Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

The talk at NVC today looked at how Jesus, as revealed in the bible (and with the Holy Spirit guiding us) provides reliable, useful moral and spiritual knowledge.  Christians are not expected believe without knowledge.  The talk drew from Dallas Willard’s book of the same title.  The audio and accompanying notes are available by clicking the “Sunday Messages” link above.

Willard’s book is available here and here.

Resurrection and renewal: some further reading

By Nathan Hobby

Those of you who were there on Sunday would know that I spoke on the idea that going to heaven when you die is not the full picture of our Christian hope. Instead, we wait in heaven for our resurrection and life on a renewed earth, where God’s will is done as it is in heaven and the potential of the things we have done on earth is fulfilled. If you missed it, the audio is now up – http://www.nvc.org.au/messages.htm.

For those who wanted to do some more reading on the subject, here’s some resources that discuss these ideas:

• David Lawrence, Heaven : It’s Not the End of the World [123 pages]
  - This book is hard to get hold of; it was published in 1995 by Scripture Union UK. You can order it on Amazon; Koorong might be able to get hold of it, and you can borrow it from Vose Seminary Library in Bentley.
• Tom Wright, Surprised By Hope [338 pages]
  - Koorong should have this one on its shelf (about $30), and again you can borrow it from Vose. It’s a recent book and covers everything in some detail, including a lengthy analysis of popular misconceptions about heaven. It’s a long read, but worthwhile.
• Tom Wright, New Heavens New Earth [24 pages]
  - This is a much better length and briefly discusses the biblical basis for the idea of a new earth. It was published by Grove Books in the UK in 1999. Network Vineyard people should contact me and I should be able to lend it to you.

The resources on the web are not as thorough, but Tom Wright has given a sermon on this topic and Byron Smith has written an impressive series on his blog.

It was great to respond to some of the questions you had at the end. If you want to continue dialogue in response to the sermon, please leave a comment, though I’m away from Thursday to Sunday, so may be slow replying.

I just have to reproduce the quote from Tom Wright that I finished the sermon with from page 219 of Surprised By Hope -

You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to fall over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown in the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are – strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself – accomplishing something which will become, in due course, part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings, and for that matter one’s fellow non-human creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed which spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world – all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation which God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God. God’s recreation of his wonderful world, which has begun with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God’s people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit, means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God’s new world. In fact, it will be enhanced there.

David Lawrence, Heaven : It’s Not the End of the World [123 pages]
Tom Wright, Surprised By Hope [338 pages]
Tom Wright, New Heavens New Earth [24 pages]

Internet
- The full text of this sermon will be available on http://perthanabaptists.wordpress.com.
- http://nothing-new-under-the-sun.blogspot.com/2006/11/heaven-in-rear-view-mirror-links.html

Discovering the Sabbath

Here’s the text of the sermon I gave yesterday.
- Nathan.

Today I want to talk about discovering the Sabbath. The Sabbath is the weekly day of celebration and rest God commands his people to take in the ten commandments. Of course, for the Jews it was the seventh day, Saturday. Some time early in the history of the church, Christians made their holy day Sunday, rather than Saturday, honouring the day of Jesus’ resurrection. I don’t think God cares which day it is, only that it happens.

The Sabbath has the potential to be a part of our good news for the world. If we kept it well it could prophetically critique the busyness and stress of our world. It could demonstrate to the people we meet that life in the kingdom of God is different. It could show them some of the peace and rest that should follow from living in Jesus’ kingdom.