Does God prohibit polygamy? What about the patriarchs?
This is a live issue in Africa. It is a live issue in my majority-Muslim community around our church. It is increasingly a growing question in our permissive Western society that brooks no dissent on the ‘love is love’ mantra, regardless of what form that apparent love takes. But what does the Bible say about it?
Ok, so there was Glastonbury
Glastonbury is back. Matthew Hosier reflects on what he saw.
People I’m proud of this month
‘The Bible doesn’t call us to less love than the world. It calls us to more. And love means carrying each other’s burdens, hearing each other’s struggles, witnessing each other’s hurt, and believing together that Jesus loves us more than any other man or woman ever could (Gal. 6:2; James 5:16; John 15:12). It means denying ourselves and taking up our cross and following our Lord—including sacrificing romantic dreams and sexual desires when they are calling us away from him (Matt. 16:24). But it doesn’t mean being alone. Whatever our patterns of attraction and temptation, we’re meant to need each other and to shoulder up, like fellow soldiers (Phil. 2:25 and Philem. 2).’
Australian Christianity is officially in decline (and I, for one, am relieved)
‘It’s a relief to be able to say that Australia is not a Christian country any longer. In fact I wish more people had just come out and admitted it. Perhaps now we can get on with evangelising it. Perhaps now we can as Christians just admit we’re not a Christian nation, and take a more “away game” stance to where this thing goes.’
Who’s in charge at church? The whole church
‘We may be ordinary Christians, but there’s nothing ordinary about Christians. We’re all products of God’s supernatural, redemptive work of grace. The reason Christ commissions local church members to guard the gospel is because every Christian has been equipped to guard the gospel.’
If you find listening to sermons boring, try this
We can all find sermons a bit dull at times. Sometimes that is the preacher’s fault, but sometimes it might be our problem. If you are often finding sermons boring, perhaps think about how you are listening to them. Then try these things and see if it makes a difference to how you engage.
From the archive: Evangelicals dissing Ocasio-Cortez slur their worldwide brethren and exhibit too low a commitment to truth
‘Specifically in the case of AOC, American Christians really need to stop the slurs. She wants to see something akin to the not-so-Socialist policies of the UK system. But this contemptuous view of her means that our US brothers and sisters are inadvertently dismissing large swathes of their brethren from the rest of the world as unbiblical and ungodly for holding political views that they wouldn’t even recognise as Socialist (and certainly wouldn’t describe themselves that way!)’