessly lost for words when confronted with grief and death. We don’t know what to do, where to look, what to say. Increasingly we lack the social practices, word, and concepts necessary to grasp our pain bu the horns and stare it in the face. We have been robbed of a vocabulary of grief, and we suffer for it. The book of Lamentations accosts us by the wayside as a stranger who offers us an unasked-for, unwanted, and yet priceless gift – the poetry of pain. We would be wise to pay attention.”

Robin A. Parry, Lamentations (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 2010), 1.

Check out this great advice on busting your idols day to day:

Reformissionary: Tim Keller on Preaching to Himself

Looking forward to the debut album from these guys.

I have heard Con Campbell play live a number of times, and it always fills my heart with joy, as well as blowing my mind.

Check out their website here: http://www.transitjazz.com

On Sunday at St Paul’s we finished a 5 week series of talks on big questions that Christianity must answer:

1. Does God exist?

2. Is the Bible reliable?

3. Is Jesus really alive?

4. Is Jesus the only way?

5. Is Jesus really worth it?

Is was priviliged enough to speak on 3,4, and 5. The talks are on the St Pauls website now.

In my answer to question 5, I looked at whether the benefits of entrusting your life to Jesus outweigh the costs. Someone asked me if I would post the list of 10 benefits that I mentioned. I said, ‘Sure!’

I will post them in a series of 5, 2 each time. Here are the first 2.

Benefit #1: Life

Before attaching our lives to Jesus, we are dead in God’s eyes. Whether we know it, or feel it, it is true. We are spiritually dead in God’s eyes without Jesus, and at high risk of staying that way for eternity.

But in Jesus, we are raised up from that death, to everlasting spiritual life. Ephesians 2:4-5:

But because of his great love for us, , God who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved.

Benefit #2: Cleansing

Not only do we have a change in our unseen status before God; we also have a tangible break with our past. All the words we have fired off that have hurt; the things we have done that we regret; the things that have been done or said to us – we carry these around with us like filthy stained undergarments. No matter what sort of suit we put oer the top, we carry the stain close to us as a heavey burden.

But Jesus offers us cleansing; Revelation 7:9-14:

After this I looked and there before me was the great multitude that noone could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.

Then one of the elders asked me, ‘These in white robes – who are they, and where di they come from?’

I answered, ‘Sir, you know.’

And he said, ‘These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’ (that is, Jesus).