Years ago, when I was a young parent, I was asked by a Christian acquaintance whether or not I prayed for the conversion of my children.  That pulled me up… because I knew that I didn’t and his question made me wonder whether I had been remiss in doing something important for my kids.

I told him that I would need to go away and think about that as I wasn’t sure whether I ought to be doing that or not.  I also had to think about what he meant by ‘conversion’.  In a sense we need to be converted daily from our sinful ways and to turn around and go God’s way.  But that daily kind of conversion wasn’t the kind of conversion my friend had in mind.  He was talking about that decisive moment in someone’s life when they move out of the Kingdom of darkness and into the Kingdom of God’s beloved Son.

My difficulties with infant baptism came about because of my friendship with some Baptists.  They convinced me that since Scriptures teaches us to “repent and be baptised!” or to “believe and be baptised!” infants should not be baptised since they can neither repent nor believe.  That argument appeared to make good sense.  It still does.

The Reformed Pastor whom I talked about that when we were expecting our first child asked me whether I agreed that Baptism means essentially the same thing as Circumcision and that it has replaced Circumcision.  I could hardly disagree because the Apostle Paul equates the two in Colossians 2.

When

With the present baby boom in our church we’re going to be having a number of baptisms and that always presents a special challenge for some people who are troubled by the practice of sprinkling some water on a baby’s head.

I sympathise with them.

I grew up in a Reformed Church family where that was the norm...

Since marrying for the second time I’ve become acutely conscious that we are very much shaped by the events that happen in our lives.

I wasn’t so conscious of that when I was married to Ali.  We had grown up together in the same congregation, taught Sunday School together for a while, sang in the same choir for a couple of years and went to the same youth group.  We were both twenty-one when we married so we didn’t have all that much history behind us.

People say that second marriages are much more challenging.  A lot more has happened in the respective lives of both husband and wife.  Both have become more set in their ways.  We’ve found that there’s a lot of truth in that.

A week in politics is a very long time.  That was just so obvious this last week.

Last Monday evening some of our folk were watching a web-cast in which the Prime Minister and the leader of the Opposition were quizzed by church leaders on some issues that are of particular concern to Christians.  By the end of that week Kevin Rudd had become another Australian ex-Prime Minister and, consequently, at least part of the web-cast had been relegated to irrelevance.

I’m not a political commentator so it’s not my intention to analyse what happened from a political point of view but I do want to comment on two of the moral aspects that last week’s events raised for me personally.

First I have a huge concern about the matter of loy

Recently Ivana Trump was interviewed on television.  Ivana is the ex-wife of Donald Trump, one of the wealthiest men in the US of A.
Somewhere along the line the interviewer asked this lady what she had learned in life.  She replied, “I’ve learned that money doesn’t grow on trees.”
When I picked myself up off the floor I couldn’t help but wonder about the priorities of the rich and famous.  Here is a lady who reportedly received some twenty million dollars as a settlement of the divorce proceedings from husband Donald.  Then asked what lesson she has learnt in life the first thing she mentions is the profound (?) statement that money doesn’t grow on trees.  I would have expected to hear that from some husband or wife doing it tough, paying off the house mortgage in suburbia.
For me there are two problems here.

Some weeks ago in a sermon I touched on the teaching of perfectionism.  Please don’t think that this is just a theory.  Abraham Kuyper tells of a man he met who claimed that he hadn’t sinned for a whole year.  Once at a Bible Study in our home the elder who led the study closed in prayer and asked the Lord to forgive us the sins of that day.  Someone who was present objected to the prayer and said: “Next time you ask God for forgiveness for our sins just pray that for yourself and not for all of us, because I haven’t sinned today!”

It seems to me that people who claim to have reached perfection have a distorted view of sin.  It’s all too easy to see sin only as those gross misdemeanours that make headline news.  However, sin is not even just

Last week in our senior Church Ed group we considered the question: how does one become a Christian?  Several young people responded: “By going to church!”

That’s not a bad answer...

Yep...!  That’s the eleventh commandment, or so it would seem, if some people are to be believed.

Over the years I’ve heard that little saying with monotonous regularity in all kinds of contexts.  More often than not it’s a variation on the theme.  Someone will be busy commenting critically on the lifestyle of a Christian sister or brother and then this person will pull himself up and add, “But I guess we shouldn’t judge!”  Today in our age, where tolerance is considered the highest virtue, the “eleventh commandment” is becoming ever more popular.

Those of us who are fond of quoting this “eleventh commandment” really need to do some rethinking.

We recently had a phone call from a relative and the discussion turned to church and to worship.  The caller indicated that the family no longer attends church and she then immediately became rather defensive: “After all Discovery Channel recently had a documentary on Jesus Christ which proves that he was just the leader of a sect.”

Wow...!  If you see it on television it must be true.  How sad that we’re prepared to base our religious practices (or lack thereof) on the presuppositions of a modern television documentary rather than on the authoritative Word of God and the testimony of two thousand years of Church history.