Riverside Anglican Churches

Peter Hitchens, journalist and brother of angry atheist Christopher Hitchens, has written a book about his journey back to faith from atheism. This video (made to plug the book) is very interesting…

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A helpful video presenting the grounds of christian hope and inviting response

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March 4, 2010

Archbishop of Sydney calls concerned people to help Chile Earthquake Victims

Archbishop Dr. Peter Jensen is asking Sydney Anglicans and their friends to respond generously to earthquake victims in Chile.

Our diocese has very close connections with the Diocese of Chile through our CMS Missionaries, Chileans who have studied at Moore College, and with the Chilean Diocesan Leadership.

Archbishop Jensen has been monitoring the situation with the Primate of the Province, Archbishop Greg Venables, and the Bishop of Chile, Tito Zavala.

“The latest reports indicate that in Concepcion, where the earthquake was at its most destructive, four Anglican congregations have been camping in groups together. They are sharing a very limited supply of food and water ” said Dr Jensen.

Now is the time to help, and give generously to the Archbishop of Sydney’s Relief to Victims in Chile Appeal.  Your gift to The Archbishop’s Overseas Relief and Aid Fund (ORAF) will enable the Bishop of Chile to provide ongoing assistance to those hardest hit and in greatest need.

Please make your donation online by visiting the Archbishop of Sydney’s Appeals Unit website, www.abau.org.au and following the links, or by calling 9284 1406 or our toll free number 1800 653 903.

Dr Peter F Jensen
Archbishop

(By e-mail.)

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This is a Christmas message, but we’ll arrive at Christmas at the end! You’ve probably heard that a fully-fledged Aussie saint is in the pipeline with the pope ratifying a second miracle from Mary MacKillop. The first “miracle” occurred in the 1960’s when a woman was cured of leukaemia and the second more recently when a woman with “incurable” lung cancer was cured with apparently nothing other than prayers to Mary MacKillop.

These claims have met with a fair bit of scepticism. One cancer-doctor wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to God in the newspaper during the past week complaining to God that “fixing…cancers is my job. I admit we don’t always make them disappear (as You know) but when we do we usually credit the decades of research and training that led us to employ effective treatments.” He doesn’t believe that the credit should go to God (or Mary MacKillop) but to the medical profession when someone is cured, even when doctors can’t explain it. Like many people, he thinks that God and the saints shouldn’t be allowed to invade the scientific realm.

But what does the Bible make of all of this? The Bible shows us a God who is in such control over the world that he should be thanked when someone is cured (or anything else good happens) whether it be attributable to medicine or labelled “miraculous”. As the Creator of the world, God is certainly able to work through the known laws of nature or outside them. There is nothing wrong with praying for someone to be healed of cancer, even if we’re praying for a “miracle”. The God that we believe in is bigger than anyone gives him credit for!

But the Bible never encourages us to pray to special people called “saints” to put in a good word for us with God. It tells us to pray to the Father through the Son in the Spirit, which means coming straight to God, trusting Jesus to give us open access, and being guided by the Spirit’s direction and encouragement. As we pray, our confidence should be in Jesus; not in Mary MacKillop, nor in Jesus’ mother, nor in any other “saint”. After all, the miracles of Jesus that are recorded in the Bible were so obvious that no one who witnessed them was in any doubt about what had happened (no official investigations required!). There’s no guarantee that we’ll get what we ask for when we ask; but there is a 100% guarantee of God’s wise care and eternal life for those who trust Jesus.

So the Bible urges us to focus on the ONE BIG MIRACLE that Christmas urges us to reflect upon – the coming of the God-Man into our world to put us right with God. Why would we need any other miracles to be assured of God’s power or love? Christmas should give us the confidence to approach God because he has approached us!

If you would like to be more confident as you pray, or if you would like someone to pray with you for any issue, please don’t hesitate to call and make an appointment to come and see me or another friendly minister (9602 8836). We’d love to help you in any way we can.

On behalf of everyone at our church, best wishes for Christmas and the New Year to you and your family.

Steve

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When you get the framework right, the reality of hell (and heaven) makes lots more sense – as Don Carson shows clearly here.

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Some very helpful points to bear in mind on a perhaps the most difficult issue to find satisfaction on (though the christian faith gives more satisfaction than any other belief system!)

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Very helpful biblical perspective of the context in which to view the questioning of God’s existence. The finish is well worth staying for!

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How important should it be to us that we are Anglicans? I have a confession to make. On my recent family holiday to Yamba (North Coast NSW), when it came time for church on both Sundays, I drove past the Anglican church and took my family to the Presbyterian church instead. There were two main reasons for this. First, the Anglican service on Sunday morning was at 7am (!!!) and surely had no provision for our three active small children. But secondly (and more importantly to me), we knew that the Presbyterian church would at least try to “feed” us from the Bible (having met the minister before), whereas we had no idea what we would get from an Anglican church in that region (it may, of course, be an excellent church!).

You may think that I, as a card-carrying Anglican minister, should have gone to the local Anglican church (even if it meant leaving my family at home). But how important should that particular label be? While I am certainly not ashamed of being an Anglican, to me it is not the most important label that I wear.

I take heart from being in good company here. John Stott has had an incredible ministry speaking, writing and pastoring in the Anglican church over many decades. While I may not be comfortable with absolutely everything that he has written, he must now be regarded as a superstar and deeply respected as an elder statesman in the Anglican world and more broadly. In a recent biography, he is quoted:

First and foremost, by God’s sheer mercy, I am a Christian seeking to follow Jesus Christ.

Next, I am an evangelical Christian because of my conviction that evangelical principles (especially sola scriptura [Scripture alone] and sola gratia [by grace alone]) are integral to authentic Christianity, and that to be an evangelical Christian is to be a New Testament Christian, and vice versa.

Thirdly, I am an Anglican evangelical Christian, since the Church of England is the particular historical tradition or denomination to which I belong.

But I am not an Anglican first, since denominationalism is hard to defend. It seems to me correct to call oneself an Anglican evangelical (in which evangelical is the noun and Anglican the descriptive adjective) rather than an evangelical Anglican (in which Anglican is the noun and evangelical the adjective).

In other words, after being a Christian, Stott sees himself first as an evangelical (i.e. someone committed to the Bible and the gospel of grace alone) and second as an Anglican.

This is particularly relevant to what is happening in the worldwide Anglican communion at present. Large sections of the Anglican church have abandoned the Bible and think “evangelical” is a dirty word. Evangelicals from everywhere within the Anglican church are now sticking together for support (and looking to our Sydney diocese particularly because there is such a high concentration of evangelicals here). The secular media is rubbing its collective hands together at the prospect of the break-up of the worldwide Anglican communion.

Should these events concern us? Perhaps, but not to the point of despair. The break-up of Anglicanism may make us sad but denominations can come and go. No one was ever saved by becoming an “Anglican” but God will make sure that the evangelical faith thrives because that is where salvation is found.

It’s good to be Anglican but being an EVANGELICAL is worth dying for!

Steve

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A few weeks ago in many Anglican churches across the world it was officially “Back to church Sunday”. There were media advertising campaigns inviting people to come back to church. Sydney Anglican churches didn’t participate, possibly because we were already tied up with the Jesus All About Life campaign.

I admit that, initially, “Back to Church Sunday” sounded like a good idea to me. However, an article that I came across in an English newspaper has changed my mind. The article is titled “Wishy-washy pleas will not get us back into church”. In it, the writer Gill Hornby puzzles over the defeatist attitude that he sees in the mainstream churches. He writes:

Tomorrow is Back to Church Sunday for the Church of England – a public relations push to get the lapsed back in the pew. It has been marked by a radio ad campaign, which shows how hip and happening the Anglican Church is now – “No need to make no innovation, Please accept this as your invitation.” Well, that will get all those young folk in, for sure.

Weekly attendance figures have now dropped to below one million [in England] and, according to the Bishop of Reading, it’s quite the wrong sort of million turning up. “How did it come to this,” he asked, in what was apparently supposed to be a positive contribution to the attendance debate, “that we have become known as just the Marks and Spencer option [i.e. old, conservative white people]?” Jesus, the Bishop feels sure, was more of an Aldi man.

…here’s the Bishop of Reading wanting to broaden his religious base, and going about it like Gerald Ratner: talking the product down. Have you ever heard a pope say: “The trouble with Catholicism is…”, or a mullah put forward the argument: “Here’s what’s wrong with Islam…”? No. And funnily enough, for them, business is booming.

Hornby has a point. People can see straight through any attempt to make church sound hip, and begging people to come back to church sounds pretty desperate, especially when accompanied by bishops wringing their hands and lamenting the decline of the church. Will people be attracted to a church that exudes the message “Woe is us – please come because we’re desperate”?

Hornby is also right in noticing a complete lack of confidence in the Anglican leadership regarding the Christian faith in general. They don’t stand for anything, so they apologise for everything, unlike other faiths which seem willing to stand behind their message! The world wants to know: Do Christians believe their gospel or not?

Surely the way to get people back into church is by proclaiming the gospel, not apologising for it, and praying that God does his sovereign work of calling people from darkness to light. There’s nothing wrong with making ourselves and our message as accessible as possible to the average Aussie, but bending over backwards to impress people (or begging them to prop up our institution) shows a pathetic lack of faith.

What reason do we have to be desperate? If we believe that God rules and our gospel is the power of God for the salvation of all who believe then surely we ought to be supremely confident to speak to people about Jesus and invite them to church knowing the God’s will is being done, rather than wringing our hands and obsessively counting heads in church.

Steve

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2009 NRL grand final, Melbourne Storm versus Parramatta Eels. During the week there was a newspaper article about a famous Parramatta fan called “Parramatta Jesus”.

Basically, Parramatta Jesus was a yobbo with long hair and a beard whose mates dared him to wear a long robe and sandals to a Paramatta game in 1998. He obviously enjoyed the attention and kept going to Parramatta games dressed as Jesus for the next ten years, becoming something of a celebrity. He has since hung up his robe and will not be turning up to the grand final as Jesus for fear of jinxing his beloved Eels (they’ve done so well now that Parramatta Jesus has retired).

Perhaps it would be fitting for Parramatta Jesus to show up though, because last Wednesday 30th Sept has been declared the first ever “International Blasphemy Day” by the American Center for Inquiry. That date marks the anniversary of the publication in 2005 of some cartoons in Denmark that depicted the face of Muhammad. These sparked violent protest and huge outcry in the Muslim world.

International Blasphemy Day includes artworks mocking Jesus that are intended to provoke Christians, blasphemy contests in which entrants submit a blasphemous phrase, poem or statement  and the online submission of video-blasphemies which have to contain the phrase “I deny the Holy Spirit” in defiance of Mark 3:29 (let’s not tell them that they are misinterpreting that verse!).

The Center for Inquiry is obviously not that brave. If it were, it would invite blasphemy against Allah as well as the Christian God. This raises a question: Should Christians be provoked to outrage when cowardly, immature, ignorant unbelievers seek to offend us? Should we defend the honour of the Lord Jesus Christ by taking to the streets in an angry mob, storming our enemies’ buildings and burning some cars?

Al Mohler, an American Christian writer and speaker, gives some very helpful advice.

First, take no offense. Refuse to play into the game plan of those sponsoring International Blasphemy Day.  The Lord Jesus Christ was and is despised and rejected of men.  Our Lord bore the scorn heaped upon him by his enemies. Christianity is not an honor religion. Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are not commanded to defend his honor, but to be willing to share in the scorn directed to him. Is the servant greater than his master?

…We must be those who take to the streets with the Gospel — not with a protest against our honor or the honor of our Lord.  When Christians forget this, we lose our Gospel witness.  The history of the church includes far too many instances of this loss. We dare not add another.

Second, mourn the blasphemy. The warning of Jesus is clear — blasphemy has eternal consequences.  The worst form of blasphemy is the refusal to hear and believe the Gospel.  For that sin there can be no forgiveness. We must mourn the blasphemy, not because honor is at stake, but because souls are at stake with eternal consequences.  God will ultimately and perfectly defend his honor.  On that day, there will be no escape for unrepentant blasphemers.

Third, see this observance for what it really is — an unintended testimony to the existence of God and the foolishness of those who deny Him.  The sheer foolishness of a blasphemy contest with t-shirts and mugs betrays the lunacy of it all.  They can do no better than this?  One testimony to the power of God is the fact that his self-declared enemies come off as so childish and manic. The heathen rage and God sees the foolish grasshoppers.

International Blasphemy Day will come and go. Take note, ponder its meaning . . . and skip the t-shirt.

So let’s pray for Parramatta Jesus rather than seeking to lynch him.

Steve

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