Forget the Channel

Author: Lionel Windsor

  • Whose incarnation is it anyway?

    From The Briefing: Within the heart of the Christian faith is an astounding truth. God—who created and sustains the universe—became incarnate. The immortal and perfect Son of God shared our messy, sin-prone death-ridden lives of flesh and blood; he became human, walked with us, suffered with us, and subjected himself to our temptations. Ultimately, he…

  • Speech and the Spirit

    We’ve got to move beyond the question, “Is every Christian an evangelist”? I had a go at moving the issue forward in my series of articles and talks entitled “speech and salvation,” focussing mainly on Paul’s letters. Tony Payne in a recent Briefing article addresses the same question in a more comprehensive and practical way. He asks: How…

  • Having your heart in your mouth (Romans 10:1-13)

    I preached this sermon recently at St Michael’s Anglican Cathedral, Wollongong. Right now, St Michael’s is engaging in a concerted effort to promote conversations about Jesus! People are being asked to complete the sentence, “Jesus is _______.” How would you fill the blank? The sermon grew out of my study of Romans 9-11, which formed chapter…

  • Book recommendation – helping kids to navigate the digital age

    For all parents and pastors, I highly recommend Jim Steyer’s book Talking Back to Facebook: The CommonSense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age. For the sake of our kids, we need to model and teach responsible, informed use of digital and social media. We can’t simply avoid it, but we mustn’t embrace it uncritically…

  • The “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” quite likely a modern forgery

    Admittedly, “Jesus had a wife” is a more sensational headline than “Media outlets fooled by modern forgery.” But it seems the latter headline is more likely to be correct. My PhD supervisor, Professor Francis Watson, an expert in early Christian texts, makes a compelling case that the fragment which has come to be assumed to…

  • Why does everyone want Jesus to get married?

    From The Briefing: It’s déjà Vinci time. There’s been lots of hype recently, but here’s my summary of the publicly known facts: A few centuries after Jesus was around, various people had various ideas about various things. Some people living at some point up to 300 years after Jesus lived possibly claimed that Jesus had…

  • Moore College School of Theology 2012: Exploring the Psalms

    Each year, Moore College in Sydney runs a two-day conference on a biblical / theological topic. This year’s topic was the Psalms. As I said in a Vox Pop during the conference, I really appreciated the way in which all the presenters demonstrated an obvious love of God, nurtured by and expressed through a love…

  • A husband’s sacrificial love: what does it actually look like?

    From The Briefing: Commenting on a previous post, Andrew asked a question that was so worthwhile it deserves a whole new discussion: I find the discussions about submission and love and even mutual submission helpful but a bit hard to understand practically. Often the discussion is centred around the controversial passages and is understandably directed…

  • Word-watch: lessons from a naïve blogger

    From The Briefing: A few days ago I wrote a short article in which I used the word ‘submission.’ I’ve just now realized that by using this word, I was being a bit naïve. The realization of my own naivety came when I read Kara Martin’s helpful review of the book Fifty Shades of Grey…

  • There is no difference: Kurrajong Ministry Training Fund keynote address

    The Ministry Training Fund is a brilliant initiative of Kurrajong Anglican Church. The fund is designed to encourage and financially support people from the church who are undertaking training in Christian ministry (e.g. at theological college, Youthworks, MTS). The inaugural dinner for the fund was held on 11 August 2012. I had the privilege of…

  • Listening to the law without being under the law (a sermon on Exodus 20:22-23:19)

    Preached at Kurrajong Anglican Church on 26 August, 2012. Our problem with the law A few days after we got back to Australia from England, my wife had an experience that made us realize that we were well and truly back home. She was driving along Redbank Road in North Richmond, and a car coming…

  • Borrowing beasts & paying preachers: Why Paul’s use of the Old Testament makes sense

    This was a real “Oh yeah – aha!” moment in my understanding of the Bible, especially in my understanding of the way Paul uses the Old Testament. The Law of Moses says: You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain. (Deut 25:4) Paul says: For it is written in the…

  • ‘Mutual submission’? Scrutinizing a lazy slogan

    From The Briefing: A furore has indeed erupted over the use of the dreaded ‘s’-word in certain proposed new marriage vows. The word ‘submit,’ of course, comes from the Bible (e.g. Ephesians 5:22-24); the proposed vows are an attempt to give couples the option of using biblical terminology in place of the traditional, often misunderstood,…

  • PhD thesis: approved and now available online (Paul and the Vocation of Israel)

    This dissertation argues that Paul’s apostolic mission to the Gentiles was the definitive expression of his divine vocation as an Israelite, and thus of his Jewish identity. For many of Paul’s Jewish contemporaries, Israel’s divine vocation was to keep and to teach the precepts of the Law of Moses as an exemplary witness to God’s…

  • Joining the saints at St Augustine’s Neutral Bay–once more

    We’re very pleased to say that I have accepted a position as an assistant minister at St Augustine’s Anglican Church, Neutral Bay, Sydney. I was a student minister at Neutral Bay in 2004-2005 and we very much enjoyed working in partnership with the rector, Craig Roberts. One of the present assistant ministers and his wife…

  • The perils of plundering the Egyptians

    From The Briefing: flickr: Gary Soup In our previous post, we looked at a story that has often been used as analogy for the way that Christians can use secular wisdom in gospel mission and ministry. This is the account of the Israelites, plundering the gold of the Egyptians as God rescued them from slavery…

  • Plundering the Egyptians: The place of secular wisdom in gospel mission and ministry

    From The Briefing: flickr: knitsteel Rock performances. Accounting textbooks. Voice coaching sessions. Self-help books. Leadership seminars. Adult education techniques. Sociological surveys. Jazz piano lessons. Child safety courses. Food safety courses. Statistical surveys. Statistics lectures. Corporate management textbooks. Primers on psychology. Magazine articles on cosmology. Blogs on modern communication techniques. Tips on writing style. In my…

  • Dangerous love

    From The Briefing: flickr: MousyBoyWithGlasses Just recently I came to realise that I had been treating a part of the Bible like a Mr Squiggle picture. Mr Squiggle was a kids’ TV show I used to watch. Children throughout Australia would draw little random squiggles–a couple of lines or curves on a piece of paper–and…

  • Support the training of future gospel workers

    Prior to Moore College, I undertook a two year MTS (Ministry Training Strategy) apprenticeship at the University of New South Wales. I’m immensely grateful for this experience; the apprenticeship gave me a gospel-centred, ministry-oriented theological perspective, which was foundational both for my academic study and for my future ministry roles. MTS Sunday is happening on…

  • Polygamy in the Bible: A sordid tale

    From The Briefing: I saw an excellent interview on Australia’s Channel 7 Sunrise program recently. Christian leaders were being asked about their opposition to proposals to redefine marriage, and were discussing the Bible’s view of marriage. At one point, the interviewer asked a question which is often brought up in these contexts: Doesn’t the Old…

  • Spectacular find: original Greek sermons by Origen of Alexandria discovered

    [My translation of the original article from the Bavarian State Library, H/T Ben Blackwell]: A spectacular discovery was recently made in the Bavarian State Library, in the process of cataloguing the Greek manuscripts from the collection of Johann Jakob Fuggers. While cataloguing a manuscript, Philologist Marina Molin Pradel identified numerous texts of sermons on the…

  • Are we really devoted to the public reading of Scripture? (Scott Newling, Cambridge)

    As evangelicals, we’ll often claim to believe that God speaks to us through the Bible. But do our public church gatherings actually reflect this conviction? This article by Scott Newling (currently in Cambridge), which appeared last year, is a salutary reminder to put our beliefs into action: Many evangelical churches are today characterized by what…

  • Same sex marriage: why are so many Christians opposed?

    Kudos to the Sunrise team for this excellent interview. No matter where you are in this debate, it’s well worth taking 11 and a half minutes to hear this balanced and helpful presentation of the biblical viewpoint:

  • Philosophers, puppies, parchments and Pastoral epistles

    Paul’s Pastoral letters can sound strange to our modern ears, especially since they mix high-minded theology together with mundane, personal instructions. In 2 Timothy, for example, we read the following theological exhortation: Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel…

  • An anatomy of sin

    From The Briefing: flickr: SashaW The first stage in Paul’s announcement of the gospel of God’s grace is a concise anatomy of sin (Rom 1:18-32). Sin is, at its heart, a suppression of truth. This suppression of truth has a kind of logical progression to it: rejection of God (vv. 19-21) leads to worshipping the…