All posts tagged Word Alive

Carson: 1 John

by Hugh on April 21, 2008 in Faith with No comments

Don Carson at New Word Alive Final New Word Alive 2008 summary post, the morning Bible readings… what a privilege to have Don Carson, arguably the best living New Testament scholar to come and teach the book of 1 John to us. I usually get bored after the first one, the seats are uncomfortable (and not wide enough) and the big tent is always stuffy, the big Don managed to keep my attention though.

Carson began by saying that removing a small piece of the gospel will distort it (making subtle allusions, more subtle than Piper, about why NWA exists), it was the distortions of Gnosticism which John was facing. DC then went into a 25 minute, unscripted critique of Gnostic beliefs and how they had subtly distorted the gospel. In the first section (1 John 1 – 2:2) he has 3 points; What John longs for, what gets in the way of that, and what brings it about… John longs for fellowship, a partnership with God, and a joy in knowing Him… Sin gets in the way, it breaks the fellowship, we can’t face God’s justice… ultimately fellowship and joy in that is brought by the cross, by Jesus our propitiation.

The big Don dodged 1 John 2:2 on the first day and set out to explain it the next, he basically just said that the atonement is sufficient for all, but not effective for all… John says it in this way to say there are no barriers to atonement, unlike in gnosticism where hierarchical barriers were erected. Carson then took us though 1 John 2:3-27, he exposited the various antitheses throughout the passage – obedience vs. disobedience, love vs. hate, God-centredness vs. world-centredness, and Christians vs. antichrists.

Third talk… I’d stopped making notes by this point… was a bit tired and just needed to listen… got a Coke and a muffin to help! I think it was this talk where he said – “Christians don’t sin” (1 John 3:6)… so I start to wonder if I’m actually a Christian, after all this is coming from the big DC! Helpfully and amusingly he told a story of his rebellious school days chewing gum… the point was the although Christians do things they mustn’t, they can’t in the sense that they shouldn’t… what a strong call to resist temptation and submit to God’s will.

On the final morning he spoke (via video link, we couldn’t get in to the main venue) on perseverance and assurance. DC was a great choice of speaker, you know he’s got a massive brain and could destroy you in any debate, theological or otherwise, but he made things easy, he still made a few jokes, was genuinely funny (not just cause of his weird accent). The thing I love most is humility… I heard that he went to the 14-18′s meeting to be interviewed, when asked “What’s the hardest thing about being a Christian?” he said something along the lines of… I always mess up, I don’t do what God wants me to do… that’s not a quote, but it was something like that, but it’s reassuring to know that a godly man who has been used mightily by God gives the same answer as me!

Piper: NWA

by Hugh on April 16, 2008 in Faith with 2 Comments

I think this was probably the highlight of New Word Alive for me. Partly because I’m a bit of a preacher groupie, actually it’s more than that, Piper’s preaching through its freeness at DesiringGod.org has really helped me during my time at Uni, really shaped my view of God, and although I haven’t read much of his writings, Don’t Waste Your Life was great! So getting to see him preach live (yes we were sad and made it to nearly the front row) was just great, he is a great communicator, passionate and dynamic, visibly in love with Jesus and deeply influenced, to the core by a massive view of God in His sovereignty . More importantly, it was the highlight because of the topic and passage.

Piper spoke from Romans 8 (in two parts) under the title ‘Treasuring Christ and a call to suffer’, it really needed 3 messages as he spent 30 minutes of the 2nd giving qualifications and expansions on the 1st, my solution is let him preach for as long as he likes! I didn’t take any notes, I just wanted to listen (you can find some notes on Adrian Warnock and Tim Chester’s blog).

Three big points on the first night were; first, suffering is universal, everyone suffers (except God and non-fallen angels), second that suffering is historical, it had a beginning and will come to an end, and third that all suffering is judicial, God’s judgement on a rebellious world. For the non-Christian that suffering is the foretaste of eternal condemnation, for the Christian there is now no condemnation, so all suffering is purifying.

The second message was the why and how of the first message, it’s aim was to try and be practical response to the theological grounding of the first, in reality he still had much theological grounding that he wanted to give – which is good, you need a robust theology of suffering to be able to in God’s grace, stand through the storm. The big point here was Ephesians 1:5-6 – “He predestined us… to the praise of his glory” - Piper passionately explained that this groaning world exists to give glory to God, and ultimately this is displayed through Christ on the cross, the suffering of which we will sing FOREVER!

Piper concluded with a quote from ‘Shining Like Stars‘, which is sourced from Howard Guinness (in the book Sacrifice. A call to faithful suffering, and obedient service…

Where are the young men and women of this generation who will hold their lives cheap and be faithful even unto death? Where are those who will lose their lives for Christ�s sake � flinging them away for love of Him? Where are those who will live dangerously, and be reckless in His service?

Part 1, Part 2

NWA Bits

by Hugh on April 12, 2008 in Faith with No comments

So, after about a nine hour trip we finally made it back from Pwllheli and the anticipated excitement was not disappointed! The site we were staying on isn’t as good as Skeggy, but in contrast to the Lincolnshire coast we had some sun, you could describe the scenery as beautiful and having Snowdon in the background is a plus.

First night we kicked off with Terry Virgo speaking on God’s Grace from Romans 5. It was a great start to the week to be reminded of our status before God based on his Grace mediated through Christ’s work on the cross. At the same time some of us felt he didn’t really give a balanced picture, yes we are under grace, but what about disciple, how does sanctification work? Terry Virgo did mention these things but had no time to explain – a shame. Nevertheless it was great to glory at God’s lavish grace.

Don Carson spoke in the morning Bible readings from 1 John, and the next two evenings formed a two-part message from John Piper – Treasuring Christ and a call to suffer… these two features deserve separate posts.

What else was there to do… Chronological Bible overview with Jason Clarke, a guide to understanding, interpreting and applying the whole Bible (using Daniel) with Vaughan Roberts, Trinity with Mike Reeves (mind blowing as ever), Humanity and Creation, 3 studies with Mike Ovey… Giving a Bible talk with Richard Coekin, Good News to the poor with Tim Chester… and loads of other practical seminars with great speakers like; Graham Daniels, Mark Ashton, Wallace Benn, Dave Bish, Andrew Sach, Jim Paul, Melvin Tinker, Jon Hobbs, John Benton, Roger Carswell… and loads more!

And if that’s too much for you then there’s go karts, crazy golf, swimming, peddlos, and a nice beach to walk on. In fact that usually is too much, I went to the main meetings and Mike Reeves on the Triune God… that’s more than enough! The rest of the time it’s good to just chillax, enjoy people’s company, think about what we’re learning, and to enjoy the beauty of Wales (and Sarah), more thoughts to come…

New Word Alive

by Hugh on April 7, 2008 in Faith with No comments

So this morning (at 8am) we start the long journey from Brighton to Pwllheli. It’s going to be great, NWA that is, I doubt the journey will be fun, I reckon it’s at least a 7-hour drive in our minibus… Don’t think I’ll be live blogging but I’ll certainly have some thoughts and feedback to share afterwards, maybe a few little extras too… I’m excited, as is Si-Fi…

Does God forgive sin?

by Hugh on August 14, 2007 in Faith with 1 Comment

At Word Alive this year, in his talk on Atonement (from Hebrews 9), Richard Cunningham (Director of UCCF) said: “God does not forgive sin, he only punishes it”. He also went on to concur with my thoughts on sin and sinners. This is a bold statement to make, but if true, I believe it cuts to the heart of lots of issues I’ve been blogging on recently; PSA, hell, depravity etc. This post has been sitting uncompleted in the WordPress system since coming back from Word Alive, unfortunately delayed due to more pressing things. In that time it’s been discussed elsewhere; by Cat and by a less supportive “Speaker of Truth” who accuses RC of heresy (now retracted).

Now the obvious thing to say is that this statement is clearly false, after all the Bible and creeds clearly state that God forgives sin. But is it that simple? What does Joshua 24:19 mean “..he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins”? What about those who advocate a PS (thoroughly Biblical) view of atonement – have we got it wrong? So what is forgiveness? I think part of the problem is that we may have a wrong view of what forgiveness actually is… generally the view seems to be of God ‘forgetting’ sin or simply saying it ‘doesn’t matter’ anymore. These are nice ideas, they make God sound like a big dad in the sky who really wants us to come and say sorry so he can simply ‘forgive’. Biblical forgiveness is not some kind of ‘cosmic insomnia’ but is administered through sacrifice, through blood. Not very popular, makes us sound ‘pre-Christian’! Whatever we think, the Bible states two truths – God forgives sin (1John 1:9) and God punishes sin (Gen 3).

Firstly (in response to Joshua 24), we know that God does punish the sin of the non-Christian, “the wages of sin is death…” Rom 6:23, sin has to be paid for, if all sin is forgiven then there is no punishment to face, no penalty to be paid - no hell – sounds nice, but that belief leads to Universalism, a heresy, the Bible teaches against that belief. But how is the sin of the believer dealt with? Yes, it’s forgiven, but what does that mean??

Biblical forgiveness is the diversion of God’s wrath, propitiation – it’s what we see at the Passover, the temple sacrifices and at the cross. Not diversion into some spiritual void, or diversion that just eventually fizzles out, but diversion in the full force of God’s wrath, his holy anger against sin being placed upon a substitute – a perfect lamb (Exodus 12). The overviews of the passages in ‘Pierced for our transgressions’ (Ex 12, Lev 16 and Isa 53) superbly present the case for God’s wrath being taken on the lamb (not hard as it’s a simple reading of the text) – Jesus our substitute.

And what about Hebrews 9, the text for this talk in question, what does this text have to say?

v.1-10 There’s a problem, despite all the ritual of the OT temple sacrifices, they “…were not able to clear the conscience of the worshiper.” , these ceremonies were a picture, waiting for the “new order”, for Jesus and his cross.

v.11-28 The blood of the goats is a picture of the blood of Christ, but Christ achieved far more than animal sacrifices ever could. He cleanses believers from sins and secures the eternal inheritance.

There are two key verse which help to answer our questions:

“In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” Heb 9:22

“so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people..” Heb 9:28 – it is the sacrifice that takes away (forgives) sin

So what?

How can sinful people come into relationship with a holy God? – our sins need to be dealt with, by God

How are our sins dealt with? – at the cross

What happened at the cross? – Jesus, the Lamb, took up the sins of his people and bore the punishment for them, he was our sacrifice and our substitute

Why did it have to happen like this? – God’s holiness and justice demands that sin is punished, Jesus was fulfilling the OT law, God did it so it was the best way

What does this mean for me?

Sin is serious, it invokes a death sentence
God is big, sometimes we misunderstand him when we try to fit him into our mould of what and who we want him to be
Forgiving sin isn’t an easy thing, it required the blood of Christ – be overflowing with thankfulness to God for his gift of forgiveness and eternal life in Christ

Triune God

by Hugh on April 8, 2007 in Faith with 2 Comments

I try not to do too much when I go to Word Alive as I just get really tired – despite plenty of coffee and cake. However, I did make it along to all four sessions of the ‘Triune God’ seminar series. Apparently Don Carson was going to take this, but had to pull out, so we got Mike Reeves instead, a worthy replacement, who I think I actually love – in a Christian brother way.

I just realised Mike Reeves’ talks from the UCCF South-East Training weekend got lost in a deleted post, so I’ve added a new blogroll for good MP3 talks and Mike’s talks are linked there -thanks to Bish for those.

Anyway, so I went to these four sessions, which were quite hard going – firstly they were on about nap time, secondly there were lots of what to me seemed somewhat obscure old theologians and philosophers referred to (Aristotle??, Plato?? – joke, I’d heard of them), thirdly English isn’t my strong point so the addition of some Hebrew, Latin and Greek on top of that was tough, and fourthly and finally we were thinking about one triune God which is inevitably going to be mind boggling.

So we started off looking at how we define God, trying to move away from ideas of “divine being” or “substance”, but instead to look at Father, Son and Spirit. This had profound implications for speaking with people from other monotheistic faiths, especially Muslims. I guess could be tempting to find common ground, believing in ‘one’ God, but actually we believe in Father, Son and Spirit – and our Father, our God-head is profoundly different to Allah.

We then looked at how we can reconcile ‘oneness’ and trinity and different approaches in Christian theology throughout history – trying to fit the 3 into 1, and trying to understand how the 3 can be one. We learned that God is not simply 3 characters, 3 faces and that actually analogies like the Egg and H2O aren’t great ones. Rather God is three persons in loving relationship. This brings a whole new emphasis to 1 John 4:16 – “God is Love”. It’s not primarily saying that Love is an attribute or characteristic of God, no it goes much deeper to say that God is a relationship – Father, Son and Spirit are One God because of the loving relationship that joins them. God is Relationship, God is Love. So what does it mean to be in relationship with God? It means to be brought into this loving communion, to be loved by the Father as the Son is loved as the Spirit is loved – that was a Wow moment, where Mike starts to use bigger hand gestures. He then talked about “Hypostasis in Extasis” which I can’t quite remember what it means, but it was to do with the nature of who God is wanting to express his loving relationship into the world – hence creation, revelation of himself, and salvation to draw humanity back into relationship, so we went to the Scriptures to look at the Trinity in action within these themes…

Creation

Gen 1:2 – The Spirit of God moves of the water

Gen 1: 26 – Let us make man in our own image

Col 1: 16 – By Jesus all things were created

John 1: 3 – Through Jesus all things were made

Revelation

John 16 – It was great to be able to study the ‘upper room discourse’ at Sparkford 2 in the summer (and good to see at least one person from my dorm group in this seminar). The discourse is just packed with profound truths about the trinity – specifically on Revelation, from verse 13 it talks about the Spirit speaking, not on his own, but what he hears from the Son, and this not from the Son, because the Son got it from the Father in the first place.

Salvation

We didn’t look at Hebrews, but the stuff in Student Celebrations about Jesus the High Priest presenting himself as a sacrifice to the Father seems appropriate. We looked at John 17 – Jesus prays (presumably in the Spirit?) to his Father, he prays that through (the Cross?) the Son and the Father may be glorified. He prays for his disciples, for protection and unity. He prays for all who will believe (us?), praying that they may be one as we (Father and the Son) are one. The Son intercedes in prayer for his people with the Father, and ultimately on the Cross intercedes for his people by taking the Father’s punishment.

‘Cosmic Child Abuse’

One phrase used by Steve Chalke and others has been to liken the doctrine of PSA to ‘Cosmic Child Abuse’. The Father punishing the Son, can this be right in the light of what we’ve said about this loving communion of God? Firstly, there is the statement that Richard Cunningham raised, “God doesn’t forgive sin, he only punishes it” – I hope to blog on this later – if we reject this statement then we don’t have a problem, if we accept it, then we see Jesus being punished by the Father for our Sin… Love and Just Punishment are neither in conflict or contradiction, so the question is, is it more loving for the Father to punish the Son for Sin or to let the world face the punishment? I’m going with the former… but it comes back to “Hypostasis in Extasis”, the idea of God wanting to broadcast his loving relationship – redemption of humanity, through the atonement of Sin is the only way this can happen, the only way that humanity can be drawn back into the loving communion which is God.

Some people think theology is boring, or simply intellectual – actually (and Mike Reeves has helped me in moving away from any notion of those two ideas) Christian theology gives glory, fear and reverence to an awesome God!

Word Alive

by Hugh on April 7, 2007 in Faith with No comments

So apparently it was 14 years ago that we first went to Word Alive in Pwllheli. Wow, so I was 7 then and I can still remember (somewhat vaguely) our caravan, going to see the Jungle Book at the cinema and a photo of my dad with a big panda. I’m not quite sure of the maths but I think this year must have been my 11th or 12th year. After Pwllheli it was off to pre-skyline, Roman Village era of Skegness. Happy memories of cold challets, youth stuff with Andy and Sarah (whoever they were, I remember Andy used to dress up and do mimes, I think I also threw a custard pie at him), getting lost in the arcade, fun on the Chuckle-Brother buggies, and then older youth stuff with Fenton, Roj, Irish Chris and Rob – brilliant. And for the last two years have enjoyed the student programme…

Charles Price on Philippians

In the main morning Bible readings we were following the main Spring Harvest theme – One People. It was One God last year and One Hope next. Charles took a chapter of Philippians each day with the titles: One People, Holy People, Catholic People and Apostolic People. I missed the first one and didn’t take notes, so I can’t give you a summary of each one, but it was good. It wasn’t so much an exposition of taking verse-by-verse and explaining every detail, rather and in my opinion much better for the situation he’d pick out a few key themes in the passage and expand on them. He was thoroughly biblical, at the same time used humour and real life examples to explain and give context to the passages. Clear, helpful and encouraging. Apparently he preaches on sunday night on the UCB channel, just after the God channel.

Mike Reeves on The Triune God

I went to a series of 4 lectures from Mike Reeves on the Trinity – going to write separately about this, see upcoming post.

Student Celebrations on Hebrews

Jason Clarke spoke from Hebrews 1:1-2:4 and told us about the God who speaks and the Jesus who is God’s Word, king of the universe. Pay attention to the Living Word revealed in the written word.

Hebrews 3 called us (through Graham Daniels) to fix our eyes on Jesus, the God who is faithful. Encourage each other, don’t harden your hearts, enter God’s rest.

Nigel Styles spoke on the last two verses of chapter 4, encouraging us that because Jesus is our high priest, who went right into heaven to present a sacrifice to the Father, that we can now approach God with confidence.
In light of some of my previous posts something that Richard Cunningham said in his talk on Atonement (Hebrews 9) struck me… “God does not forgive sin, he only punishes it!” I think I may explore this in a later post… for now suffice to worship Jesus our great high priest who gave himself as a sacrifice for sins – once for all. It was great to share communion with two thousand students afterwards.

Wallace and Lindsay Benn took us through the ‘gallery of faith’ in chapter 11, a call to trust in God in all situations and confidence in God’s faithfulness to keep his promises to his people. It was nice to use the shiny new thinline ESV that Wallace sent me for my 21st, for which I believe Adam paid 20 quid for :-p

As ever I usually forget what Roger Carswell says, good though it is, I’m obviously thinking how cool it would be if he was my uncle. He spoke from chapter 12 and encouraged us to keep running!

New Word Alive

So after 14 years it’s back to Pwllheli, for the new Word Alive event. It’s no secret really of the differences between the 3 Word Alive co-organisers (UCCF, Keswick and Spring Harvest), exacerbated in the last few years by the old herecies brought back by Steve Chalke (re-hash of 19th century liberalism – as Richard Cunningham put it) and Spring Harvest’s refusal to distance themselves from that. In the midst of the debate though it was great to see such a strong emphasis of PSA put across through the Bible teaching and plugging the new book ‘Pierced for our Trangressions‘. So next year begins on the 7th April, and has a strong headline trio of Carson, Piper and Virgo… good, but they weren’t crucified for me. And more importantly, as Kath says – “God will be there”… New Word Alive