Dealing with Pornography

Here's some extremely helpful material in the struggle to avoid and be freed from the tyranny and sin of using pornography. Simply titled Breaking Pornography Addiction Part 1 and Breaking Pornography Addiction Part 2, David Powlison offers plenty of Gospel help and hope. This is the sort of thing worth reading over and then meeting up with a friend to talk over.

Three books to change your world

With the year quickly coming to a close I’d like to recommend three books which tie in with what we’ve been looking at recently in church.

You Can Change – by Tim Chester Don’t be fooled by the title, this is not a book that gives you a quick 5 step program to becoming the world’s happiest and most successful person. It’s much better than that. This book is about transformation of sinful behaviour and negative emotion through the wonder of the Gospel. Chester is so helpful in this book because he gets you to think about what’s underneath and driving sinful behaviour, and then showing how powerful and fulfilling Christ is to win us over to change. He even suggests as you read through the book you pick out an area of your life that you know is a problem and then he workshops that area right through the book…..it’s extremely helpful. He gets far beyond the guilt and shame that are so ineffective in seeing us live differently and at the same time he so helpfully shows how good Jesus really is so you wan to change.

So forget your new years resolutions….this book, if read and understood will bring great blessing for you and others.

Breaking the Idols of your Heart – by Dan B. Allender & Tremper Longman III

This book is different because each chapter starts with a well written fictional scenario and story which the second half of the chapter then analyses. The story continues to build as the authors look at issues of power, relationships, pleasure etc. Allender is the story teller, and Tremper is the theologian and it works really well. It deals with very believable situations for both men and women in their work, marriage and social settings and faithfully exposes what is going on largely through teaching from the book of Ecclesiastes. It’s very gospel focussed and will get you thinking more deeply about the why of your worries and stresses and distraction in life.

Counterfeit Gods – By Timothy Keller

It’s hard to be disappointed by anything Keller has written. He’s so good at nailing our problem and revealing the wonder of the solution in Jesus. If you love quotes, there are scores of them here that bolster his thesis that our great problems and our sinful behaviours are driven by the conveyor belt of idolatry which resides in our hearts which only Jesus can replace. Keller is anti-moralistic and anti-religious because he is so gospel focussed. He really does believe that Jesus is better than anything this world can ever offer and your heart rejoices as to why as you read through these chapters.

Hear about it from the author here.

Hosea and the shocking love of God

Hosea…a desperately loving man during desperately evil times.

A few things stand out for me from our recent series.

1. Hosea’s amazing willingness to obey God.

Chapters 1-3 are a devastating and astonishing read. Would you do what this man was prepared to do? Could you find it in your heart to love like this and go through this?

2. How easily we forget God.

In chapter 4:1-3 Hosea writes,

‘Hear the word of the LORD, O children of Israel, for the LORD has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or steadfast love, and no knowledge of God in the land.’ (See also 4:6,14)

How on earth could a nation steeped in the most amazing history plummet to the point of forgetting their God? It’s not that they couldn’t recite their salvation story, it’s not that they believed those things didn’t happen. It’s that their heart moved from trusting and loving their God, to presuming and using him. And then things got very ugly.

3. How idols deceive and fill our hearts. The Puritans of old would speak of the human heart as a factory of idolatry. I think they read and knew Hosea. Israel should have been a great crucible for godliness and transformation, instead the very opposite was the reality. Quite simply my heart on it’s own will inevitably tend to gravitate in trust and hope to all the wrong things. I’ll yearn for all God’s good gifts, but seek it not from God, nor via his ways….but others. Without God doing something to change this, to awaken me, I will not be able to change.

4. How committed God is to us. The faithlessness of Gomer and Israel is contrasted so blatantly with the utter faithfulness of God. He is willing to take his wayward people back (who will not come) because he is committed to fulfilling his promises. Even though Hosea’s generation won’t return, there will be those who will in the future. God looks forward in love and commitment…and we are the ones who benefit.

5. How God’s justice and mercy meet. This is a huge question left unanswered in Hosea (and indeed in the whole Old Testament). How can mercy and judgement both be done? The price of forgiveness always means the one forgiving has to absorb hurt and pain. Hosea learnt this, but was moved to do it because he knew God in his tenderness and compassion was to be the very model of this. Jesus of course resolves the great question for his Cross is the astonishing collision of both justice and mercy where both are upheld perfectly.

6. How shocking God’s love is. The depth of emotion is so striking in Hosea. Yes God is angry and outraged at sin, it will be punished, and yet at the same time he is moved with warmth and tenderness, compassion and love. The depth of feeling highlight the significance of the action that will follow. If Hosea will take back and win back his adulterous wife, what will that look like as God takes back and wins back his wayward people. The turmoil of emotion that comes out especially in chapter 11 is understood once we see how the cross would be the way and means of drawing his people back.

7. How we need to celebrate our God. Hosea, the prophets are not all doom and gloom. A rich picture of future blessing and hope drives them on. Hosea celebrates even while for so long he languishes as God’s goodness and glory is so misconstrued and forgotten. But the day will come when it will be experienced and known again, God himself will see to it. Hope like this is so important because it helps us not hope in hopeless things….like idols. Surely we who are the beneficiaries of his amazing grace and love in Jesus have everything to celebrate in. A people who celebrate and live out the goodness of God are far less likely to wander to other things. How Hosea longed for that day. His generation did not share his longing nor did they see it. How kind God has been to us, to draw us to Jesus, the one Hosea longed for.

Friends don’t easily or quickly forget this book of Hosea. It shows us things about our God in ways that are unlike the rest of the Scriptures while being consistent with the rest of the Scriptures. Hosea draws us to our knees to Christ in humbleness and joy. Please keep reading it in the future, perhaps at times on your knees, because humbleness and joy is surely the response to God’s shocking love for us.

NTE 09

For those at Uni I hope you're considering getting along to NTE in December. The conference has moved to Exhibition Park in Canberra (EPIC) and will be an amazing 5 days. Head here to get registered.

Crossroads in Garema Place

Many thanks to those who put so much effort into this event. The rain stopped at just the right moment to make it possible and given the conditions of the afternoon and early evening, I was surprised by how many people showed up.

For those of you who made it along, feel free to share a thought or two...or a highlight.

Getting the right perspective

This really is very clever...and very true.

Perspectives from Peacemaker Ministries on Vimeo.

New video for CitC

Many thanks to Dean Halpin for putting this together.
Feel free to share it. To friends who want to know a bit about church and especially to people you know of who are moving to Canberra next year.

We'll keep it on the blog and website.

Invitation to Crossroads in the City from Crossroads in the City on Vimeo.

John Calvin: A heart for devotion, doctrine and doxology

In the months leading up to 10 July 2009, any casual reader of Christian blogs would have had to have typed the keywords 'Calvin' and '500' into their parental control software to not know that John Calvin’s 500th birthday was approaching.

500 years on, Calvin is still read, argued over and often vilified.

Yes, Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion still stands up today as arguably the summary of the biblical Christian faith. Yes, he was a reformer of enormous influence – in the church, in civics and in science. But, I hear you say, wasn’t Calvin a harsh, authoritarian pointy‑head with a pointy beard? Wasn’t he, according to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, the ‘unopposed dictator of Geneva’? And wasn’t he the champion of the doctrine of predestination, which led to the emergence of the movement that stopped doing evangelism (often labelled ‘hyper‑Calvinism)?

Calvin evokes powerful images, most of these negative.

So given the online excitement about his 500th, I made it my personal project as a 20‑something, mere layperson to meet the man behind the stigma. I started by reading a number of papers and journal articles.

Then, at about the same time I discovered online shopping. So the first thing I did was to buy the Institutes. To accompany the Institutes, I bought a book called John Calvin: A heart for devotion, doctrine & doxology – based on endorsements from two of my favourite authors D A Carson and David F Wells.

A heart for devotion, doctrine & doxology gives an overview of the life, work and teaching of Calvin. Pitched at the ordinary reader, it consists of 19 short essays by a mainly North American all-star cast of scholars and pastors. Far from being dry, the book set out to capture the heart of Calvin through his life and his writings. The book can be broadly split into two parts.

Calvin's life and work

The first half of the book (chapters two to eight) is about Calvin’s life and work. The picture portrayed is that of a reformer, churchman, preacher, counsellor and prolific writer who made a difference. While it has been widely argued that Calvin played a pivotal role in transforming western society, his deepest imperative was to transform believers to conform their lives and minds to Scripture.

To this end he worked tirelessly, motivated by a single-minded service to the biblical God. Calvin’s motto Cor meum tibi offero Domine prompte et sincere was genuine. Freely translated, the motto reads: 'My heart for your cause I offer, my Lord, promptly and sincerely.'

For this cause, Calvin worked himself at a self‑destructing rate. Stories of him lecturing students from his deathbed and working through the pain of a stone in the urinary tract the size of a hazelnut are legendary. When he was seriously ill and confined to bed, his friends urged him to rest, but he replied, “Would you that the Lord, when He comes, find me idle?” He is also portrayed as a man gifted with a pastoral heart. Excerpts from his letter consoling a grieving father were particularly moving, powerfully demonstrating that doctrine and love were inseparable.

One thing about his ministry particularly stood out for me. Rather than stifling evangelism, Calvin’s ministry inspired generations of evangelists and apologists. He set up schools in Geneva which trained up legions of pastor and evangelists.

Many of these workers subsequently returned to France and were persecuted and martyred. Many of them were killed in the massacres of St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, where Protestants in France were targeted and slaughtered following the assassination of the French Calvinist political leadership. The death toll relating to these massacres has been estimated at around 3000 in the provinces and 2000-4000 in Paris[1], although there are claims that these estimates are conservative.

Further, many of the great evangelists in the centuries to follow were avowed Calvinists. Just for starters, think Spurgeon, George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. The heroes of the faith that I have admired from my formative years — Messrs Jensen, Packer and Carson — all teach with a heavy ‘Reformed’ flavour (in the Calvin sense of the word).

Two observations about his teaching

The second part of the book seeks to grapple with his key teachings – drawing extensively from the Institutes and his commentaries. This section starts with one essay on Christ as the supreme King, Prophet and Priest followed by one on the work of the Spirit. Then there are five chapters that correspond to the ‘five points’: Man’s Radical Corruption, Election and Reprobation, Redemption Defined, Transforming Grace, and A Certain Inheritance. Finishing up are chapters on our union with Christ, justification, Christian life, and prayer.

The first thing that was immediately apparent was that Calvin’s work was far richer than the ‘five points’, often represented by the TULIP acronym. The five points, while attributed to Calvin, was not a doctrine summary championed by Calvin himself. As such, to focus solely on the five points oversimplifies Calvin, wherever you may stand on the five-point spectrum. As the author of chapter one puts it, ever the diplomat, ‘there are many self-proclaimed Calvinists whose Calvinism runs no deeper than the five points’:

They have perhaps found themselves prancing gleefully amid a valley of bright red tulips, but have not lifted their heads to behold the lush green forests and glorious mountains all around them. (p4)

The second observation was that Calvin was wholly and fundamentally established in the Scriptures. His imperative was not to, in technical terms, ‘make stuff up’.

As James Montgomery Boice points out, ‘Calvin had no weapon but the Bible’. Unlike many today, Calvin did not use the pulpit or his writings as a platform to unload a captivating story, a personal inspiration or his most recent liver shiver. Rather, consistent with the Reformation war-cry ad fontes (‘to the sources’), he urges:

Let us not take it into our heads either to seek out God anywhere else than his Sacred Word, or to think anything of him that is not prompted by his Word, or to speak anything that is not taken from that Word. (Institutes 1.13.21)

The foundation of Calvin’s 'Calvinism' was threefold: the heart’s devotion to the biblical God, the mind’s pursuit of the biblical doctrine of God, and the entire being’s surrender to the praise of the biblical God. Calvin’s legacy was a Bible-shaped pattern of thinking that inevitably led to a Christ-centred, Spirit‑armed, God-hungering, gospel‑driven life.

A heart for devotion, doctrine & doxology was a refreshing and enjoyable read. I was struck by the humility of the man and it motivated me to read more of his writings. However, I found the endnotes at the end of each chapter annoying (one chapter had more than 100). I would have preferred footnotes. Also, I would have liked to have seen the book do more to critique the parts of Calvin’s writings which, with the benefit of hindsight, showed his weaknesses – in particular his polarisations and intolerances about some of his contemporaries.

What are we to make of Calvin on his 500th birthday?

Whatever you might think of Calvin let me suggest that you follow the Reformation war cry – ‘to the sources!’ Be very careful reacting to cardboard cutouts. Download the Institutes. Buy the book. Either way, get it from the horse’s mouth. As JI Packer put it, ‘the amount of misrepresentation to which Calvin’s theology has been subjected has been enough to prove his doctrine of total depravity several times over!’

Rather than responding to the caricature, read Calvin for yourself and apply the biblical blowtorch. I know Calvin would have.

In him
Tim Wong

[1] Tulchin A (2006) ‘The Michelade in Nîmes, 1567’, French Historical Studies, 29(1); Knecht RJ (1996) The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France, 366

Date with Destiny - Steelo's book for you!

Here's a shameless plug for Dave Steel's book on relationships Date with Destiny.

With so much confusion and so many unhelpful models of how people can and should connect together this is such a wise and helpful book to have. It's also very real and you'll enjoy Steelo's dry wit all the way through.

There'll be things in here you probably never would have thought about (I hadn't) and if people took this book seriously much heartache, frustration, hurt and time wasting will be avoided when it comes to connecting with the opposite sex. You'll also love the 'choose your own adventure' options and the really helpful questions to be asking yourself.

Sometimes people actually tell me that they are keen to start a friendship/relationship with someone. The first thing I do is tell them to read this. But even for those in our midst who are not looking to get 'involved' with someone at the moment, this will be so helpful for you.

Is this one of these plugs where you basically say the book is for everyone? For $5...you bet!

And hey, it's by our very own Steelo....so spread the word and may God revolutionize the way we think about this whole area.

Directions to the Coombs Lecture Centre

On September 6, 13 & 20 CitC will be meeting in the Coombs Lecture Centre.
Check out the directions...

Untitled from Crossroads in the City on Vimeo.