5 Reasons Patriotism is Wrong

1. It's thinking your country is superior to every other, which is both deluded and proud.

2. It inhibits critical reflection on what is good and bad about your culture.

3. It's selfishly putting what is good for me and my country above what is good for humanity.

4. For Christians it forgets that our citizenship is in the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus.
5. It means that Aldi can make money selling cheap and tacky Australian flag merchandise and people drive around with those cringeworthy plastic Australian flags on their cars that they got free with their carton of beer.

New font

Here's my Acts graphic with a different font. It's supposed to have an 'International' feel. Now for some studies to go with the cover page!

Graphic for Acts 13-28 Series

Here's a draft copy of some publicity for my Acts 13-28 series (hence the watermarks). Not completely convinced about the graphic though. Any thoughts?

New mobile phone browser

Mmm - ironic. I was just doing a blog post about my cool new mobile phone browser that makes it easy to do blog posts, and it crashed my phone!

Still, it is a cool browser. It resizes things almost perfectly for my phone screen, scrolls nice and smoothly, and does tabs. Not quite the iphone of course but not far off.

Depression

I'm hopeless at this kind of thing.

Gospel on the Go

While I'm on a role tonight, I think I have a title for my Acts series this term - Gospel on the Go: The journey of the gospel to the ends of the earth. Of course that title could apply to the whole of Acts, but I think it is particularly relevant to the second half of acts where Paul finally gets out of Israel/Syria and starts to take the Gospel seriously international.

The Big idea I'm working with for the series is: As Paul takes the Gospel towards Rome, we see that it is a message for everyone, equally powerful to Jews and Gentiles, pagans and godfearers, and ordinary people and high officials.

Is it better to be wrong or non-commital

Read an interesting comment in an interview wifh American theologian and historian Carl Trueman the other day. Talking about the issue of truth and doctrine he says 'There are some things that it is more important to be wrong about than to think that they are not important. It's better to lack complete clarity over baptism than to say it doesn' matter.'

I essentially agree with this statement, but I think the rubber really hits the road when you decide what to do about those issues that you think are important but over which you lack complete clarity. 'Do you say it's my way or the highway' or do you say 'I come down on the opposite side of the fence to you, but I can work with you.'

I think the Bible actually gives us some guidance on which approach you take with which doctrines. Eg, Colossians seems to make it pretty clear that if people are adding stuff to the Gospel and undermining the sufficiency of Christ then that is a 'God's way (as far as I can determine it) or the highway' kind of issue. Unlike Trueman I'm not so sure that baptism is one of those issues - at least not the things Protestants have divided over about baptism (adult/infant, immersion/sprinkling). Can't see any verses that get really fired up about those things, or any essential doctrines that hang on them. But maybe I'm missing something.

Bizarre Swimming Experience

Went and did some laps this afternoon and had a very strange experience at the pool. When I got out my eyesight was completely blurry - so much so that I could hardly even find my way over to where my towel and gear was. Even after I blinked and washed them out with water and got some saline solution from the pool staff it was still like there was a thick mist over them - driving home was a bit of an adventure. Even now, 2 and a half hours later the computer screen is blurry as I write this.

I've had stinging eyes before after the chlorine (and my eyes certainly aren't feeling great at the moment!), but the whole blurry thing was something else. The pool staff reckon there was nothing wrong with the chlorine levels in the pool, so maybe my eyes were just being strange. Anyone else had that experience before?

Preaching on Acts

I'm working on my talk series for term one at the moment. It is the second half of Acts. Haven't got anything too concrete yet, but my breakdown is as follows:

Acts 13-14 Paul's First Missionary Journey
Acts 15:1-35 The Jerusalem council
Acts 15:36-16:40 Paul in Phillippi
Acts 17:1-18:17 Paul in Greece
Acts 18:18-20:38 Paul and the Ephesians
Acts 21-23 Paul gets into trouble in Jerusalem
Acts 24-26 Paul defends the gospel before a whole bunch of Rulers
Acts 27-28 Paul makes it to Rome

stay tuned to hopefully see a cohesive series take shape!