Articles from our weekly newsletter
Good Friday stands before us a bit of a reality check. Despite all the evidence we in Australia seem to be given to outward displays of optimism about human nature and our abilities which fly in the face of reality. Reinhold Niebuhr remarked many years ago that no amount of contrary evidence seems to disturb humanity’s good opinion of itself. Yet the…
The topic of the humanity of Jesus does not seem to be as hotly contested as his deity does. I guess at a glance it seems self evident that Jesus was human and our society today spends most of its time trying to reduce God to nothing more than ‘a man’ and man to nothing less than ‘a god’. But this has…
Last week I spent a short time looking at the Biblical texts for the divinity of Jesus … that Jesus is ‘the Son of God’ or as John 1:14 puts it, “The Word (God) became flesh and dwelt among us”. I wanted us this week to do some thinking about what the implications of this are for us today. Firstly we can…
As we look at the gospel of John I thought it would be a good idea to give us some biblical references that demonstrate the Jesus is fully God (100%) and then go on to show how the scriptures show that he is fully man (100%). I am not worried about this task but I have around 500 words to do it…
I have read that one of our Federal Government Senators said, “What’s found in the rubbish bins of a society will tell a telling story of that society”. As they unpacked the bin of our society there would be lots of packaging that shows our affluence. Wasted food stuffs that betray our abundance and fussiness…and so on. But what would they make…
In Galatians 5 we read what the spiritual life of a follower of Jesus will look like. In Gal 5:16 there is the command to “walk/live by the Spirit”. This is not something that we do from time to time – we are commanded to keep on doing it… in fact it is to be our ongoing experience as God’s people. The…
In Romans 8 there is an extensive piece of scripture that deals with the person and work of the Holy Spirit. There is lots of great stuff in this chapter but I wanted us to look at Romans 8 to discover 6 characteristics of someone who is led by the Spirit. The spiritual life is intimately related to the saving work of…
In the New Testament being spiritual is all about being indwelt by the Spirit of God. So from a biblical point of view only those people who have the Spirit can really be described as spiritual. Thus the outworking of the Spirit in the lives of followers of Jesus is what could be referred to as ‘biblical spirituality’. And yet are all…
So much of today’s “Christian spirituality” is mystical in essence and whilst we do not have the time to delve into this in detail the Christian mystic’s ‘search for the spiritual’ often contradicts what the Bible says true spirituality is all about. Let me give you just one example. Brother Lawrence the author of “The practice of the presence of God” says…
Maybe in your yearning for the spiritual you are driven by the thirst for experience. Sadly many forms of spirituality that ‘thirst for experience’ hold any experience as ultimate. Thus experience because authoritative in their quest for spirituality. Of course there is nothing wrong with thirsting for experience in your relationship with God. The phenomenal growth of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements…
