Last night I was out to dinner with the Ma, Pa, and the step-Grandma, and I ordered a steak. The gave it to me with a soft-shelled crab on top. The legs were all floppy. It felt like I was eating a spider. I didn't like it. I thought it might hurt me.

Spiders suck, even when they're actually crabs.

- Australia dominates colonies and the mother land, proving that criminals make the best athletes.
- Making fun of Indians is still rather acceptable, just don't call them monkeys.
- Robert De Castella has gotten fat, and good on him, he deserves it.
- Empty stadiums make me sad.
- Sally Pearson has a disqualification, a gold medal, and quite the set of abs.

My friend Graham Baldock blogs. And because famous bloggers sometimes guest blog on each other's blogs, we thought we'd do it too.

So here is his special guestage (if you want to read mine go here):

The school chaplains should have beaten me to death with the chairs they were sitting on. They were plunging daggers into me with their eyes.

Why?

I simply wondered aloud “Why don’t you just do Chapel services that don’t suck?”

Was it gentle and showered in grace? No. Was it amazingly blunt and cringe worthy to reminisce about publicly? Yes.

As a Youth Pastor I’ve wondered about religious schools a bit (my church is heavily connected to one). I wonder if they actually do more long-term harm than good.

Disclaimer (every outlandish statement must be followed up with a disclaimer): Those who work in schools are folks who genuinely love Jesus, want to see the Kingdom of God advance, work really hard and are phenomenal people.

AND if done well, as I have seen it done, it is an amazing opportunity. Weekly, kids are presented the life-changing message of Christ.

But, if it is not done well, does it place the youth in a worse position to respond to the gospel? Do they become deadened to the message? Are they hardened by mediocrity?

The same question can be asked for scripture in schools, children’s and youth ministry. Is crappy kids’ stuff on a Sunday morning really better than no kids program? Can we say that bad ministry experiences early in life make it harder for people to respond later on?

Bottom line… Do we think we are reaching kids with the gospel when we are actually inoculating them against it?

Thank you Failbook

Last month Andreana wrote a piece on her blog about how the doctrine of original sin makes people feel terrible about themselves. Then last week I was talking to one of my friends who told me they felt pretty much the same way. They didn’t like that there is this central belief within Christianity that you are basically evil. It’s bad for self-esteem and locks people into seeing themselves only as terrible people, incapable of good.

So I’ve been thinking about this for a while and had some thoughts. What follows is kinda the extended edition of a comment I left on Andreana’s blog.

I guess firstly any discussion of original sin needs a definition, so I’ll tell you what I know. Original sin is the doctrine that through the actions of Adam all humanity have inherited a sinful nature. In conservative evangelical thought, this means that humanity, as descendants of Adam, are born under judgement for Adam’s sin and with a built in predisposition for sin.

Probably the main reason why I believe in original sin is because I think it's biblical.

Obviously the biblical texts are open to interpretation, and need to be understood in the context of the literature, but as far as original sin goes I think there is biblical evidence for it, particularly in Romans 5:12-19. I am unclear as to what extent all people are guilty in Adam or how that works, I am sure that all of us have inherited our sinful nature, and are unable to live righteous lives without the direct intervention of God.

Perhaps the other lesser reason I am inclined to believe in original sin is that I see it in humanity. Kids aren’t taught to sin, they seem to have it built in. No one teaches a kid to snatch, punch, bite, kick, yet they all seem to figure it out for themselves. And if you watch kids interact, they are pretty horrid creatures. Sure they’re cute and precious, and funny, and fun. But they’re also mean, and selfish, and childish. If an adult behaved like a child we wouldn’t say “Oh how innocent they are” we’d say “Oh how horrible they are.” I think we learn civility because we learn that our deviant ways don’t get us what we want.

So I think I’m happy to see humanity as essentially sinful, both from what I read in the Bible and what I see in the world. I’m not saying that humanity is entirely sinful, or that babies, kids or adults are incapable of good, or love, just that I think that all people have a predisposition towards sin. I think sinfulness is built in since the fall, it’s not learned.

Obviously this isn’t a particularly cheery doctrine. I understand if a person accepts this on its own it certainly doesn’t give a person cause to feel excited about being a human or hopeful that they will be able to achieve anything more than evil, or hope that they will be able to move beyond their sin. However if they accept it, it should drive them to Christ. And if it drives them to Christ and they are willing to accept Christ’s work for them on the cross, then they no longer need to worry about their sinfulness, because in Christ they have been given all the righteousness of Christ. They are sinless before God. And they have the Holy Spirit living in them who enables them to live good, loving, godly lives, every day becoming more like Jesus.

The book of Romans seems to be a meditation on this idea. After spending many chapters thinking about the plight of humanity and the grace of God, Paul writes his famous segment in chapter 7 lamenting his inability to live the way he wants to and get rid of his sinful life. He climaxes the chapter with the cry “I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:23-24). It’s certainly a feeling that knowing that you are unable to escape sin’s effects or influence would bring about in you.

But Paul doesn’t stop there. He knows that this feeling shouldn’t drive him to despair, but to Jesus. He goes on to say this: “Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do... God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering.” (Romans 7:25-8:3)

Paul is saying that his need to sin forces him to turn to Jesus. Only because of Jesus’ death, in our place, for our sins, do we get saved. And what a glorious rescue it is. If there was not original sin, if we did not have an awareness of our own love of evil, would we really feel like we needed Jesus?

Original sin may not make us feel good, but it makes the love of God all the more sweeter, because we know that in that is everything we need, and the only thing we can hope in.

So if I was to sum up my thoughts I’d say this, the issue with original sin making people feel crappy is not that it goes too far, but that it doesn’t go far enough. The gospel focused Christian should not let their friend wallow in their own guilt, but they should point them to the fact they are in fact guiltless. Our sinfulness is not an end point for how we understand ourselves, it’s a starting point; Jesus is the end point.

If you believe in original sin, you should also believe that through faith a person becomes a new creation in Jesus, and so all the effects of the fall are taken care of, either now, or at the resurrection. Anyone who teaches original sin without teaching redemption through Christ teaches an unbiblical message. And anyone who encourages guilt instead of encouraging people to turn to Jesus for forgiveness and new life, forgets that the gospel is not about the sin of humanity but the glory of God.

And those are my thoughts on original sin.

So I've been thinking, after reading a question in some Christian youth publication, what movies can you think of where you see a married couple having sex? I'm not asking because I'm looking for raunchy sex scenes, only because almost all sex scenes are between couples who are not married.

But actually now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure that's not because Hollywood says married sex is not sexy, but that when sex is generally shown in a film is either because it's a significant moment in a characters journey or it's a bit of character exposition and within married sex isn't generally significant for either of these.

For instance, if there is a sex scene often it's the culmination of a relationship. When two characters have sex they have reached a particular high or low point in their relationship. From there things either plateau or bottom out, depending on whether the sex is seen as a good thing or a bad thing. I'd name some examples but it's in almost every movie. For a married couple this is going to be rare, because sex is going to be a given. The thing which gets commented on will be a couple's lack of sex, which of course cannot be shown through a sex scene (American Beauty may be an exception).

If on the other hand the sex is about character development it's almost always bad or neutral. It says "this character likes sleeping around" (eg the early hot tub scene in Charlie Wilson's War telling us the Mr Wilson has rather loose morals) or "this character has sex" (Havoc's early sex scene perhaps), or "this character has sex and is about to die" (any horror movie in the 80s which was perhaps Hollywood's sex-ed for teens regarding the AIDS crisis).

TV shows on the other hand tend to use sex a little differently. I think you're more likely to have implied sex (eg the pre-sex flirt) between a married couple, usually to show the resolution of whatever issue was between them in that particular story. But they still use sex in much the same way as movies both in plot points and character exposition/development.

From what I can tell in all this Hollywood isn't out to undermine married sex, they are out to tell a story, and show stories that we're interested in. Sex between a married couple just isn't vital enough to story or character in Hollywood to give it screen time. Sex outside of marriage is rarely frowned upon, unless it's adultery but even that is often glamourised. The sin of Hollywood, in my view, is not that it sets out to promote bad sexual behaviour, it just gives us what we want. And we, the public, want interesting sex and married sex just isn't good enough.

That said, some movies and TV shows that I can think of which have married sex as a plot point:

300 - Leonidas and his wife make love before he goes out to battle.
Mad Men - Don and Betty sometimes make love, although we're pretty much always aware that Don is cheating on Betty so it's never a really positive moment.
Friday Night Lights - Coach Taylor and Tami often talk about it and flirt with each other and it's always positive. On the flipside there is a whole episode in season one about their daughter Julie not losing her virginity. It's quite the morally conscious show.

That's all I can think of. But to tell you the truth, I generally try and avoid the films which have heaps of sex in them, and the ones I do see with sex in them, I tend to forget the sex, so I'm sure there are much better examples out there.

Can you think of others?

It's been a big week or so for preaching. 2 sermons and 4 kids talks in 8 days.

The first sermon I did was last Sunday. I did it back at my old church. If you want to read about the actual sermon you can read about it here and you can download the sermon here.

It was fun to be back at my old church. I do always enjoy being back. It was my first time in the morning service, and I had a little bit of trouble remembering names of some of the older memebers of the congregation, which was embarrassing. But I got there in the end. Or just mumbled my way through.

I met my old Year Advisor at church. He'd started going to church there about 6 months after I left. It was a little odd, but he's a good guy. I'm pretty sure my year got the best year advisor in the school. In fact I think I would have quite liked having him at church when I was there. Although I may have been more self concious about all my sermon illustrations about school.

One of the families from the church had me over to lunch afterwards and invited some of the youth and young adults around to join us. It was really nice. I do love that bunch. In some ways it's a bit sad catching up with that crew, especially people who were in my youth group, because their life goes on and I don't get to be a part of it anymore.

On the other hand my life goes on too, and there is much richness here. Saying "Yes" to one thing is saying "No" to another, that's what they say. If only we weren't finite. Or we were just ever expanding like the universe.

Maybe we are ever expanding like the universe but so is everything else at the same rate, so we'd never know.

I should think about that some more.

I was driving home from Bible Study on Monday night with my new British friend, Ant, and as we drove past a telegraph pole in Hornsby, I looked up and saw a bright light. I said to Ant "Look there's someone welding, on top of the pole, all by themselves." I thought it was odd that there would be a person on top of a telegraph pole at 10:30pm doing some welding. But then when I looked further, I saw there was no person up there, just the bright light. I realised that this was electricity, burning brightly where it shouldn't be burning brightly, coming out of the top of a telegraph pole.

This was an exciting discovery for me, this meant it was an emergency. So I said dramatically "We're going to have to call emergency services!" I put on my hazards and did a u-turn to get a better look, used my iPhone GPS to figure out exactly where it was, then dialed triple-0. I reported that there was a telegraph pole on fire, and I think the lady on the other end was happy to have taken such an pivotal call in the safety of the nation and our fight against terrorism and stuff.

Once that was done we parked and wandered a little closer to watch this sparking electrical brilliance. At times is grew very bright, bright like a thousand suns (minus 999.9999 of them) and made a noise some what resembling battle involving multiple lightsabers. We didn't stand too close, as we thought it might explode. That was certainly my hope.

The Fireys and the Cops arrived about 3 minutes after I called. They parked right opposite the sparking thing, so it seemed they weren't too worried about explosions.

I was then hoping to see some action as the fireys set about putting it out but everyone just stood around staring at it. They informed us that you can't really put the fire out, you just have to turn off the electricity.

So it was less exciting than I'd hoped. But still more exciting than a normal drive home.

As it turned out, one of the fire fighters was my friend Wayne who I used to think was awesome when I was a kid, and who I got lost in a canyon with when we all went canyoning with Keith. It was a nice moment.

When we realised nothing more was going to happen, we left. Our work was done, Hornsby was safe in the hands of the NSW Fire Brigade.

I am Australia's Next Top Model!

No... wait... sorry... hold on... I'm feeling a bit sick about this... actually, it's Amanda.

Damn it.

Sometimes I wish I had a girlfriend so we could share our Google Calendars.

Do what you must do to find yourself
Wear another shoe

Paint my shelf



- Damien Rice

After the City 2 Surf Jem, Gem and I got all excited to run the Bridge Run, a 9km run across the Harbour Bridge. I was going to train hard and be awesome.

Alas...

I ran once, a few days after the City 2 Surf and didn't run again. Gem and Jem run only once too.

Today was race day, and we ran. None of us died. In fact we all found it way too easy.

We've decided to do the half marathon.

We're going to train hard and be awesome.

Last night at youth group I was speaking on Evangelism as a value for our youth group. I talked about our need to share the good news of Jesus. This gave me the perfect opportunity to talk about our love of sharing dumb videos and to show two of the most watched videos on YouTube this week.

Seeing as I love YouTube, this was perfect.

First I showed this one, because I think it's brilliant:



Then I showed this one because it seemed to have been the biggest thing on YouTube in the previous 24 hours. I'm not normally a fan of people getting hurt videos. Actually I am, but I try not to be. But I showed this not to laugh but to make a point about the uselessness of the things we share. Still, I may have laughed a bit:



Anyway, the talk itself seemed to go ok. I gave the kids an opportunity to become Christians and what was great is that two of them indicated that they wanted to become Christians! So in hindsight, the talk went brilliantly.

But despite the kingdom success I didn't feel all that good about the talk. I came home thinking I spoke too long, that it wasn't interesting enough and it was a bit of a mess. One of the leaders told me they found my gospel presentation "interesting". They clarified that it wasn't wrong or heretical, just interesting. I didn't quite know what this meant, so I worried then about my presentation of the gospel too.

So I came home feeling a little depressed. Which is highly dumb. I'm sure it was partly due to the fact that I was coming off the back of another big week of Bible talk preparing and giving, so I wasn't feeling real happy.

Still, it was dumb. Here I am, two kids have believed the Gospel for the first time and prayed to become a Christian, and I'm worrying about whether my talk was good enough. How full of pride I am that my primary response after my talk is not "How amazing God is that people gave their life to Jesus!" but "Oh dear, I don't think my talk was good/funny/interesting/short enough."

Less of me. More of Him.

I'm writing a talk at the moment on work and laziness in the book of Proverbs. It's for a school. I was asked to do it. I didn't realise I could have picked another topic. This is a shame because work and laziness are not very exciting ideas. I'm not passionate about people working hard. I especially don't want to be the guy who turns up to school and says "Work hard and you'll achieve stuff", I hated those speeches at school. And the "Don't waste your education" speeches, I hated them too. I don't want to be that guy. I want to stand there and say "Don't open your HSC. Don't stress. Go out late at night. Only do the homework you want to do. You are not your education." Though I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get invited back.

I might try and find the middle way. I might tell them all to become plumbers, cause plumbers are awesome.

I went to the launch of the Sovereign Grace Sydney on Sunday. I was there because both my housemates are part of the core planting team and I wanted to cheer them on. I also wanted to see how it'd all go down. I've never been to a church launch before.

It was a very enjoyable experience. The service was smooth (except perhaps for the tempremental keyboard at the end). The music was good. The preaching engaging. The people welcoming. It was a well executed first service. It felt very much like they'd been preparing for months and now they finally got the chance to pull it off, which I guess was the case.

Dave Taylor, the pastor, gave a good message on keeping the gospel central. He was passionate, Jesus focused, and he had the ability to keep everyone engaged for the whole message. Most importantly it moved me to love Jesus more.

I did really enjoy the sung worship. We spent half an hour singing four songs. It was the kind of charismatic-esque worship I don't get to do much of these days.

At one point I was sitting there thinking, "If I was a little more flaky, I'd quit my church and come here." Not because I don't like my church, I love my church, but because they did everything really well in a way I really liked. My guess it's not too hard to do everything well. They're the first plant in Australia from a large, successful US based ministry. They can pick a quality pastor from their worldwide network to come out and plant the church, and then, because of their reputation they can attract a good core of people for their core team, and they can pick a bunch of the most talented, highly functional Christians to do the plant with. If they weren't doing things well there'd be something wrong.

Anyway, none of this is a bad thing. I was impressed, and tempted toward church lust. I wonder if it's a similar feeling that married men get when they see a young, hot lady pass by and know they can't have her. That said, I'm not dissatisfied with my church, but I know the issues of my church, I don't know the issues of Sov Grace, all I see is the shiny, alluring, first day, launch specialness. If we're still going with the marriage metaphor, Sov Grace had on it's wedding night lingerie on Sunday while I'm pretty sure I'm at the stage with my church where they're not embarrassed to wear the grandma undies in front of me.

Hmmm, I should probably end this metaphor now.

All this to say, I'm sure Sov Grace will grow quickly and I pray they do and they fill up with people meeting Jesus for the first time and people coming back to Jesus after some "time off". They're going to be a good gospel witness in Sydney. I'm not going to quit my church for them, but I will cheer them on from the sideline. For my church I'll pray that we'll also can be a good gospel witness and that we too can look hot in some ecclesiastical lingerie.

Well I'm pretty pleased we have a government now. That was, however, a very enjoyable 17 days.

I think Rob Oakeshott is a bit of a dude.

I was amused that right after Oakeshott and Windsor announced their intentions my Facebook feed filled up with people proclaiming the imminent ruin of Australia. I'm pretty sure, whoever they sided with, Australia wouldn't get ruined. As far as I can tell neither Labor or the Liberals would set about turning Australia into a police state, or legislating forced abortions, euthanasia and gay marriage. Neither of them are going start burning books or merging Australia with North Korea. They're just going to plod along making good decisions and bad decisions none of which will immediately send Australia into Zimbabwean territory. We're rather blessed to live in a country where we can survive in a country where we have no government for 17 days and there are no riots, no military coups, no assassinations, we just keep going on our way and make amusing websites.

I was similarly amused by the article on SMH that said that Rob Oakeshott "held Australia hostage" because he took 15 minutes to tell the press conference that he was siding with Labor. Giving the man 15 minutes after he's spent the last 17 days trying to sort out the next three years of Australian government for the country is a small ask. I'm very thankful for the diligence and care that Katter, Windsor and Oakeshott put into their decision. I don't think anyone should accuse them of taking their role lightly, though I'm sure they will.

What has interested me in all this is the vast difference of opinion that Christians can have in politics. You can get a bunch of Christians together who all have basically the same views on the Bible, on persona morality, on their theology - but then you get them to talk about politics, and they'll be people all over the political spectrum.

In my house there are three of us, we are all pretty much of the same view of things in our faith, we all believe in the authority of the Bible, we're all pretty much reformed in our theology, as far as the churches practice and message goes we probably all have the same view on abortion, gay marriage, care for the poor, etc. But I think we each voted Liberal, Labor and Greens or maybe one of them should be changed to Family First. This makes me happy. I love that loving Jesus doesn't make you vote one way or the other. And I love that it's rare that people will question your faith just because of who you choose to vote for.

I'm thankful for democracy. I'm thankful for politics. And I'm still thankful for Mike Kelly's moustache.

Yesterday I had a work event on and there was a guy there who I went on camp with last year. I was the speaker and he was on of the leaders, he came up to me to say "Hello" but I couldn't for the life of me remember his name. It was the old "Hey Tom, how you going?" "Heeeyyyy, not too bad, how are you?"

I thought he must have been one of the directors of the camp because there was a camp directors' weekend on there at the time. As we talked I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what his name was and what else I knew about him. Then I remembered that both the directors were studying medicine, or were doctors or something. I thought, "Great, I'll ask how that's going and it'll be clear from the question that I remember who he is" and that could make up for the obvious fact that I completely forgot his name.

So I said "How's your studies?"

And he replied "I finished last year, I'm working now."

Me: "Oh so are you saving people's lives?"

Him: "I'm not sure you save many lives in the media."

Damn! Now it's freakin' obvious you have no idea who he is, dig up! Dig up!

Me: "Well... you know... Jack Bauer, he saves people's lives, and he's in the media, sort of, well, he's a fictional character, portrayed in the media, who's saving people's lives... actually he kinda kills more people...yeah..."

Idiot!

I sometimes worry that my acts of love and kindness are motivated not by love and kindness but rather by pride. I'm not so concerned for other people, as I am that other people will think I'm a loving, kind person. I do good so that people will think I'm good. And I don't do bad, because I want people to think I'm good.

This isn't so good.