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Lent Day 22: Athanasius: Life of Anthony: Chaps. 11-20

...ith godly wisdom he countless counselled many various people in need. He began preaching from Romans 8:32 about how God didn’t hold anything back, but gave up even his only Son, and continued “exhorting all to prefer the love of Christ before all that is in the world”, which led many to prefer the solitary life of devotion to God than to their worldly pleasures, and eventually caused many groups to gather “even in the mountains, and the desert was colonised by monks, who came forth from their own people, and enrolled themselves for the citizenship in the heavens”. To me, that seems pretty amazing! That such conviction could fall on so many people to...

Lent Day 27: Athanasius: Life of Anthony: Chaps. 61-70

...Day Twenty-seven: St. Athanasius: Life of Anthony: Chaps. 61-70 Who: Bishop of Alexandria; Confessor and Doctor of the Church; born c. 296; died 2 May, 373 AD. He was the main defender of orthodoxy in the 4th-century battle against the Arianism heresy. Certain writers received the title “Doctor” on account of the great advantage their doctrine had on the whole Church, Athanasius especially for his doctrine on the incarnation. What: The biography of Anthony the Great’s life, which helped to spread the concept of Christian monasticism, particularly in Western Europe. Why: From the letter’s own prologue: “The life and conversation of our holy Father...

Lent Day 28: Athanasius: Life of Anthony: Chaps. 71-80

...r form of wisdom, yet mock the cross but marvel at the resurrection! But “the same men who told us of the [resurrection] wrote [about the cross]”, Anthony responds. They would mock the cross but be then are silent about all the miracles and wonders which Jesus did which show that “Christ is no longer a man but God”; so they do themselves “much injustice” to have not read the Scriptures properly in order that they should see that “the deeds of Christ prove Him to be God come upon earth for the salvation of men”. Since they allegorise all of creation with the Greek legends of Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis etc, they “do not worship God Himself, but s...

The Temptations of Jesus: Testing God

...n, in his wisdom, when writing to Timothy also instructed him in these things when he said to study and know the Word of God to “rightly [explain] the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). If we are immersed in the Scriptures and know them inside and out, then when things get misquoted or twisted to be applied in situations where the original context doesn’t allow, we will know it and not be led astray. This is exactly what the devil tries with Jesus. He may be quoting Scripture, but he’s using it wrong. In this passage we see that the devil quotes from Psalm 91:11-12 but with one main difference – he misses out the second half of the sentence in verse 11....

John Chau, missionary to the Sentinelese: martyr or madness?

...You've probably seen it in the news lately: John Chau, the American guy who tried to evangelise the secluded Sentinelese tribe off the coast of India. Much of the debate in secular media has centered around the grief of his friends and family; how he could have brought outside disease to the tribespeople and potentially killed them all (despite this not being their first contact with outsiders, with no known ill effect), or that he ventured there completely in ignorance with no preparation or wisdom — something which the missionary agency, All Nations, has recently debunked. But the question I want to look at is this: was Chau's mission total madness or is...

Creedal Christians: The Nicene Creed

...The Nicene Creed — what is it and why is it called that? This creed gets its name from a time and place: the first ecumenical Church council held at Nicaea, which is now known as İznik in northwestern Turkey, in 325 AD. Now that may raise another question for you: what is an ecumenical council? Well, to explain more about the Nicene Creed, we are going to have to take a look at The First Council of Nicaea in order to better understand why this creed was written. First things first though; an “ecumenical council” is ideally a Church-wide meeting where all the Bishops from all across the Church come together to hold a very large and very important meetin...