What is marriage?
I sat down this afternoon to consider a question of increasing importance in modern life. What is marriage? What exactly is marriage? What follows is a collection of my thoughts on that question. It is not my goal to outline what a marriage should look like. Or what is Christian marriage per se. But rather, my goal is to get to the very fundamental core of what constitutes a relationship as a marriage. Biblically. These thoughts are prompted in part by a post titled When Two So-Called “Married” Women (or Men) Repent by John Piper in which he argues that same-sex marriage is not valid marriage. To decide whether I agree with him, I need to understand what marriage is more precisely. What is marriage? Is marriage a legal thing? Is marriage an ecclesiastical thing? Is marriage a spiritual thi... Read more
You get one life. How are you using it?
This is not an inspirational book. It's a hands-on, 44-page guide for living your life deliberately in 2017. But it is rooted in some inspirational truths. This is how the introduction starts: You get one life. Just one. You live it. You use it up. And then it’s gone. Your one life is precious. It’s short. It’s fragile. And it’s permanent. It’s precious because it’s an irreplaceable, customised gift from God himself. It’s short because it precedes the infinity of eternity. It’s fragile because it could end at any moment. It’s permanent because it’s unrepeatable, irreversible, and has implications for you and others for as long as God lives. This is not a practise run. There is no “take two.” There is no backspace on the keyboard of life. The moments come, they pass, and then they are gone.... Read more
A new lease on life for InFocus
It's been over eleven years since InFocus was founded and this year could have easily been the last for this website. But I sat down with some key people behind this website recently and we decided that the website still has a role to play and a purpose to serve. For instance, there are topics that the more mainstream blogs won't feel the need to cover because their readership don't come from a Fundamentalist background. Not only can we offer an Australian point of view, but we can offer a perspective from a Fundamentalist background as well. We can, therefore, provide a bridge between Australian Fundamentalism and more mainstream Evangelicalism. We don't want to be an "abuse blog." We don't want to be an anti-anything blog. We want to be pro-God, pro-grace, pro-gospel, pro-health, pro-gro... Read more
Child protection at church
I was recently involved in preparing a child protection policy for our church. We were given a template by our insurer which was really great as it prompted us to put a policy in place early. Even though our children's ministries are still small, we're now prepared to offer a safe environment and our people are trained so that in the case of a bad situation arising, our people know who to talk to and what to do about it. More than that, our leaders have it clearly spelled out what our obligations are. For independent churches, a child protection policy can easily get overlooked and even where it is not overlooked, developing such a policy can be quite a daunting task. So I wanted to share our policy with you. We have significantly upgraded the template that was given to us. You can downloa... Read more
What Christians must require of Malcolm Turnbull
When Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull took to the podium to speak on the night of the Federal election, there are a number of things he could have said that wouldn't have been surprising at all. What he did say was very surprising. I can report that based on the advice I have from the party officials we can have every confidence that we will form a Coalition majority government in the next parliament (source). This statement was clear. It was decisive. It was confident bordering on arrogance. At the time I wasn't sure whether it was a sign of madness or a stroke of genius. I'm still not sure. What is clear though, is that the PM took a bold gamble. And won. And this speaks to the kind of man he is I think. He didn't get caught up in the hype of the media analysis. He surrounded himself with... Read more
