The sermon for February 23rd 2025 is now on the New Life web site.
In this sermon, which is based on Genesis 3, I talk about The Reality of Sin.
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Today’s Sermon
sin
Out of Alignment
Scrape! Crunch! It happened again, and at the worst possible time.
I was on my bike, pedalling around the corner on to the bridge, and the chain had come off the front cog. As cars and trucks approached, I quickly discovered that the safety fence was for me a danger fence, trapping me on the road. I quickly walked my bike back around the corner and managed to get to safety before any B-Double truck squashed me.
The problem was that the mechanism that pushes the chain from one gear to the other had got out of alignment, allowing the chain to go past the cog. Instead of smooth, silent travel, you get a noise and then nothing.
Having a chain out of alignment on a bike is not a big problem. It is inconvenient and annoying and takes a few seconds to fix, leaving you with dirty fingers. Adjusting a cable solves the problem for good.
When your life is out of alignment, there is a much bigger problem.
Most people are familiar with the story of Adam and Eve. They were created perfect and placed in a beautiful garden. God told them they could eat any fruit except the fruit of one tree. The inevitable happened and they were tossed out of the garden. What happened later is shocking. Their eldest son Cain killed his younger brother Abel.
Perfection to murder in a generation, and all because people had come out of alignment with God’s purposes. We see the ongoing consequences of this everywhere we look in the world.
How do we get back into alignment with God? You can’t fix the world, but you can fix you. Read the Bible and see how Jesus lived. Ask God to change your heart. Let God’s Spirit spark in you a desire for you to worship Him and obey Him. Join up with a group of believers, often called a church, to find out how other people follow Jesus.
Not as simple as adjusting a bike, but certainly worth the effort for a better life.
Covid Vaccination and Sin
Have you had your jab yet? I got mine last week and lived to tell the story!
There are many vaccines available today, but of course the only one that most people are interested in a the moment is the corona virus.
Vaccines have brought a massive improvement in health conditions and life spans over the last century or so. Second only to the provision of clean and safe water, vaccines have changed our lives for the better. Diseases such as small pox and measles used to ravage communities and kill millions of people, but we don’t even think about them these days.
It amazes me that within about 12 months of the covid virus exploding around the world we have a number of vaccines available to protect our community. It used to take years, even decades, to discover how to beat a disease, but the increase in knowledge about genetics has made it possible to rapidly discover, test and deploy these vaccines.
There is another disease rampant around the world that we have learned to live with but is just as deadly. This disease is not a physical virus, but is deadly. You won’t get it by contact with other people and you can’t heal it with an injection.
The disease goes by many names- pride, self-centredness and sin are but a few.
It is a condition of the spirit that says that I am the most important person in the world. Everybody has to bow to my demands. I can do whatever I like regardless of how other people might feel.
Just about every problem in our lives comes down to our desire to control our own lives, to live as if nobody else matters and to ignore God’s ways for our lives.
There is a cure for this. It involves admitting that we are wrong and asking God to forgive us through Christ then living His way not our own way.
Tough medicine perhaps, but absolutely essential.
A Catastrophic Betrayal: Carson Weitnauer
This is a very sad story about the ministry of a Great Apologist and Champion of the Christian faith. I am very saddened by these reports and reminded that we are all just one step from catastrophic sin.
A Catastrophic Betrayal
The “Greatest Apologist” was the Greatest Fraud
As a young man with a passionate love for Jesus, many of my dearest family and friends asked me difficult questions about Christianity. Because of these conversations, I felt compelled to resolve existential questions. Perhaps my supposed faith in God was no more than an outdated fairytale? Due to these pressures, I constantly studied and discussed apologetics with mentors and friends.
I was excited when I had the opportunity to personally meet Ravi Zacharias at a Christmas dinner in high school. After all, his book Can Man Live Without God? had persuaded me that atheism was an untenable position. I subsequently wrote to Ravi for guidance while studying philosophy at Rhodes College and I visited his international ministry’s offices when I studied abroad at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. Throughout ten years of campus ministry, including seven years serving students at Harvard University, I often pointed to Ravi Zacharias. As a globe-trotting intellectual who persuaded elite leaders to place their faith in Jesus, he was an inspiration.
When my family moved from Boston to Atlanta in 2013, I was thrilled to begin working at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. Working closely with gifted apologists, I thanked God for the impact of Ravi’s growing ministry on audiences throughout the world. Serving together with so many passionate evangelists, I celebrated near-daily reports of those whose lives were being transformed by the gospel.
In August 2017, the ministry team at RZIM was informed that a greedy couple in Canada had identified Ravi as a target for extortion – and felt no scruples in falsely accusing Ravi. Taking advantage of his friendly, even naïve, approach to people, they had conspired together to defraud him of millions of dollars. Through prayer meetings and regular updates on these “Satanic attacks,” we managed to get through this trial with renewed unity and commitment to our mission.
As we sometimes heard troubling details that suggested Ravi was guilty of what he had been accused of, it was a relief to hear that his incriminating emails were taken out of context, that exculpatory material had been reviewed by the board, and that his courageous RICO lawsuit had put an end to their falsehoods with a non-disclosure agreement. We gave thanks that Ravi’s bold leadership had freed us to focus once more on the ministry God had called us to. Convinced of this narrative, I served at RZIM with great passion and joy, and then wept and grieved for weeks when Ravi’s health unexpectedly declined, followed by his death in May of 2020.
However, in September 2020, new evidence surfaced about Ravi’s relationship with Lori Anne Thompson. As I studied this information carefully – again and again and again – it slowly dawned on me that Ravi had personally and repeatedly lied to me and others in the ministry about his relationship with her. If true, it revealed that his RICO lawsuit was a malicious attempt to bully his victim into silence, and that Ravi had perjured himself in the effort.
More humbling and embarrassing was the realization that the public evidence was sufficient for me to have pieced together the truth in 2017. Anyone who has taken pride in their association with Ravi, and especially those who like me work at RZIM, will now experience that as a shame. I confess that my longing for the approval of others kept me from asking hard questions and accepting the painful truth much sooner. The way forward is to lament the betrayal, confess any complicity, receive the honor of being God’s beloved children, and resolve to live with a chastened faithfulness.
Just as I was awakening to an accurate understanding of the abuse uncovered in 2017, another bombshell came: credible, carefully researched reports appeared in Christianity Today and WORLD magazines, demonstrating that Ravi had committed criminal sexual abuse against at least three massage therapists in the mid-to-late-2000s. The reporting shared the testimony from multiple women, corroborated by their co-workers, from women who had nothing to gain from reliving these awful experiences and were not seeking to win monetary restitution through the courts. If true, these allegations suggest that Ravi’s abuse of Lori Anne Thompson wasn’t an isolated affair, but rather part of an ingrained pattern of life stretching over a decade or more. His constant traveling, especially overseas, now seemed ripe with foreboding possibilities.
Read the rest of the article here
Jon Bloom: Leave Your Secret Sin Behind Today
Jon Bloom from Desiring God Ministries warns all christians, but especially leaders that we are in a time of judgement and it is time to leave our sins behind.
Today is a day of reckoning. A wave of judgment is sweeping leaders from their high positions of cultural, political, corporate, and religious power because they used those positions to indulge their self-centered sexual appetites on subordinates.
Things that in the dim, hidden realms of their imagination and control looked deceptively like perks of privilege and sexual entertainment — pleasures they pursued without giving serious thought to how the human objects they used would be damaged — now look lurid, foul, abusive, pathetic, and shameful when dragged out into the bright light of public exposure.
Victims are speaking out, many for the first time. Their anger is justified and palpable, and their words are carrying real consequences to their once-insulated abusers. So far this has been a very good thing. It would be a great mercy if lasting cultural intolerance resulted in the balance of power changing between lecherous leaders and vulnerable subordinates.
Is Your Heart Being Hardened?
But God is doing far more than exposing the sin of leaders. He is showing again how deceitful and desperately sick the human heart is (Jeremiah 17:9) apart from Christ, and reminding us that we have such evil blood still coursing in our veins, so prone to be “hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13).
And for those who will hear it, God is offering us total forgiveness and freedom. He has sent his Son into the world precisely to liberate us from our sick hearts and sin’s slavery, no matter how lurid and shameful. There is an escape; there is a safe place.
But the time is urgent and short. God can turn a day of reckoning into a day of amnesty. But he’s calling today, “Today, if [we] hear his voice, [let us not] harden [our] hearts” (Hebrews 3:15).
Read the full article here
Battered but not beaten
It was the perfect storm.
I felt the pressure rising all week, like when I forget to take my blood pressure pills for a couple of days. This wasn’t my blood pressure rising but spiritual pressure. I could feel the enemy closing in. The taunting and lies were increasing in my mind as the week went on, and I would shake them off from time to time, rebuking satan at other times. But they were relentless, returning to hammer my conscience with accusation and threat.
I was reading Heidi Baker’s book “Birthing the Miraculous” this week, and I was so excited about what she writes about. With a free evening, no commitments and my family all away, there was space to find the Presence of the Lord.
This afternoon the pressure ramped up. I heard the Lord tell me that I would face an unprecedented battle with evil, but it was OK. Then I heard satan say, “You will fail tonight. You will not choose relationship with God.”
I said “Goodbye” to my family members as they headed off in different directions. I cooked some dinner. The evening lay before me. And that choice.
I knew that satan was right. I had stopped fighting, because the fighting was way too hard. I sat down at my computer and surfed the net. Instead of listening to the gentle wooing of Jesus, I gave in to the mind-numbing trivia of the world. Instead of the healing of the Father, I sought nothingness. Rather than victory in the Holy Spirit I allowed temptation to defeat me.
Late in the evening I finally came and laid myself at the feet of the Lord. I surrendered to Him in the Secret Place. This is a part of what He said to me:
You faced a huge temptation tonight. Satan has increased pressure on you all week and you have stood firm. Tonight was the biggest challenge you have ever faced- satan attacked you without restraint. There will be another challenge, but this time you will focus on me and my love, and you will stand firm, you will overcome.
I have given you my Spirit. I have called you by name. Know this and rejoice in me.
Not long after this there was a beautiful shower of rain. I went outside to enjoy the smell and the coolness and the cleansing. It seemed to be a gift from the Lord, a sign of His love for me.
“Hypergrace” or “Antigrace”?
There is a terrible heresy going around at the moment which some call hyper-grace but which is really anti-grace.
The teaching has it that once we are saved, our eternal destiny is assured and therefore we can live as we want to. God will cover all the sin.
While it is wonderfully true that God will forgive all of our sins, even the ones we commit after we are saved, this is not to be seen as a licence to commit all the sins we want to.
To follow Jesus means that we live in obedience and allow Him to shape our lives. That’s what being a disciple means.
What these teachers overlook is the relational aspect of christianity, replacing it with a purely transactional approach. In the hyper-grace theory the sole purpose of salvation is to guarantee that our sins are forgiven. Once you’ve bought that guarantee by reciting an appropriate prayer, then you’re set to do what you like for the rest of your life.
But the real purpose of salvation is to bring us back into a love relationship with God. God isn’t merely about populating a future heaven with as many souls as possible. His desire is to pour His love onto all who will receive it. When we really receive the assurance of forgiveness, then our hearts are open to the wonder of God’s love and we are able to start loving Him.
The interesting thing is that if you really love someone, you don’t want to hurt them. There might be times when there is conflict, friction or misunderstanding, but love means having a heart that is sensitive to the other. If I am more concerned with what I can get away with than I am about how my actions affect someone, then I cannot love them.
None of this is new of course. Some in the early days of the church argued that since our sin gives God an opportunity to show His grace, we should sin more. Paul gave this notion short shrift:
“What shall we say then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (Romans 6:1,2)
In the end this so-called hyper-grace is actually antigrace. It’s just another religion whereby people try to force God to accept them without any desire to do what He wants. “Say this prayer and God will ignore your sins” is no different to offering sacrifices or going through the thousands of other rituals that people have invented to twist their deity’s arms.
The true gospel is so different. Yes, God forgives our sins, with no limit, no preconditions. But He does this as a Father forgives a child- in the context of a loving relationship. Let’s run into His arms and enjoy His love instead of lurking in the shadows in the furthest corner of the room.
New Life Narrabri 