Never Yours, Soul
Dear Sin, I thought of not engaging you at all, but decided it would be more profitable to respond—not for your sake, but for mine. It will be refreshing for me to review how wrong you are on every single point.
Dear Sin, I thought of not engaging you at all, but decided it would be more profitable to respond—not for your sake, but for mine. It will be refreshing for me to review how wrong you are on every single point.
See part two of this two-part series on fighting sin here. I just committed a sin. It doesn’t matter what it was. It does matter that I knew it was wicked; tried not to do it, and did it anyway. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t stop myself from doing evil? And how did I get from a place of enjoying God and obeying him, to doing the very thing he hates? It wasn’t the first time I’ve sinned and asked those two questions, and it sure won’t be the last. Perhaps you have asked them too. But...
In May, the temperature in Brisbane was wonderful. You know that sort of weather where the days are warm, bright and you can enjoy the sunshine on your back. The evenings are cool as soon as the sun has gone and you can enjoy snuggling into the doona that’s been sitting at the back of your cupboard over summer. In my experience, living in Brisbane, this gradual temperature change downwards usually becomes noticeable in April. In May, things get a bit cooler and then we reach June, when it is actually cold (yes, I am acclimatised to Brisbane and am not going...
How do you talk about sin? If you want to share the gospel, you need to talk about sin. If you don’t know that you’re a sinner, you won’t know that you need a saviour. You won’t get why you deserve judgment. And you won’t care about repentance. So how do you talk about sin? How do you get someone to realise that they are ‘the bad guy’? Last week, Billie Eilish topped this year’s Triple J’s Hottest 100 with her track “Bad Guy.”[1] The song picks up on the common theme (albeit sarcastically) that being ‘bad’ is cool. Bad...
The question of Jesus temptations has been raised again. It is a complex, but very important area of theology. Here are twelve points to keep in mind about Jesus’ temptations. Thinking about Jesus’ experience of temptation highlights the mystery of his person. Since Jesus is fully God and fully human—and Creator and creature are infinitely different—then there must be mysteries, and even paradoxes in what we affirm about Jesus. We can affirm certain things, as I will here, but we cannot hope to describe Jesus’ inner experience of temptation. The New Testament words translated “tempt” and “temptation” (peirazo/peirasmo) mean test...