At Focus tonight we’re looking at Romans 14, as Paul shows how the gospel affects how we relate to brothers and sisters who have different views on disputable matters (in the passage it’s food and special days). Where often such differences can quickly end-up causing frustration and friction, Paul calls all to seek the edification of others, following Christ’s example. As Paul has shown since the start of Romans 12, the gospel brings about sober-minded selfless thinking with enemies, with authorities, and here across individual churches.

In the context of Christian Unions, student mission teams dedicated to speaking the gospel of Jesus Christ across campuses and colleges, often secondary issues can hamper such critical primary aims. One of these issues is often music/worship; does the way we concieve of music at our CU meetings hamper whether our brothers and sisters feel held back, restricted, left out, relegated, ignored in the work of the CU? The great thing about Romans 14-15 is that everyone is addressed and called to be selfless, which like the marriage in 1 Cor 7.1-4, is the result of gospel-thinking in the believer.

Mark Stone, a UCCF staff worker in the north-east, did a really practical seminar session on the topic of leading music in a CU context, up here in Durham in November. You can download the two files here (1) and here (2).

First day back home, after a few days out in the sticks with my fellow two muskateers, and then church’s annual Mid-Year Conference for students in the Lakes. Much to ‘mull over’ from the time away, and no doubt much to blog too.

A seminar on unity was really thought-provoking… how clear are we on the essentials of the gospel that has saved us, the gospel that unites God’s church… what truths would we fight for? What would we want to hold fast to when everyone else has deserted?

The doctrine of sin has to be one of those things. Was watching The Simpsons last night with my sister and it was the episode where Bart and the family travel to the Itchy & Scratch World amusement park. The theme was all about whether or not violence on kids’ TV actually caused children to be more violent – it made me think about our society: we’re so quick to point to this or that as the cause for society’s ‘downfall’. Our communities aren’t like they used to be surely? Things have changed, right?

J. C. Ryle didn’t think so. Writing about the church in the nineteenth century, he stated that one its chief wants ‘has been, and is, clearer, fuller teaching about sin.’ That is, sin, ‘doing, saying, thinking, or imagining anything that is not in perfect conformity with the mind and law of God.’

And from where does this vile offence against God come?

‘Let us, then, have it fixed down in our minds that the sinfulness of man does not begin from without, but from within. It is not the result of bad training in early years. It is not picked up from bad companions and bad examples, as some weak Christians are too fond of saying. No! It is a family disease, which we all inherit from our first parents, Adam and Eve, and with which we are born.

…

‘Search the globe from east to west and from pole to pole; search every nation of every climate in the four quarters of the earth; search every rank and class in our own country from the highest to the lowest—and under every circumstance and condition, the report will be always the same. The remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, completely separate from Europe, Asia, Africa and America, beyond the reach alike of Oriental luxury and Western arts and literature, islands inhabited by people ignorant of books, money, steam and gunpowder, uncontaminated by the vices of modern civilization, these very islands have always been found, when first discovered, the abode of the vilest forms of lust, cruelty, deceit and superstition. If the inhabitants have known nothing else, they have always known how to sin! Everywhere the human heart is naturally “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9). For my part, I know no stronger proof of the inspiration of Genesis and the Mosaic account of the origin of man, than the power, extent and universality of sin.

John 3.6; Ephesians 2.3; Romans 8.7; Mark 7.21.

The practical applications of such a doctrine:
a) one of the best antidotes to the ‘that vague, dim, misty, hazy theology which is so painfully current in the present age.’
b) one of the best antidotes to the ‘extravagantly broad and liberal theology which is much in vogue at the present time’.
c) one of the best antidotes to that ‘sensuous, ceremonial, formal kind of Christianity…’
d) one of the best antidotes to ‘the overstrained threories of Perfection, of which we hear much in these times…’
e) an admirable antidote to the low views of personal holiness which are so painfully prevalent in these last days of the Church.

All quotes from Holiness by J. C. Ryle.

I think it was Richard Baxter who said…

In essentials unity,
in non-essentials liberty,
in all things charity.

One exam to go. New Testament Greek.
They said Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Thankfully they didn’t say that Greek couldn’t be learnt in a day.
Elpis is Greek for hope.