Not long after we moved to Narrabri, a town of 7000 people in the wheat belt of Eastern Australia, the Lord started talking to us about a “new thing” that He wanted to do with us in this place. We weren’t sure what this new thing was, but in 1996, we stepped out in faith and left our denomination to start New Life Christian Fellowship.
About that time, I read Ralph Neighbour’s book, “Where Do We Go From Here?” which documents in great detail the decline of the evangelical churches in the USA since the glory days of the 1950’s. That trend has only increased into the current century, as leaders have recognised that a whole generation has left the church.
This decline has also been felt in Australia, perhaps more so. Since I became a christian in 1976, churches generally have lost their influence in the community and many people are suspicious, even hostile, towards any expression of christian faith.
Ralph goes on to describe the new- old cell church paradigm for churches that was far more effective than the Program Based Design. While PBD churches add never-ending programs to meet the expressed needs of special groups in the church, the cell church disciples everybody in small groups designed to grow disciples and reach out to the local neighbourhood.
In the traditional style of church, Bible Studies were optional extras for the committed members, but in the cell church the cell was the primary expression of the church. Later on, Ralph would coin the phrase “Christ’s Basic Bodies” to describe the primacy of cell groups.
This description of cell church hit me as a revelation of what Jesus intended the church to be. I was so excited to be planting a church at the same time that I was seeing what we needed to do.
Over the last 24 years I have devoted my time and energy as a Pastor to encouraging my cell leaders and equipping them for their task. Of course we gather on Sunday morning for worship and preaching of the word, but my thoughts are always about growing our cell groups. At times it has been exhilarating, at other times disappointing. Regardless of my feeling at the time, we know this is the path God has set for us.
When we started out, I believed that we would eventually grow to be a church of 1000 people. When I prayed into that, I would envisage a large auditorium filled with a huge crowd of people. Now I see 100 cell groups spread across the town and the surrounding farm lands, shining the light of Christ into the darkness.
Following a television promotion some years ago, our town was crowned “The Sportiest Town in Australia,” but by God’s grace I hope that one day it will be “The Godliest Town in Australia” as our cell groups take seriously the commission to make disciples.
The Left absolutely loathe former PM Tony Abbott, even years after he left office.
So no surprise that former low achieving NSW Premier and current non-achieving Senator Kristina Kennealy accused him of *shock* riding his bike in the Northern Beaches area of Sydney, the heart of the current coronavirus lockdown.
Naturally this accusation has been aired in all the mainstream media. Naturally the Police investigated the claim. Naturally the claim was half true- Tony did ride his bike, but that is allowed in the current regulations.
If this sort of nonsense is the best the Federal Labor Party can come up with, they don’t deserve a single vote at any election.
For those who are interested in my fish- buying exploits, the first photo below is the one I bought from Tamworth last week, flame wrasse (Coris gaimard).
The other photos are of my other fish: there are a pair of Great Barrier Clownfish, a Common Clownfish (“Nemo” if you must), and a humbug damselfish (currently the oldest of my fish at 8 years since I bought it).
At one stage I had three humbug damsels with the same black and white marking, but subtle differences in the tails marked then as three different species.
Keeping marine fish can be challenging, but the fish are really beautiful.
Equally challenging is taking good photos of fish as auto focus gets tricked by the reflection from the glass, and if the flash is activated you can end up with a white blob and nothing else. This lot turned out pretty well, though!
One of my great concerns in the pandemic has been the potential for Government to seize emergency powers to “protect” us, and then never let those powers go when the emergency is over.
While the NSW Government has been pretty sensible in its approach, just as we are getting to the end of the worst of the pandemic, they are trying to soften us up for more loss of liberty.
Today, Premier Gladys Berejiklian was again talking about the use of QR codes to track who goes into which business venue at various times. Business people can use the Service NSW site to generate their unique QR code which they print and put near the entry to the business. Customers then use the app to scan the code and everything is good.
It’s a great solution for contact tracing, except for one fatal flaw. The information that you were at the Good Coffee Cafe is instantly sent to the NSW Government and held for four weeks in case they need to use it for contact tracing.
They guarantee that your information is used only for this purpose and that their database is secure.
I am somewhat sceptical about those claims. Government databases are always being attacked by people looking for data. But people who work for the Government can always find great reasons for using these great data resources for other purposes. Imagine some diamond rings are stolen from the “Glittery Things Jewelers”. How long will it be before the police think that information might be useful “to eliminate people from their enquiries”?
So I went to the NSW Premier’s contact page today to express my concerns about this. After filling out the form I found this little disclaimer at the bottom of the page:
By submitting this meeting/ event request, I/ my organisation and its representatives consent that Department of Premier and Cabinet do not take responsibility for the security of any commercially or otherwise sensitive content.
So all those claims about “You can trust us we are the Government” just don’t mean a thing.
That is why if you go to any business with a Service NSW QR code you should say, “No thanks. I will register with pen and paper.”
The choice is always between the real King and false kings:
The reasons why people hate Christ, Christians and Christianity are many, but a major factor in this hatred is the fact that Christ sets himself up as a king – the one and only real king – and challenges all other false claimants to the throne.
The chief challenger is of course self: the Christophobe hates the claims of Christ because it means they have to surrender their false pretences of being the centre of the universe, of being god. Human pride – and delusion – makes us think we are all there is, and we can call the shots.
But the all-powerful state – and those slavishly devoted to it – is another and related false kingdom that far too many worship. And the easiest way to pinpoint one very contemporary illustration of this is simply to look at how the state has treated Christianity during the COVID crisis.
In many places churches are STILL closed down, including here in Victoria. Yes, a handful of folks can gather inside, and a few more outside. But overwhelmingly it seems most folks – and incredibly, most Christians – have no problem with this at all! There is complete silence.
Never mind that plenty of church structures are built to hold hundreds, if not thousands of worshippers. But we are allowed only 10 inside. Really? Yet the shops are packed with shoppers, and so on. In Brisbane the other day 30,000 screaming fans could cram into a sporting arena to watch a football game, yet the churches remain basically off-limits.
The fact that so little protest about this has been heard by the Christian community demonstrates that for too many, they have another king. They are far more willing to slavishly go along with whatever the state says, even if it means allowing churches to be shut down indefinitely.
And this is a perennial problem. Religious folks have long put the state ahead of devotion to Christ. We see that happening all the time in the Gospels and the book of Acts. Consider what I just read again this morning. In Acts 17:1-9 we read about what happened when Paul and Silas were in Thessalonica.
Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.” And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women. But the Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd. And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.” And the people and the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things. And when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go.
While I have long emphasised what we find in verse 6 about the early believers ‘turning the world upside down,’ here I want to emphasise what is found in the next verse: “they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.”
Yep, because they said that Jesus is Lord, that meant that all other lords and all other gods are in fact false kings, false rulers. That is not to say that there is no place for human rulers and civil government – there is. But no human authority dares to set himself up against the one true God. That is idolatry of the highest order, and never ends well.
These things are not just found in the New Testament. The attempt to challenge God and throw off his rightful place of rule goes way back to the book of Genesis of course. Our first parents, Adam and Eve sought to do it – with disastrous consequences – and folks have been seeking to do it ever since.
In Genesis 11:1-9 for example we read about the Tower of Babel episode. This was another direct challenge to God and his rule. That did not end well either. Whenever people seek to become fully autonomous, rejecting the rightful rule of God, they always end up in big trouble.
Of interest, just hours ago I found a book I had been looking for for a while (that is one problem with having a large library). The book was released the year I was born, and is penned by the German Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). The volume is called The New Tower of Babel (Sophia Institute Press, 1953, 1994). Early on he says this:
The real conflict today is between Christianity on the one hand, and a thoroughly anti-Christian conception of life on the other. This struggle has reached a decisive stage and has become a radical clash between two worlds, embracing all domains of life and human existence. The liberal age was an age of compromise. Notwithstanding its anticlericalism and its contention against Christian doctrine in the religious and philosophical fields, it retained Christian elements in the moral, sociological, juridical, and cultural spheres. Our present age, however, reveals a consistent, anti-Christian conception in every domain of life on the part of the enemies of Christianity.
The mark of the present crisis is man’s attempt to free himself from his condition as a created being, to deny his metaphysical situation, and to disengage himself from all bonds with anything greater than himself. Modern man is attempting to build a new Tower of Babel.
The Message of Acts (Bible Speaks Today)by Array
Exactly so. The situation described in Acts 17 is simply more of the same. Let me offer some commentary on this. In his commentary I. Howard Marshall says this about the charge levelled at the disciples: “This is an apt description of the positive content of the gospel with its claim that Jesus is Lord (cf. 16:31); it indicates how the focus had shifted very naturally from the proclamation of the ‘kingdom’ in the ministry of Jesus to the proclamation of the ‘king’ in the evangelism of the early church.”
John Stott comments this way about the charge:
Since the emperor was sometimes called basileus (‘king’), as well as kaisar (‘emperor’), how could the attribution of basileus to Jesus (7) not be a treasonable offence? The ambiguity of Christian teaching in this area remains. On the one hand, as Christian people, we are called to be conscientious and law-abiding citizens, not revolutionaries. On the other hand, the kingship of Jesus has unavoidable political implications since, as his loyal subjects, we must refuse to give any other ruler or ideology the supreme homage and total obedience which are due to him alone.
I’ll leave N. T. Wright have the final word here:
Another king! Well, they really have got the message. Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn’t; the fundamental ‘decree’ or ‘dogma’ of Caesar is that he and he alone in the emperor….
So was Paul being a loyal Roman citizen, or wasn’t he? It all depends on what sort of a ‘king’ you think he thought Jesus really was. It is easy to quote Jesus’ famous saying, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, but what John actually wrote was ‘My kingdom is not from this world’ (John 1 8.36), with the clear implication that, though derived of course from elsewhere, Jesus’ kingdom was definitely for this world. And it is easy to show that the charge Luke reports against Jesus, that he was claiming to be a king (Luke 23.2), was, like the other accusations hurled around at the time, at best deeply misleading.
But when we stand back from the present incident and look at the whole sweep of Acts as it unfolds before our eyes, we begin to see a pattern emerging, a pattern which will grow and swell until it leaves us . . . wondering what on earth happened next. In Acts 1—12 Jesus is hailed as Messiah, king of the Jews, until eventually the present king of the Jews tries to do something about it but is struck down for his pagan arrogance. Now, from Acts 13 onwards, Jesus is being hailed as ‘another king,’ ‘lord of the world’; but there already is a ‘lord of the world,’ and anyone who knows anything about tyrants, particularly ancient Roman ones, knows well that they don’t take kindly to rivals on the stage.
And they still don’t today. All the more reason for Christians to get their allegiances and loyalties right. As the state takes ever more powers for itself, the Christian will need to determine who it will ultimately serve. We need to decide now, before things get even worse.
HAVING gotten rid of their star black player, the Australian rugby team is set to take a knee at the start of their next game in support of Black Lives Matter.
The Australian Rugby Union chased Israel Folau out of the sport and eventually out of the country for his supposedly outdated minority views.
Now, with Folau out of the way, the woke Wallabies plan to signal their support for minorities.
Confused?
That’s because you’re thinking. To enjoy performative virtue you must be woke enough to feel, but never conscious enough to think.
Senior Wallaby Dane Haylett-Petty revealed this week that the team will consider taking a knee during the national anthem before the third Bledisloe Cup Test against the All Blacks on October 31.
“We’ve got a very diverse group and we see that as a big strength of ours,” he said.
Not strength enough to tolerate diverse views though, or Folau would still be playing for Australia rather than running around for the Catalans Dragons in France.
But again, you’re over thinking things. And that’s no way to enjoy politically correct sport.
Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan said the Wallabies would be wearing their new Indigenous-designed jersey for the October 31 game.
“We’re very proud of our Aboriginal and Indigenous heritage, and we’re going to promote it proudly,” the proud chairman said with pride.
Except that no player of Indigenous heritage has been picked in the squad. He said,
“I think it shows that we’ve got to open more player pathways for indigenous rugby players, but what it also says is that we’re very committed to an inclusive culture.”
So there are no indigenous players included in the squad but the non-indigenous players will wear jumpers featuring indigenous squiggles to prove rugby has an inclusive culture.
It makes complete sense, provided you don’t think about it.
The Wallabies also made a big deal about the fact that new coach Dave Rennie has been encouraging players to embrace different cultures, even teaching them to sing Fijian and Tongan songs.
If this news makes you wonder how much better the Wallabies would be at singing Tongan ditties had they not punted their star Tongan player for expressing views commonly held in Tonga, stop it. You can’t square a circle any more than the Wallabies can beat New Zealand.
And there is no point wondering why, if our footballers are going to sing, they don’t instead learn the words to the Australian national anthem so that they can actually sing it before games rather than pretend.
Of course, the winless but very woke Wallabies could ditch all the virtue signalling and focus on winning rugby games.
But that thought doesn’t seem to have occurred to them for a long time now.
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James Macpherson is a sought after international speaker with a background in journalism at the Courier Mail and Daily Telegraph. He previously pastored a significant church in Australia and South Africa. James’ weekly Good Sauce podcast comes out every Tuesday. He also writes regularly for The Spectator.
