aprt from your brain, lungs, heart and blood... are all your other organs purely for fighting "decay" (aka Gen 3 decay)?

Holidays

These latest holidays have been great. Apart from the whole short trip to melbourne with Julie, its been really nice just to stay at home with the kids and watch them play. That's something i haven't done for a while. Just watch my kids play and play with them. Its one of the things i'm really going to miss as i go back to work.

Impressive, most impressive

Julie and I are completely stoked with the fantastic reception we're getting from unichurch members. I just can't tell you how cool that is. This reception could well change once we're there of course, but its very nice anyway.
The best part of it is that it seems to show a certain maturity of character from the students. Getting a new pastor is a bit scary itself, but to turn their worldview around and thinking how it would be for a new pastor to step into a new church... that's a very Christian thing to do. Being mindful of other people's lives and concerns is a selfless thing, and selflessness is so much of what following Jesus is about.

Projected results expected lower

I'm both happy and disappointed with my project. In the end it was titled:
An Evaluation of the 'Ontological' Explanation of Christ's Representative Ability in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics.
I liked it because I got to think about why Christ gets to represent us, rather than just anyone. But I wish I had more depth than just looking at uncle Karl. I would have much rather done a sweeping overview of a few positions and then done a much more thorough biblical investigation. But in all honesty, if I had wanted to do that, I would have ended up doing a theology of priesthood. But that wouldn't have been all bad either.
I think the idea of priesthood is an under developed area of Christology, partly because the Priests were the first to be called Anointed Ones (the Christs). Therefore, at the very heart of what a Christ is, we should see a sense of priesthood. It could be that the Kingly sense of 'Christ' has built on top of this priestly idea, rather than just trying to incorporate priestly idea's as most people seem to think.

aMazeIn 5K

I've always like mazes, and particularly making mazes for people and kids' activities. So I've always wanted to write a program that does it automatically. The best type of maze is a complete maze, because you can choose any two points on the perimeter and there must be a way through. That's what this program makes. I hope you can use it to make activities for kids church and things like that. Check it out here.

This was originally an idea for the 5k.org competition, but after the competition closed down, there wasn't really the impetus to write it up. But since then (yes 6 years ago!) I started to get a clearer picture in my head of how it would work. Its not really under 5k as the title suggests, but I'm pretty confident it could easily be taken down to that size.

You can set the size of the maze, and the size of the individual maze units. I haven't included any ability to change the frequency of the path divisions, but it can be done.

Becoming more than Sin 'Neutral' and reducing your Sin 'footprint'

So there's all this talk and ho-ha about companies and homes becoming 'Carbon Netural' and reducing their 'Carbon Footprint'. In fact, a friend was telling me yesterday about these new companies that are selling their carbon credits. They're sole purpose is to do things like plant trees and replace those old lights with the new efficient lights so that they are at a carbon negative state. They then sell 'Carbon Reduction Credits' or something like that to the big companies who have a massive Carbon outputs.
The result is that big business can simply buy their way out of their polloution guilt.
I was thinking how similar it is to our guilt. We have a massive Sin problem, such that our 'sin footprint' is to big for us to fix. But through faith in Christ, God credits us with righteousness.
But its different in 2 very cool ways.
1. We don't have to buy our righteousness credits, and they don't just get transferred to us. Jesus becomes our new CEO and brings them with him, such that our guilt is his and his credits are ours. Its not a transfer, its a union.
2. Because its a union of Jesus as our new CEO, we don't just get made the equivilant of 'Carbon Neutral' - we not made 'Sin Neutral'. Rather, Jesus takes us to the heights of his glory. We are not neutral before our God, we have been made fully righteous.

The older I get, the more glorious I was

So, a few years ago I entered this competition where you have to make a web site in under 5k (5012 bytes). I made a chess board, that you could use to play against someone... but it was well under 5k, and pretty sad. So I had a go at making it a full on, play against the computer game... and had 1 byte spare!

Check it out here.

The Joy of Being Irrelevant

It is a wonderful thing to be irrelevant to God. However, please don't misunderstand me; we are not worthless to God, nor is God ignorant of us. Rather we are, in some ways, simply irrelevant to God – and this is good news.
Firstly, we are irrelevant to God's purposes and plans for his creation. God is the supreme ruler of all things who stirs up the very atoms of the galaxies to his liking. All creation obeys his command, and whatever he wills happens. No human being can stand in his way nor throw a spanner in his works. He is too great and mighty, we are irrelevant before him. (Which makes prayer an amazing privilege when you think about it!)
Secondly, our good works are irrelevant to God's opinion of us. Since God is all good, we can at best be only a shadow of his goodness. God thinks no higher of us when we live for his glory, since that is the reason he made us in the first place. No human can stand before God on the platform of his many (if any) good works, they are irrelevant to God.
Thirdly however, a Christian's sins have become irrelevant to God. God's wrath at humanity's disobedience has been fully emptied on his son Jesus. Therefore, God's opinion of Christians has been altered, his view of their sin has been obscured. A Christian can stand before God, knowing they have sinned, and yet assured that their sin has become irrelevant to God. God no longer takes it into account – it is irrelevant.
When was the last time you thanked God that you were irrelevant to him?

Essays are up

I feel like I've slaved away so much of my time writing these essays for College, that it seems a shame to just leave them sitting on my computer. I really believe and thought hard about the things I wrote.

So If you want to check out my essays I handed in while here at Moore College, they'e all avaialable.

Sex - How much do you want it?

I've written a new article for AFES SALT on sex compared to heaven. Would you be happy to go to heaven not having had sex?
Read entire article here.