Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.

Raging against the ‘Machine Church’

I want to start this little mini-series by starting to tease out the idea of ‘machine church’ — and the ‘machine’ as I’m going to describe it, with Paul Kingsnorth as my conversation partner. One of the fundamental ideas behind machine church is the inexhaustible inexorable desire to grow beyond limits, rather than receive and embrace them as creaturely gift; the other main aspect, probably (though there are many components) is the reduction of all things to technology and technique (ala Jacques Ellul’s Technological Society). I’m mostly going to unpack the idea of growth beyond limits being the essence of the ‘machine’ in this post, and will pick up the technology/technique line later.

I don’t want to be Don Quixote tilting at a straw windmill here either, so, through these posts, I’m going to ground these reflections in my own experiences of machine church; which lead me to observe the same fundamentals operating in other churches, systems, and church growth systems.

Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine opens with this line from Wendell Berry.

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

If he — and Berry — are right in their prophetic/poetic assessment of the modern age, it shouldn’t surprise us to find this tendency at work in the construction of Christian communities as a missiological technique or discipleship strategy — it’s simply an outworking of an anthropology (and perhaps an eschatology).

Kingsnorth also describes — with a dose of Tolkien — the perspective one committed to creatureliness of a certain type might bring to the present moment.

“This world, you can see, is on the way out, if it is not already long gone. The one that is manifesting to replace it is a left-brain paradise, all straight lines and concrete car parks where the corn exchange used to be. The future is STEM and chatbots and cashless parking meters and economic growth and asteroid mining forever and ever. There is no arguing with it. You can feel the great craters that it makes in the world, you can feel what is being tarmacked and neatened and rationalised into oblivion, and the depth of what is leaving, but you cannot explain or justify it in the terms which are now the terms we live by. You just know that something is wrong.”

I’ve written, once upon a time (in 2018 even), about how STEM being the basis of human formation is — to my mind — more dangerous in public schools than sexuality education because it trains a certain sort of participation in the machinery of the economy, to fuel perpetual consumption; so it’s fair to say I resonated with this description (while also, admittedly, often loving being a cog in the consumer machine and the convenience of Amazon’s next day delivery service — a product of its vast magical logistical empire, complex global supply chains, and machine-human hybrid where workers are digitally monitored by wearable tech, and codes and machines augment their productivity).

I know of a church, by the by, that realised it could track an interesting stat — either newcomers or new devices — by observing how many unique/new MAC addresses pinged its router during a Sunday service. Big data.

Kingsnorth describes the machine ‘uprooting’ people from traditions (including religious traditions) and place into a kind of global uniformity, particularly expressed in urban life — those one might, following Marc Auge — describe as ‘non-places’ at a metropolitan level (here’s a sermon from my ‘Being Human’ series exploring how church spaces that are basically black boxes designed for artificial light, smoke machines, and video projection, have become non-places, this is a kind of ‘uprooting’ — the antithesis would be, for example, the rootedness of the Ethiopian Church Forest — that’s an old article where I interact with some older work from Paul Kingsnorth).

At some point in my time at machine church the auditorium at our mothership was painted black. Voices who complained about no longer being able to see one another, or the pages of their paper Bibles were told they would be able to better see the stage and the screen. The goal of this design change was to make Sundays more excellent and the media — on screen and on stage — easier to attend to, and more compelling by contrast. The campus I pastored already met in a black box — first a rented black box theatre, and then a Pentecostal warehouse conversion with an excellent plug and play AV setup with more screens than we could figure out how to use.

Here’s Kingsnorth on the uprooting process:

“We could simply call this process modernity, which is not a time period so much as a story we tell ourselves. But I prefer to call it the Machine, because a machine—as the poets showed me—is what it feels like. This process, which has been going on for centuries, of uprooting us from nature, culture and God, leads us into a mass society, controlled by and for technology, in which we have been on course to become, since at the least the Industrial Revolution, mere cogs in a giant mechanism that we have no control over.”

Kingsnorth talks about the impact of the machine on the architecture of the city; describing a movement from cities designed for ‘human scale living’ where everyone could be addressed by a single voice, to global cities. The idea of a ‘human scale’ church is one I’ll pick up in a future post.

“This is the modern Machine city: global in scale and ambition, bland, homogenised and empty at its heart. Plato’s ideal city, and the real cities of the pre-modern period, were a combination, sometimes uneasy, sometimes harmonious, of ambition and aim. They were religious centres, cultural hubs, marketplaces, dwelling places, loci of power. The twenty-first century city exists mainly for one purpose: profit. Everything that exists there, from schools to art galleries to concert halls to government buildings, is pointed towards this end.”

The goal of the machine is growth — unfettered growth — not to serve its users (who, Matrix style, become its fuel), but its owners — maximising profits, or growth, or bums on seats consuming and paying and spreading your content; probably, in machine church — ‘digital content’ served up on screen corporately, and on your individual pieces of glass through the week. Kingsnorth again:

“This ‘growth’ is the overriding purpose of the ‘global economy’ which the Machine has built: everything else is of secondary concern. The growth has no specific aim and no end in sight, and can always be justified by pointing to problems—poverty, environmental degradation—which were in many cases caused by the growth, but which can now only be solved by more of it. It is facilitated by the production and consumption of ‘goods and services’, the desire (or ‘need’) for which has been manufactured by vast marketing and advertising concerns whose best minds are trained in the essence of psychological manipulation.”

In 2023 I wrote a piece with CPX, also published in Eureka Street, looking at the mechanics of poker machines and how necessary limits are in the design of machines. There’s a thought experiment about the need for limits in the tech-philosophy world, the Paperclip Maximiser Machine (originally from this essay) — this artificially intelligent machine exists with the sole goal to ‘maximise the number of paperclips’; and sets about converting all of material reality into paperclips — ultimately including human bodies. Poker machines, like many other tools of capitalism, are designed to ‘maximise profits’ — in industry parlance, to have users ‘play to extinction.’ This is the machine impulse, and the impulse of the forces Kingsnorth describes.

He introduces Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, which compares the consuming power of the machine to Moloch, the devouring pagan god of the Ancient Near East (I’ve used this same poem in an AI talk/lecture thing that I gave at an ISCAST conference a few years ago; I probably should turn that into a post at some point).

The payoff for Kingsnorth, later in his book, is that he sees dark spiritual forces — powers — animating the machine; the kind the Bible might name as Molek (Moloch) and Mammon. And, like the machine Moloch of Howl, or the 1927 silent film Metropolis (that’s the mechanical god from that movie at the top of this post), this profit maximising machine bucks against limits and seeks to devour all it can to serve its ends.

“The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Its momentum is always forward, and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world. To do that, it must raze or transmute many older and less measurable things: rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, faith and the many deeper values which we all adhere to in some way or another but find difficult to describe or even to defend. Its modus operandi is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences and truths: the uprooting of all previous ways of living in the name of pure individualism and perfect subjectivity. Its endgame is the replacement of nature with technology, in order to facilitate total human control over a totally human world.”

In 2016, when Telstra was running it’s ‘communication technology is magical’ campaign, I read (and wrote about) a book by a technologist, David Rose, Enchanted Objects, he described a kind of ‘machine’ world.

“I HAVE A recurring nightmare. It is years into the future. All the wonderful everyday objects we once treasured have disappeared, gobbled up by an unstoppable interface: a slim slab of black glass. Books, calculators, clocks, compasses, maps, musical instruments, pencils, and paintbrushes, all are gone. The artifacts, tools, toys, and appliances we love and rely on today have converged into this slice of shiny glass, its face filled with tiny, inscrutable icons that now define and control our lives. In my nightmare the landscape beyond the slab is barren. Desks are decluttered and paperless. Pens are nowhere to be found. We no longer carry wallets or keys or wear watches. Heirloom objects have been digitized and then atomized. Framed photos, sports trophies, lovely cameras with leather straps, creased maps, spinning globes and compasses, even binoculars and books—the signifiers of our past and triggers of our memory—have been consumed by the cold glass interface and blinking search field. Future life looks like a Dwell magazine photo shoot. Rectilinear spaces, devoid of people. No furniture. No objects. Just hard, intersecting planes—Corbusier’s Utopia. The lack of objects has had an icy effect on us. Human relationships, too, have become more transactional, sharply punctuated, thin and curt. Less nostalgic. Fewer objects exist to trigger storytelling—no old photo albums or clumsy watercolors made while traveling someplace in the Caribbean. Marc Andreessen, the inventor of the Netscape browser, said, “Software is eating the world.” Smartphones are the pixelated plates where software dines.”

His solution was that rather than ubiquitous black glass and code trying to fill every inch of space, we should harness technology’s magical power by imbuing everyday objects with ‘magical’ properties but in a way that contained (or constrained) the magic within physical limits. He suggested pill boxes that glow when medication needs to be taken (like Bilbo’s sword), or ‘portal wardrobes’ sitting in the homes of extended families across the globe that glowed when a motion sensor across the world revealed the proximity of a family member so you could open the door and chat. He viewed this as an alternative to a world of ‘black glass’ — the black mirror — wall to wall ‘smart’ screens.

There was a conversation I had, while working at machine church, about the prospect of people waking up to start the day staring into a smart mirror that both monitored their dental hygiene and served up a daily devotion — content we could produce — including video snippets from sermons; to maximise our ‘reach’ and the integration of our content into the daily life of our followers. The desire to coat the world in black glass — technology — to have us always attentive to screens that can sell us more stuff and harvest our attention — this is both the warped eschatology of Wall-E or Infinite Jest, and the maximising desire of the surveillance capitalism algorithmic machine. But it, too, is the impulse of the machine to fill all space and to maximise the harvest.

There’s a certain type of thinking that turns the content of the Gospel into a thing — data — to be consumed and believed (and perhaps eventually embodied), something reducible to a series of 0s and 1s — that aims to reduce friction in the transmission of that information and to embrace any possible mediums — without question — so long as they are available and effective.

This reduces ministry, mission, discipleship, teaching, and pastoring to technical issues; a matter of technique, to be amplified by available technology.

Sermons become TED Talks — with imagery and definitely no notes — to be filmed and chopped up into social media highlights, or podcasted around the globe with fancy top-and-tails inviting people to give more or spread the reach — but no rooted, relational, context or connection between speaker and audience. Why shouldn’t they be written by a Chat bot, or delivered by one in virtual reality? Really.

Discipleship becomes ‘serving the machinery’ of the Sunday production, or the extension of the content throughout a network, and being ‘fed’ by consuming more of the product.

Questions about whether the media undermine the message are not asked, or not welcomed. Growth and efficacy — or ‘impact’ — are the measure of faithfulness. This thinking comes from the machine, and serves the machine — embedding it into spheres of human life — communities and spiritual practices — where it should least naturally gain a foothold.

Anyway, back to Kingsnorth — his take is that the ‘machine’ is now so embedded in our physical environment and our psyche that we treat it as natural — there’s a fantastic essay by Neil Postman titled ‘Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change’ where — in 1998 — he talked about the way technology aims to be ‘mythic’ — to make us think we ‘can’t live without it’ — that it’s part of the natural order; that progress is inevitable and via the mechanisms dictated to us by the workings of our machines. But the machine isn’t natural — it is disruptive.

We do, by our nature, imagine, invent and create tools and technologies. Tolkien’s neat model for thinking about when we do this humanly, as bearers of the divine image, was to create a distinction between sub-creation — making in the image of the maker (like elves) — and a kind of powerful de-creation at the heart of the machinery impulses of Mordor. In a letter to Milton Waldman, who he hoped might publish his books, Tolkien wrote about the sub-creator’s tendency to fall; to try to protect our own creations from the will of the creator, and how this gives rise to ‘the machine’:

“He will rebel against the laws of the Creator — especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective — and so to the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of the development of inherent inner powers or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised.”

C.S Lewis, in his first public lecture at Cambridge, recognised the way the machine had coded itself into our imagination and changed our stories — disenchanting them so that the imaginative gap, or conception of the world, between Egypt and Jane Austen was smaller than the gap between Jane Austen and us. Our imaginations have been mechanised — not just in our stories, but in how we perceive and interact with the world, and ‘progress.’ So, Kingsnorth says:

“The values of that Machine are now so ubiquitous that we treat them as if they were as natural as rain or wind. Progress; ‘openness’; an objection to limits and borders; therapeutic individualism; universalism; the rejection of roots, place and history; pure materialism; the triumph of ‘reason’ over ‘superstition’; scientism; commercialism and the primacy of market values: all of these go to make up the unseen and unquestioned value system within which we live, and to which we feel there is simply no alternative.”

Then, citing Lewis Mumford, he says “The Machine, in Mumford’s words, feels ‘absolutely irresistible … and ultimately beneficent’. Opposition to it is presented as naive idealism at best, and a dangerous denial of its benefits to the needy at worst.”

The machine exists to grow. To defy limits. To overcome. At all costs. By any means. To ‘reach the city and reach the world’ — or just ‘reach’ more people… for the good of, well, its mission — even if we claim that it is in Jesus’ name and for his glory; our methods serve the machine, whose mission is antithetical to Christian discipleship; to formation as humans in the image of Jesus; because it exists to form humans into parts of the mechanism — or fuel for the mission; harvesting our attention, our bodies, our energy and our resources to grow and feed itself and produce profits for its masters.

So, Kingsnorth again:

“The ethos of the Machine is expansion, the busting of limits and the consumption of whatever can be sold to us to meet the ‘needs’ of the individual self which the Machine constructed for us in the first place. But all of nature’s functions operate within limits. They rely for their continued operation on a healthy balance of the complex and delicate systems that the living planet brings about.”

I’m not saying that, under God’s sovereignty, faithful mission carried out this way cannot produce fruit — it can and will; God works despite our purposes and against the powers and principalities in many and varied ways. There are still things from my time in machine church that thrill me; much good was achieved, sub-creation occurred — not just magic — the Gospel was preached, lives were transformed as people repented. But results — this sort of fruit — are not the measure of faithfulness; that’s machine thinking (which, again, serves the machine’s goal — self-maximisation and ubiquity).

My thesis is that there are church growth strategies — and models and systems of church life that are functionally mechanical; that share language, methods, and values with the machine — often with the stated goal of a ‘bigger harvest’ — more converts; more people joining the church machine as cogs in the mechanism.

And, even, that this mode of operation will seem natural to anybody building a church community in the machine culture of west, to reach the machine culture of the west, with a genuine zeal to make disciples.

But, just as Kingsnorth sees the machine as cancerous to human flourishing in the western world, I’m going to try to make the case that the nature of the machine — antithetical as it is to being transformed into Christlikeness — is cancerous to discipleship, to community, and to the mission of the Gospel, and we should, indeed, rage against the machine and extract ourselves from its machinating, masticating, cogs — before it chews up more people.

January 10, 2026 1 Comment

Resetting the joint #67

There are many reasons my blogging dropped off a cliff from about 2021. It’s probably worth canvassing a few of them as I begin dipping my toes back in the water of expressing my thoughts publicly.

I’m aware there’s a thread of ‘meta’ posts through my archives recalibrating or articulating what I’m trying to do with this corner of the web, and that nobody reads these — probably — but they’re important for me because when future someone asks “why”, I can say “well, I explained why…”

This, hopefully, isn’t simply an exercise in introspective gazing at my own belly-button — but rather, some useful framing of ‘why now’ for a re-entry into potential stirring of various pots.

First, I’ve been pretty cynical about ‘Thought Leadership’ for a while; especially thought leadership unmoored from accountability structures — and, in 2021, I became differently accountable to my employer. For the previous era, I had been on staff in a large ministry team (maxing out at 25+ employees) in a large church, where I had been encouraged to ‘thought lead’, since 2021 (really 2020) I have been the sole employee of a small church community accountable to my elders and my regional body (the Presbytery). At some point in the past (ok, it was 2021), when I wrote a post critical of the hard Christian right in Australia and the increasingly violent rhetoric they were using — a complaint was made about me to the Presbytery by a member of the Christian right (who also accused me of defamation and threatened to take me to court); it was not upheld — but I recognise that the relational context in which I operate is different, and I don’t want to waste my time, or the time of those I am accountable to, with needless Kafkaesque processes where the bureaucracy is the punishment and people enjoy complaining.

Second, the unhinged ‘thought leadership’ through Covid; disconnected from actual expertise, where every man (typically men) and his blog crowded out expert perspective with ‘opinion’ made me reluctant to add ‘noise’; the whole game of ‘bot-farmed’ outrage driving polarisation and the way humans get caught up into sides, plus the advent of generative AI and the way the stochastic parrots of ‘large language’ slop production holding up a mirror to reveal most cultural commentators are utterly predictable and bring one or two hammers to every single phenomenological nail made me reluctant to just be another hammer, indistinguishable — especially because of my em dash use — from EutychusGPT and/or Russian troll farms. Plus, there’s real pressure, if you’re going to be a ‘thought leader’ to comment on ‘every’ issue — both to stay current, and to avoid accusations of cherry picking your outrage or whataboutism or whatever; and I simply do not want to play that game. You don’t need my opinions about, well, anything, really. Especially if I just say what you already think. Touch grass. Invite your neighbours for a beer on your street. Read a book.

Third, I’d rather be a ‘Bible guy’ than a ‘cultural commentator guy’ — I deliberately shifted to posting sermons for this reason; to the extent that I have cultivated any expertise worth hearing, I would like it to be more geared towards what is good, true and beautiful, generative, and unpacking the timelessness of God’s word rather than being timely reactive ephemera about events thrown out of proportion by recency bias where we don’t have sufficient context to say anything particularly useful anyway (hence the hammers we bring). Also, I put heaps of work into my sermons and they’re — I think — likely to be of more value than random thoughts about whatever else I might talk about as a hobby.

Fourth, and this is related to point one and three — I’m paid to be a Bible teacher and pastor in a local community, by my local community — to the extent that I think ‘intellectual property’ is anything other than a construct of neo-liberal capitalism; my ‘work’ belongs to that community, and should probably serve it — getting dragged into the ‘global conversation’ and away from a context where I am known, and loved, and my words are interpreted in the context of actual relationship is a fool’s game and I don’t really want to be a fool — or need that attention or complexity in my life. If I’m going to speak publicly, that comes at a cost (or potential cost) to me, and actually costs my community the money they pay me (as well as the reputational cost of being connected to my words). I don’t ever want to make money from my online presence or ‘commercialise’ myself or be a “brand” chasing likes to grow a platform — that gives me the ick. Since kicking off my blog and self-hosting, this has cost me money (quite a bit over time), but this is part of a commitment to a degree of purity and control (and to no ads).

Fifth, since 2022, the Presbyterian Church of Queensland has been in receivership because of our management of an aged care entity. I’ve thrown myself into denominational work via our structures, and also found myself — for the last little while — managing a second Presbyterian congregation through a vacancy. Time and head space for writing has been limited; we’ve also renovated our house (a long project with two moves (out and in), albeit to next door), and my kids are getting older. The time involved in writing, and in entering the conversation that responsible writing and a commitment to discourse produces is not nothing.

Sixth, I stopped writing publicly because all my best writing is grounded in real experiences as a pastor — the best public Christianity is pastoral and evangelistic — which is to say it applies the Gospel to political or cultural situations. I couldn’t figure out how to write about my experiences anymore. On one hand, some of my ‘public’ advocacy around pastoral issues (like how the church engages with the LGBTIQA+ community) was driven by real pastoral concern and, in some ways, was to give a voice to those who are voiceless in words they could send to those in their lives, while on the other, the people I’m pastoring don’t need their issues extrapolated into a public square where they become combatants in a culture war. I can’t tell, on balance, whether there was a net positive for my beloved community — though I also am aware that when you try to do this advocacy thing it may provide benefits further afield (and people still tell me things I’ve said have been helpful).

Further though, when the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill dropped in 2021, I was having, what I’ve come to realise (thanks therapy) a ‘trauma response’ to the events described in the show — I still haven’t quite figured out a way to talk about this that honours the good intentions and systemic nature of the people and ‘machine’ that harmed me (while I have worked out a bit of how to take responsibility for my role in creating and perpetuating the machine).

I’ve been trying to process my experiences of a certain model of church — one I see replicated in various systems, that I’ve best come to understand and describe as ‘machine church’. In 2019, as our church was spinning off from our mother ship and the mothership was undergoing something of a restructure, I was beginning to articulate my theological differences to that model for the sake of my own community as we worked through our future. With Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine dropping last year, I’ve decided that maybe I have a few things I want to say as catharsis and perhaps as a contribution to a conversation about the shape of the church in Australia in a machine world. So. I’m going to reluctantly re-enter the fray on this basis, first, with a series of posts engaging with Kingsnorth, articulating some of my story and experiences, and perhaps humbly offering a way forward. Also, I should acknowledge — I actually really enjoy the writing part of blogging and have missed some of the discipline of crafting my thoughts about things in words.

Enough context setting. Stay tuned for part one of my reflections on Machine Church to drop next.

January 9, 2026 2 Comments

25 for 25

I haven’t put together a year end list of things I’ve loved for a few years. But here goes. Here are 25 artefacts, experiences, books, podcasts, communities, or pieces of culture that have shaped this year for me. They didn’t all come out this year — some are old(ish) but new discoveries for me; they’re not in any particular order.

  1. 60 Songs that Explain the 90s: the 2000s (Podcast)

    A few years ago my friend Izaac recommended 60 Songs that Explain the 90s — a podcast hosted by music critic Rob Harvilla. It’s hard to explain 60 Songs, and maybe harder to get people excited by it by describing it as a ‘rambling and meandering essay-podcast explaining things through the lens of a chosen song filled with tangents that are somehow tied together into a coherent whole.’ My favourite episode from the 90s (before Rob moved on to the 2000s) is the Nirvana episode, but, if you want to dip your toe in, pick any song you enjoy and be prepared to let the slow burn get you.

    This year’s venture into the 2000s has featured more hip hop than I’d like, probably, but is still appointment listening for me. Each episode ends with an interview, and Rob interviewing fellow Ringer Podcast network host Yasi Salek, there’s a beautiful chemistry, that leads me to number 2 on the list…
  2. Bandsplain (Podcast)
    Where 60 Songs picks a song to explain not only a band’s oeuvre, but a heap of surrounding contextual colour, Bandsplain offers catalogue-spanning deep dives into a variety of artists. Yasi’s coverage of Oasis (with Rob Harvilla) spanned six hours over two episodes.

    Yasi occasionally does ‘one perfect song’ episodes as filler, which, led me to the next item on the list after she interviewed Cole Cuchna about Radiohead’s Let Down. This is up there for ‘podcast episode of the year’ for me.
  3. Dissect — In Rainbows season (Podcast)
    Cole Cuchna, it turns out, ran a whole season of his podcast Dissect analysing the Radiohead album In Rainbows. His lyrical analysis is flat and literal, and I’m not sure adds much to the experience of the album — but — his analysis of the musicality and Radiohead-esque weirdness and magic at play in In Rainbows threw that album to the top of my list of Radiohead releases, and the episode on Reckoner is, hands down, the most incredible episode of any podcast ever.
  4. Listening to In Rainbows on vinyl on my friend’s incredible speakers
    I put a few IRL friends onto Dissect, which prompted the daddest of all dad experiences — hanging out with a bunch of middle aged blokes (like me) listening to In Rainbows, in the dark, on an excellent sound system with good company. One of my favourite things this year and the culmination of those podcasty threads.
  5. Leviticus on the Butcher’s Block, Phil Bray (Book)

    When I first started out in full time church ministry, the preaching philosophy of our church was to preach the Gospel every week, from every part of the Bible (still a fan of this), but one of the ways we articulated our ‘difference’ from other churches was that ‘we’d never do a 10 week series on Leviticus’. There’s much I have repented of in terms of things said as part of that machine — not least of which is to treat Leviticus this way. This year I spent 10 weeks preaching through Leviticus and it was paradigm shifting and challenging in a host of great ways, and this book from Aussie butcher and Leviticus lover, Phil Bray, was a meaty companion for the journey and an accessible read for anyone else who grabbed hold of the idea that Leviticus Is Fun.
  6. Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord, Michael Morales (Book)
    This was a headier and heavier read — Michael Morales book on Exodus is one of my all time favourite books, so I was keen to dig in to his work on Leviticus in the New Studies in Biblical Theology series and it did not disappoint.

    If you want to see (or hear) how this played out in sermon form, the first video from the sermon series is here, and the first podcast sermony thing is here (there are some visuals that probably make the video more worthwhile).
  7. Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth (Book)
    The best ‘not yet a sermon’ thing I read this year was Paul Kingsnorth’s latest book. I’ve been a Kingsnorth fan for a bit, even if at times he leans into conspiratorial ‘crazy uncle at Christmas’ territory (I had a weird email exchange with him about vaccines through Covid). I think he occupies the kind of prophetic posture like a desert father or Old Testament prophet that allows him the space to see and critique the things about our technological age that he sees and critiques. I’ll have a series of articles spinning off the book early in 2026, because I think his critique of the ‘machine’ extends to churches built by and for a machine culture. Sometimes the crazy uncle is right and seeing things we’re missing.

    Kingsnorth’s essay Against Christian Civilisation from the end of 2024 was also provocative and good (and shorter than a book).
  8. 1 Corinthians — Michael Gorman (Book)
    Michael Gorman’s emphasis on union with Christ producing cross-shaped (cruciform) participation in the life of Jesus has probably been the most influential theological idea in my life and ministry. His book Cruciformity (part of a trilogy) unpacking his reading of Paul is still my most recommended Christian book, and I was super thrilled — when preaching through 1 and 2 Corinthians — that this commentary was released (I’d used his Romans commentary a couple’ve years ago and loved it too).
  9. Winning a Grand Final in your 40s
    I’ve been playing football with the same bunch of blokes for about 6 years. We aged out of church league Saturday competitions a few years back and into the over 35s Friday night comp. This year we triumphed in the Grand Final after a great season, playing on a spectacular ground. I had suffered some nasty torn rib cartilage or a break a month and a half before the game, but managed to return for the finals. I love the bunch of blokes I play with; who even came to the late night, post-game rescue after our car broke down on the highway en route to a family holiday (complete with trailer and dogs in tow). I decided this isn’t going to be my last year because winning was so much fun, so am now trying to shed some excess KGs in the off season.
  10. Hard Fork (Podcast)
    The fast paced world of tech — especially AI — is hard to keep track of even for those who are avid followers of developments. I enjoy the NY Times pod Hard Fork as a way to keep tabs and find rabbit holes to dig down. It’s a weekly listen for me.
  11. The Varia VS3 Coffee Grinder (toy)
    I’ve been rocking the same grinder for about 17 years — a Macap M4 Deli grinder that was big, heavy, noisy and slow — this upgrade has been a long time coming and it feels like when you first open up an Apple product or drive a car with inbuilt bluetooth and/or USB ports. It’s got magnets, it’s whisper quiet — and the difference in the cup is noticeable (still slowish).
  12. ChatGPT (tech)
    I’m part convinced by Paul Kingsnorth’s view that our technology and obsession with technique is basically dabbling with powers and principalities (I gave a talk for ISCAST last year on AI that made a similar argument — that we should see it having similar Babylonian properties as Molloch and Marduk).

    But I also enjoy using ChatGPT as a super-smart stochastic parrot autocomplete. I’ve found it helpful in Hebrew translation, digging up ancient Greek and Latin sources (that I could vaguely remember and verify independently) for my sermons, and finding published authors who share my crazy (maybe) ideas about Leviticus and the serpentyness of unclean food. I’ve enjoyed sharing my usage (transcripts via a link) with my church family so they can see how unhinged it becomes and how quickly, in any given week, I’m asking about leviathan and serpent scales and being treated like a genius by my sycophantic virtual companion…

    I’ve tried using it to shorten my sermons (never to write them). Editing is the most painstaking part of my job — but it just cuts out the fun human stuff, so I’ve mostly given up that because trying to prompt it to produce a workable outcome takes almost as much work as killing my darlings myself.

    My most common use this year, though, was converting my sermon scripts from randomly CAPITALISED and oddly contracted’n punctuated text in Powerpoint notes into a bloggable format.

    ChatGPT has also been my companion in weight loss meal planning; and, while some of the recipe suggestions have been tasteless, I’ve actually found it pretty helpful.

    It’s also been helpful for some design work — I struggle with colour palettes (as a colour blind person), and it’s helped me with some colour stuff for various church design projects.
  13. Midjourney (tech)
    ChatGPT’s image generation stuff still sucks (in my opinion — but I’m probably not using it right). I still feel like Midjourney is kinda magical, whether that’s designing cartoon T-shirts with my kids for our drop shipping business Solid Rock Shirts, or wall art of classic paintings with teethy grins (like the Mona Lisa), black and white photography portraits of animals doing weird anthropomorphic stuff, or generic sermon graphics, Midjourney is still a fun toy. I also played around with AI music generation using Riffusion this year, turning wrestling theme songs into ephemeral folk music, but it’s now been bought out.

    None of what I’ve made is good art. All of what I make is an attempt to get my head around the tech and use it with a sense of irony. I find the AI slop generation thing creates soulless echoes of human creativity quite fascinating to think through and talk about — everything truly is a remix, but I’d actually rather humans be very involved in the making of my art.
  14. Hiker Brewing (beer and location)
    Hiker is great. It’s co-owned by a friend, so I’m probably very biased — and — because it is owned by a friend and I’m biased, it’s basically the only beer I drink these days. Luckily it’s very very good beer. When I was enjoying a can of their re-released Hazy IPA, Cloudscapes (it’s put out seasonally), I messaged brewer Dan to tell him I think he’s put heaven in a can. I stand by that review. I’m including them in this year end list with the breaking(ish) news that you can now order their beer online. And you should.
  15. Five Senses Coffee (coffee beans)
    A few years ago I was writing for Soul Tread magazine, and got to interview Dean from Five Senses about the incredible story of his business. It’s an incredible story of Christian generosity and mission, that maybe one day I’ll republish here. Five Senses roast delicious coffee and I enjoy drinking it. You should grab some from their site.
  16. NES Classic (toy)
    As a kid, I loved the Legend of Zelda on the NES. But. I confess. I never completed the game — a combination of ‘the Internet didn’t exist yet to explain various locations’ and ‘I probably didn’t have the ability to be cautious enough’ meant I had not completed the Triforce.

    Well. Friends. I stand (or sit) before you this year having conquered my personal Everest, thanks to a purchase of a NES Classic — mostly to introduce my kids to the games I played as a kid (and, well, to finish Zelda).
  17. Darling Fresh Smoke Haus (food)
    Pretty much every week our family makes the trek over to the Rocklea Markets on a Saturday morning. It’s one of our rituals. Every fortnight it’s a ‘meat man meat’ week. I have a smoker and have dabbled in smoking meat, but nothing I do comes close to the quality Jeff cooks up and sells vacuum sealed and ready to go. His meat is available in various butchers and meat shops around Brisbane and his rubs and sauces are great.
  18. City South Presbyterian Church (Our Church)
    On the Sunday before Christmas our church ticked off another weird anniversary — for the last six years we’ve called a local Church of Christ building home — and for the last five years we’ve been gathering as one congregation, in a service we Presbyterians provide in a building owned and operated by a Church of Christ congregation who join us. It’s a fun arrangement that, for the first few years, felt unstable and weird — you had to explain it to visitors and newbies and it was a turn off — now it feels normal and good and sustainable in a way that has a certain appeal to people looking for a church that can tolerate ambiguity and hold unity around a centre.

    My best articulation of what we try to do is one I borrowed from my friend Dave Benson — churches can provide space for sheep by building fences and policing the boundaries, or by digging wells and inviting sheep to drink; we’re leaning into the latter and I love it. My church family also tolerate my inordinate love for preaching about the weird bits of the Bible. This community has been a rich blessing to me this year.
  19. The Bear (TV)
    I know season 4 disappointed some people — but — I still love The Bear. I was glad to see the episode Forks from season 2 rank so high on The Ringer’s 100 best TV episodes of the century.
  20. The Last Kingdom (TV)
    This was a rewatch for me — in full — because as a fan of the Bernard Cornwell novel series that the show is based on, I binged each season the day they came out. I’d assumed Robyn wouldn’t be interested in the blood and gore; but the English history lesson hooked her and we rewatched the whole thing. Destiny is all.
  21. Daredevil: Born Again (TV)
    The original Netflix run of Daredevil is my favourite television show of all time. I wrote thousands of words about Daredevil as a type of Christ in the archives here. This new season was now chronologically removed enough from that first run that it scored nostalgia points. I didn’t hate it. I may even have loved it; not as much as round one, but it was a good start.
  22. Taskmaster UK (TV)
    It’s sad I had to specify “UK” here because of the abomination that is the Australian version — but — we enjoyed watching Taskmaster with the kids (we don’t explain any rude bits, and there aren’t that many). We’re also mostly rewatching series we’ve already completed with comedians we love (Bob Mortimer, James Acaster and Sam Campbell).
  23. Vine Building Group and Flourish Architecture (businesses)
    By far the biggest change in our family’s life this year was a pretty large scale renovation of our home. The concept came from Robyn’s very clever spatial brain, and was drawn up by friends at Flourish Architecture and built by new friends at Vine Building Group. We’re very happy with the result, even if we’re still putting the finishing touches on moving back in six months later
  24. Custom built library shelving with a ladder
    My friend Naman doesn’t have a website setup for his cabinetry side-hustle yet, but when he does… Naman designed and built floor to ceiling bookshelves in our upstairs library space. The shelves are art, and feature a library ladder on a rail from Ram Hardware. It’s lovely to not need to go downstairs to find a book, but to climb a ladder instead. Would recommend.
  25. Slow Horses season 5 (TV)
    This show has not had a bad season. Slough House forever.

December 31, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Ten — Crafting a rule of life

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

Who — or what — is ruling your life?

We started this series in Athens — a very religious city (Acts 17:22–23) — where figuring out the answer to this question was obvious. There were temples and altars where you’d sacrifice time and money to show you were ruled by these gods.

This is where Paul announced that God had called all people to repent and be ruled by Jesus (Acts 17:30) — to meet the God who made us to inhabit time and space so we might find him (Acts 17:26).

We might not have altars and temples, but we’re all sacrificing our time and money in spaces that show what rules us. We might answer the question by looking at where we’re spending money — though everything seems to cost so much at the moment — or looking at where we’re spending time: more time than we need to, so we’re sacrificing other things. It could be work… or family… or the gym… or church… it could be what we’re working for that we don’t have yet.

We’re still very religious. We still sacrifice our time and money for whatever or whoever rules us — even if we rule ourselves.

But hopefully, for most of us, the answer to the question “Who’s ruling your life?” is Jesus.

And I guess I want to ask: how would you know?

Can you spot the difference between your life with Jesus and without Jesus? Does your life look different to your neighbour’s? Are you inhabiting space and time differently as someone who has found God?

Sure — we might hang out here once a week, or a couple of weeks a month, or once a month. And we might go to growth group, or even have a few spiritual practices we’ve incorporated into our daily rhythms, and we might try to do good stuff with a sense that God’s in the mix somewhere…

But are we living in a different economy — with different objects of worship and a different approach to time and money?

If we’re not, how are we meant to resist the pull of the idols of our age — resisting the rule and the promises of dead gods?

It may be that Jesus is ruling one part of our minds — the rational part — while our lives are playing catch-up… or still running the show.

Right back at the start of this series we looked at this idea of our minds being like a rider — the rational bit — and an elephant: our deeper, emotional self — our loves and identity and attachment and belonging.

And the elephant isn’t formed by knowing more, but by experiencing love and belonging and joyful connection that brings us into alignment with whoever or whatever it is ruling our hearts.

Who’s ruling your elephant?

Are we ruled by the patterns of this world — like the idols and architecture, the habitat, in ancient Athens — or by Jesus renewing our minds? If we want to be ruled by Jesus, we should probably set up our lives expressing that rule. This is where the idea of a rule of life comes in.

To be a disciple — to be ruled by Jesus — is to practice what he teaches and commands (Luke 6:46), and to come to him to learn his ways: to throw off the heavy burdens of self-rule, and self-justification, and sacrificing on altars of deadly gods… to find life in the one who sacrifices himself to give us life and rest (Matthew 11:28–29).

A rule of life is an expression of being ruled by King Jesus — the king of rest. Finding life in him, not the idols and temples of this world — not because you have to, out of some sense of legalistic obligation to earn his favour, but because he has given you his life and invited you to come to him and learn a way of life that is good and beautiful and gives rest to your soul.

And so, as we wrap up this series, I want to encourage you to carve out space this week to start building a rule of life — a guideline that shapes your habits in time and space — or to keep building on what’s already established.

We’ll recap some ideas, and it’d be great to turn those ideas into practices: to write some things down, schedule them in your diary or calendar, take notes on your phone — start the work of establishing, or building on, habits that show you belong to Jesus.

I’ve got some tips here from the world of habit-building.

First: start small. Don’t try to pull off a massive revolution of your life all at once. We know what it’s like to make big resolutions and then have them drop off a week or two later.

Second: start with habits you’ll enjoy. There are lots of disciplines that will feel hard and restrictive. These are good. But if we’re building a rule of life from scratch, let’s start by adding a thing that will bring joy — that we’ll want to stick to. This will be different for each of us because we’re all wired differently, and in different stages of life and circumstances, with different rhythms we’ve already established both to survive and to grow.

You might love the idea of solitude and a quiet time with God. Quiet times are an evangelical sacred cow. But I hate them. I want a noisy time. I want to talk about the Bible with other people. I chucked a little two-page thing about how different personality types resonate with spiritual practices differently in the Facebook group earlier this week.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t ever establish hard habits, or disciplines that hurt — but…

This is where tip three comes in. There’s this idea of stacking habits: connecting new habits to established habits. We all have habits already — regular routines. When we link new habits to existing ones, they act as cues. Something like: “When I get out of bed in the morning” — that’s a habit — “I’ll make my bed straight away.” But we can connect spiritual disciplines to these moments too: “Before I get out of bed each morning I’ll pray.”

Then, as you’re ready to add something new into your rule of life, we can build it on the last habit, or on another regular routine.

“One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.” — James Clear, Atomic Habits

Tip four is kind of from the series already: habits follow cues — which often come from our habitat. Energy or effort we invest in controlling the environments where we want the habits to happen, to prompt these habits, will pay off by reducing the energy involved in fighting to make a choice.

“Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimising your environment.” — James Clear, Atomic Habits

As we craft a “rule,” remember: this isn’t about legalism. It doesn’t save us. You don’t have to do this. This is about carving out space and time to know Jesus and become like him.

It’s also not a self-improvement exercise, where we’re discovering the realest and truest and best version of ourselves, or getting better at self-rule. It’s a discipleship exercise where we’re seeking to come to Jesus and learn his ways.

This means we’re not just deciding who we want to be, but discerning where we’re not like Jesus, and where we think God might want us to grow by his Spirit. And that happens in community, not in isolated introspection. You might want to talk with a trusted sibling in Christ about what this will look like in your present season of life.

And this isn’t self-improvement that we discern together, then do by ourselves. We live and belong and are formed in community: the household of God — which operates in our households, and in our growth groups, and as a church. We’re also practicing the teaching of Jesus who turns us out from ourselves and commands us to love God and love our neighbours as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:37–39).

So the first step in this process will be reflecting on how you want to become more like Jesus.

Do you want to be more loving? More patient? Is there a fruit of the Spirit you want to cultivate? Is it something in how you see him speak or treat others — closer to our Father in heaven? More shaped by his word? More self-controlled? Wasting less time — resting more? Using this season well? Giving an inheritance worth something to the next generation?

Is there a habitual sin — an act of disobedience to Jesus — that you want to replace with a habitual obedience, where you can interrupt and redirect that process?

Identify how you want to become more like Jesus, and then pick a small step to take to head in that direction.

Picking the small step to get you there might be tricky. You could look at someone else who has this characteristic and examine their lives, or dig into the Gospels and see how Jesus does something. There are stacks of practices you might slot in here.

We’re going to recap some of the ideas from this series, and as we go you might want to take note of ideas you could bring into your daily, or weekly, or yearly rhythms — and ways you might reshape your life. The ideas that resonate most with you. The low-hanging fruit.

As we recap, one of the other things we did back in week one was imagine how life might have changed for Dionysius and Damaris — these two citizens of Athens who met Jesus through Paul’s preaching (Acts 17:34) — and how they might have started to embrace the rhythms of the early church we see described at the very beginning of the church in Acts 2 (Acts 2:42).

There’s nothing radically new in any of the practices we’ve covered this series. They’ve mostly unpacked the way of life described for those who have repented and found life in Jesus’ kingdom, under his rule.

If you pick a habit from Acts 2, you probably won’t go wrong — whether it’s being devoted to the apostles’ teaching — the Scriptures — to the breaking of bread (which I take to mean participating in the body of Jesus and remembering the gospel together at our tables), and to prayer, and to generosity: to living a common life and sharing our possessions and wealth — what God has gifted to us — with each other and the world in a generative, life-giving way (Acts 2:44–45), habitually meeting together and praising God — gospeling each other (Acts 2:46–47). And look: as the church community takes on these habits, their life overflows to others. It’s contagious (Acts 2:47).

So here’s a chance to jot down some areas you want to build something different: where you might establish a new regular routine — a way of life where you’re seeking to be ruled by Jesus as you inhabit space and time.

You may not have picked this up, but across the series we thought about inhabiting space and time — and we started small in each category and expanded.

So — in space — the smallest thing that belongs to you, that is ruled over by you (or whoever rules you), is your body: your life. Jesus calls you to build your life like a house — to build wisely — by hearing his words and putting them into practice (Luke 6:47–48).

You might want to build a habit of engaging with God’s word in a way that leads to reflection and practice. Maybe “no Bible, no breakfast,” or “I’ll read the Bible with my household each evening at dinner,” or “I’ll listen to the Bible on my commute.” Or you could download the Lectio 365 app and start an ancient practice of reading, prayer, and reflection.

We don’t live alone. Some of us might be sole occupiers of our homes, but we live in a household: the household of God (1 Timothy 3:14–15). And we’re formed by relationships. Ideally, we learn to grow up connected to God and one another in relationships of joyful attachment and hesed — committed love.

Our brains are shaped by joy, which, according to the science, is transmitted through our faces and eyes as we experience others being glad to be with us. Not all of us grew up with this, but you might habitually introduce joyful connection within your relationships: make time and space for eye-to-eye, face-to-face connection.

“Our identity is built and formed by joy-bonded relationships. The identity center in our brain grows in response to joy… If joy is transmitted primarily through our faces and eyes, we need to practice letting our faces light up with each other.” — Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks, The Other Half of Church

We thought about shaping the physical spaces we occupy as habitats for true humanity.

Like tradies who have jigs for repeated actions, we can rejig our spaces — and I know some of us already have. If there’s a sin you feel ruled by, that you’re habitually struggling with, what are the environmental prompts that cue up that behaviour or enable it? How can you act to remove or cut out the source — the cue — and replace it with something that prompts godliness instead?

Part of being deliberate about our environment, and about pursuing love and good deeds, is about filling our environment with people — especially people who will encourage and spur us on.

Habitually meeting together to share the good news of Jesus with each other (Hebrews 10:24–25).

This life together in our spaces sets us up to live in spaces we don’t control — a world, like Athens, where the architecture, art, and culture primes us for false worship (Acts 17:22–23).

As we learn that this architecture expresses and enforces misfiring parts of our human search for God, we can reorient our response from being conformed, or taking offence, or culture war, to our calling to be living images of God — those pointing others to life, those engaged in culture care: bringing beauty into this shared space.

What’s a habit you might embrace of cultivating towards what’s good and beautiful?

“Culture Care is a generative approach to culture that brings bouquets of flowers into a culture bereft of beauty.” — Makoto Fujimura

It might even be time in the garden, praying and growing things that delight you. It might be a habit of generosity and hospitality: habitually living as someone who’s received a good and beautiful gift from God, who shares at his table. Volunteering in a community. Making space for others. Baking for your colleagues. Delighting in God with an eye to what you might bring into the spaces you move in.

Our shift into time meant considering how we’re ruled by the clock, or the calendar — learning to number our days so we live wisely (Psalm 90:11), redeeming the time (Ephesians 5:15–16).

This means — at least in Ephesians — carving out time each day to remind ourselves that we live before the throne of God, as those raised and seated with him. Making space for prayer and worship: praising God for his goodness, knowing God, living in his presence so that each moment becomes holy.

You might rethink how you structure your day — like the psalmist (Psalm 119:164) — and many Christians through history who carve out regular moments for prayer. There are apps for this, like Every Moment Holy; they can act as prompts. So can daily reminders in your calendar app.

Now, if this flood of ideas feels overwhelming, remember: we’re just trying to pick one or two.

When it comes to the shape of your week, as one following the King of rest, you might want to carve out deliberate time to do this with a practice of Sabbath (Matthew 12:7–8): setting aside time to stop, rest, delight in God, and worship.

So we learn to resist the pull of our version of Athens and its altars that demand sacrifice — or our version of Egypt and its slavedrivers — or even from living as slave-drivers in what the Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey, calls “the violent culture” that views our bodies as machines.

Carving out time to know God and receive rest for our bodies and souls will mean we work differently. It will mean we can approach the good works he’s prepared for us — and everything we do — as though we’re working for God.

“…this violent culture that wants to see us working 24 hours a day, that doesn’t view us as a human being but instead views our divine bodies as a machine.” — Tricia Hersey

Habits of time are trickier when it comes to seasons — but maybe as you figure out what habits to embrace, you might ask “When am I?” How does serving God not just in this moment, but in this period of life, look different?

We’re all working out how to make every moment count as heavenly: to always give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord, in every season, because the resurrection means this work is not meaningless (1 Corinthians 15:58).

You might have a lifetime of great habits so this all seems silly — but have never stopped to consider how life in this season, where you’re older and more mature and facing ends not beginnings, can be used as a gift — and how to keep growing towards eternity as it feels like you’re finishing up.

I love the idea of the church being like a time machine that teaches hope as we come together in different seasons.

You — or us — older folks might help us — or you — younger folks navigate living in time in seasons that are present for us but past for you. Us younger folks — and especially our babies and kids — might help older folks focus on what inheritance we’re investing in leaving behind.

But all of this is about learning to see time differently: as eternal, and revolving around Jesus. So we might embrace rhythms across our year that embed us in the story of the gospel.

You might start following a church calendar, or a lectionary, or a Bible-in-a-year reading plan — even at the end of life — to learn to see that time isn’t getting away from us, but always going somewhere: taking us somewhere.

Which we saw means working to store up treasures in heaven; living as heirs who inherit eternal life as the household of God (Titus 3:6–7). So our habits now are about us seeing the long term, and building on becoming the people we’ll be forever, with the people we’ll be with forever.

Our relationships with each other aren’t temporary, but eternal.

So, as we build a rule of life, this is our horizon. Which means each moment, each step — they’re not urgent. But each habit we build — the lives we build together — that God builds by his Spirit — they’re important.

Important enough that I reckon it’d be great for you to spend some time this week making a start… building some habits as part of expressing Jesus’ rule in your life, and becoming like him.

You might want to take up one or two — or some daily and some weekly. But make them manageable. And when they feel routine, add another.

Take the time to set up your environment to make this something you do. Ask your growth group to check in. Take up a habit together. Put reminders or prompts into your phone, or your diary.

If this doesn’t feel like enough… if you want to go bigger… some of our growth groups have been working through the Practicing the Way course this term — which is where that video came from. They have an online rule-of-life builder you could try out.

But we don’t just want to think about our individual rule of life, but how we live together. Whether that’s in households — whether they’re biological or spiritual households — or in growth groups, or even here together.

But let’s start in our homes and where we meet together in homes, and ask what it looks like to have regular rhythms and routines where we cultivate joyful connection to God and each other, in households bound by God’s love.

For us to be deliberate, and calibrate what we do with our time: what we do routinely, how we meet together as those ruled by Jesus — to explore how.

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this series, and it would be overwhelming to do it all at once. But the goal has been for us to see our lives in time and space, minute-by-minute and centimetre-by-centimetre, be more and more ruled by Jesus, so minute-by-minute and centimetre-by-centimetre, we become more and more like him.

King Jesus promises to give rest for our souls, as he reconnects us to our good Creator who gives us life and breath and everything else — and promises to do this forever. Let’s be ruled by him together.

December 16, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Nine — Generating Eternity

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

It has been a bit funny throwing up this graphic every week of this series — a blueprint with the idea that we inhabit space and time; a habitat. Because the Campbell family was about to move out of home. While we worked through this series we were also working on plans for our house.
Well… when I say “our house” — it’s complicated.

Families are complex, and all of us have different stories and different things we’re juggling. But for us, we’re kind of in a season of generational limbo. We don’t own our home; we hope one day to inherit it. In our circumstances, we’re in this stage of life where it’s natural to think about our own inheritance, and also what we’ll leave our kids as an inheritance — how we might care for ageing parents, and how we’ll help our kids navigate a housing market (or make space for them). And all that gets folded into planning a renovation.

The idea of inheritance is complicated for lots of us — not just because it always involves death: the death of someone we love, or our own. It’s complicated whether we’re thinking about stewarding intergenerational wealth from a family system that has built and benefited from intergenerational advantage — and doing that with generosity and justice and love, battling temptations towards greed — or if we’ve already inherited all we’re going to get from our parents, materially or in the form of baggage we carry. Or whether we’re at the stage of life where we’re really deciding what it is we want to leave behind.

This whole question of inheritance challenges some of the way we want to think about — or not think about — time.

One of our challenges as a family — and maybe as a culture — is this sense of living moment to moment; paycheck to paycheck. Whether that’s because we’re in a sort of hand-to-mouth season in a cost-of-living crisis, or just swept up in an age of instant gratification… to stop and think longer term — about what we’ll inherit or leave behind — is not something everyone has the privilege to do.

So much of our habitat — our environment — is set up to have us live in time moment to moment, or to keep us there while others get rich.

This isn’t new. There’s a book from the 70s — Future Shock — that described a society-wide shift into an era of temporary products made by temporary methods to serve temporary needs. Future Shock is the changing experience of time caused by this super-fast change in environment — society and culture. Some of us lived through this moment… and then things got faster:

“We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs… Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society.“ — Future Shock, Alvin Toffler

So a more recent book, Present Shock, says we now live in this constant state of being pulled in every direction all at once, in one moment. Future Shock was about one big change; Present Shock is about everything changing all the time to keep us fixated on right now.

“Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on… It’s not a mere speeding up… It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now.” — Present Shock, Douglas Rushkoff

In present shock we don’t plan for the future or think long term, or about our inheritance — unless, like the prodigal son, we want it now so we can live fast.

Some of us, though, resist this pull. We think obsessively about what we’ll leave behind for our heirs — our super balance. We’re storing up security; wealth — delaying gratification — avocado on toast — to build something for ourselves, or for others.

Whichever camp you’re in, it’s like we’re in the marshmallow test. Have you seen this test? You put a marshmallow in front of a kid and tell them if they wait until you get back, you’ll give them another one. It was meant to be this test to show that delayed gratification leads to success… and it appeared to. This is what you might’ve heard about it.

When later scientists tried to replicate the test and actually asked the kids who grabbed the marshmallow why they didn’t wait, it turned out rich kids would delay gratification because their parents had demonstrated that adults could be trusted. While kids from poor families had learned it was rational to seize an opportunity that might not come again. And the positive outcomes for the kids in the first experiment wasn’t so much about wisdom and delayed gratification, but about what they were inheriting from their family.

If these better outcomes come from generation after generation delaying gratification and passing on opportunities and advantage… then just focusing on the present feels unwise — we’re kind of stuck. Especially when we’re also spending our kids’ inheritance when it comes to natural resources and the climate; pushing us to think really long term — sometimes in ways that distract us from needs in the present.

So how are we meant to live beyond the moment, with the long term in view?

We’ve thought about inhabiting our days and weeks and seasons. How do we expand our horizons to the bigger picture, and think about generations — and leaving an inheritance worth something for those we love? No matter what we inherit from our families, what kind of inheritance do we want to pass on to our heirs, whether they’re biological or spiritual?

I reckon we find some guides for long-term thinking in our two readings that shape how we live in the world in the present.

The sons of Korah in Psalm 49 have advice for both the rich — those inheriting and leaving an inheritance of material value — and the poor; those who’ve inherited forms of economic disadvantage. Wisdom for everyone who’ll listen (Psalm 49:1–4).

The Psalm kind of expects those who are wealthy to be wealthy through exploitation; that they’re wicked deceivers (Psalm 49:5–6). Now, this is complex, right? Wealth can be a blessing that follows wise life in God’s world. Intergenerational wealth and privilege is tricky to track — in my family history there are fortunes lost and found, and made through the colonial project here in Australia. But the Psalmist doesn’t have much patience with the idea we should trust wealthy folks who boast in their great riches in evil days; certainly not that we should fear or revere them as though they’ve got something to offer.

Because the reality is: we all die. Basically.

Their wealth can’t buy you out of the grave. They can’t go to God and ransom you — or themselves. There’s no payment, this Psalmist reckons, that’s enough to get a life out of the grave so someone can live forever (Psalm 49:7–9). Nothing the rich can do. The wise die. And so do rich fools — leaving their wealth to others (Psalm 49:10). And this sort of inheritance doesn’t lead anywhere good; it’s a speck in space and time.

We might worry heaps about how big and flash our houses are, but we’ll spend much more time dead and housed in our tombs — and his point’s not to buy a good grave or coffin (Psalm 49:11). No matter how significant we are — we could have a city or a street named after us — but we still die. Just like the beasts (Psalm 49:12). This is all very Ecclesiastes. Except the Psalm has a little upbeat note: the rich can’t ransom us from the grave and give us eternity, but the sons of Korah are confident that God can, and will. That he will redeem people from the grave and take them to himself (Psalm 49:15).

And the wise who hear this advice bring this perspective to life — a different sort of long-term vision — so we don’t get overawed by others growing rich (Psalm 49:16). And presumably the assumption is just that we aren’t going to spend our lives pursuing that sort of wealth if we know we can’t take it with us. Pursuing wealth without this understanding is pointless. As the Psalm says, we can all see everyone dies, and what we amass in our lifetime we leave to others.

So the question’s not just what do you want to live for, but what do you want to pass on? What do you want to leave behind?

Is it just that we want to pass on more wealth and comfort to a generation who might benefit — might get a better job if they don’t take the marshmallow, might have a nicer house — but they too will end up not taking it with them; our heirs will also end up in the grave.

So maybe we should be passing on something else.

Something that lasts.

To people who’ll last.

When Jesus teaches this same sort of wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount, he says, “Don’t store up treasures for yourselves on earth.” You can’t take that stuff with you; it’ll die, or break, or get stolen. But instead, store up treasures in heaven — permanent stuff — and where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also (Matthew 6:19–20).

This is a long-term investment strategy. If we can’t buy our way to eternal life, it makes sense to invest with the one who can. And there’s something about becoming a disciple of Jesus that’s about investing in others — passing on an inheritance in his family, in our households.

Which is what we see in Paul’s letter to Titus. This letter’s a lot like 1 Timothy, which we read earlier in the series — there are some overlaps.

Check out how Paul describes himself at the start of the letter: a servant of God — a slave, even — and an apostle of Jesus. He’s invested to further the faith of God’s elect — his ransomed people he’s bringing to himself (Titus 1:1–2).

Paul’s investing in people knowing the truth that leads to godliness — to the sort of life we’re looking to live as we inhabit time and space as God’s people — “in the hope of eternal life.” This is a time idea. He’s not writing to people just to keep them fixed in the present, but to keep our eyes on the long term in ways that shape how we live in the present.

He says God — who doesn’t lie — promised this eternal life before the beginning of time, and in this appointed season — another time word — he has brought to light this promise and its fulfilment through Paul’s preaching (Titus 1:2–3). Just think about what Paul’s saying about time and its meaning here: before the beginning of time, God planned to give eternal life to people. Paul’s kind of saying that to make sense of all time, we have to keep this long term in view, and act accordingly in the moment.

He’s writing — like with Timothy — to someone he considers family; his son in the faith (Titus 1:4). He’s given Titus a job in Crete: to appoint elders — leaders of the church — specifically “managers of God’s household.” We saw in Timothy this was about spiritual parents: people who shape the inheritance left to a household, and steward what has already been inherited.

And just remember — because it’s fun — when we see the word “household” in the Greek, especially with this idea of managing, we should think “economy.” Paul wants Titus to appoint leaders who’ll manage time and space and build and pass on an inheritance that isn’t about treasures on earth, but eternal life (Titus 1:5–7). The managers of this economy — the parents in the household — are to steward resources differently. Paul lists these values or virtues to be passed on: don’t be overbearing, or violently angry, or drunk, or greedy for wealth that comes dishonestly. Instead, wealth and homes are made for sharing in hospitality; as folks cultivate love for what is good — self-control — the ability to delay gratification, or choose not to be gratified but to be holy, upright… disciplined (Titus 1:7–8).

Titus has a job: he’s to teach what actions are appropriate to sound doctrine (Titus 2:1). And look, this passage is full of head-scratching moments, and we’re barely going to touch on them — and I’m sorry. I’ll do my best not to leave stuff hanging in ways that trouble you. But we’re glossing over some of the substance to see the nature of the relationships — what people are doing for each other here with the long term in mind.

Paul’s expecting older folks to create an inheritance with the long-term view in mind: passing on treasures in heaven to younger folks while they’re alive — not amassing wealth or passing it on, but cultivating godliness and loving relationships — joyful connection with God and each other — as the basis of privilege and advantage in God’s economy.

So “elder men” are to be temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love and in endurance (Titus 2:2). In the same way, “elder women” are to be reverent — living towards God — not being slanderers, or drunk, like the overseers in chapter 1, but to have self-control and teach what is good. They’re to pass this on to the younger generation: teaching younger women — if they’re married — to love their husbands and children (Titus 2:3–4).

I’m in the sort of camp that thinks Paul’s envisaging way more than he lists here — a sort of network of relationships where the old invest in the young becoming godly because this is how you live with the long term — eternal life — in view. But there’s a list of ways these women might do this through their example and teaching: helping younger women to be self-controlled and pure; busy at home; kind; subject to their husbands (Titus 2:5).

Now — couple of red flags there, right? We hear “busy at home” and think “oppression.” But in the first century, households were family businesses — economies. This isn’t about dishes; it’s about contribution to the shape of the household. And being subject to their husbands has to be read with everything Paul says about mutual love and respect, and wives and husbands belonging to each other, and the call for husbands not to be violent and domineering patriarchs, but those who lay down their lives like Jesus does rather than raising their hands and ruling harshly.

But I want you to see the pattern of relationships more than the content: experienced women of character investing in younger women. And the purpose of these particular behaviours is that nobody looking on will malign the word of God (Titus 2:6). It’s part of bearing witness to the world that this economy is different, because we’re living with a different vision of death and the future.

Titus and the elder men are to do the same with younger men: encouraging them to be self-controlled — to delay gratification; choosing the eternal over the momentary; eternal life over the marshmallow. Setting an example by doing what is good; showing integrity and seriousness and soundness of speech that can’t be condemned (Titus 2:6–8). Again, especially so opponents outside the church will be ashamed because their way of life is so visibly good:

“…so that those who oppose you may be ashamed because they have nothing bad to say about us.” — Titus 2:8

This is all a sort of picture of apprenticeship within this household structure: this community embracing a different economy — building an inheritance that will be passed on from generation to generation.

They’re thinking big picture, but the response is to do the hard work in their own lives of cultivating goodness and virtue — godliness — in order to pass it on through relationships. They’re not driven to abstraction, but to the very concrete.

There’s another really tricky bit here: slavery in the first century isn’t the slavery we picture in America or the British empire. It’s not that it wasn’t awful for many slaves, but slaves were part of households — often part of the family. Paul’s also called himself a slave of God. In these newly ordered households, as the economy is upended, there are ways Paul’s encouraging slaves to live with the heads of their households — again, super uncomfortable for us.

But what’s Paul doing? Telling them not to play the short-term game — stealing, instant gratification — but building trust, again so that their witness to God our saviour will be attractive (Titus 2:9–10). There’s a different view of this short-term pain and indignity that comes if a person has become an heir to God’s promises and you’re banking up treasures in heaven.

This long-term view — this vision of the grace of God — the perspective on time that comes with eternal life — God offering salvation to all people — Paul reckons this teaches us, over time. And with these examples, as people invest in us, over time we learn to say no to ungodliness, to worldly patterns and instant gratification, and instead to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives — the lives modelled by our spiritual parents; the lives we inherit from those passing them on living with the same vision of time — while we wait for the future, the long term, to become the present when Jesus returns (Titus 2:11–13).

Jesus, who did give himself for us to redeem us and purify us as a people who are his own — people eager to do what is good (Titus 2:14). No one can redeem the life of another or give them eternal life using our own wealth (Psalm 49:7). That’s beyond what money can buy; the things of earth can’t deliver.

But Jesus does.

And he invites us into a new economy with a new sort of inheritance.

It’s lovely to be able to meet the material needs of your heirs, your household — both biological and spiritual. What a privilege it is to give and receive generosity and hospitality and security. But like the Psalm says, wisdom comes in investing in the long term. Like Jesus says, wisdom is found in storing up treasures in heaven — and we do this by helping one another become more heavenly; more like Jesus. Because it’s the bits of us that become godly that’ll last for eternity, as all else gets left in the grave.

In the next chapter of Titus, Paul says God has brought us into this life — saving us through the washing of rebirth and the renewal of the Holy Spirit. God, our heavenly Father, poured this out on us generously through Jesus Christ our saviour (Titus 3:5–6). Having been justified by his grace, this gift — this is our inheritance — we now have life with him; eternal life (Titus 3:6–7). This is our view of the long term, and what we’re invited to receive from each other and pass on to each other as something of great value.

This view of the long term, Paul says, is meant to see us carefully devoting ourselves to doing what is good — this is the economy of God; the pattern of his household (Titus 3:8). Life with the long term in view is about cultivating this goodness and hope, this inheritance that is our gift through Jesus, and passing it on.

We can get distracted by marshmallows; by wealth; by visions of the long term that pull us away from those around us — by the idea that security comes in the form of a bigger house, and that love looks like passing on wealth and advantage to those we choose to give it to.

But if you’ve found life in Jesus, you’re now part of a family who inherit this life together, and you’re invited to pass it on from generation to generation — to become the sort of person, bit by bit, who has something to give.

This long-term view means carefully devoting yourself to doing what is good — modelling that, teaching that, generation to generation. I reckon churches can get obsessed with quick fixes and fast growth — especially pastors. We hunt for silver bullets and want to see hundreds of converts, which would be amazing. But wanting hundreds of disciples, not just converts, requires something different in this model. It requires households of people committed to modelling and forming and practising and passing on an inheritance of this sort of godliness.

One of the things I love about the church of Christ is the idea that some of you have been in community for longer than I’ve been alive. I’d love our church community to think long term rather than short term about our mission — to imagine not just hundreds of people joining us, and us having to plant new things or do things differently — but to imagine little Hazel Jean, the newest member of our family, born last week, and the other newborns and toddlers and kids and teens. Imagine still being connected to them in five years, ten years, twenty years, fifty years — as older, wiser family in Jesus — invested in them inheriting eternal life.

This is the new economy — the new family — we’re invited into, where we get to both create an inheritance we leave for this generation and those that follow, and to learn to live in our own inheritance: the security of eternal life that has been given for us.

If you’re a parent, imagine this being the inheritance you’re building for your own kids — that this is a bigger and better investment than real estate or a bank balance.

Whoever you are, this is the most important inheritance passed on to you that you will steward. It produces bigger and longer-lasting advantages than the sort of wealth that means your kid will ace the marshmallow test.

What changes in the way we think about church and relationships if we think about the long term together and start living, loving, and relating to each other remembering we’ll spend eternity together?

How might this sort of time scale shape your rule of life; your practices; and the way you’re depositing into their lives in ways that’ll hopefully compound and produce something better than wealth that we can’t take with us?

December 16, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Eight — Seasons

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

I have a rule with preaching that I do not do sports illustrations.

It is not because I do not love sports. I love sports — but I am aware others do not like sports; or sports illustrations. They are alienating. I am making an exception because I do like weird DIY graphs, and this fits this chapter’s theme — we looked at inhabiting space, and then have spent the last couple of chapters thinking about numbering our days and redeeming the time and the shape of our week — this chapter is about seasons. And you know what has seasons… sports.

At the time I preached this sermon, I had just finished playing a season of over 35s football — soccer for uncultured folks — I am the goalkeeper. In the 2024 season we did not make the finals, so it was all over (in 2025, at the time of posting — we had made the finals, and won the Grand Final).

The team I play for started playing together in the Baptist league; some of us have played together for 15 years — since our 20s, playing against 40 year olds, and then found ourselves in our 40s playing 20 year olds, so we moved to a more age-appropriate league where we are in our prime again, not past it. Now — you have been waiting for the graph I flagged above.

Here is how life works if you play sport. At some point you hit your peak. You are the best you will ever be.


When you are young you are fit and healthy; you might move better, but as you gain experience, you play smarter — and at some point, it all clicks and you hit your peak — the perfect overlap of experience and ability — a real sweet spot. Life before this moment is prep for that season, and from then on, you are always kinda trading on the glory days.

I think I peaked in 2010 — at 27 — here I am lying on the ground in the grand final.

Turns out my graph is based in reality — this journal article looks at average ages of success in different high-level sports in Australia.

First — the good news for people considering a run at the 2032 Olympics — Olympic athletes are getting older on average — there was a 66-year-old competing for Australia in Tokyo.

They also looked at male World Cup footballers, concluding attackers peak at 25, defenders at 27, mids in the middle, and goalkeepers are the oldest player type — where our agility and reaction time might decline, we learn resilience and strategic decision-making, and mostly we are just tall.

“Goalkeeping requires significant agility and reaction time. Traits benefiting older players, such as psychological resilience and strategic decision-making, are also important. These skills are thought to develop with experience and age… Their greater playing longevity may be because they are specialized both in skill and body type: they are often taller.”

This sounds a bit right. My body is slowing down every season; my recovery time is longer — but I am probably playing smarter.

What is true of sport is true of many parts of life — this is why sporting illustrations are preaching gold. This season stuff is true of discipleship too. Becoming more like Jesus — our habits and practices will look different in different seasons of life — our capacity will vary, but there are ways our experience teaches us to be smarter.

Discerning the changing of seasons and how this changes what we are called to do within our limits is vital to redeeming the time. This sort of discernment is important for our own growth and for the role we play in the household of God.

So. What season of life are you in? What does living wisely — building wisely by practicing the way of Jesus — look like in this season with your mix of experience and strength and energy and availability and ability? Especially where you maybe cannot jump at tasks you might have in earlier seasons, but where you have developed some other skills — or maybe you are just tall.

Our lives will be made up of various seasons; you have got your classics — birth, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, middle age, old age, dying — and then sorts of shifts that happen along that continuum — education, getting a job, leaving home, maybe marriage, maybe kids, maybe job loss, maybe buying a home, maybe renting, maybe grieving relationship breakdown, or singleness, or childlessness, maybe job transitions, raising teens, maybe caring for an elderly parent, grandparenting, grieving dying parents, grieving lost children, a medical diagnosis — every one of these is not just an ‘event’ where it just happens in a moment and is gone; these are experiences that stretch over a body of time, often overlapping.

And if we pretend they do not change our capacity — or what faithfulness and wisdom look like in our lives — we are kinda missing part of what it means to inhabit time faithfully while seeking God; seeking to become godly in the circumstances where he has placed us.

Part of maturity is not just knowing who I am and acting with integrity — it is — as Jamie Smith puts it in How to Inhabit Time — being able to answer the question “When am I?”

He reckons seasons are a better way to discern when we are and how we should live than days and dates… that if we discern what season we are in, this helps us know what to expect, and that the key to living well through these seasons is not numbering our days by the sun, but by remembering that in every season, we revolve around the Son.

“The answer to the question ‘When am I?’ is not six o’clock or 2022; it is more like youth, middle age, chapter 3 of a life… To ask ‘When are we?’ is not a question of counting years as much as discerning a season, knowing what to expect… Remembering that, in every season, we revolve around the Son.”

Somehow that pun is less clichéd when you have as much panache as Smith.

This discernment of the seasons helps us see that our situations are temporary; to receive the good and live through the bad… which is the tension the poem in chapter 3 of the book of Ecclesiastes explores; it is an invitation to discern the time — the season — and act appropriately.

The poem opens declaring there is a time and a season for everything — and then it describes a bunch of times — seasons — where different actions are appropriate — as well as milestone moments — birth and death, planting and uprooting, killing and healing, tearing down and building.

Some people might say deconstruction and construction here. Some of us have experienced these sorts of seasons in our lives, our faith, our relationships. In any of these, if you do the wrong thing, that is bad, right? We had some ‘help’ from some folks in the garden out the back where we uprooted when we should have been tending to the plants, and it set the garden back a bit.

A time to weep and a time to laugh, to mourn or dance, to scatter or gather, to embrace or refrain, to search and to give up, to keep or throw away, to tear or mend, to be silent or speak, love and hate, war and peace — lots of these are momentary, but some of them are seasons (Ecclesiastes 3:1–7) — and wisdom lies in discerning the difference and acting according to the time.

This list — they are all actions where we have agency to respond to the situation or season or time we find ourselves in — and maybe one of the things this poem also invites us to see is that if we are always just doing one of these options — always uprooting or deconstructing and never moving into a different season — then we might be stuck in a less than wise rut. We are made to discern the time and to act in ways that go somewhere.

Although, the writer of Ecclesiastes is maybe not sure there is anywhere to go, because our seasons end. Eventually.

We worked through the book of Ecclesiastes as a church when we were looking at the books that are often called Wisdom Literature; we saw how it tells the story of someone — a teacher — who we are meant to identify as King Solomon searching for meaning under the heavens (Ecclesiastes 1:12–13); specifically, under the sun — which is a phrase that mostly seems to be about life on earth without much reference to God (Ecclesiastes 1:13–14). In Genesis it is the heavenly lights that shape how we measure the passing of time on earth (Genesis 1:14).

Solomon is trying to make sense of life if death is the end of the story — if every moment is fleeting — this Hebrew word hevel that gets translated as “meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 1:13–14), but is more literally the word “breath” — if every moment, every season, is temporary.

The whole book is an extended meditation on the burden the teacher describes after his poem (Ecclesiastes 3:10) as “the burden God has laid on the human race.”

The burden is this idea that everything is beautiful in its time, but that time seems so fleeting in the face of eternity — and our longing for something lasting — that sits beside knowing our fate; knowing one day the breath will leave our bodies; one breath will be our last. Fleeting. Meaningless. Breath (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

In this he reckons we are no different to the animals… the same fate awaits us all; the same breath animates our bodies. Everything is breath. Temporary (Ecclesiastes 3:18–19).

The teacher’s advice is to embrace the moment; discern the time — the season — and roll with it; eat, drink, be merry — work hard and enjoy our labour — know that whatever season you are in, good or bad, it will pass — and that life is a series of different times and experiences and moments (Ecclesiastes 3:12–13).

There is some wisdom here, right? When it comes to not trying to make fleeting things eternal. We can waste a lot of time and money trying to be eternally young and never die. We can look for magical ‘forever young’ solutions; trying to hold on to a magic season and never experience the maturity and wisdom that comes through navigating our way through other seasons.

There is wisdom in discerning what season we are in under the heavens (Ecclesiastes 3:1), and how to live accordingly — in knowing when to move to over-35s, or walking football, or coaching rather than trying to keep up with 20-year-olds.

The teacher in Ecclesiastes does not have the same perspective Paul offers in 1 Corinthians — where Paul says, “Actually, the resurrection of Jesus and our resurrection with him is a game changer for how we live in time.” It is not that we should not discern the seasons still, but picking a wise reaction to each season includes hopeful certainty about where we are going.

He also uses a bit of seasonal language — farming language — through this passage, as he describes the resurrection of Jesus as the first fruits (1 Corinthians 15:20); the beginning of a new season — the start of something new even for those who have died already.

It is fun reading this bit of 1 Corinthians and its wisdom side by side with Ecclesiastes. The teacher says “humans and animals have the same breath of life” — which is a reflection on Genesis 1 and 2 — and death makes everything “breath” — fleeting. Paul is like, “Yep. Without the resurrection of Jesus, this is true — even faith is futile” (Ecclesiastes 3:19; 1 Corinthians 15:17).

If he is not raised and we are not raised, then the teacher’s wisdom is right — eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we die (Ecclesiastes 3:13; 1 Corinthians 15:32).

But there is a game changer — our dying “under the sun” bodies are not the end of the story. Living in dying bodies still requires wisdom and discerning seasons of time and what these perishable bodies are capable of — but because of the resurrection of Jesus, these dying bodies of breath are not the end of the story (1 Corinthians 15:42–43).

Our natural bodies will be replaced with spiritual bodies (1 Corinthians 15:44). There is a fun thing in the Greek here where Paul is playing with two different words that can be translated as “breath” and “spirit.” What we get as “natural” uses the same Greek word the Greek translation of the Old Testament uses for the breath of life — the fleeting breath that animates even the animals but disappears on death. And the resurrection body — Paul uses the word pneuma — or spirit — here, the word used for the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ resurrection breath being given to our bodies changes the story.

Now we do have something the animals do not. We had the same breath; now we are animated by God’s Holy Spirit (Ecclesiastes 3:19; 1 Corinthians 15:44).

Now not everything is meaningless… breath. Fleeting. Ending in death. Our destiny has changed; our season has changed; our burden has been lifted. Now we are living — as those with the Spirit — in anticipation of an entirely different season with an entirely different body; one that will not break down and decay, while our experience grows.

I do not know if this graph is entirely accurate — I do not know if our heavenly, imperishable, glorious bodies will be 27, or improve over time — but we will not be experiencing the frustration that comes from dying and decaying bodies that break down and recover slower.

One day the perishable will be clothed with the imperishable — the mortal with immortality (1 Corinthians 15:54). We will see continuity in the bits of our lives that we have invested in the spiritual reality, the life of Jesus — and the other bits will be left in the grave and defeated.

And this future hope might inform how we navigate seasons of frustration and change now — or even great seasons of joy and productivity where we might be inclined to forget eternity and try to make these fleeting moments last forever.

Paul says through Jesus and his resurrection we are liberated from the worst aspects of time — death — as we are also liberated from sin and the law that condemns us. We have this victory through Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:56–57). That is what you want at the end of a good season.

And so this shapes every moment.

Paul says we ought to stand firm — no matter the season we are in — not be moved from this truth that shapes our days and our seasons and our lives. Always — through every season — giving ourselves fully to the work of the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:58).

That will change season by season, in accordance with our obligations and our limitations and our health and our energy and our strength — but when we are labouring in the Lord it is not meaningless; it is not vanity; it is not just breath — it is not just under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:13–14).

It is for eternity — an eternity enjoying the fruits of this work for God as he sets the table for us to eat, drink, and be merry under the Son.

This is God’s answer to the longing for eternity set in our hearts. It helps us receive beautiful seasons and moments now as temporary pictures of what is to come, and the ugliness — especially the ugliness of dying — breaking down to dust — as temporary struggles and sorrows that will also pass and can be endured.

So how do we do this? What are some practices we can embrace to live seasonally; to rightly number our days, asking “When am I?” discerning the time so we can redeem it and live wisely?

Some of us are in our physical prime — we have so much energy and motivation; we are not weighed down by some of the commitments that come with family — whether with a spouse and kids, or ageing parents who need care — we might lack some experience and wisdom, but that will come with practice. Stewarding this season might mean stepping up and saying yes to challenging things, recognising that you have this season as a gift, and that it is fleeting. This might play out at work or at home or here at church. I am thankful for the way so many younger adults without kids serve our community with energy and enthusiasm — especially those who are teaching kids in kids church to help parents navigate this season.

This season for you might involve grief about unrealised hopes, or navigating the path to get to a new season. This requires discernment, recognising limits — our humanity — maybe even confronting the way our bodies are imperfect and limited no matter how hard we push them. That is okay. There are practices you can embrace in this season that will grow you towards your eternal future. You might look around and resent some older folks because of how much you are doing and forget that older folks have been through that season, have done the stuff you are doing now — and might wish to still be doing it… but they… we… just cannot.

Many of us are past our physical prime. It is true. We are in dying bodies that do not have the energy we once had. How do we live faithfully with the time we have left — valuing our experience? Maybe there is a set of habits or practices you might embrace that are the discipleship equivalents of walking football or coaching; slowing down — still doing the stuff you loved, but as someone who brings experience but not speed to the field, or helping from the sidelines; energising and encouraging. Maybe there is stuff you imagine that you cannot do anymore because you cannot do what you used to — but maybe you are like a goalkeeper and you might find you have got more useful with age, and wasting energy is not the wisest path.

I have got to say — I do not just love that young adults are involved in our kids ministry — you might not have noticed, but our elders are rostered on creche or kids church most weeks. You might join them. Your knees might not cope with playing on the carpet, but you can take a chair and offer love to our kids — or find ways to help parents in our church navigate this season, or offer support and encouragement to single folks navigating a complex season filled with griefs and hopes and challenges to stay godly that look different for each of us.

This discernment — it is not a solo sport. It is part of living in the household of God (1 Timothy 3:14–15); part of being family for each other — the environment in which we each grow and learn and navigate seasons with those who have gone before and those coming after us.

Discernment requires listening — perhaps to those who have gone before — not because being old automatically brings maturity, but because navigating seasons with wisdom that produces godliness is actually what maturing might look like. I know as a younger person I was dismissive of older folks, because what would they know — and I still can be — but now as an older person I am realising that some of what I offer is maturity, not just old-person thinking, and some of what younger people — not exclusively my own children — lack is hard-won maturity, where some of that winning happens through struggle, but maybe some of it is easier to navigate with a good coach.

Those of us who are younger might need to cultivate a practice — and the sorts of relationships — where we can listen to older, more mature voices, while those of us who are older might need to realise what we have to offer; discerning what is mature and what is appropriate for any given season of life — not just cultivating an expectation that young folks will act just like us. That is not wise either. Wisdom is about acting according to our season.

Smith talks about this as a bit like time travel, where the church is like a time machine; as older, wiser folks who have negotiated a season can report futures those navigating a season cannot comprehend — creating hope. He says:

“Trading testimonies across generations turns the communion of saints into a time machine… When an older friend reports from a future you could not imagine, your imagination is infused with a new possibility. That is called hope.”

Some of us are entering — or in — the final season. And this season presents its own particular moments; fleeting moments that might not come back and might be savoured or grieved with particular weight. It is not easy for a young bloke like me only just past sporting retirement age to speak about this — but this is a season some of you are facing. A season not of firsts but of lasts, or “maybe lasts,” where you are just not sure.

And we want to honour that as your church family; to walk with you, to laugh with you, to cry with you, and to be there through this time — as you work out how to say goodbye; how to finish well — and as you model that to us too — especially how to finish well — to mourn while hoping.

We want to see you live as though life is not meaningless but death has been swallowed up in victory, and we want to play our part in celebrating and reminding you of that while thanking God for the seasons you have experienced. Because one day, whether we know it or not, we each experience this season.

The call for each of us — in each season — is the same; according to our ability and capacity and experience — it is to not be moved from our hope; to stand firm in Jesus and give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord. To live for him. To live shaped by the way he shapes time.

One way Smith reckons churches can do this is to think differently about time — to see time as cyclical, not linear. There is an ancient practice where church communities have structured their years to rehearse and remember the Christian story — the church calendar — holy days — they still mark our secular calendar with Christmas and Easter — but this is a way to remember that time does not revolve around the sun but the Son; and that we do not live under the sun but under the Son. He is our centre of gravity.

In this calendar each year begins with a deliberate movement towards the events of Gethsemane and the cross — the silence of Easter Saturday and the explosion of light from the rising Son.

“The Christian inhabits time as cyclical and linear… The liturgical calendar rehearses the way time curves and bends around the incarnate Christ like a temporal center of gravity. Every year, the church walks with Jesus toward Gethsemane, bears witness to his anguish and suffering, steps again into the chilled shadow of the cross, lives with the harrowing silence of Holy Saturday, and arrives on Easter morning to witness the explosion of light that is the resurrection of the Son of God.”

And we end the calendar with Advent, anticipating, hoping for the coming of the Messiah, remembering that he has come — in flesh — stepping into time in a way that changes everything. Embracing this cycle — these annual seasons — we remind ourselves of our story in every season of our own life.

This is already something we have started to do more of together as we gather as a church, but marking time this way in your homes might be something you consider as we cultivate a rule of life together and navigate each season that life throws at us.

We are all caught up in the business of learning to tell the time; to discern the season we are in so that whenever we are in life, we can give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because when we labour in him — eyes and hearts towards eternity — it is not in vain.

October 25, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Seven — The King of Rest

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

What does your regular week look like?

What are the things you do week in, week out — regular commitments — that are shaping you?

For many of us it will be work, or studying, and some exercise — then some church stuff — church on Sundays, growth group mid-week — your calendar is probably already full — and if you throw kids and their weekly commitments it is overfull.

We have been thinking about inhabiting space; now we are exploring time; learning to number our days; making them count — redeeming the time — so we might live wisely.

The end goal is to construct a rule of life; a pattern of habits to adopt to be formed as followers of Jesus — so we are considering how we are ruled by regular life.

How is your regular week shaping you?

And what regular commitments could you embrace to become more like Jesus?

We cannot make time for everything; we are limited — busy — and this idea of adding more regular stuff — it feels — overwhelming…

We have spent time earlier in 2024 thinking about hospitality and Luke’s Gospel; the idea the kingdom of God is revealed at the table — how do we make time for that? And about living before the throne of God as those raised and seated with Jesus — spending time “in heaven” in prayer and worship? So we can live heaven-on-earth lives — we might want to do this regularly.

But… something has probably got to give if we are going to make time for this stuff…

As we think about the shape of our weeks now — seven days — about our limits; our busyness; how overwhelmed we are — I am going to suggest we should carve out time each week for this stuff, and there is a ready-made category for this in the Bible.

The Bible’s story is the reason we have a seven-day week — our rhythms come from the Genesis story, where God creates and generates for six days, then rests on day seven; naming it holy time; a bit like the garden is marked out as holy space (Genesis 2:2-3) — this becomes the regular rhythm of the week for God’s people in the form of Sabbath (Exodus 20:8-10).

Now. I have preached on Sabbath before — but — I am still not sure I am nailing it as a practice in my own life. And if you know anything about Presbyterians, you will know we have got a tradition of being legalistic about the Old Testament law; a bit keen to apply Israel’s laws to Christians — maybe especially on the Sabbath; which we call the Lord’s Day…

This is not just a Presbyterian thing — my mum’s family were part Methodist, part Anglican and there were all sorts of rules about whether you could watch football on the Sabbath — because you certainly could not play it — and — anyway — my family are reactionaries, so when we moved to Queensland in the late 90s, my dad was asked to MC this annual Presbyterian event called a Celebration Rally; it was on the Lord’s Day — a Sunday night — and at this Celebration Rally there was a sausage sizzle; apparently it was OK for people to cook sausages for hundreds of people on the Lord’s Day, but they ran out — and people were hungry — and rather than breaking bread and fish and passing them around the crowd, dad dared to suggest anyone hungry should grab some drive-through Maccas on the way home — a Lord’s Day tradition in our family… And he caused a mini scandal. Trading on the Lord’s Day is a no-no.

This is the heritage I bring to thinking about the Sabbath — which is mostly “it is a restrictive rule from the Old Testament that does not apply to Christians…”

But.

I am increasingly convinced that I have had it wrong — that the Sabbath is not about restriction — but liberation — that rest is not an imposition but a necessary act of both re-creation and resistance to the patterns of the world we find ourselves surrounded by… that maybe we have reacted against legalism — rightly — but robbed ourselves of a rhythm of refreshment; a habit of time — of coming to Jesus as weary and burdened people and receiving rest (Matthew 11:28-29) — seeing the Sabbath as a practice of grace, not law — learning the way of Jesus as we come alongside him; the Lord of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:7-8).

I am on this journey — and today I want to make the case that our week should be shaped around a regular practice of Sabbath — holy time; time marked out to spend in God’s presence, receiving his gifts — enjoying him and his creation — not just as recreation but as re-creation — not as a legalistic restriction but liberation from a machine world that wants to desacrate time and space and our bodies — make those things less sacred — while we should be learning to see time and space and our bodies as connected to the divine life in whom we live and breathe and have our being.

So we will cover the Sabbath in the Old Testament pretty quickly — we have already seen how the Genesis story sets up the Sabbath as holy time, that reflects God enjoying his creation and inviting people into holy space and time with him —

it also emerges against the contrasting backdrop of Egypt in the Exodus story; Israel’s life without rest; their slavery — their oppression — at the hands of Pharaoh and his slave drivers — where they are an oppressed group of migrants doing back-breaking labour while being treated ruthlessly (Exodus 1:11-14).

They are enslaved by a slave-driving kingdom that gives no rest. The Exodus is their rescue out of this kingdom and into God’s kingdom, and this experience defines their ethical system; their law; their regular weeks — see how the Ten Commandments are framed in the Exodus story: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery” (Exodus 20:1-2).

And when you get to the structure of the week — they are called to keep this day that God declared holy in the beginning holy; to do all their work in those six days, and then enjoy a Sabbath — to God — doing no work; it is a rest day — a holy day given to enjoying God’s rest (Exodus 20:8-10).

And this is for everyone — it is an anti-Egypt — Sabbath includes whole households; including servants — anyone employed or enslaved — and any foreigners — the migrant workforce of their day — it is a day tasting liberation for all. At this point it is tied back to the creation story, to God’s words in Genesis (Exodus 20:11), but as the law expands from the Ten Commandments, Moses says do not oppress foreigners because you know what it was like to be oppressed — their experience of oppression; of work without rest is meant to shape how they live — this regular Sabbath expands from week to year — every seven years (Exodus 23:9-11) — Leviticus calls this a Sabbath year — where they — and all those in their household — and the foreigner — are to live off the land; off God’s provision; rather than their own work; resting the land — and every seventh seven-year period they would have this Jubilee year (Leviticus 25:4-6).

This Sabbath day though — it is to give rest and refreshment to all — including the slave and the foreigner — now — this stuff about slavery amongst God’s people is tricky — but, briefly, I reckon the whole point of Sabbath is that it is meant to shape how you see the people you rest with the way God sees them — and see work differently too — it is a teaching thing (Exodus 23:13). When Moses restates the law in Deuteronomy as Israel is about to enter the land, we get the Ten Commandments again, and the Sabbath command again, with two tweaks — the Sabbath is so everyone — including those who might be oppressed — can rest; and rather than looking to Genesis, the Sabbath is tied to their liberation; the Exodus; their rescue and re-creation — that they were slaves with no rest, so they are not to enslave with no rest (Deuteronomy 5:13-15).

The Sabbath is meant to show them they are not slaves, and teach them not to be slave drivers; to be like the Egyptians.

But once they get in the land they are just like their neighbours; they get obsessed with acquiring wealth; they do not practice the Sabbath year; the prophet Amos says they trample the needy and have done away with the poor — and they spend their Sabbaths daydreaming, waiting to get back to trade; they are dreaming of cheating others out of their wealth, enslaving the poor… buying them with silver or a pair of shoes (Amos 8:4-6)…

The prophet Isaiah launches his condemnation of Israel by announcing their celebration of Sabbath has become worthless to God; because their hands are full of blood; they are not seeking justice or defending the oppressed (Isaiah 1:13-17). Instead, Isaiah lists out their rebellion — explaining why God is not seeing their fasting and holy days as they are facing exile (Isaiah 58:1-3) — because — on the day of their fasting they are not just not defending the oppressed; they are oppressors — they are regularly exploiting their workers; fighting each other (Isaiah 58:3-4); their religiosity is the opposite of what God wants; he wants them to fast from oppression and injustice and set people free, not enslave them.

They should be fasting from hoarding, by sharing their food with the hungry; sheltering the poor; clothing them; spending themselves on behalf of the hungry; satisfying the needs of the oppressed (Isaiah 58:6-10). That is what God would notice; if they do this, then God will guide them to life; they will be like a well-watered garden (Isaiah 58:11) — a people of paradise — Isaiah turns from fasting to Sabbath; he says if they keep from breaking the Sabbath — doing as they please — treating holy time as holy and a delight — not going their own way, but God’s — then they will find joy in the Lord.

This is what the Sabbath is meant to be and produce, then God will bring them into his heavenly feast (Isaiah 58:13-14) — that they have become oppressors; slave drivers means exile; these promises need fulfilment; an Israel who understand the Sabbath, who delight in God and rest in him; enjoying him; practicing justice and love; modelling this new way of living in time.

And we find this fulfilment; this true Israelite in the one who invites the weary and burdened — those overwhelmed by life under the oppressive rule of other powers — in other kingdoms — to come to him — not to buy them for a pair of shoes, and oppress them more — he is not violent and proud, he is gentle and humble, and he offers to give rest (Matthew 11:28-29).

He does not come with a heavy yoke of slavery, but an invitation to come beside him and receive rest, to learn to rest; so that we find rest for our souls — Sabbath rest with our creator, who invites us into his Exodus, the fulfilment of Isaiah — paradise and a feast. Matthew follows these words with a picture of two visions of Sabbath — a miserly legalism, and the enjoyment of God’s provision — I reckon we have often tossed both in order to avoid oppressive legalism. Jesus feeds his disciples on the Sabbath — they are tasting a sort of Jubilee year; picking from the field — but the Pharisees — well — they have never seen Jubilee, so they just see work — rule-breaking — they want the hungry to stay hungry (Matthew 12:1-2). Jesus condemns them for missing the point of God’s law; his heart — and condemns the innocent — missing that the king of rest — the Lord of the Sabbath — is in front of them modelling fulfilment of the law (Matthew 12:7-8).

And then, as another image of the contrast, we meet this man with a shrivelled hand — and the Pharisees do not see a human; they see a test for Jesus; they want this guy to stay unable to work… excluded… poor… to prove a point. But Jesus declares it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath; and he heals the guy — he brings life — complete restoration — while the Pharisees — well, they are happy to plot a murder on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:10-14).

Later the one who has an easy yoke and light burden says these Pharisees load up heavy, cumbersome burdens on people’s shoulders and do nothing to ease the burden (Matthew 23:4). They oppress. They enslave. They walk like the Egyptians. So what does this all mean for us as we seek to follow the Lord of the Sabbath?

What are we to do with this way of shaping our week?

The miserly legalism of the Pharisees has no appeal to me at all — but maybe it is not a choice between working to eat, or to do good, and legalistic rest… but between coming to Jesus for rest, or being team Pharisee.

Maybe the Sabbath is not meant to oppress, but to liberate; maybe it is a chance to follow a different rhythm; to live differently in time as we come to the Lord of the Sabbath and receive rest; the fruits of the new life of God’s people promised in the prophet Isaiah — whose writings Jesus fulfils.

Jesus is the one who does away with the yoke of oppression; replacing it with a yoke that is light; giving on behalf of the hungry — liberating the oppressed — bringing people into garden-like rest.

Jesus is the one who delights in God’s Sabbath; the king of Sabbath — and brings people to feast at God’s table. Jesus is the one who, on the cross — launches a new Exodus; liberating humanity from sin and death and Satan and from life under oppressive rule into life where he shoulders our burdens — telling the rebel there with him “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43) — a promise for us as well, as those raised and seated with him now — so that our Sabbath rest is not just shaped by God as creator, or by Israel’s Exodus rescue, but our own — so, in the same way, the practice of Sabbath is a chance for us to learn from Jesus, and, like for Israel, a chance for us to not oppress others; to give rest to others as we embrace the pattern of the kingdom.

Sabbath is a chance not to be a slave or a slave driver; to not live like Egypt, or embrace the patterns of our world, but to delight in God’s goodness; to taste paradise today.

The rest the king of rest invites us into is the garden; not just to look back to Eden, and not just to look forward to paradise, but to remember we are in paradise with him today; it is a day to shape ourselves to live as heaven-on-earth people as we work the other six.

In the Practicing the Way resources on Sabbath — it is one of the practices they suggest might become part of your rule of life — they break down how to think about Sabbath not as a legalistic restriction but as this way of life with four headings — Stop. Rest. Delight. Worship.

Stop working and participating in the systems we live in that are inevitably violent and oppressive; disconnect from the grind; not just reluctantly, like in Amos — where we are plotting and scheming how to game that system. Resting from our work; and trusting that God provides what we need and will keep the world ticking over even when our shoulder is not pushed against the wheel.

And as we do this we are invited to use this time we have carved out to delight in God; his goodness to us in our rescue and in creation; enjoying abundance; anticipating paradise — feasting, practicing hospitality — enjoying one another as we live as the household of God — and worshipping God together; spending time “dwelling in the heavenlies” as part of the rest Jesus has entered into that he invites us into as those united with him.

The issue with that Celebration Rally was not so much that my dad suggested people go to Maccas — it was in the lack of abundance at the heart of the celebration — that was a picture of a certain sort of miserliness. The Lord’s Day is a chance to join the leisure of the garden — to play in anticipation of the new creation; to taste and see that God is good; to feast — and to do this as both the culmination of each week and a practice that shapes our week… to plan and prepare ahead of time in order to experience fulfilment and contentment in God’s generosity that remind us we do not need that Sabbath experience every day; as we work; a rhythm that is deliberate and focused on receiving God’s goodness that keeps us from chasing that same satisfaction from idols…

And… here is a surprising reason to embrace the Sabbath that I like — grounded in the prophets and the life of Jesus — and not just in “what is good for me personally” — Sabbath is political; Sabbath is an act of resistance — a liberating practice for us — and for others — we are not just celebrating not being slaves; it is where we learn not to be slave drivers.

This comes with a challenge as we build our own practices; seeking to enjoy abundance in this sanctuary in time — it is to hear the words of Amos, and step out of consuming others — actively, or in our daydreaming about our own little kingdoms… to refuse to act like an Egyptian slave driver, relying on the exploited labour of foreign workers to deliver for us — and, instead, to make space and time for these very folks to enjoy liberating rest — and this practice is meant to shape the rest of our week too.

You might not notice, but we participate in systems of oppression — particularly the oppression of migrant labour, or foreign labourers — we are not slave drivers… but maybe we enslave drivers.

I wonder how many of you have ordered food using Uber Eats, rather than cooking yourself… what about ordering from Amazon?

There are plenty of other forms of modern slavery embedded in our supply chains… but Amazon has got a track record of exploiting its workers — this story from the Guardian is about delivery drivers so desperate to stick to their delivery schedule — which is so tightly monitored drivers cannot take bathroom breaks…

“I saw no effort on Amazon’s part to push delivery service providers to allow their drivers to use the restroom on a normal human basis, leading many, myself included, to urinate inside bottles for fear of slowing down our delivery rates… ”

Many of them will use bottles in their cars. In Australia, Amazon has gamed the employment regulations so they can overload drivers’ schedules and erode safety practices; by calling drivers “hobbyists” or contractors.

“Serious safety issues like dangerous overloading and pressuring drivers to rush through deliveries is not something to brush off as insignificant, implying that this gruelling work is little more than a paying hobby with drivers in full control.”

People caught up in this system talk about being treated like robots rather than humans.

“I feel dehumanized. I feel like they resent the fact that I am not a robot and that I am made of flesh and bone.”

Enslaved; dehumanised to deliver according to quotas — like Israelite slaves making bricks in Egypt — not just set by their corporate overlords, but the consumer expectations of the market…

Deliberately not consuming on the Sabbath is a chance to lift our eyes so we are not swept up in making money, or planning how we might buy a person for a pair of shoes… to make time to see the way our consumption impacts migrant workers, or the poor.

One of the coolest things I read on Sabbath comes from Tricia Hersey — who gets called the Nap Bishop — she wrote this book Rest Is Resistance — where she argues that the conditions of the modern market were actually born in slavery; in the plantations that built the wealth of the west; and where our bodies — especially those of marginalised and oppressed people — when we are working in a system that celebrates 24/7 productivity and rewards hustle and always being on — what we see in the spirit of Amazon — we are still working under Egyptian conditions; brainwashed by a violent culture that does not see us as humans but as machines — she reckons that is at work across the economy — where we work, and where others work for us — and we will not see it unless we carve out time to notice. She sees naps — resting — Sabbath — as acts of resistance against a world that always wants more from you — liberation; a path back to our true nature.

“ …this violent culture that wants to see us working 24 hours a day, that does not view us as a human being but instead views our divine bodies as a machine… The Rest Is Resistance movement is a connection and a path back to our true nature. ”

Sabbath is a chance to deliberately step out of other kingdoms that claim our time, and our bodies, and reorient ourselves to the kingdom of the king of rest; as we come to him, and receive rest — because it is a path back to being human; as we stop and rest and delight and worship — maybe we would find life in a weekly rhythm of Sabbath, not just on that one day, but in a way that will shape our work on the other six days; as we experience freedom from the patterns of sin and slavery and slave driving so we find rest for our souls; learning life with him in paradise.

October 16, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Six — Redeeming the Time

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

What does it look like to learn to number our days? Psalm 90 is the only Psalm attributed to Moses in the Psalter; it is presented as Israel’s oldest poetic meditation on God, which may have been composed during Israel’s wilderness wanderings. It is a reflection on God’s relationship to time as an infinite being, and ours, as finite beings where every day counts.

This song carried through Israel’s entire life as a nation. These words — including a prayer — shaped how God’s people understood living in time.

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” — Psalm 90:11

This is where we are turning in our series on inhabiting time and space. We have looked at how we live in spaces; how we are formed by the places we inhabit while invited to join with God in reforming or generating new patterns of life in the world; making spaces for people to come to know God. Now we are thinking about time.

We started this series in Paul’s sermon in Acts where he speaks of God making humans to inhabit space and time; our boundaries and our appointed times in history; our numbered days — so we inhabitors might search for him and find him (Acts 17:26-27).

So I wonder how you inhabit time; what your habits of time are — your routines.

Are you ruled by the clock — reacting to the passing of time, and each moment — trying to cram stuff in; meeting deadlines, rushing from one thing to another, where there never feels like enough time — the clock is ticking? Or are you a calendar person — ruled by your diary? Taking control of the way you allocate time ahead of the curve? Planning out your days, and weeks, and months and years?

Some of us might be a mix of both.

I am more a clock guy than a calendar guy — I would love to be able to use a calendar, but I am routinely flexible; chaotic; life is a series of deadlines. I am ruled by the clock — but I also waste a lot of time. I am not as productive as I could be. It is not that I am lazy. I work hard, but I am not one for life hacks; calendar hacks — counting every second.

How do you spend or fill or invest or waste your time? Are you making your time count? Or just watching it fly by?

And if God wants us to inhabit our days seeking him; finding him — how does that shape your days? The idea of this series is that this search for God is about becoming disciples; being wise builders of a life following Jesus, and how we use our time shapes who we are becoming.

Next week we will look at our weeks, and then the week after our seasons, and then how we live with the long term in view — but today we are looking at today. How to number our days; to make them count.

This is stuff philosophers love to ponder. So I want to start with a popular philosopher of time — the modern Psalmist — Jon Bon Jovi. With the lyrics from his songs I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead and It’s My Life — they are a kind of anti-Psalm 90.

Bon Jovi imagines days not counting; a week of Saturdays; no need for Sunday — for the religious day of rest — no need for resting in peace; he is here to party — not to work.

Seven days of Saturday
Is all that I need
Got no use for Sunday
‘Cause I don’t rest in peace

“I don’t need no Mondays
Or the rest of the week
I spend a lot of time in bed
But baby I don’t like to sleep, no

No Mondays or the rest of the week — time in bed, but no sleeping.

No bed, really — he will live while he is alive; he will sleep when he is dead.

Until I’m six feet under, baby
I don’t need a bed
Gonna live while I’m alive
I’ll sleep when I’m dead

There is no need for prayers; he will grasp hold of life on his terms.

This ain’t a song for the broken-hearted
No silent prayer for the faith-departed

As he says elsewhere; it is his life; it is now or never; he is not going to live forever.

It’s my life
It’s now or never
I ain’t gonna live forever
I just want to live while I’m alive

If this is the case — living while we are alive — making every moment count — that comes with its own habits that will shape the sort of person he is.

He is the foolish builder though, right? From Jesus’ story?

Because there is something else shaping a person — Bon Jovi no longer looks like this…

Now he looks like this… And one day — he will be dead.

And he will not just be dead, if the Psalm is right, and it is God who sweeps people away in the sleep of death — Bon Jovi will meet his maker.

“Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death — they are like the new grass of the morning: in the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered.” — Psalm 90:5-6

How do we make time count — numbering our days — in the face of death? In the face of coming face-to-face with God? Who do we want to become — not just in the face of death, but this idea of coming face-to-face with God? How does this shape how we spend today? Numbering our days. Making them count.

There is a writer I love — Tish Harrison Warren — an Anglican priest in the U.S. In her book Liturgy of the Ordinary she writes about deliberately shaping our days, our time, around seeking God, because how we spend time — whether it is a morning routine, or going to the gym, or going to work — will always function like rituals or liturgies; acts of worship that make us who we are.

“We are shaped every day, whether we know it or not, by practices — rituals and liturgies that make us who we are… we spend our days doing things — we live in routines formed by habits and practices.
How I spend this ordinary day in Christ is how I will spend my Christian life.”
— Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary

We are creatures of habit; and our routines are made up of practices, and these are what build our life.

Another writer I love — Jamie Smith — wrote this book How to Inhabit Time. He says:

“We are all choosing to synchronise our watches with someone’s configuration of time.”

We are choosing for our time to be ruled by someone — and so — who is shaping your habits of time — the shape of your days — whose schedule are you synchronising your watch to? Your own? The powers of this world? The consumer culture — the rat race — where you have to work harder and longer to produce more so you can consume more, or amass more security?

Or is it the God we meet in Psalm 90?

This Psalm makes the case that as we number our days, we ought to be synchronising our lives — our watches — to God’s rule. And when we get to Ephesians, Paul shows how our perspective changes with Jesus, and unpacks how we might live in time differently as a result; as those who have met the creator God through Jesus, and received eternal life.

Everything this Psalm says about God focuses on his relationship to time and space; his limitless experience; his mastery and power and authority — his role as Lord of all; all generations; who pre-existed the oldest things we can imagine — the mountains. God is God from everlasting to everlasting (Psalm 90:1-2). It is hard to describe infinite life poetically, but God is everlasting. While creation is not. The mountains will erode.

People are mortal — we will die and turn to dust. For God a day is a blip, a thousand years is like a day (Psalm 90:3-4). Life comes and goes — like grass — but he remains (Psalm 90:5-6).

And this produces an amount of awe — especially if God has the capacity to intervene and judge such puny finite figures as humans; to look at our sin, even the ones we think are hidden — and find us wanting (Psalm 90:7-8).

We become very small in this perspective. Our days pass away. Even our sufferings are fleeting. We might last seventy or eighty years — they pass, we fly away, we die (Psalm 90:9-10).

It is all very depressing.

We are fleeting. God is not. This is all about perspective.

And for Moses part of this picture is meant to generate a fear of God — a life that recognises him as God and so avoids his power being turned on us. A desire to learn from God to think about time, and from this perspective gain wisdom — a heart of wisdom — an understanding of reality (Psalm 90:11).

And somehow — Moses — who in the story of Exodus has come into God’s presence, who knows things about God and his compassionate, covenant love, his character — this holy, infinite, potentially unapproachably glorious and powerful God — he does not stop with fear and avoidance. He turns to God and speaks to him; he asks him for stuff; he asks him to be compassionate and to shape the days of his people, those numbering their days and recognising him as God and becoming wise.

He says “satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love” in a way that shapes not just that one day but every day — all the days we humans are given — so that we might sing for joy and be glad even in the face of our mortality, because we are facing God instead (Psalm 90:13-14). And he is making us glad for as many days as he gives us; as many years — balancing out, or neutralising the bad, the suffering — giving people time to see and experience God’s deeds, from generation to generation (Psalm 90:15-16).

This perspective leads Moses to ask that his favour might rest on his people — so that time is not producing nothing, fleeting rubbish — but so that God, the everlasting creator, might be establishing the work of human hands; making it count; making it something wise and established and not frustrating or grass-like (Psalm 90:17).

It is a Psalm worth meditating on, and asking how the God it depicts might shape our days. Paul draws on the ideas of this Psalm in Athens as he proclaims the God who made us to inhabit time and space; the one in whom we live and breathe and have our being — and the idea that we might meet him; find him — as he reaches out from the eternal, from reality beyond our limits of space and time, into our experience of space and time in the person of Jesus so that our search for him can actually lead us to him, as he invites us into life with him. As we receive his Spirit living in us so while we live day-by-day in dying bodies, we now see our lives continuing beyond death. This has got to change how we number our days, right? Not just from Bon Jovi’s perspective, but also from Moses’ perspective.

We are now able to work towards things that last; what Jesus calls treasure in heaven. We now have a fuller sense of how to make our days count; how to be wise. We looked at a bit of Ephesians in our Before the Throne series.

The idea that we have been brought from death to life; taken out of the rule of the prince of the air — Satan — and the power of sin and death and darkness (Ephesians 2:1-2). Where all of us lived at one time, and so were headed towards death and wrath (Ephesians 2:3) — like in the Psalm. But because of God’s love for us we have been made alive with Jesus (Ephesians 2:4-5). And raised with him so that we are already seated with the God of Psalm 90, in heaven, enjoying his life — in anticipation of the coming ages (Ephesians 2:6-7). And living in this world as his handiwork, created in him to do good works; to spend our days on earth as those shaped by this reality, towards this future (Ephesians 2:10).

In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about how we become children of God who are now going to follow God’s example as we see it in Jesus (Ephesians 5:1-2). He has this phrase that I reckon should bounce around in our heads like asking God to “teach us to number our days” so we might live with wisdom. He says “be careful how you live — not as unwise, but wise” — and our English reads “making the most of every opportunity” (Ephesians 5:15-16). Literally this says “redeeming the time” because the days are evil — because life in this world is still marked by death; by those powers and principalities that lead people away from God; to folly, and the judgment Psalm 90 speaks about.

So wise people who live in time ruled by God, as those given life with God — we will number our days — make them count, knowing though our time here on this earth is limited — death is not the end of the story. And we will redeem the time; living with our position in time and space as those raised and seated with Jesus defining our days now. For Paul this looks like not finding ultimate meaning in the things of this world; the days we have here, marked as they are by evil, not being foolish, but living understanding God’s will (Ephesians 5:17).

Not filling our days with drunkenness, or sex — pursuing pleasure, now or never, living while we are alive — the Bon Jovi principle — but being filled with God’s Spirit as we speak to one another with psalms, hymns and songs (Ephesians 5:18-19). Just like Moses wanted in the Psalm.

This feels like the satisfaction Moses longed for — and Israel with him (Psalm 90:14). Making music from our hearts. And always giving thanks to God the Father in everything; always (Ephesians 5:19-20). Redeeming the time means living in this world grounded in who God is; recognising who he is; using Psalms like Psalm 90, and music, and prayers of thanksgiving to shape our hearts and our journey through time towards eternity. Not towards God, because we are already living with God. But redeeming the time; making our days count, because we are seeking to live with him.

We all synchronise our watches with someone’s configuration of time.

Bon Jovi’s?

The prince of the air?

The God of Psalm 90 who reveals himself in Jesus?

What is it for you? The Bon Jovi principle; the clock is ticking — you just want to live while you are alive. Your boss, the “clock” where you are clocking on and off. Your biological clock; stuff you want to do because you are old, or before you are old, or because death is getting closer.

What would it look like to synchronise your clock, and align your calendar — your day — to God’s plan? To number your days; to make them count — as someone living towards eternity now, by redeeming the time. Because this is what wisdom looks like. And it starts with having a plan for your ordinary days; your habits, your routines.

And how should that shape today and tomorrow as the ordinary, numbered, days that are the building block for your Christian life? How will you make them count? Redeem the time? Sync up with God? We have been thinking about habits we might adopt in space; about practicing the way of Jesus — doing what he calls us to.

Building our lives wisely by building them on his life; on his teaching (Matthew 7:24). On imitating his example, and the example of those who imitate him (1 Corinthians 4:16-17). Creating a way of life (1 Corinthians 4:17). We have talked about the idea of a ‘rule of life’ while exploring Practicing the Way together, this ‘rule’ is a deliberate pattern we might adopt in our lives to give them a structure so we are growing towards where God wants us to be growing towards; a way to “schedule our daily life practices and relational rhythms that align our time and our habits to our desire to be with Jesus and become like him,” to be wise.

James K.A Smith reckons part of this wisdom is captured in the spirit of Psalm 90; recognising that our lives in the flesh are transitory; that we are limited in ways God is not; that we need to learn to keep time.

“Learning to live with, even celebrate, the transitory is a mark of Christian timekeeping; a way of settling into our creaturehood and resting in our mortality….”

As we settle into our creaturehood and rest in our mortality — not live the unsettled, hurried, life of Bon Jovi, trying to cram everything in, get all we want…

But learn to be content in time — temporal contentment; inhabiting time with eyes open, hands outstretched, not to grasp and make the most of every moment on our terms, but to receive and enjoy and let go. To practice thanksgiving and rest in who God is.

“This is temporal contentment: to inhabit time with eyes wide open, hands outstretched, not to grasp but to receive, enjoy, and let go.” — Smith, How To Inhabit Time

It is his life. And he gives us now and ever. So what does this look like day-to-day; redeeming the time — living in our limits, wisely — but also towards eternity?

When it comes to how we spend our days — most of us will spend our days working in some form of labour — whether it is paid, or unpaid; out, or in the home — grandparent duties or in the trenches of parenting — and this work can feel meaningless if our life feels like it is being wasted and going nowhere.

Some part of redeeming the time will mean asking, with the Psalmist, that God will establish the work of our hands; directing them and giving us a sense we are approaching work with purpose.

The purpose of doing good; bringing order; orienting our hearts and our bodies towards heaven as we do the good works God has prepared in advance for us to do.

Redeeming the time at work might involve prayerfully orienting your labour towards this greater meaning; seeking to work as though working for the Lord. Not simply sharing life and love and hope with, or praying for, your colleagues — though those are good habits to get into — but by working with eternity in mind. Sometimes that just means remembering that some of what we do feels pointless and mundane, and fleeting, but we might be building character that lasts forever, and we might find ways to enjoy the fruits of our labour and the satisfaction of a job well done.

Our best work though will be limited; we are not omnipotent creatures of boundless energy. Our work comes from a place of rest — we are maybe addicted to busyness and productivity as a culture, but part of numbering our days and remembering that God is infinite while we are finite and limited is scheduling rest. This will be part of how we think of the week next week — but it is also part of how we think of the day — sleep.

Now. Sleep is harder to come by for some of us — because of our bodies or our brains or our circumstances — and I do not want to be insensitive to that struggle. But those people will tell you that sleep is a good gift from God, even if it feels unattainable. And I know for myself, and for others, that sleep sometimes feels like not living.

Like Bon Jovi we might feel like sleep is a waste of time; something we do not like because it gets in the way of partying.

That we will sleep when we are dead.

But rest — it is one of the good gifts of God Jesus came to give us — and our days are not just made for work, but for play — recreation — relationship — and rest, and sleep (Matthew 11:28-29).

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

And redeeming the time, numbering our days; recognising that we are finite and that we depend fully on God, not ourselves — might require trying to, at least, sleep.

We are able to sleep — so the Psalms say — because God does not sleep; he looks over us as we slumber; he does not sleep so that we can. So that we can rest in him while embracing our limits. But this might also mean working less. Being less busy; less productive.

“He will not let your foot slip — he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” — Psalm 121:3-4

Maybe the best thing you could do to redeem the time is learn to slow down; to rest; to sleep — to let go and let God, so to speak. To un-hurry, as John Mark Comer who is behind Practicing the Way puts it. He reckons many of us will be too busy to add Jesus to our daily schedules; too hurried; not resting; not making space in our lives. We fill our lives — Bon Jovi style — with the sort of stuff Paul tells us not to do, and crowd out the life-giving stuff we ought to do, including rest.

“The elephant in the room is that the vast majority of us have far too much going on to ‘add’ Jesus into our overly busy schedules.” — John Mark Comer

And our best work, and rest; our best redeeming of the time; our best numbering of our days begins with knowing who God is, and who we are before him; creatures — not the creator — those who live before the throne of God in heaven, which shapes us for life on earth. Redeeming the time might mean spending time located in not just our future home, but a home we are located in now, by God’s Spirit. As we sing Psalms, and songs, and always give thanks — praying — not just sometimes (Colossians 3). Did you notice as we looked at Acts 2 earlier in the series the early church met daily together (Acts 2:46-47); involved in these rhythms?

They met habitually — with the idea this habit would increase the more they understood how life now is oriented towards life eternal; that day approaching (Hebrews 10:25). They just could not get enough of time together, or time with God.

I wonder if that sort of time with God — before we think about time with others — is part of our days. Did you notice in Psalm 90 Moses calls out to God asking that he might satisfy us in the morning so our days might be filled with his love; that we might sing for joy and be glad all our days (Psalm 90:14)?

There is lots of stuff in the Psalms that aligns with the practices we see Jesus and his disciples embracing through the Gospels — probably because the Psalms are their songbook. They seem to routinely pray at certain hours of the day.

One suggestion is that this is a tradition that begins in Psalm 119, which is all about meditating on God’s word — a life filled and formed by the Scriptures — where the Psalmist says “seven times a day I praise you…” (Psalm 119:164).

What would your calendar look like if you had reminders in it to pray seven times a day? What about just one? Or two? This is how we redeem the time.

Now look — for most of us our calendars and clocks are on our smart phones. And we probably have habitual relationships — some might call them addictions — to these little devices; rituals training us not to redeem the time, or rest, but to waste it.

I am not sure the answer is to get a dumb phone, or no phone — but I wonder if we might use our phones as tools to help us redeem the time; to shape our hours, to remember to pray, and even to provide us words to pray when we cannot come up with our own.

Some of us really like the project Every Moment Holy, which is a group of creative folks committed to writing beautiful prayers for all sorts of moments that come up in modern life; whether these are hard or special occasions, or just the mundane day-to-day stuff. You could get a hold of that app, or go old media and get a hold of the books.

Maybe you could set a reminder, or create a habit of Bible reading, prayer, and journaling with leather-bound tactile books that break the phone’s hold on you. Or maybe you could get an app like PrayerMate, that helps you track prayer points and pray for the people you promise to, and prompts you to do it throughout the day. You might redeem the time by using your phone to dig into the Bible — whether just in a Bible app, or something like the Bible Project, which I love. I have even got a life hack where I will listen to Bible Project podcasts, other great podcasts, or Christian audiobooks while I am gaming. Talk about redeeming the time!

Whatever you do as we work towards a rule of life; however you structure your numbered days — what would it look like to redeem just a little bit more of the time by adding just one or two more practices, could be from this list, could be something else, so that you are deliberately pursuing wisdom and embracing reality; the reality of who God is and who you are.

A wise life inhabiting time as people who are going to die, and face our maker is a life grounded in Jesus; a life looking towards eternity; a life redeeming the time we have now as we do the good works God has prepared for us — as those who know God because we spend time with him.

Are we going to take advice for how we fill our time from Jon Bon Jovi, or from Jesus?

October 13, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Five — Setting the Table

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

Let’s talk about Paris. The city of love and liberty — from kings and from gods… any gods.

Let’s talk about the 2024 Olympics — a public, global event where all the nations of earth come together in a festival, celebrating the human body and the human spirit. An event tracing its heritage back to Greek paganism, that now includes people from every tribe and tongue and nation and religion.

And — let’s talk about the opening ceremony.

Did you see it?

In a performance that ran through France’s secular history — its revolution and liberation so it’s now a society that celebrates unrestricted love and beauty — there was a fashion show that became a bacchanalian feast, and there was a moment where Jolly created a scene that looked like Da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper.

That’s an important distinction — right — that he copied a painting of the Last Supper, not the Supper itself. We Presbyterians have a tradition of thinking any representation of Jesus in a picture runs the risk of violating the second of the Ten Commandments — whether it’s Da Vinci’s white Jesus, or Jolly recreating that scene with Jewish lesbian, Barbara Butch.

Jolly re-presented this painting using humans; re-framing a famous artwork consistent with his own religious convictions. Describing his intention he said:

“We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.”

We’ll come back to this.

Because as the camera zoomed out in the opening ceremony it was clear this wasn’t just the Last Supper — Da Vinci didn’t paint a smurf on a platter.

The performance was (apparently) a homage to a painting, The Feast of the Gods, by Jan van Bijlert from the 1600s, which you can find hanging in a French gallery.

People who made this connection suggested Christians were silly to be outraged; we should calm down; it’s not even a painting of Jesus — only — the French museum has a guide to its artworks where — in a bad French-to-English Google translation — we’re told the Reformation meant less demand for paintings in “temples,” which I assume is a translation of “churches”:

“In the context of the Reformation, in which the commission for temples had disappeared, the artist found a stratagem to paint a Christlike Last Supper under the cover of a mythological subject…”

With mythological, pagan features… the Greek gods feasting on Mount Olympus. Apollo in the place of Jesus. All the gods are included, as Jesus is replaced.

And, just for fun — there’s another painting hanging in a gallery in Paris — a Last Supper scene on the River Seine — its title is a pun; I won’t mangle the French but “Last Supper,” “the scene,” and “the Seine” all sound the same.

When Paul visited Athens he was introducing a new God to a pagan landscape. Where we sit, any religious revolution — any paganism — has to account for Jesus and his impact on the west. While most of the ancient Athenians laughed at the idea of a resurrected God, who had been mocked and ridiculed — powerless — on a cross, modern paganism laughs at a God they have found repressive, exclusive, and powerful.

Anyway. How did this image — this event — this mockery and idolatry make you feel?

Whether you interpreted it as a direct insult to an image of Jesus, or just the image of a feast of pagan gods supplanting Christianity’s claims of exclusivity in the west, in the name of inclusivity of people often excluded from the table by Christians… however you saw it — what was your response?

Disorientation?
Offence?
Distress?

And what’s your response to the response — both from other Christians, or the apology from the Olympic committee — or to the death threats received by the person at the centre of the image, or by the artist — or the Vatican issuing a statement condemning the display?

How you think we should respond or react to this is kind of a picture of where we are up to in our series today about inhabiting the world. We’ve looked at building our own lives, at being part of a household or family, at creating habitats that shape us in our homes or church spaces. This week we’re thinking about how we live in public; in cities — or a world — designed with its own conforming pattern; its own architecture or habitats that shape hearts and minds.

How we react to this moment around a global festival, this overt display of religious worship, this appeal to form our minds is a bit of a test case; a way to explore how we imagine life inhabiting spaces like Athens, or Paris, or Brisbane, as people who have inhabited and been formed by the living God — as his temples.

We started our series in Athens, where we saw Paul’s reaction to the pagan art and performances of that city — its idols, and altars, and temples — he was greatly distressed (Acts 17:16). It’s literally the word provoked.

I think some of us are hard to offend and might minimise the distress others feel in response to blasphemous dismissals of the God we worship; the desire to see his name hallowed. We might miss that idolatry is an affront to God, and not be provoked by this enough — whether the performance was directly the Lord’s Supper, or just a pagan feast replacing it — but I reckon some of Paul’s distress is not just about love for God, but love for humans — and his understanding of what idolatry does to humans; how it excludes us from life with God; life at his table.

Paul’s distress doesn’t just lead to a classic Old Testament response to idols — he doesn’t tear them down or smash them with a hammer or “devote them to destruction” like Deuteronomy says:

“This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire.” — Deuteronomy 7:5

He preaches to them. He invites them to the table, to meet the living God (Acts 17:18).

He uses their human impulse to worship; their idols and altars (Acts 17:22-23) — their artists, poets, and philosophers to point them to their Creator (Acts 17:28) — who made them to inhabit time and space (Acts 17:26)… and to seek and find him (Acts 17:27). He uses all this architecture — including art and images — and their desires — to aid this search; pointing them to the Creator they are ignoring in their pagan worship.

He doesn’t come with a hammer, but he calls them ignorant — and tries to inform them so they might be transformed. While God overlooked this offensive paganism in these nations before Jesus, now he commands all people to repent (Acts 17:30); to leave the gods of Mount Olympus and their feasts and festivals to find transforming life at God’s table, with him. God, our creator, has us inhabiting space and time so that we might find him, and the way to find him is through Jesus, in his kingdom.

This speech in Athens is part of Luke’s two-part volume about who Jesus is and what his kingdom looks like. When our church worked through Luke’s Gospel earlier this year, we saw how this kingdom is revealed at the table:

“When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table… he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’” — Luke 22:14, 19

Whatever that meal symbolises, it is a picture of life feasting with God, and how God invites us to this feast through Jesus. Our desire to be included in human community might well be part of how God has wired us to look for connection and belonging and inclusion — a desire that is best fulfilled at his table, rather than filled with pagan feasts.

And we’ve seen how the Christian habitat for being formed as God’s people is a household — homes, spaces where people meet together and break bread, remembering Jesus’ body and his blood given for us so that we might become children in God’s family; so we might be transformed as we turn away from destructive idols, and patterns of life, and inhabit the city differently.

But what should this look like? This transformation? Life in this kingdom? Life at this table — and why choose it rather than the feast of the gods around us?

If you think way back to the start of the year to our second talk in the Luke series (podcast here), we saw how in Luke Jesus proclaimed the good news — the Gospel — as the beginning of a party with God, the year of Jubilee (Luke 4:18-21). He came to fulfil this.

Some part of inhabiting the world as those feasting at God’s table involves this preaching — a proclamation that comes as an invitation to feast at God’s table, and away from other tables, altars, and gods.

We get a picture of this transformation from the Old Testament passages Jesus says he fulfils. His good news announcement of Jubilee comes from Isaiah 61 — which is good news for the poor and the oppressed, for captives who are in the dark (Isaiah 61:1). Now — we either tend to read this and see a picture of justice being meted out for any oppressed people, and see God’s heart to include excluded and oppressed people — or we tend to spiritualise this idea of freedom and rescue and make it just about sin and forgiveness. And God certainly liberates us from sin and death and the rule of other powers and principalities. But Isaiah is written to the nation of Israel, and this is — as much as anything — a promise that exile from God will end; that being excluded from his presence is not forever; that God will regather a people for himself.

And those of us reading after Jesus who are Gentiles — most of us — this regathering comes with bonus inclusion: the end of an exile from God for all nations, nations who had worshipped other gods, with pagan feasts like the one on Mount Olympus. Pursuing liberty — freedom from God, freedom to rule our own lives and pursue our own feasts.

Isaiah suggests this idolatry is destructive and dehumanising — we become what we worship:

“All who make idols are nothing, and the things they treasure are worthless. Those who would speak up for them are blind; they are ignorant, to their own shame.” — Isaiah 44:9

And we are left “feeding on ashes” (Isaiah 44:20). The worst thing is to be formed in the image of these false gods, and to find ourselves as enemies of the God of all nations.

Anyway — Jubilee is not just about liberation and inclusion and diversity. It is about invitation and transformation. Through it, God will take those — first of all — those of his people on Zion — and replace their ashes, the way they had been marked by mourning, with a crown of beauty. Bringing the oil of joy instead of mourning. This is beautiful imagery, isn’t it? Restoration. God will make these people righteous; like trees planted to display his splendour (Isaiah 61:3). These people will be rebuilders of cities — specifically in this case it is about Jerusalem — they will create shared architecture that points to life with God (Isaiah 61:4). They will be priests of the Lord, benefiting from the produce of fields and vineyards, receiving abundance — a double portion, an inheritance. Joy-filled (Isaiah 61:6-7).

God will make a covenant with this people and reward them. Their descendants will be known among all the people of the world as his blessed people (Isaiah 61:8-9); clothed in salvation and righteousness; a fruitful, garden-like people who will multiply praise as God makes them grow in righteousness (Isaiah 61:10-11). This is what Jesus says he fulfils. This is the sort of people we are invited to be as we become part of his household. This picture of life as God’s people — who dwell at his table and model fruitful life in the world.

How should this idea of being fruitful, righteous, rebuilders of cities work when we live in cities more like Athens than the new Jerusalem?

Another image that might help comes from another prophet, Jeremiah, who talks about God’s people preparing themselves for the promised end of exile while still living in Babylon. God promises them they will return to life with him, and to prepare by building houses and planting gardens — creating homes that operate as habitats where they are formed as God’s people; gardens that echo Eden and the temple they lost (Jeremiah 29:5); being fruitful and multiplying (Jeremiah 29:6); seeking the prosperity of their neighbours because their prosperity will be found as the city prospers (Jeremiah 29:7). God promises he will end their exile — bring them home — but the pattern of life in a hostile city is to build and plant, to generate life, to bless their neighbours, anticipating restoration to life with God — to practice the sort of things Isaiah pictures as restoration.

And there is something very Genesis-y about both these pictures — isn’t there — some explicit language that connects to the mission God gives humans in the beginning. As he blesses them and calls them to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28); to fill the earth and rule over it as his representatives. And then as he commissions his gardening human to cultivate and keep the garden — his dwelling place — where he gives a feast (Genesis 2:15-16).

So this is who we are to be. God made us to inhabit space and time, and he has called us into life with him. Jubilee life at his table. Life in his kingdom. Calling us to cultivate space — planting and building — that reflects his rule, while inviting others to the party; to be transformed as they find the God who is seeking them through his resurrecting king.

But what does this look like? How do we live like this when there are so many other feasts, other gods clamouring for our worship, forming our minds? Provoking us? We are invited to be cultivators, builders, planters — to live constructively, not to seek the destruction of these idols and their tables or altars.

There’s this Japanese-American artist-slash-theologian, Makoto Fujimura. He makes art drawing on his Japanese heritage and his Christian faith, and writes books about how Christians might think about participating in our culture — our Babylons — while anticipating the heavenly city.

Where some folks suggest our job is to fight a culture war, he calls us to culture care, and to an approach that summarises all this Old Testament stuff — to a life of generativity. It’s a good word. He describes it as bringing flowers into a culture bereft of beauty:

“Culture Care is a generative approach to culture that brings bouquets of flowers into a culture bereft of beauty.”

— Makoto Fujimura

Being fruitful and multiplying; generating life.

“God creates and calls his creatures to fruitfulness… We call something ‘generative’ if it is fruitful.”

— Fujimura

He applies this idea to his art — and to critiquing other sorts of art or creativity. And it is a useful idea when we are confronted with art — or life — that feels degenerate: paintings, performances, pagan feasts, idol statues, or modern altars and temples that turn our hearts and habits away from God.

“We can also approach generativity by looking at its shadow, ‘degenerate’ — the loss of good or desirable qualities.”

— Fujimura

This allows us to respond to something degenerate or degrading with imagination; trying to introduce beauty to the ashes. Gardens to Babylon. Where, like Paul in Athens, we focus on being fruitful and multiplying; pursuing abundance; being constructive not destructive — inviting others to encounter this life.

“What is generative is the opposite of degrading or limiting. It is constructive, expansive, affirming, growing beyond a mindset of scarcity.”

— Fujimura

“Generative thinking is fuelled by generosity” that responds to God’s generosity; hospitality that responds to God’s hospitality — reminding us not to commodify or objectify life; to dehumanise other humans, or treat God as an object in our own plans to consume.

He says: “An encounter with generosity can remind us that life always overflows our attempts to reduce it to a commodity or a transaction.”

I love this stuff.

So often the “culture war” dehumanises the other — in the Paris situation this looks like not seeing the humanity of those at the table; and Thomas Jolly or Barbara Butch getting death threats. Generativity means building movements or creating things that seek to make our cities — our culture — more humane and welcoming, and inspire us to be truly human.

“Thinking and living that is truly generative makes possible works and movements that make our culture more humane and welcoming and that inspire us to be more fully human.”

— Fujimura

So. We might see the Olympic opening ceremony — the Olympics themselves, and the controversial “feast” in particular — as degenerate. Degenerating. Like the idols and altars and feasts of Athens; designed to dehumanise. We might — like Paul — be distressed.

But let’s examine not just our distress — but our response. It would be a problem if our distress did not move us towards where it moves Paul: towards inviting people to encounter God as God actually is; to find life in a feast with him. But instead to our own sort of degenerative behaviour where we dehumanise the other, the opponent — where we pick up our sledgehammers and attack the idols with our own angry art.

It would be a problem if, when we saw a table full of people typically excluded from church community and life with God — dressed in drag, or gender non-conforming folks, or queer people like the lesbian DJ Barbara Butch in her crown — we joined the crowd of people yelling hate or sending death threats.

To respond with outrage at the idea that these folks might be included would be to perpetuate their exclusion, and probably to join in seeing them as less than human. And our distress or outrage might be around the idea of who is at that table and what they represent, rather than the portrayal of Jesus.

Reframing Jesus as part of another pagan festival — replacing him with Apollo, and serving up Dionysus — is dumb, insulting, and blasphemous. It is degenerate, as was plenty of the sexual stuff, the celebration of promiscuity around that particular image. It is dehumanising, and like any idolatry it offers a dead end.

The modern idol of inclusion and diversity — without Jesus and the transformation he offers everyone through resurrection and re-creation and life at God’s table as his worshipping image bearers — that’s also a dead end. But it is a longing tied in with our search for meaning, for God, for love and connection and inclusion — the same impulse that led artists and architects to build idols and altars in Athens.

There’s also an interesting sub-thread here with the anger about the inclusion of the “other” in the culture war here — queer folks — at the table. The comparison here is not exact; but where our intuition is to see anything not binary as an affront to God’s design of image bearers as male and female, we have to grapple with one of the primary pictures Isaiah gives us for exile and restoration, and the way he challenges our categories — in a thread explicitly picked up by Jesus.

In Isaiah 39, Isaiah tells the king of Israel that exile is coming; Babylon will cart off his household, and Israel’s images of God — humans — in this case, sons of the royal house will be turned into eunuchs (Isaiah 39:6-7).

For Israel, a man whose sexual organs were mutilated would be excluded from life in God’s house under the law:

“No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord.”

— Deuteronomy 23:1

This was common practice in Babylon in a way that reflected their creation story — where the god Marduk creates through violence and dismembering other beings. In Babylon’s religion, only the king was the image of God, of Marduk. Babylon’s kings would routinely gather up the most beautiful sons of conquered nations, and make them into eunuchs to serve the royal household (Isaiah 39:7).

This probably happened to Daniel and his friends, who were literally given to the “chief of his court officials,” which is “chief of the eunuchs” in Babylon (Daniel 1:3-4). Someone made a eunuch before puberty would develop different feminine bodily characteristics. They would not fit a typical gender binary. An Israelite would see this as an affront to God’s design, his law, and an expression of idolatrous worship and power. Such a person would be excluded from the table.

But as Isaiah pictures the return from exile God promises, he pictures eunuchs — the excluded, these humans whose bodies were marked by the idolatrous empire that included them at the royal table, in the king’s family, who do not conform to a rigid gender binary image. They are being included in the temple, God’s house, as a prophetic picture of God’s rebuilding and recreating and liberating work, of Jubilee (Isaiah 56:4-5).

Some religious folks in Isaiah’s day, familiar with the law, may have found this image incredibly provocative and distressing — or they may have been moved by compassion and by excitement to be part of something God was going to do, rebuilding a people.

Jesus continues this inclusivity when he talks about eunuchs as a picture of faithfulness in Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 19:12). He describes those who are born this way, those made this way by others, and those who choose to live this way for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, as he speaks of those who will choose God’s kingdom over sexual expression that rejects God’s design.

It is striking, too, that the first Gentile we meet included in God’s kingdom in the book of Acts is the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:27)… who is reading Isaiah (Acts 8:32).

Now — this is a broad category and it does not only or exclusively map on to the sorts of people at the table in the opening ceremony image. There are complex dynamics around individual circumstances and biology and sin working out for any person who comes to God’s table seeking inclusion and life with him.

Practicing generativity and generosity will mean looking to see the humanity of the other we might dehumanise, as we build communities with a desire to see all people come to the table with Jesus to be transformed by him as their exile ends and Jubilee begins.

Our reaction to a picture of queer people at the Lord’s Supper, our outrage, risks closing the door to this sort of inclusion; to creating a prophetic community where those harmed by Babylon, or Athens, or Paris, and its worship, find adoption and life in God’s family, at his table. Where we see those in this picture as less than human, or do not desire their presence at God’s table, or close the door, we are missing the pattern of life we are invited into.

A culture war posture of outrage — our response when we feel attacked — might fail to recognise the deep desire folks have for inclusion; to feast at the table of God. To see how when this desire misfires in degraded, degenerative, pagan worship that dehumanises, there is an opportunity to proclaim the one who is at the table offering his body to give life.

What if — though we are provoked, distressed — by pagan parties that mock Jesus — we reacted with a generous invitation, like Jesus does from the cross. Where he says “Father forgive them,” or invites the rebel next to him to join him in the garden.

What if, when we see a picture like this, we do not see an awful attack on Christianity, but — in the artist’s words — a search for inclusivity that, without Jesus and the transformation he offers, is just a dead end.

So we do not pick up the sledgehammer or keyboard in a culture war, but set the table with culture care.

And look — you might say “but this is not what the artist meant, it was deliberately offensive and you are letting them off the hook”… But I am pretty sure the people who built the altar to the unknown God in Athens did not mean for Paul to make it about Israel’s God either.

What if instead of seeing these folks taking the seats of Jesus and his disciples, we saw them at the other side of the table; across from Jesus.

What if we imagine Jesus in this picture offering his body and his blood — his loving hospitality and invitation to these folks just as he did for us? Offering inclusion and transformation to those prepared to repent and be transformed.

What if this was our posture in real life too — not just our reaction to the opening ceremony? To build and plant homes and spaces in our city — amongst the idol tables — that offer this life to others.

What if our building and planting — our generativity — were generated by our own weekly re-enactment of the Lord’s Supper at this table; a picture performed for us, and the world, as we remember and proclaim the good news that Jesus has given his body and blood to include us, to transform us, as we bring our lives, our crowns, and our sin to the table and repent. Laying those things down and taking up the life of Jesus so we might carry it into the world with us.

September 30, 2025 1 Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Four — Habitats For Humanity

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

You can’t believe everything you read on the Internet. In July, rumours of the death of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter circulated, leading to an outpouring of grief for the 99 year old some months before his actual death. Carter was an interesting guy if you watch the horror show that is U.S. politics; he seems to be universally loved — and one of the reasons he was loved, was because of his work with the charity he helped make famous, Habitat for Humanity — it is a charity that builds houses — habitats — for humans.

It exists in Australia as well — and it is built from the recognition that we need a home; a habitat to survive and thrive, as we inhabit time and space. The spaces and places we call home — their rhythms and rituals, the furniture and the people who fill them — form us.

Back in week one of this series we were in Athens and we imagined the shift facing Damaris and Dionysius — these two people who believed the Gospel (Acts 17:34) — from the architecture of Athens and its idols to the rhythms we saw in our reading from the start of the church — both the rhythms of meeting together with other Christians — a new household — and of meeting in a very different sort of sacred space — the home (Acts 2:46–47).

This is the architecture described in the New Testament as the first habitat for this new community, the church, which we saw last week is called the household of God; a kinship network that teaches us how to be human — the church and our households within it — as we wisely build our lives — and we saw the way the New Testament uses the metaphor of building a house for this process.

The physical spaces we live in, where we meet together and eat together, structure our lives. And to live in the household of God means changing the furniture — these structures — the architecture of our lives as our habits change.

And so I wonder, first up — if you think about your house — what are your physical spaces geared towards; what are they producing in you? What about your workspace or other places you spend time habitually — what about church?

What are the rhythms and rituals in your habitat? Who lives in your habitat with you?

What changes can we make to our habitats to become the humans God is inviting us to be in his household — and so we offer the hospitality and transformation of his household to others drawn in to this ecosystem?

How is your home shaping you?

I want to acknowledge up front that many of us are living in non-ideal situations; not where we imagine for ourselves, and we are already at the limits of what we can afford in the current economy — interesting if you remember last week that is a household word — we are finding the household management of the world pretty unbearable.

And so what I am not saying is move — change in ways we cannot afford; but maybe there are changes to how we live in our spaces — whether at home or in shared spaces that we cannot afford not to make — especially because we will see this idea as we explore our two readings is about both our habits and who we are habitually connected with.

Anyway. Here is a tour of our house — I took these photos when there were dogs around, but fewer humans than normal — and this is not me saying our house was well designed to form us — it was a mix. The photos are our house as it was — since preaching this series we moved out and conducted significant renovations.

When you walked through our front door there was a hallway, and on the wall there were pictures our kids have made hung on a string.

On the left of the hallway were our bedrooms — there were three of them for five of us — we added another bedroom to minimise fights between the residents who share — the kid ones — and to provide a little more space away from each other — I will not show you pictures of the bedrooms both because they are pretty much just bedrooms, and because of privacy and mess.

Bedrooms are for sleeping — although there is a desk in our room, and bedside tables covered in books, that are also where we charge our devices. Which means they are on hand as we go to bed or wake up in the morning.

Our living area is open plan — we like this because it means we can see what our kids are up to. We built these desks into this set of shelves so kids would work there and not take screens into their rooms.

We really love our kitchen where there is a big communal island bench, where multiple people can prep food together — and breakfast bar — there is a fruit bowl in the middle to encourage us all to eat fruit, and some flowers because they are beautiful, and mess because we are a family and both parents are working pretty much full-time jobs and we still had not cleaned up fully from Growth Group a couple of nights before.

There is the coffee machine that keeps me sane — one that is great for firing up to make coffees for more than one person at a time.

A dining table in the corner crowded in by the dog crates — and our couches, which are both pointed at the TV so that when we collapse onto them once the kids are in bed we are inevitably drawn in to the screen.

The next biggest thing on our wall is the clock — well, it is maybe the painting — but in the morning we are ruled by the clock; racing against time to get everyone out the door in chaos.

Out the back we have got another table — with more clothes and toys — and a pizza oven in the corner so we can have people round, and play equipment for the kids because we want them to be habitually active.

This is the habitat shaping our household — it is built for chaos and hospitality — filled with marks of conflict, and mess, connection and distraction — and there are good and deliberate bits built around eating together and being together, but other bits that rule us more than they should; the screens on our wall and on our bedside table — part of thinking through our architecture means curating what is on our screens; and where our screens are — both the TV screen and all the stuff you are paying for to stream distraction into your life, and the stuff on your phone and in your browser.

What does your habitat look like? Are there ways you have set it up to make certain practices repeatable and easy? As an expression of your values — or just as something shaping them by shaping your habits?

Most of us spend lots of waking hours at work — like I said last week, my workspace tends to be my couch — or the desk in our room — or the dining table — when I am not working from a café or meeting people — but I used to work in a cubicle, and so I wonder how your workspace is set up…

Maybe you have a cubicle — what pieces of “flair” — the idea made famous by Office Space — is expressing your personality but perhaps even drawing your eye and prompting your thoughts when you have a moment in your cubicle? What is on your screen?

What your space looks like is going to vary widely based on what sort of job you do — you could drive heaps where your only real decision is what you listen to on the road, or if you hang something from your mirror that reminds you to pray, or something like you will often find in a car driven by someone whose religion involves more icons or images.

How have you structured things to aid your work? Or your formation? Some of this is silly window dressing, but changing our habitats can shape the way we work. Carpenters in their workshops use these things called jigs — deliberate structures they will turn to for repeated tasks that make them faster and more automatic.

The author Matthew Crawford is a motorbike mechanic and philosopher — he is all about keeping our heads and our bodies connected. He reckons we could all learn from carpenters and have jigs that produce the repeated habits we want to see more effortlessly; where our habitat assists us automating our habits. He defines a jig as:

“A device or procedure that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such a way as to make the action go smoothly, the same each time, without having to think about it…”

— Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

This fits with the brain science we have been looking at a bit this series; the idea that we think about things in one part of our brain, but have this automatic set of processes on the other — one of the guys who made this brain-system thing popular, Daniel Kahneman, says we form the fast side of the brain the way we learn skills with our body — through repetition; habit — and the best way to fast-track that is to set up our environment — our habitat — to produce the behaviours we want to repeat.

“The acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.” — Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

We will find these jigs — this environmental organisation — working to form us in ways we do not notice in stuff designed to addict us, to automate harmful behaviours — and in things like weight machines at gyms as opposed to free weights that guide our motions along a repeated path to help us develop a muscle.

So what about this habitat? Where we repeatedly come together — habitually — how are we being shaped as we walk through these doors and sit in rows — learning not to look at each other eye to eye, which we saw last week is super important — but to stare at and listen to people up the front — and some of that is feeding into the slow-process part of our brain — the rider of the elephant — and this is important. The rider’s job is to steer things around and decide what skills to develop and how to do that — we focus on hearing from God’s word; and we participate in habits with our bodies — standing and sitting to sing; engaging in prayer, sharing communion — breaking bread together up here, and then eating together downstairs.

But what are our jigs? The structures that guide our actions in church life? The pews… the pulpit… the communion table… the baptismal pool… the coffee machine… the tables where we eat together downstairs?

The architecture of this space works to produce behaviours that we repeat that work to produce us.

I wonder how this architecture could shift — or how we could think of our movements through this space — so we are working not just on knowledge but on attachment and joy and skill development — learning the skills of loving others intuitively because we love God intuitively; because we have learned that intuition through practice.

And who are we gathering with? Who are the people forming our habitat? Our household?

If we want our habitats to be jigs that help us learn a skill; set up to make repetitive right action shape us, we want to make sure both the context and the content of what we are trying to form in ourselves — who we are trying to be, with a picture of how we are going to get there — like a trainee carpenter — an apprentice in a workshop, or someone working out in a gym — it helps to have teachers around too. Examples who are part of the furniture; the habitat, and who are teaching us and correcting us as we practice our humanity.

I reckon that is what we see in Acts, as these believers whose hearts are being reformed to be directed to God are devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to time with God in prayer while eating together in houses in this new community. And in Hebrews, the writer is building on this idea that we are located in God’s house now — behind the curtain in the Temple, as we saw last series — we are living in holy space; this is our habitat (Hebrews 10:19–20). We have Jesus as our holy personal trainer; the master builder who is the priestly head of the household of God (Hebrews 10:21), and we are caught up in this exercise of coming to God (Hebrews 10:22) — this is the practice that will shape us most, knowing our hearts have been cleansed; our sins have been forgiven through the blood of Jesus, and we have been cleansed so we can come close to God — and the writer of Hebrews pivots from this to say “OK — the goal is drawing near to God” to the call to “hold unswervingly” to this hope. This is an active thing — a directed thing — “hold this hope” (Hebrews 10:23). This is a practice. Practice hoping because God is faithful.

Our habitat should be jigged up to teach us this skill of hoping; knowing that God is faithful to his promises — and what else? To ‘love and good deeds’ — we spur one another on — encourage one another towards practices that shape us as God’s children. “Love and good deeds” — the stuff Jesus taught and calls us to practice (Hebrews 10:24).

And how do we do this? We stay in the habit of meeting together (Hebrews 10:25); we habitually enter habitats that will shape us in a certain way in our practice of meeting and our practices together — especially the practice of encouraging one another. And why — well — because of where we are going — towards this Day. Now. I almost stopped here. This would have been an easy thing to apply, and to talk about — but the passage keeps going. Verse 26. It is a doozy. I reckon the hardest verse in the New Testament to balance against our understanding of the Gospel.

“If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.” — Hebrews 10:26.

It is a warning to persevere — to keep building wisely rather than turning away from the foundation that is Jesus; those who are saved will be those who stick at it, those who do not stick with Jesus will — the foolish builders — well, the storm that will hit and test our house is not just suffering in this world — it is the testing of God’s judgment. This feels weird coming hot on the heels of a claim that we should come to God with full assurance…

But this is a theme the writer of Hebrews has banged on about all the way through the letter; the way to have assurance that you are part of God’s family (Hebrews 3:16), his household, is if you are hanging on to hope that God will be faithful, because Jesus is faithful, and we have just read about the practices that will keep you there — the practice of sinning, rejecting Jesus, will stop you being faithful to Jesus (Hebrews 10:29). I do not know about you, but I can forget that hope, or feel it slipping in moments when I turn to sin — and that is a pathway that leads to bad places.

There is a particular warning here against finding life in Jesus; building on him, and then deliberately, habitually, rejecting him and turning away. To do this would leave us especially deserving of punishment — knowing the holiness of God and treading him through the dirt. The writer of this letter is making a pretty strong case to choose life and joy and God’s love in the face of this Day, rather than the alternative. And the point of this rhetorical move, like in Deuteronomy in the Old Testament, is to choose life, not death; blessing, not curse; and to build habits that will prepare you for that Day so that you can endure all the other days between now and then (Hebrews 10:32) — and any conflict or suffering — as people of joy and hope — connected; not alone. In The Other Half of Church the authors talk about that connected joy we looked at last week, where we are together with people who are glad to be with us — reflecting God’s delight to be with us — being vital for growth — it is also vital for surviving suffering.

“Our identity is built and formed by joy-bonded relationships. The identity center in our brain grows in response to joy.”

— The Other Half of Church

It protects us from trauma; which they reckon happens when we suffer alone; without joyful security and people to process with.

“Suffering turns into trauma when we are unable to process our suffering with God and other people.”

— The Other Half of Church

The writer of Hebrews does not want people suffering alone; or suffering without having habitually built the relationships that might protect you from traumatic harm. They say “remember how just after you trusted Jesus you endured suffering” (Hebrews 10:32); being publicly insulted, persecuted… being side-by-side with those suffering and being persecuted (Hebrews 10:33) — suffering with those in prison — hoping together (Hebrews 10:34). This is a picture of occupying a household together; a habitat — they even had property confiscated and stayed joyful because their true home is in God’s presence… and holding on to our hope; our confidence — persevering — habitually — leads to being home with God.

Drawing near to God.
Holding on to and professing their hope.
Spurring one another on toward love and good deeds.
Meeting together habitually.
Encouraging one another.

You imagine they are doing what the Acts 2 church did too — praying. Studying the teaching of the apostles; the Gospel. Breaking bread — communion and eating together — in houses. Learning by heart the skill of hope and perseverance and joyful connection to God and each other.

Our habitats matter — who we fill them with matters — because our habits matter; cultivating habits of perseverance in faith and hope; drawing near to God through Jesus is how we exercise our faith and how we are formed; how we hold on to rather than throwing away Jesus (Hebrews 10:35). This is what persevering looks like; and persevering is what forms us as we draw near to God (Hebrews 10:36).

We are formed in this habitat for our new humanity; as we learn skills by heart; as we automate this perseverance by habit. And we form habits — getting in the groove of godliness — by structuring our environments and repeating our actions in loving environments. So it becomes easier to repeat right actions than wrong ones, and so we limit our freedoms to choose badly.

We will find these jigs — this environmental organisation — working to form us in ways we do not notice in stuff designed to addict us, to automate harmful behaviours — and in things like weight machines at gyms as opposed to free weights that guide our motions along a repeated path to help us develop a muscle.

This might mean keeping your phone out of your bedroom — or screens away from places where you know you are likely to engage in bad habits when nobody is around — it might mean turning couches towards each other, or eating at the table, or all sorts of things — it might mean reaching for God’s word in the morning, whether that is in a physical Bible or an app, before you reach for or hook into an algorithm; it might mean not being ruled by the clock — it might mean adjusting how you redeem the time in your car or your cubicle or the little visual prompts you use that remind you who you are at work, where things get stressful…

It might mean changing how we approach church so it is not just a place where we sit and look forwards and hear one or two people speak, but a community where we gather together to look at one another and direct each other’s gaze to the throne room; encouraging one another.

People are part of our habitat — perhaps the most important furniture in our lives — so tweaking our environment involves making sure we are connected to God’s household in a real way — that joyful and connected way we talked about last week — and this is not just about meeting together where safety and joy are the end point; those things are the soil that enables transformation when we encourage one another towards our goal; our hope.

This also means choosing not to meet together with God’s people is a choice to be formed by a different habitat — to not be encouraged by God’s people, or to encourage God’s people as we do this for one another. To risk not persevering.

So what is this encouragement thing — really — I reckon sometimes it is the “keep going” idea — where we suffer together and say “keep going,” “hold on,” “remember the destination”… stay faithful… prodding each other towards perseverance… holding on to the hope we profess — but part of this will be about calling folks back to holding on. Back to hoping. Back towards love and good deeds; towards being and becoming the sort of people Jesus calls us to be (Hebrews 10:25).

I reckon we are comfortable working at being a joyful and connected community — even with eye contact (which we “practised” at communion and in singing together the previous week) — one where we want people to be included and feel safe and maybe hear some good stuff or sing some good stuff to each other — I am sure we can get better and better at noticing the good things people do as part of cultivating joy and gratitude — being glad to be together — but I reckon some of this encouragement stuff is actually about saying hard things to one another — calling one another back to being who we are meant to be — and our habitat needs the sort of people who teach us skills by telling us when we get things wrong — and by showing us how to be who we are learning to be.

I am not sure we always have the relational security or the joyful attachment we need for that sort of speech to happen well — and then I am not sure we have practised this encouragement and spurring one another on when the pressure is not on, so that we are able to do it when it is real…

After joy and hesed, this is one of the practices suggested in The Other Half of Church for forming this side of our brain; forming our character. The authors talk about building a habitat of relationships in terms of forming group identity and calling each other to live together in this community — now — the book warns about how this can go wrong in cults and abusive contexts, we should not be naïve about this — but I reckon those of us who have experienced abuse and trauma — abuses of power or authority — can respond by rejecting all authority and just trying to do our own thing — which is another way of being formed but one that leaves us alone, or just with peers, or people we have got authority over like our own kids, or people we are teaching in various contexts.

I know I have struggled to work out what authority is and even if it can be used well, without harming others. I have found this part of my job the most difficult bit; because I recognise the harm done to so many of us through bad authority, and I do not want to compound that, but this fear — driven by love — pushes me — and others — away from hard and necessary conversations.

This is not who we are invited to be for each other. It is not who we say we are for each other. One of the values of our church is that we speak truth in love to one another in vulnerability and honesty. This love bit involves that security and joy — but this speech bit can be hard. Scary.

“We are vulnerable and honest about our own sin and brokenness, living and speaking the truth to one another in love, and welcoming to those not yet trusting Jesus.” — City South Presbyterian, Mission, Vision, Values

And while there might be a role for spiritual parents or those in authority to have these conversations, this is a one-another job — we are to spur one another on as we meet together — and the authority we are trying to point to is Jesus’ authority, not our own; we are part of his household, not our families of origin or our ideal communities, and so this sort of conversation involves discernment.

Anyway — the book talks about how important it is not just to talk about beliefs but about values; the sort of people we are and who we want to be, not just what we think — and about the need to proclaim these values habitually.

“One way a community can build a strong character identity is by speaking regularly to each other about what kind of people we are.” — The Other Half of Church

They say some traditions recite doctrinal statements — like we do with the creed — but we have also got to learn the vocabulary for how we live; our shared values — the commands of Jesus — so that when we are not being consistent we have a framework we can use to call people back to love and good deeds.

“Some traditions recite doctrinal statements as part of their Christian practice. We also need to do the same with how we live. We need constant reminders.”

— The Other Half of Church

This kind of correction is hard because it involves shame, inevitably — when we are told we are doing something wrong — but when there is genuine love and joyful connection, shame does not threaten our relationship or isolate us, knowing we are loved and secure helps us regulate that shame response and direct it towards growth — when this speech is genuinely encouraging it spurs us not just away from wrong action, but towards a correct path.

“Without hesed, shame will push us to isolate and hide, which naturally sinks us into unhealthy shame. Our hesed helps us regulate the emotional energy of shame.”

— The Other Half of Church

They talk about a template for this sort of conversation — a skill to develop as we seek to help one another be transformed by the renewing of our minds; as we proclaim the Gospel to one another to build hope and to persevere together — their template involves a reassurance of the hesed — the love — that connects us to God and each other, and by saying “I believe you did this,” not “you did this,” invites a conversation and listening.

“I love you but believe that you stopped acting like yourself. Let me remind you how we act in this situation.” — The Other Half of Church

Framing the “spur” or prod as a recognition of where we have stopped acting like who we are, with an invitation back to shared values and action, does not cast out — like bad shame — but invites closer; prodding; spurring; encouraging. It is a terrifying idea, right?

This sort of speech takes real love; and real agreement on shared values for it to be helpful.

We will not always get this right; and sometimes someone might raise something with you, in love, where they are wrong — that is an opportunity for more encouragement, and perhaps to invite spiritual parents — those more mature than us — into the mix if it feels like it is going wrong.

Our habitat will shape us not just when we structure our physical environments right, but when we fill them with people filled with God’s Spirit — God’s household — who love us and direct us towards Jesus.

September 29, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Three — the Household

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

I need to give a bit of a content warning — we are talking about family — about parents — and I know some people have had damaging relationships with their parents, so this is a traumatic topic to engage with.

We are also talking about church as family — which, in high-control environments, is language that can be used coercively or abusively — probably in ways that overlap with those family experiences.

I am hoping we will steer clear of these dynamics, but acknowledge there will be an overlap with language that may have harmed you; deforming rather than forming some of us.

There is also a caveat I want to add up front; sermons have limits. The sort of ideas we open up today about our households, and our church as a household, might require deep recalibration of our lives. I am sketching out a framework for how we think of discipleship; our formation as children of God. This is a conversation starter, not a conversation finisher.

I am also opening with a confession. I am worried I am not a good parent; and the more time I spend with those of you whom I love, who have suffered at the hands of bad parents; the more I have seen the cost of these wounds, the more I fear how I am deforming my kids. I need help.

At home I am short-tempered. Distracted. Focused on what I want to do. Trying to cope. Parenting is hard. Kids are always fighting. Always noisy. Always too slow to do what I want. Our house is too small, and we just always feel angry at each other. It is overwhelming… and it needs to change. I need to change.

And look, I am on social media — I know I am not alone in this sort of feeling.

A few years ago Robyn and I visited these psychologists — a couple — who specialise in ministry families. If you have been around for a while you will know I have not always been great at work-life boundaries — another thing I inflict on my kids. Robyn is quite insightful; she had recognised that this was not sustainable for either of us before I did — and one of the things she brought up was that it is a real problem for her, and the kids, when I work from home; from the couch.

I reacted pretty badly to this — some of you will know I am in the family business; as a kid, my dad never felt available. In his first church he had an office across the yard from our house; we knew when he was in the office we should not interrupt. Then, when we moved to Brisbane, his office was downstairs — and the door was always closed. I had decided not to be behind a closed door; to be present and accessible. It turns out a clearly marked-off workspace is probably a wise thing — but — my folks had been looking after our kids, and when we picked them up after our session they asked, “What did you say about us?” — because you always talk to psychologists about your parents.

I told them I had brought up the closed door and how I worked from the couch so I could be interrupted; and Dad explained he had worked from home, in his office, because my mum’s dad — also a pastor — his office was in town, and he was always absent, and Mum did not want that.

Dad worked from home to be available and the door was closed because the air-con was on. I had to re-narrate that closed door… because, as you know, “love is an open door…”

It is funny how much I had been impacted by this part of my habitat; the closed door; and how my own choice with the couch was not a fix. I tell this story because it is a picture of how we learn to be human in a household. And how we set up our households is part of what forms us, and others — perhaps especially kids. And even if you do not have kids yourself, you are probably conscious of having been formed by those around you.

Last chapter we looked at the analogy of the human life as a house; one we each build either on the foundation of Jesus — or something else — where we take responsibility for building wisely (1 Corinthians 3:10).

This week we are mixing our metaphors — or building them up a little — moving from house to household. This is language we find through the New Testament; a picture of the church as a household — the household of God (1 Timothy 3:14-15) — not just a biological family. We modern Western folks are quick to equate a household with a nuclear family — and plenty of our experience of a household is a product of this move; our families — our households — inevitably shape us; our habitats shape our habits; we inherit patterns of life in the world from others — or define ourselves against them — like in my story; three generations of pastor-dads choosing where to work and messing up their kids.

We will look at 1 Timothy here, and while we will look at the content, I also want us to think about the nature of relationships this letter is operating in and trying to create. Paul is writing to Timothy — last week we saw Paul holding up Timothy as his beloved son who follows his example (1 Corinthians 4:16-17); his way of life (1 Corinthians 4:16-17). Also — while we are looking at 1 Corinthians, remember that bit from last week where Paul calls the church the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16). He uses a Greek word for house in this bit where he says God dwells with us; it is maybe more literally translated inhabits; God’s Spirit inhabits the church; and this word, it is all through 1 Timothy; where Paul is writing to his true son in the faith (1 Timothy 1:2). Paul is Timothy’s spiritual dad. We do not know what has happened to Timothy’s biological dad — he is not described as a spiritual influence when Paul reflects on the role Timothy’s mum and grandma played in teaching him God’s word (2 Timothy 1:5).

Anyway, in Paul’s opening words there is a household reference we lose in english that shapes the whole letter. Here in this warning about avoiding faithless controversies that get in the way of advancing God’s work (1 Timothy 1:4), is actually this same house word; oikos — “managing God’s work” is oikos nomia; the Greek word we get economy from; it is the idea of household management. Paul is writing to Timothy — his spiritual son — about building God’s economy; his household, which is what he calls the church.

And, up front, the goal of his instructions — the task of stewarding God’s household — is love (1 Timothy 1:5). Love from a pure heart; a good conscience and a sincere faith — you might summarise that as a transformed mind — this is a particular kind of love too — it is the word for committed, sacrificial, connected love for another person; it is about giving, not getting.

So Paul’s point in writing the instructions for what kind of examples should shape the church — spiritual parents in the household of God — is part of this guide to love; to the sort of conduct that happens — the practices — that produce the character of the household of God (1 Timothy 3:14-15). Paul gives a list of behaviours for men and women who are going to be model parents in a church community — parents who do not follow worldly patterns. In the Roman Empire in the first century there were patterns and expectations for a male head of a household; a patriarch.

Paul subverts a bunch of these as he writes to men who occupy this sort of presumed role about shaping a new type of household by not acting this way; he says these spiritual dads should be above reproach — exemplary — faithful to his wife — not engaging in the predatory sexual power games of the culture, he is to be self-controlled — not violent or striking out in anger like a Roman patriarch could when they felt wronged; hospitable — able to teach — picture taking on apprentices here, rather than just lecturing… someone who is not ruled by alcohol or money or their passions (1 Timothy 3:2-3)… someone already doing this job in their family (1 Timothy 3:4). Again — this is the same house word in Greek — it is not just about the nuclear family; though it mentions his children — a Roman household was a little economic unit; home to multiple generations, single friends and relatives — and often slaves or clients — he has got to be running his little economy — in a manner worthy of respect, of imitation — before he can be an example; a spiritual parent, an economic model in God’s household (1 Timothy 3:5).

This is true for any of the examples Paul uses in the letter; if they are not modelling it in their own households they cannot be models in God’s household (1 Timothy 3:12).

There are not just instructions about exemplary men in this letter — or this passage — some of this feels pretty gendered to us, but I reckon Paul is inverting certain stereotypes that are documented as part of Roman culture — in a patriarchal culture, not universal gender norms — and the idea is really that both exemplary men and women are worthy of respect; and — I reckon this word should actually be translated wives (1 Timothy 3:11) — Paul is mapping out the patterns of matriarchs and patriarchs — patterns — in this new household of connected love — not the self-seeking competition and power in other economies. This is not to say unmarried people cannot be heads of households, or examples to follow — as we will see…

If we flip over a few pages in 1 Timothy, in chapter 5 Paul keeps unpacking the dynamics of this new family system — Timothy is to see those he is in community with as family — older men as fathers; younger men as brothers, older women as mothers and younger women as sisters — with purity — the sort of love that comes from a pure heart (1 Timothy 5:1-2); and this pattern spreads through the community in particular ways — families care for each other — especially when suffering occurs — so we get these instructions for how to care for those within biological families, and without a biological family (1 Timothy 5:4). Kids and grandkids should care for widowed mums and grandmas — practicing our religion — that is another habit word — by caring for those in our immediate household; our families; recognising they have cared for us — this is tricky if they have not; if our family have harmed us and not loved us in ways where this care would be an act of reciprocity — and we will talk more about this; it is a challenge in the face of broken family relationships and trauma and abuse to practice our faith this way — but, just notice — and this is important — Paul has very harsh words for those who fail to care for their relatives — including parents who do not care for, or abuse, their kids — they have denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever (1 Timothy 5:8); they have put themselves outside this network of connected love; God’s economy; the task of loving people into the love and likeness of Jesus.

Where people in the church community do not have others to care for them — where these households have failed — the church family is their household.

There is a widows list (1 Timothy 5:9-10), where the church will pay exemplary women to keep being motherly or grandmotherly examples in the life of the church — those known for their good deeds; there are big overlaps between the women provided for in these ways and men who are held up as leaders of the church — raising children… showing hospitality… serving others (1 Timothy 5:10)… while younger widows can provide for themselves — whether that is through marriage if that is an option — or through managing their own households (1 Timothy 5:14) — a type of leadership — being exemplary motherly types who care for others, presumably to cultivate this same way of life.

All of this is about the household of God; this new family that we are brought into as God makes his home among us and builds us to be his household (1 Timothy 3:14-15); his children in the world as we learn how we ought to live from people doing it; people embodying godliness — finding it expressed in the foundation of the house — the source of true godliness — Jesus — who appeared in flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit in his teaching and life and resurrection — was taken up in glory and who now forms the basis of our faith and practice; shaping our economy (1 Timothy 3:16).

So what has this letter to Timothy got to do with us — you are not an apprentice or adopted son of the Apostle Paul — but Timothy is an example for the church to imitate; a model for us — that is a lot of pressure for a young bloke — and Paul says “do not let anyone judge you for being young — focus on being an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12) — a picture of life in the household of God; the life of love the letter is designed to produce — this comes through devotion to reading the Scriptures (1 Timothy 4:13). Timothy is to keep the message of Jesus at the heart of the household — but not only this; he has also got to live it; his example; his progress — his growth in maturity — is to be visible to all; we are all learning what it means to grow up and mature in God’s household together — even our leaders — Timothy is to keep his life aligning with his doctrine (1 Timothy 4:15-16). Because this is the pattern we are growing into; our examples and communities form us as children of God.

While perfect habitat will not perfect our heart — that is page 2 of the Bible — our habits, our households are either part of the conforming patterns of the world, or, in the household of God, part of the transforming and renewing of our minds as God’s Spirit makes his home in us. We will be shaped by the household we belong to. To inhabit the world is to be formed by life in a household; the architectures and rhythms and examples of who we live with and where we live — or who we do not live with when we feel disconnected from others.

One of the obvious ways we inhabit time and space is by being born into a family — a household with a story or history — every human has to navigate this reality — whether our parents, or households, aid us or hinder us in seeking God. Someone born into a household in ancient Athens would be shaped not just by the architecture of the city, with its idols and temples, but the architecture of their household — their family gods — shaping their lives too. And this is true for us, and our patterns of worship.

The household we are brought into profoundly shapes our elephants — more than the city; the world around us — we have been thinking about our minds — what we carry into the world using this metaphor of the rider — our thinking brains — and the elephants — our ingrained intuitive responses to the world. That part of our mind is profoundly developed — whether positively or negatively — whether through presence or absence — by those humans who shaped us; and can be reshaped by a new household built around habits of love and connection.

I mentioned Jonathan Haidt’s idea of the brain featuring a ‘rider’ and an elephant, and this book The Other Half of Church in chapter one — which is about how we are not formed just by teaching the rider; the bit of our brain shaped by listening to sermons and talking about stuff; we need to form the bit of our brain that does the heavy lifting; the automatic, intuitive bit that accounts for most of our behaviour.

The authors suggest this ‘fast’ part, or ‘elephant’ comes from who we are; who we have learned to be in our connected or disconnected relationships; this formation begins in our families as babies and infants — but it keeps happening in our bodies as we experience all the way into adulthood; we do not stop being children; we do not stop being shaped by our households. Even in my 40s I am learning that I am a child; a child of my parents; a product of my family system, my household — even as I parent my own children — I just need to keep learning to be a child of God.

My parents were pretty good, really — I have had to re-narrate the closed door and a bunch of other stuff as I have found out how hard parenting is… but there are things I want to do differently as I set an example for others — including my kids — new patterns to learn — and I know that for some of us this is a bigger battle, because the patterns of our families have traumatised us; leaving our elephants scared and scarred. Trauma shapes our elephant; this part of our brains — because trauma is a function of broken relationships; not having a secure way to process suffering.

Humans need a household — whether that is biological or not; the households we define ourselves around — and their rhythms and our experience of embodied life within them — produce our character, shaping our hearts and minds. Children of God need households operating according to the values and conduct of the household of God; his economy, where spiritual parents provide examples of maturity and love for us in secure and connected relationships; love that reflects God’s love. If you are a parent who wants your kids to know the love of Jesus — whether they are infants or adults — you might need to assess where your spiritual parenting is forming those in your household — including you — are you conforming to the patterns of this world, or being transformed by God’s Spirit dwelling among you? What are your routines — when you get up in the morning is it the “get out the door” rush that teaches work and school and success are important — or connection to each other and to your heavenly Father that guides your steps? What do you talk about together? When do your kids experience encouragement and connection? When you discipline are you discipling?

I know I have got some work to do as a parent on this front. I have still got things to learn and unlearn from my own parents, and from other spiritual parents in our community. And I need help. But I grew up in a household that wanted this for me.

If your biological parents have been abusive or harmful — worse than unbelievers — you might — even as an adult — need spiritual parents, in a community lovingly teach you a new way of life as you submit to learning their example rather than imitating or reacting against those who harmed you. Family trauma — broken attachments — not being cared for — stops us growing up because the people who were meant to model these things have failed us. When we are in this situation we need a new household. New models.

Lots of people who have experienced trauma or exclusion from their biological families have created new household structures — using language like “chosen families” — which is great — but often these chosen families are peer networks, often with others who have experienced similar patterns, with an inbuilt suspicion — and trauma response triggered by parent-like figures. I wonder if we do not just need chosen families but chosen parents; those in the household of God who can teach and model life in God’s family for us — and — perhaps — actually start undoing some of the ways we have been harmed. And there is a role here in our community for some of you older folks — or us older folks — to serve as chosen parents or grandparents in the faith. If you are older you might need to take steps to build some of these connections with others, while if you are younger you might need to deliberately ask some older folks to be part of your life; to open their households to include you. Growth groups are part of that in the rhythms of our church family.

I mentioned this book The Common Rule, in chapter one, and this quote from Justin Earley about “the house of his life” being decorated with Christian content while the architecture of his habits was like everyone else’s.

“While the house of my life was decorated with Christian content, the architecture of my habits was just like everyone else’s.”

And because I would like to make changes on this front for me, and for my household, I was excited to read his follow up, called Habits of the Household — it is another book full of quotable quotes and ideas of practices and rhythms to build into home life.

He seems to be zeroing in on 1 Timothy when he says our households should be little schools of love; habitats that teach inhabitants to live our calling; to be formed as lovers of God and neighbour.

“The most Christian way to think about our households is that they are little ‘schools of love’… places where we have one vocation, one calling: to form all who live here into lovers of God and neighbour.” — Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household

He chose the word “household” not “family” because he reckons we should think bigger than the nuclear family…

“Thinking in terms of the household, instead of just the family unit, encourages us to think bigger about how God is working through our families… People do not join our households just because you wish for them to. They become part of the household because there is a rhythm or a pattern that invites them in.”

But apart from his chapter on hospitality, which imagines making ways for others to become part of the household at the table, his book is really about the nuclear family… and about parenting.

It was disappointing — the households of the first century; multi-generational groups of connected people — not just biologically related to one another — were a brilliant structure, and as we have reduced life to biological families living disconnected lives in the modern world we have created all sorts of problems for ourselves; especially when it comes to learning to be human and the pressure placed on parents, and kids. And plenty of households in church communities are not nuclear families with two parents.

There are some helpful practices in the book that can be applied in various contexts, but if we see the church as the household of God — made up of households — and that this might happen in chosen family groups, and different structures — not just biological families — then I reckon it is worth engaging with The Other Half of Church — and, for homework, I would love you to read it, or listen to The Other Half of Church podcast — especially the episodes on joy and hesed. Hesed is the Hebrew word for connected, committed love — in Greek it is translated into ‘agape,’ the love Paul says is the goal in God’s household.

The writers of this book are incorporating the work of modern psychologists like Allan Schore — I read some of his work this week and he seems legit — his work on attachment theory is built on the idea that we develop attachment through our eyes and our faces — especially through experiencing joy; connection to a person looking at us who is glad to be with us — an open door.

“If Dr Schore is right about the definition of joy being what I feel when I see the sparkle in someone’s eye that conveys ‘I am happy to be with you,’ I was experiencing joy… Our identity is built and formed by joy-bonded relationships. The identity center in our brain grows in response to joy.”

— The Other Half of Church

This is identity-shaping; elephant-shaping… so much of my parenting has communicated the opposite — especially when I have been working on the couch and been annoyed by an interruption; gazing at screens does the opposite — anyway, they reckon our identity; our right-brained sense of self is formed by joy-bonded relationships — they build on this idea that biblically, joy is connected to God’s face shining upon us — and that we experience this in face-to-face community aimed towards this sort of connection — and where churches do not habitually express and include this joy face to face, eye to eye — our ability to produce fruitful life is depleted — they use the analogy of cultivating the right sort of soil to grow towards maturity.

“If my community is not in the habit of expressing what God sees as special in each of us, our eyes do not meet and our faces do not shine when we see each other. Our soil becomes depleted. Soil that is low on joy is primed for growing addictions. When our brain looks for joy and does not find it, we become vulnerable to ‘pseudo-joys.’”

— The Other Half of Church

Where we do not have this joy we start looking for it in pseudo-joys — addictions; things like consuming; looking at people’s faces on social media; porn; the stuff in the list of behaviours that spiritual parents in God’s household should model avoiding. They reckon we need to practice face-to-face “joy transmission” in our households.

“If joy is transmitted primarily through our faces and eyes, we need to practice letting our faces light up with each other… Our brains draw life from our strongest relational attachments to grow our character and develop our identity. Who we love shapes who we are.”

— The Other Half of Church

We share in communion as a community; a household — connected by bonds of love; by God’s love — his Spirit dwelling in us — inviting us to be at home with him as his household. The people around you as you take communion are prime candidates to be this household for you — a community we are attached to, where we experience hesed — this love — God’s love.

Our elephants are formed by the joy we experience in strong relational attachments — who we love shapes who we are. This is true of our attachment to God, but we learn this from each other as we take up the task of forming one another towards maturity; listening to the word of God and taking on the character of Jesus; the source of godliness — and we only do this when we build our community wanting this attachment with each other, where we experience a different economy; one not built on consumption or self-service, but on connected love where we come face to face not just with people glad to be with us, but the God who adopts us into his family.

September 28, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter Two — Learning Jesus By Heart

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

There is something you do not know about me. Probably. I cannot tell you. But if you were there when I gave this as a talk, I tried to show people by playing a song on the piano.

As a kid, I learned piano. I reckon my parents spent thousands of dollars so I could learn — really — that one song. It is basically all I have to show for it — that, and I can still play most of the scales. Maybe I should have just done that.

I was not great at practicing, but I did learn — and practice — that one song, until it became part of me. I can play it without looking — or thinking — and I play it much faster than it is meant to be played, and probably much less well than it is meant to be played.

But I remember it. I know where my fingers are meant to be and what it is meant to sound like — and I know it without thinking. What the people heard when I played was automatic; it was muscle memory.

There is a phrase we use when we learn something that we can produce automatically, is there not? We talk about learning something by heart. And we know we have not learned it through some process of our heart — that organ — magically latching on to a thing. When we learn something by heart, when we get it to the stage of being natural or automatic, it is a product of practice. Of repetition. Of bedding something down deep into our bones.

And we think of this sort of automation as good when it comes to learning an instrument, or a sport, or how to drive a car — so that we are making those movements without deciding.

I stopped learning piano — practicing — because I did not love it, so only one song comes naturally to me; I only know one “by heart.” While I am almost 42 and still playing soccer; still practicing hoping more things might become automatic because even though I am uncoordinated and nothing feels automatic, I love it. I have given my heart to it, and I am hoping my body will automate some things if I keep repeating the actions. I wonder how we go though at following Jesus by heart; learning to live as a disciple of Jesus.

That is what we are thinking about this series — we are thinking about how we be who God has made us to be; those who inhabit time and space in order to seek God like he made us to (Acts 17:26-28). And we do this as those who have found God because he has revealed himself to us in Jesus so that we are now trying to be formed as disciples. Trying to be transformed as we saw last week, rather than conformed into the patterns of the world (Romans 12:2).

I wonder what your model for this transformation looks like — whether we think of learning to follow Jesus as like learning to pass an exam at school, or like becoming more like him from the heart. I wonder if our approach to discipleship should look more like learning an instrument, or a sport — something we do with our bodies — rather than something we do by thinking right. If you are doing the Practicing the Way course in your growth group you might have heard them talk about thinking about discipleship as more like an apprenticeship than a university degree.

Last week we looked at the metaphor of an elephant — where the idea was that the world and its patterns — the architecture and idols that surround us — are designed to shape us in particular ways, and to shape our hearts or minds in particular ways as we use our bodies in these spaces, pursuing what we love. And we talked about how often we slip into thinking about our minds as the bits of us that are conscious — we borrowed the analogy of the rider and the elephant from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. We think about our minds as the rider and about discipleship as informing the rider with the right information about God, but most of what we do is shaped by the elephant — our intuitions, what we have made automatic, our instinctive sense of who we are in the world. These elephants are shaped, like when we make piano playing automatic, by what we do, what we experience, who we are around, what we learn to love, and what we practice.

And this week we are picking up a different metaphor — it is one we will expand over the next few weeks — we are going to think of our lives — our bodies, our minds, our growth and formation — and especially our heart, the core of who we are — as a house.

And rather than examining the architecture of our city, I am going to invite you to think about your life and its structures — how you are being built and formed as a human house; what the plan is, what is foundational, what is load bearing, what is giving you a shape, and how you are building your life, piece by piece. How you are building not just the plans — which might be the rational thinking part of your brain — but the structure; your loves, what is automatic, who you are actually becoming.

We are going to do this looking at the teaching and example of Jesus — and then the teaching and example of one seeking to become like Jesus — the Apostle Paul.

So Jesus, in our reading, he is located on the plains — a level place (Luke 6:17). This is interesting, right — because there is a parallel between what Jesus says here in Luke, and his teaching from a mountain top in Matthew (Luke 6:17, Matthew 5:1). What we are hearing from Jesus is like his stump speech. I heard this week that President Biden gave basically the same radio interview to stacks of different stations around the country; reporters are given pre-vetted questions so he can stick to his script. Well, here is Jesus sticking to his script — this is a core part of his teaching about what the kingdom looks like, and how we should think about being formed as disciples.

Both Luke and Matthew have this first metaphor of a tree producing fruit — it is literally making fruit — this will be important as we roll on. But Jesus says good trees make good fruit (Luke 6:43, Matthew 7:17). You can tell if a tree is good from the fruit, and if the fruit is good from the tree.

And just like that, humans are trees. If fruit is being made, it is coming out of the heart of a person (Luke 6:45). The good things are stored there — literally, treasured there. Our lives that we live, what we make and what we say, are a product of our hearts.

Jesus is picking up an Old Testament idea here — one you will find in the wisdom of Proverbs — that we should guard our hearts because everything else flows out of this part of us (Proverbs 4:23).

And straight up, the next bit in Luke — well — it is a shift in metaphor, but I think Jesus, as he talks about building a wise life as building a house, is talking about building a wise heart that will produce this sort of fruitful, kingdom-shaped life. There are a couple of links we lose in our English here — Jesus literally says “and do not ‘make’ what I say” (Luke 6:46) — it is the same root word for what the tree produces — and then in the next verse where we get “practices” — which I think is a great word — it’s the same word again, this “making” word (Luke 6:47, Luke 6:43).

A tree makes good fruit when it is a good tree. Jesus is asking why do you speak as though I am Lord if you are not producing the fruit, the practices, the way of life that comes from his words. It is not just about belief, this discipleship caper — the link between who we are and what we do is about this link between our heart and our actions.

And to be a disciple — someone who calls Jesus Lord — is to take Jesus to heart; to learn his way by heart — through practice — where our practices reflect his practice and his words (Luke 6:46, Matthew 7:24). Jesus is the ultimate good tree — his words and actions come from his heart, and for us, fruitful, wise life looks like being like him because he is our Lord.

There is this formative cycle between doing what Jesus says and our hearts being fruitful, so that our actions then reflect our hearts.

And here the stump speech continues with this metaphor of a house — of our lives as a house (Luke 6:48, Matthew 7:24). Those who hear Jesus’ words and put them into practice — having them shape what we make, what we do with our bodies — these people are humans, wise humans, who build a house on a secure foundation. A rock.

So that when flooding waters come they do not shake the house — the life of the person — because it is well built (Luke 6:48).

The point of this metaphor is to construct a well-built house, right? To build wisely — starting with the foundation you build on. Starting not just with listening to Jesus’ words but putting them into practice. It is almost like the well-built house is about a heart that has treasured up and stored goodness so that it produces goodness and is not destroyed.

The alternative to the wise builder is the one who hears the words of Jesus and does not put them into practice (Luke 6:49). Just pause there — he does not say the fool does not hear the words of Jesus. The fool is the one who hears — perhaps even believes. Perhaps, to throw back to the model of our ‘mind’ in chapter one, this is the person who just thinks life is about the rider, where you just have to hear and believe, but where that does not translate into wise building, into elephant training, into treasuring and being formed by the words of Jesus as we practice them and make fruitful life.

The person not building a house on the rock — but just on any piece of ground, with no foundation — their life gets swept away when the storm hits; it is destroyed (Luke 6:49).

If we want to be wise builders — houses that are formed as good, disciples of Jesus, truly human — we need not just a building plan, but to build well. Not just a foundation — Jesus — but the practice of doing what he says, which is how we store up treasure in our hearts; how we learn by heart to live with the new hearts he gives.

Jesus teaches plenty of stuff in the Gospels that his stump speech — whether it is the Sermon on the Mount or the Plains — invites us to practice; to make our way of life. There is another consistent message across the Gospels — a summary of what we are invited to practice; to take to heart and learn by heart as we build our lives.

In Luke it is recorded as Jesus meets a guy who reckons he has got it all together — an expert in the law — who asks what must I do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him, “What does the law suggest?” (Luke 10:25-26).

And this bloke says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and mind” (Luke 10:27). This is a command to treasure God; to have our heart shaped; to learn his ways through how we honour him with our bodies. And this flows through into how we love other humans. Our neighbours. Jesus says, “Yep. Do this” (Luke 10:28). In Matthew he calls this the first and greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37-38), and that all God’s word hangs off these two commands (Matthew 22:39-40).

So I guess we could start there.

But I reckon there is one other bit of Jesus’ teaching that is worth having in mind here as we think about our hearts and becoming disciples. And it is that we do not do this as people disconnected from Jesus, not as individuals left to our own devices, our own ability to work our way into new habits.

If we are calling Jesus Lord and our hearts are longing to, and treasuring him — then this itself is an act of God’s transforming, heart-changing grace in us. We are not earning our way in as we seek to be disciples. This is a pattern of life for those who have listened to what Jesus says and are seeking to put his teaching into practice because he is our Lord, our foundation, and we are in the process of being transformed not just to be like him, but by him as we live with him and listen to him.

A disciple — an apprentice — has a teacher. And we also have this picture from Jesus of coming to him to have our hearts transformed not just by habits of working to improve ourselves, but the life-transforming habit of not relying on ourselves, but coming to him. Jesus invites us — those of us tired and overwhelmed by the world and its patterns; those of us buffeted by the storms and recognising that anything we build will never be strong enough to hold us secure in the storms, or in the face of death — who feel the constant gnawing sense that we need to do better, work more, build a better us on our own. Jesus invites — commands even — us weary ones to come to him, to learn his ways as we rest (Matthew 11:28-29), as we pass him this burden and learn from him, like a trainee learns from their trainer as they carry the load, and as we learn to be like him — gentle, humble in heart, good — while we find rest for our souls; rest from the relentless pressure to do better.

This is why he can say his yoke — the bit of wood on the shoulders of a beast of burden, connecting them to the one walking beside them so they would share a load — this is why he can say his yoke is easy and his burden light (Matthew 11:29).

Even as we also embrace the paradox of denying ourselves daily and taking up our cross — dying — and following him (Luke 9:23, Matthew 16:24). But note, part of this dying is dying to the idea that we are kings or queens of our own lives; that we are Lord; that we have to save ourselves and build our own security and always be better. And it is hard to write that story into our bones; to die to the false gospels that say be better, do more, self-justify, self-improve, self-satisfy, and to the bits of our heart that still believe that deforming lie. We have learned that story by heart — some of us — from the world, from our families, from our inner voice, and our loves for false gods.

Jesus offers a different foundation, one that will last, one we can build on differently as we inhabit his life and take on new habits that we learn by heart.

I reckon we see a pattern of discipleship in Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3. Paul picks up the words of Jesus and calls himself a wise builder (1 Corinthians 3:10). At this point he is talking about the way he has taken the words of Jesus and not just used them to form himself as a house disconnected from others, but to produce fruit — loving and serving the folks he is writing to. He has laid a foundation for them and now he wants this church to build with care; to produce their own wise lives.

Jesus is the foundation not just of the church — as a corporate reality — but for Christians. And this passage keeps the corporate and the individual in tension. Each one should build; each one is a house (1 Corinthians 3:11). But we all together are God’s house — his temple — where the Spirit dwells in our midst (1 Corinthians 3:16).

This week we are thinking about the individual part — how we live in the world in our body and pursue a wise life with a heart that produces fruit because we practice what Jesus teaches ourselves. Next week and the week after we are going to expand to think about the corporate realities we are part of as we inhabit space together.

Paul will take this idea of being a temple of the Holy Spirit to apply it to how we use our bodies — reminding us that Jesus, our Lord, redeemed us. We — the church — are the fruits of his life, his listening to God, what he is building. That we have the Spirit is part of God’s plan to recreate humans; giving us new hearts that can love and obey God as fulfilment of the prophets. So as those bought at a price, we are invited to honour God with our bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

This is what it looks like to build with care on the foundation laid for us by Jesus (1 Corinthians 3:10); to learn the life of Jesus by heart so that what we treasure in our hearts brings forth good, not evil, as we practice what Jesus teaches (Luke 6:45).

Building with care is not just about thinking, it is about creating this way of life in the body that honours God — that means good things come out of a heart that treasures Jesus and a life built on him (1 Corinthians 3:11, 23). Paul is a wise builder, building on the foundation of Jesus toward the reality that we are now of Christ, just as he is of God.

As Paul unpacks this idea in the next chapter, he urges the Corinthians to build this life by imitating him, and in his absence, by imitating Timothy — who is also faithful in the Lord, who is an imitator of Paul following in this chain of imitators (1 Corinthians 4:16-17).

Timothy will remind the Corinthians of Paul’s example — his way of life in Christ Jesus, which lines up with what he teaches (1 Corinthians 4:17). Timothy is a disciple of Jesus and an apprentice of Paul. Paul’s way of life is not just words, it is this visible pattern. He will say later they should imitate his example — what they hear and see in his life, and Timothy’s — as they imitate Jesus. This is part of how discipleship happens: finding wise people who are imitating Jesus who will teach us. But it is also about following a way of life that lines up with the message of Jesus, and with his life.

I asked earlier what the model of transformation you have in your head is — how you would go about learning a new way of life by heart — and what that looks like when it comes to discipleship. A lot of the resources I have been reading for this series are from a guy named Dallas Willard, or a second generation of pastors and counsellors deeply impacted by him. Willard’s book Renovation of the Heart sketches out his basic idea that discipleship is about character formation that comes about as a result of our inward renewal — a renewal brought about by the Spirit as we connect with and imitate Jesus; as we become apprentices of his way, those yoked to him who do what he says.

One of his offsiders was a guy named James Bryan Smith. He came up with a shape to summarise both Willard’s framework and the New Testament. It is a kind of picture of the building blocks that seem to lead to this sort of transformation. If you remember that triangle from the video last chapter of unseen forces shaping us, these are a kind of antidote.

He suggests our path to transformation involves embracing the story of Jesus as our story, so that we learn how Jesus lived and what he calls us to, and having this enacted and embodied in communities where we find examples that we want to imitate and where we act as examples for each other. This formation is not just about introspection, it actually happens in relationships where we experience and practice the love of God and love of neighbour together. And the third corner is about practicing things; exercising — learning Jesus by heart, becoming who we aim to be by imitating Jesus repeatedly, practicing his commands as we encounter them in the Gospels and the New Testament. And the Holy Spirit is at work in each of these activities.

This seems to me to be a reasonable shape. We will look more at our community and relationships over the next few chapters. But I wonder what practices you might adopt to learn the way of Jesus by heart; what rule of life or way of life you might build to be a wise builder who is treasuring him in your heart.

His book has a bunch of suggestions for soul training, but so do some of the other books I will mention like The Other Half of the Church and the Practicing the Way course. Over the course of this series we will be thinking about the rhythms and structures — how we live in space and time. We want to build into our lives so we are practicing the way of Jesus, glorifying God with our bodies.

This starts with us. It starts with how we feed our hearts through the way we use our bodies, which is a question of who we serve, who we are ruled by. Are we going to be people ruled by Jesus, who call him Lord and practice what he says, who build our life-as-a-house on him as a foundation, shaped or structured by his rule at the level of our practices?

Or will we be ruled by someone or something else, serving someone else, having our hearts — our habits — shaped by the habitats set up by other masters who are not as gentle, or forgiving, who place heavy burdens on our shoulders?

If we are not deliberate about embracing a rule of life where we are ruled by Jesus, then other people — other rulers — will fill that vacuum. Or we will be practicing some other way and being formed accordingly. This sort of practice — taking on new habits, shaping the elephant, writing things into our bones so they become automatic, building our house wisely — it is not easy. It is not easy to learn to put off the heavy yoke of the world, what we are used to, to replace it with the easier burden of Jesus. Automating godliness.

It is hard work to unlearn things, and at times you might feel like I do on the sports field or at the piano. But hopefully it will be life-giving and liberating. And at its core the idea is to build on Jesus, to be planted in him, yoked to him.

Discipleship is about practicing the teaching of Jesus, imitating him, imitating those in our lives who imitate him, so that we learn him by heart. But it is not about self-mastery, it is about finding life loving God and knowing his love wholeheartedly so that we can love others. It is about making time and space to spend time with Jesus, in prayer, in listening to his word, so that we can put it into practice. It is about learning and experiencing that he is good, that he is humble in heart and gentle, learning to stop striving to carry our own burdens, being overwhelmed by busyness and the burden of self-improvement or self-transformation, coming to him for rest, taking up our cross and dying to those false gospels and the patterns of the world they create and that sustain them while destroying us daily.

And because we know Jesus is good and that he is leading us to life, being prepared to suffer when we reject those patterns and experience the cost, or even being prepared to suffer like Jesus as we engage in costly love for our neighbours because we are learning the goodness of God. This is what it means to produce fruit — fruit that comes from a heart shaped by Jesus and practicing his commands.

September 27, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter One — The Architecture of our Lives

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

If Being Human was about who we are (or whose we are) and Before the Throne was about ‘where we are’ — on earth but also ‘raised and seated with Jesus in the heavenly realm,’ this series is about how we live in time and space; how we inhabit the world as humans, and as followers of Jesus.

The idea is that if we want to be disciples of Jesus — people being formed by him because his love and Spirit are transforming us — this happens as we inhabit time and space, and this happens at the level of our habits.

Forming these habits that form us is tricky, because the world we live in — our habitat — has been set up by humans to deform us with an entirely different set of habits; leading us to worship entirely different gods and so forming different habits in us; habits we have to combat and unlearn.

We are not always good at spotting our habitat and how it shapes us. In fact, often we do not think about habitats or habits. We can slip into the modern, western way of thinking where we do not really reckon with the power of habits — unless we want to change to be “super successful,” where we might buy a self-help book about ‘atomic habits’ or ‘the power of habit.’

Right from school we are taught that we change — we are formed — by thinking the right thing; having the right ideas so we can choose how to live. This is true for how we think of church too — we emphasise content, listening to sermons, reading the Bible, talking about ideas — hoping education about God will transform into our character.

I know we have been combating this idea as a church for a while; thinking about what it means to live before the throne, and to see God’s kingdom on display at the table as we eat together in unity as a family or household united in Jesus. But this has been stuff we have thought about. What does it look like to change the architecture of our lives — our habitats and habits — to reflect these ideas? To move ‘ideas’ into ‘habits’?

And how much is the habitat we live in — our city, our homes — priming us towards different habits; forming us to worship different gods? There is an idea in our world that religion is a private thing best left for church spaces or your home — where the architecture of our world would be “neutral” — nothing like the Athens in our reading — and not like somewhere like Sri Lanka.

If you were the apostle Paul walking through Kataragama last year you would have recognised a community that is very religious — and then you would have seen a procession of elephants getting out of control and trampling the crowd, injuring thirteen people.

This will be a bit of a parable for us this morning. I think there are two principles to pull out: all space is set up to produce behaviours — habits — and these habits are a kind of worship that form and shape us. It is just easier to see how that is true in the stomping foot of a living elephant than in the architecture of our lives. We can try to stop that impact by grabbing the elephant by its tail — but it is better to be consciously deciding where that formation is happening.

Let’s jump into Athens, where the religious architecture is made of stone rather than flesh, and set the scene by looking at the end and beginning of our reading. At the end, Paul has given what looks like a pretty compelling sermon to the council in Athens whose job it is to decide whether a god will get space in their assembly of gods — symbolised by the Parthenon, that massive building that still dominates the skyline in the city of Athens today.

When he is finished, there are a few people who are convinced to change the architecture of their lives; to alter their altars, so to speak. Some want to hear more, some believe, but it seems most of the crowd sneered (Acts 17:32). They are entrenched in their beliefs; their habits. They have been formed as worshippers of the gods of their city; their convictions align with the convictions carved into the architecture of Athens.

What Paul sees in the opening of our reading as he wanders through this city is that it is full of idols (Acts 17:16). I do not know if this is your experience when you wander down the Queen Street Mall, or Boundary Street, or West End, or in Garden City or your local Westfield — can you spot the architecture of these habitats and what it is designed to do to human hearts and minds? The trampling elephants?

It is more obvious for Paul in Athens because it was a city filled with statues and altars and temples — full of things designed to pull people away from the worship of Yahweh, the creator; to form them — or deform them. Paul’s heart is attuned to this, and to the impact of this sort of habitat. He is distressed.

He starts inviting people to meet the living God — he is preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection (Acts 17:18). He ends up with an invitation to the Areopagus, this council — and there is some evidence he crafts his speech according to the rules they used to accept or reject new gods as he speaks to them — but he is also drawing on his observations of their habitat.

“I see that you are in every way very religious”

— Acts 17:22–23.

Now, let us suspend for a moment our belief that our city is not religious; that religion is a private matter — and let us imagine that religion is about what we give our lives to; what we serve because it is what we see as ultimate and powerful. Let us take a moment to consider how our city’s architecture is just as contested and confusing as the polytheism of Athens, and how religious we still are. Our cities are full of monuments to human ingenuity — our capacity to shape the world using technology and technique; to money — banks and skyscrapers named after banks; our belief that education transforms — and so our universities, where the architecture is often similar to the architecture of the Athenian forum — and our belief that we can buy or consume our way to the good life, through pleasure and purchasing. This is before we get into the ground-level architecture of our own lives.

Athens, though, is so religious it has every box ticked — even an altar to an unknown god — which is an opportunity Paul cannot pass up. There is not much architecture in their city pointing to this God — no church buildings, and not many Christians living lives that model the gospel yet.

One of the criteria Athens had for introducing a god via this council was to address the question of what sort of physical architecture they would need — what sort of temple and altar and cycle of sacrifices. Paul challenges this category — not so much by saying “do not think about habitats,” but by claiming that the whole world is meant to be geared to the worship of its creator. The Lord of heaven and earth — the God who made the world — does not live in temples built by human hands (Acts 17:24–25). This is part of the game-changer that happens in the start of Acts, where God’s Spirit comes to dwell in humans who receive life from Jesus as his gift to us. This life is not a thing we earn through ritual; but it is a life that comes with new habits as we are transformed into living temples. We do not serve God the way a pagan god is served through sacrifices on various altars, because the living God has served us through his sacrifice. He is not a taker, like the other gods of Athens — but a giver — even to the Athenians who are not worshipping him. He gives everyone life and breath and everything else (Acts 17:25).

An Athenian believes their prosperity — if they have any — comes from the specific collection of gods they have chosen to serve; to worship; to sacrifice to — that their prosperity is earned through getting the mix right between their efforts — their habits — and what those efforts trigger as they engage in their habitats — these religious spaces. But Paul says everything they have is actually a gift from a God they do not even know, let alone worship.

Here are the key verses for our whole series. Paul says all nations — all the peoples of the earth, who have built all the cities of the earth — all our habitats — all people are made by this one God so that we might inhabit the whole earth. This is a throwback to Genesis and the idea of being God’s image-bearing people who are fruitful and multiply and fill the earth — and it is God who locates each nation — each person — in time and space, marking out the time and the space we will inhabit (Acts 17:26) — with a purpose — so that we would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him (Acts 17:27–28).

Maybe this is why idols are so distressing for Paul — they get in the way of this purpose; they stop people being truly human; imaging the God who made them. These images and the habits that come with them — the habitats we build around idols — stop us inhabiting the world the way God created us to; they deform us; they keep us from reaching out for him and finding him; they blind us to how proximate he is, and even how much he wants us to know the source of our life and breath and being.

And look — maybe you are here with us this morning still searching; maybe you have come along to church because you have noticed that the architecture of our city still includes these spaces and these communities offering some sort of answer; some sort of meaning — and pointing to some sort of God amidst all the other choices you have. I hope you can find meaning and purpose with us — not in us — but in God — the God who wants you to find him, and who gives life.

Maybe you are here this morning as someone who is a Christian but you feel this gnawing sense; this lack of meaning and purpose; or like you are caught between so many choices; so many options; a habitat that is confusing and a set of habits that do not align with who God wants you to be — sins, addictions, wired-in responses to the world based on what you have done, or what has been done to you. This series is an opportunity to take a fresh look at the architecture of your life and to let God do some reforming.

Paul’s message in Athens is a message for us — whether it is about our idols, what we look to for meaning or purpose; or our self-help — our self-actualisation or self-idolisation — where we work on our self-image through sacrifice, even harnessing the “power of habit” out of some legalistic desire to be better.

We are God’s children — this is all humans, not just Christians — and so we should not think that being more human is a matter of human design and skill (Acts 17:29), whether that is idol-building or harnessing the right power of atomic habits. It would be easy, as we talk about inhabiting time and space and the way our habits form us, to become Christian legalists who think nailing good works is a path to the “better us,” the “truer us” — to focus on self-improvement and make us the drivers of our destiny. This is a tension Christians have grappled with for the entire history of the church.

That is not the gospel though. The gospel liberates us from legalism, and from false worship, and from self-reliance because it liberates us from human rule — whether the rulers of the cities we live in, the architects of our behaviours and our slavery to sin and to deforming powers and deadly idols — or just our need to master ourselves through skill — and places us as children who are invited to learn life from our heavenly Father and from his Son — our king — Jesus. This comes with different habits, and it helps us to think about the architecture of our life differently — but hopefully in a way that is liberating and life-giving and re-humanising and good for us, rather than destructive — because we are pursuing what we are made for; not on our terms by discovering the “true self” within and never being sure if we have quite understood ourselves — but by understanding the nature of the divine being in ways that mean we begin to reflect his life in his world.

There is some fun stuff in the background of this Acts sermon around the nations and their gods — and God overlooking ignorant worship (Acts 17:30). I will not go super deep into it, but there is an interesting thing where, if you dip into the Old Testament, the nations do not tend to be condemned for idolatry — they have been given to powers and rulers who are not Yahweh — and you can kind of pinpoint this moment in the story to the story of Babel when the nations are given their boundaries (Genesis 11:9), or to this idea in Deuteronomy that the nations have been given to other powers — “sons of God” — while Israel have been marked as God’s children (Deuteronomy 32:8). The story, though, is that all of these nations are human; all created by God, and that God is greater than all these powers one might worship. In Jesus — and his victory over sin and death and Satan and these powers — God now commands all people everywhere to repent (Acts 17:30); to come back to him and find their humanity in his kingdom; in reflecting him. As we saw in our last series — this is the turning point in the Lord of heaven and earth’s plan to bring heaven and earth back together as one.

This day — this future — is where he will judge the world with justice through the man he has appointed — Jesus — the one raised from the dead (Acts 17:31). This day — this future — is now the guidepost for life inhabiting time and space; a reason to seek out and perhaps find the God who sought us in Jesus.

And if we are those who hear Paul’s message and believe, this comes with a new architecture; because the architecture of the city of Athens — its idols — is a dead end and will not last. You have to wonder what life was like from here on for Dionysius, who was a member of this gatekeeping council, or Damaris (Acts 17:34). Luke, who writes Acts, often does this thing where he names people along the way, where I think he is both indicating they are a source in his investigation and description of the life of the church, and that they are people in these church communities; living, breathing witnesses for his first readers. You can imagine Dionysius going home and cleaning the idol statues out of his home, and maybe renouncing his job deciding which idols do and do not get worshipped, and Damaris rethinking who she turned to in prayer to secure her fortunes — and even what “fortune” looked like — as she worked out how to serve a living God of heaven and earth, not a statue contained in a temple. That this came with new habits and a change of habitat as they discovered what it means to live as children of God; and, hopefully, a sense of liberation from the need to get everything right in order to live.

Their challenge in their city is our challenge in our city: inhabiting God’s world as God’s children. Inhabiting our time as the time God has appointed us to exist in — in history, within the boundaries of our lands. Inhabiting time and space is not a choice; it is a given — given to us by God.

Habits are not just atomically powerful tools for transformation; they are not just areas for legalism and self-actualisation or self-improvement; they are also, to some extent, givens. We are creatures of habit; shaped by the habitats we operate in and our vision of the divine, and what we work towards and serve with our bodies.

The architecture of our lives — the space we inhabit — whether our city, like Athens, or our homes, and how we structure our time — is full of idols. It is geared to produce habits and rhythms, and if we are not deliberate in our choices, or fortunate enough to occupy spaces deliberately shaped to form us in godliness by others, the habitats we operate in deform and trample us like elephants.

In Romans, Paul talks about this architecture as the patterns of this world, and he invites worshippers of Jesus, as we engage in worship — the habitual use of our bodies — in view of God’s sacrifice, his gift of life for us, to not conform to the trampling elephants of this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:1–2). For Paul, this is a product of God’s Spirit being at work in us, transforming us into the image of Jesus.

It is this idea of our minds I want to zero in on today as we begin this series. Preachers get into big trouble trying to sound like experts on brain science — in part because the science itself is always developing and is pretty contested because we are complicated.

One study suggested just using a picture of a brain scan in a news story — and probably a sermon — means you can make just about anything seem plausible; that the image provides a physical basis for something abstract, and that we tend to want simple explanations of cognitive phenomena — brain stuff.

“We argue that brain images are influential because they provide a physical basis for abstract cognitive processes, appealing to people’s affinity for reductionistic explanations of cognitive phenomena.”

— McCabe and Castel, ‘Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning’

But another study debunked this one; they tried to replicate the experiment and found that brain images exert no influence on people’s agreement, but that “neurosciency language” can make bad explanations seem better.

“We arrive at a more precise estimate of the size of the effect, concluding that a brain image exerts little to no influence on the extent to which people agree with the conclusions of a news article.”

— Michael, Newman, et al, ‘On the (non)persuasive power of a brain image’

With all that in mind — and with us thinking about transforming our minds as we inhabit time and space — Daniel Kahneman was a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist who wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow about how our brains work.

He brought in this idea of “System 1” and “System 2” thinking. System 2 thinking is the kind of stuff we aim at in churches when it comes to formation — thinking; rational decision-making where we are conscious and applying principles of logic and agency.

He reckons System 2 accounts for about five percent of our actions, while System 1 does most of the work — it is our intuition and instinct; what we do on autopilot.

Jonathan Haidt is another psychologist — he is going a bit viral at the moment because of his book on social media and anxiety — but before that book he wrote a couple of books about how our brains work and how they shape our moral actions and judgments.

He used a metaphor that is a bit easier to grasp for System 1 and 2 thinking: the rider (System 2) — the conscious part of our brain — and the elephant (System 1) — the automatic part — where the idea is that it is nice to think that the rider is in control; that we steer our elephants towards goodness and truth, but really so much of who we are, and what we believe is right and wrong, happens at the level of our emotions and guts.

I reckon this is true of our discipleship too — the question of what god we serve and how we live that out. I do not know if this is your experience with sin, but I reckon I can be believing, in my rider-brain, all the truths I get up and preach and read and speak, while at the same time feeling pulled again and again into anger and lust and all sorts of patterns of this world and passions of the body — ruts, addictions, bad habits — that deform me and harm others without conscious thought.

The battle to be in control feels like a battle to steer an elephant before it tramples me, or others — trying to grab its tail while it is stampeding.

So here is my theory: the architecture of our idolatrous world is set up to feed our elephants and steer them in destructive ways.

Idolatry and worship work not just on the conscious mind, but our whole minds — our intuitions and instincts. These are the patterns that need renewing and transforming, not just our thinking. While it is great to get our brains in control and try to steer the elephant, maybe we also need to work at training the elephant with a new architecture — to pull us towards godliness; to keep in step with the Spirit so God produces fruit in us, rather than us producing destruction.

One of the ways we feed this elephant is through habits. It used to be a criticism of churches that did lots of ritual stuff that, over time, the repetition became less meaningful — but I wonder if that is because it moved from being conscious to automatic, and whether we live in a culture that puts a disproportionate amount of importance on the conscious bit of our brains because we like the idea that we are masters in control with the right information.

The Other Half of Church — a book about brain science and how we think about church and discipleship — is worth grabbing if you are interested in thinking through some of this.

We will dip into it throughout the series. The authors take the same model — the slow and fast parts of our brain — and suggest we have built churches to cater just for the bit that is impressed with good arguments and logic and stories and strategies, at the expense of shaping our intuitions and relational depth.

They reckon this part of the brain — the elephant (though they do not use Haidt’s model) — is shaped through attachment; through schooling our emotions and our intuitions by feeling secure, and connected, and attached to God — like children to a loving, nurturing parent — and in a community where we are being shaped and nurtured.

The problem is that often how we approach church is about our rider; the slower system — and we live lives that are hurried and almost constantly on autopilot — another function of our habitat. We can try to put the rider in charge but, to do that, we need to be slow and unhurried, and not anxious or panicked. That elephant stampede happened when loud noises startled the elephants.

“We were pursuing discipleship by focusing on strategies centered on the left brain and neglecting the right brain.”

— Jim Wilder, Michel Hendricks, The Other Half of Church.

So this series is an invitation to slow down, to be deliberate; to try to get the rider in control — to use our time and space to make conscious decisions aligned with the truths we believe, but also to bed down habits and security into the elephant so it does not get panicked and crush us or others; so we automate godliness rather than sin.

It is to discern some of the habitats we live in — the idols in our architecture — the patterns of our world — and their deforming power, and to make decisions about our habitats and our habits. It is to take up this search we were made for; reaching out for and finding the God who lives; who is in heaven; who is not destructive like a rampaging elephant, but a generous giver — who gives us life and breath and everything else — because we are his children (Acts 17:28). When we find him we find a good Father, who is also seeking and reaching out for us, delighting in a relationship with us.

Repenting means turning from the gods and patterns — the elephants — who stomp us into their image, and returning to him as our Father, the giver of our life, and being shaped accordingly. It means restructuring our lives — how we inhabit time and space — as those who have found life with him.

Justin Earley has written a couple of resources we will look at this series for how we live together in time and space. In his book about building habits of purpose for an age of distraction, he talks about realising how the shape of his own life was a bit like Athens. His house might have been decorated with Bible verses and imagery — Christian content — but the underlying architecture of his habits, his habitat, was like everyone else’s.

Repenting involves transforming not just the decorations in our life, but our structures and rhythms — how we live in the place and time God has put us, with our bodies and our time, as children of God; knowing what he is like and experiencing joy through our attachment to him as those who can come before his throne.

“While the house of my life was decorated with Christian content, the architecture of my habits was just like everyone else’s.” — Justin Earley, The Common Rule.

When we are imagining what life might have looked like from then on for Dionysius and Damaris in Athens, I reckon it is safe to assume the pattern of the first church — its habits and habitats — might have shaped their lives. Those who repented and found life in Jesus devoted themselves not just to learning — shaping the rider through the apostles’ teaching — but to connection: fellowship with God and each other, the breaking of bread, and prayer (Acts 2:42). They met together as a rhythm; not just in the temple — which they could do in Jerusalem — but in homes, around tables, eating together, praising God, experiencing joy and security and connection (Acts 2:46–47). Inhabiting time and space together with God; learning to be like Jesus.

The final resource we worked through in small groups during this series was the Practicing the Way course. We used their material in Growth Groups — meeting in homes — where we are not just learning information, but experiencing this connection. We used this video as an introduction to assessing the architecture of our habits; trying to spot the way elephants are stampeding us.

September 26, 2025 Add Comment

Before the Throne — Table of Contents

If the ‘Being Human‘ series asked the question ‘who we are’ (or whose we are), this ‘Before the Throne‘ series asked ‘where we are’. The next series-into-blog-chapter thing will be a series exploring how we inhabit this reality at the level of our habits in time and space.

These were the chapters, the ‘imagery’ suggested for aiding our imaginations in prayer as those ‘raised and seated in the heavenly realms’ for each week is listed in the parenthesis.

  1. Chapter One — Gazing at the Son (Glorious light)
  2. Chapter Two — Paradise Found (The Garden)
  3. Chapter Three — On the Mountain Top (Mountains)
  4. Chapter Four — The Heaven on Earth House (Temple)
  5. Chapter Five — The Chariot of Fire (Throne)
  6. Chapter Six — Facing the Fire (The lamb seated on the Throne of Judgment)
  7. Chapter Seven — The Hands of the Crucified King (Jesus)
  8. Chapter Eight — Joining the Heavenly Crowd in Worship (The heavenly choir)
  9. Chapter Nine — The Heavenly City (The garden-mountain-temple-city)

September 26, 2025 1 Comment

Before the Throne — Chapter Nine — The Heavenly City

This was talk nine, and the final talk, in a series preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2024. You can listen to this sermon on the podcast, or watch it here.

We are at the end. How have you gone with all this picture stuff — engaging your imagination — your ability to make images — if you have that ability — as we have worked through these images of heaven through the Bible together?

We started out with Paul’s prayer in Ephesians — that the eyes of the heart of his readers might be enlightened (Ephesians 1:18). If you are joining us, we have been leaning into this idea from Paul, and it is just worth recapping as we set the scene today. His prayer is that we might know the hope to which he has called us — the picture of the future that drives us. This is what hope is really; an imagining of a good outcome that shapes how we live. Paul speaks of this as the riches of his glorious inheritance in or for his holy people.

He has already unpacked a bit of this earlier in his introduction to this letter where he talks about God’s plans and purposes that he has revealed in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:8–9). He speaks of God’s plan for the fulfilment of time — where he will bring all things in heaven and on earth together in unity under Jesus. This is what we read John describe in his vision from Revelation. This is the hope Paul wants our hearts to be captivated by; what he is praying we will see.

In another letter — Colossians — Paul talks about God having all his fullness dwell in Jesus, and through him all things being reconciled — being brought together in harmony — whether that is on earth or things in heaven, or heaven and earth. This is secured, ultimately, through Jesus’ blood shed on the cross (Colossians 1:19–20).

The Son of God who reigns in heaven is reigning with the purpose of bringing heaven — where God lives — and earth — together. This is what that video from the Bible Project covered — the idea that our hope, the trajectory of reality as the Bible describes it, is heaven and earth coming together as one eternal reality where we dwell with God.

We have seen that Paul says in some way this is not just our future, it is our present. Those who have received God’s Spirit so we are united with Jesus where he is now, have been raised and seated with him in the heavenly realms — we have been located in heaven (Ephesians 2:6).

So we live on earth as walking temples, where God dwells on earth (Ephesians 2:21–22). We are walking, talking, imagining, living, serving pictures of the future of all things; those who have been reconciled to God, and to each other.

Paul says because of all this we can approach God with freedom and confidence — this is what we do as we pray — we approach God in this heavenly throne room (Ephesians 3:12). This is what Paul was doing for the readers of his letter as he prayed that the eyes of our hearts might be enlightened. This is the reality he was seeing as he prayed that his readers would see.

It is the reality he was encountering in a prayer we will come back to as he describes himself kneeling before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth — all the beings who will be brought together — derive our name. That is a way of saying we owe our existence and role in the cosmos to him (Ephesians 3:14–15).

Paul ends that prayer in Ephesians 3 with this idea that even as he is kneeling before God, imagining the splendour of the throne room of God — coming before the throne — even then our imaginations are limited. We are not getting the full picture of this reality of our hope in God’s goodness. God can do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine according to this power he has described — the power that has raised and seated us and that will reconcile all things (Ephesians 3:20–21).

Our imaginations will fall short, and the eyes of our hearts are always up for more enlightenment; more contemplation or imagination of the future; of our hope, through more time before the throne of God. This is so that we are more and more caught up in this calling to be living temples — heaven on earth people living in this overlap, anticipating and picturing the future in our imaginations and our lives.

There is this idea that we can spend so much time thinking about heaven as Christians that we become no use on earth. We sometimes see this in how Christians write off pursuing justice in political issues in this world, or speaking up — trading off doing “earthly stuff” against investing in evangelism — proclaiming the Gospel. Or in how we think about climate change, where maybe you have heard Christians say “it is all going to burn up so we should focus on saving souls.” Or maybe it is the idea that hope is a sort of naïve optimism that stops us confronting reality as it really is, and seeing the suffering not just in our lives, but in those around us as a serious indication of something deeply wrong with reality that should leave us grieving or crying out for justice.

But I think the opposite is the case. I think the more we spend time imagining this hope — an earth reconciled and connected to heaven — and see our calling as living like heaven on earth people, the more this time dwelling with God before his throne in prayer and worship, cultivating hope, will translate into lives that embody this hope now. It will shape lives that pursue a picture of heaven-on-earth life, and a hopeful vision of the future that frames how we suffer differently, and how we enter the suffering of others.

So the working theory this morning is that we maybe do not spend enough time hoping and picturing this future — we do not spend enough time before the throne, contemplating heaven. We would maybe be more useful on earth if we did, and even more effective in our evangelism. Priests in the Bible — those sent out to carry God’s presence in the world — are shaped by time spent in that presence; by understanding the God we represent. The working theory for this morning is that the more time we spend dwelling in this hope — imagining it, picturing it, meditating on it, prayerfully cultivating a sense of who God is, the God who will always be immeasurably beyond our imagination in terms of his goodness and love, the God who is committed to this reconciliation, this heaven-and-earth future — the more meaningful and purposeful our life on earth will be, and the better our witness will be to the world.

This is how John’s vision works in the first century. He is writing to Christians facing incredible suffering, looking at Rome enacting its vision of heaven on earth, tempted to jump ship and worship the emperor and enjoy the fruits of the empire, tempted not just by the carrot of sharing in that power and beauty but the stick of being set on fire as candles in a garden party if they do not. John’s vision of heaven is meant to reframe their reality, to hold them fast to Jesus, and to expose this Roman empire as a false, beastly, destructive vision of heaven — so they will live as faithful witnesses; God’s church, his kingdom of priests.

John’s vision ends with this picture of the end — of heaven and earth made new, the old passing away, and there is no longer any sea (Revelation 21:1).

Now — for those of us who love the beach — I do not think this means there is no more Sunshine Coast. The sea was a picture of chaos and destruction — think about the waters at the start of the story of the Bible. But in the context of heaven and earth — the sea is also that barrier separating the heavens and the earth — the crystal dome under the throne of God (Exodus 24:10; Ezekiel 1:22). Moses goes through it at the top of the mountain; Ezekiel sees it above the cherubim who are carrying around God’s throne, and it is in that giant bowl in the temple.

John describes this sea of glass in front of the throne earlier in Revelation (Revelation 4:6). I think we are meant to imagine this as the vault from Genesis 1 that separated water from water (Genesis 1:6–7). It is the dome God opened up to send the flood in the Noah story. For the ancient reader who did not have telescopes or spaceships, this was how they imagined a real physical barrier between God’s realm and ours in the sky. And that barrier is gone.

Because that barrier is gone, the holy city — the new Jerusalem — can come down from heaven into earth (Revelation 21:2). The new Jerusalem, this heavenly city, is the predominant image from what we read together. It is this heavenly city that ties all the images from our series together — the light, the mountain, the garden, the temple, the throne in the holy of holies where God acts as judge and king, and the dwelling place of the Lamb of God — the Son of God, the bridegroom as Jesus describes himself in John’s Gospel. Here we are meeting the bride — this city — prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. This is a picture of Jesus being united with his beloved church, a permanent union between heaven and earth.

A voice comes from the throne to interpret this image for us — “look, God is dwelling now with his people; the barrier is gone. God and humans are reconciled in this new heaven-meets-earth space” (Revelation 21:3). He comes as the God whose hands are outstretched to wipe away every tear from our eyes. He comes as the God who defeats all the things that harm us and separate us from God (Revelation 21:4) — no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the old order of things is dead and gone.

The one seated on the throne says, “I am making all things new.” All the sad things are coming untrue (Revelation 21:5). This is our hope, and the one on the throne says it is trustworthy and true.

Do you believe it? Can you conceive it in your imagination? Just take a moment. What would that mean for your life in the future? What does this look like, beloved of God — to dwell with him, to have all the remnants of sin and death removed from you, your grief and pain wiped away by the God who loves you?

Can you picture a hand wiping away your tears and with that swipe, removing the burden of everything you have done — and everything done to you — so that guilt, and shame, and trauma, and wounds are dealt with? These barriers that have left you feeling separated from God, feeling unworthy — gone. That shame you feel because you never measure up to your own standards, let alone the standards of others, even if only you know it. The harsh and violent words and deeds shouted in your face, or maybe worse — whispered. The indifference you have felt from those who should love you, the contempt. The never feeling like you belong. The guilt you carry because you have done the shouting, or the whispering, or the violence, or the contempt — the way you have consumed others in darkness, even just in the darkness of your imagination — dead, wiped away, as you are made new.

I know I need this picture. I know I need the comfort it offers. All things new. How might that hope shape your now?

Jesus — the one who was dead, and is now alive — joins his Father enthroned, and offers the water of life from this heavenly spring, to bathe in and be cleansed, to drink and never be thirsty — for free, without cost (Revelation 21:6).

This is what Jesus offers to those who are victorious (Revelation 21:7) — those who come to the throne and cling to him and worship him and are not lured into life — or death — with the beastly empires and destructive powers of heaven. The darkness. Children of God.

This newness can only happen as the old order is destroyed — which includes those powers committed to visiting violent suffering on others; those who have not been transformed by encountering God’s hand stretched out in embrace. They experience exclusion. This is uncomfortable for many of us, and we might hope that God is going to do that transforming work in every person whether we see it or not. But this pattern of death cannot exist in this new creation, and so the patterns — and those who live by them — are destroyed in the fiery power of the throne, in the second death (Revelation 21:8).

We might want to dwell on this idea, and it might devastate us to imagine this happening to us, or to our beloved — and I suspect it should. We should grapple with this as humans — humans who know we bring nothing to the table when it comes to God extending his embrace to us through Jesus. We know that we fall before the throne deserving whatever fate our neighbours experience. This is part of the vision that should motivate us to live as priests of the reconciling God who wants to bring all things to Jesus.

The marriage of the Lamb is totally consensual. He will not force those who reject him into this relationship, and this peaceful future cannot happen with those totally committed to ways of death that come from rejecting God, and God’s vision for life, destroying others in pursuit of their visions.

But we are not dwelling on that picture in John’s vision. John’s eyes are swept up, and so are ours, to examine this bride — the wife of the Lamb (Revelation 21:9–10). Here is where images we have contemplated come thick and fast. For starters we are on the mountain — great and high — seeing this holy city coming down, shining with the glory, the bright light of God (Revelation 21:11). It is bright like the jewels we saw in the prophets and earlier in Revelation — shining.

It has twelve gates. There are lots of twelves — it is a picture of completeness, like the twelve tribes and the twelve apostles — and there are twelve angels as well. It is a picture of heaven and earth coming together in this sort of fulfilment — filled up (Revelation 21:12). Then we start to get the hint that this city — the whole city — is a temple. Where the old Jerusalem contained both the temple and the palace so that God ruled from his throne and the Messiah from the throne in the palace, here there is one throne room (Revelation 21:15–16).

We are getting this tour from an angel who is carrying a measuring rod to help us see how this city is a square. This is a throwback to Ezekiel’s vision — also on a very high mountain — of a new temple in a city on a mountain (Ezekiel 40:2). Ezekiel also saw a heavenly figure with a measuring rod, as he saw a square-shaped building (Ezekiel 40:3). John is seeing a square-shaped city — it is huge, overwhelmingly big (Revelation 21:16).

Just as the temple in the Old Testament was covered in gold, this city is pure gold (Revelation 21:17). It is covered in precious stone, like the throne room of God. There are twelve walls with twelve types of jewels, and just in case you think “there is no such thing as twelve different jewels” — or if you are skeptical — John names them all (Revelation 21:19–20).

The gates are pearly. There is that sort of memey joke where we are meant to imagine ourselves standing before the pearly gates wondering if we get in. That is not the point here. Those united with Jesus are already in, and have already been behind the walls through the gates, in the city of gold, as those seated with Jesus (Revelation 21:21).

Because behind these walls there is no temple. This is a temple city; this is a holy of holies city. This is where God dwells. The Father and the Lamb “are the temple” (Revelation 21:22–23). This is where God’s throne is now located. The light is emanating from them. It does not even need the sun or the moon — those heavenly bodies that reflect God’s light and help us picture it. We are invited to imagine Father and Son as brighter than the sun, providing light to the nations. All the kings of the earth in this new reality — who do not serve beastly powers, but God — bring their splendour forward in worship of the one seated on the throne. They give as an act of worship, and the gates are open because there is no longer an enemy. There are no wolves lurking around at night waiting to do harm, that would make you shut the gates (Revelation 21:24–25).

Nothing impure will come in, nor those excluded who do what is shameful or deceitful. Only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life — those pulled out of death into life through Jesus’ blood, his death that makes peace and reconciles all things, offering reconciliation between us and God as heaven and earth are brought together (Revelation 21:26–27).

Then we get both a throwback to Ezekiel’s vision of the water being released from the temple, living water turning the earth into a fruitful paradise, and to the garden of Eden. Garden imagery is bursting out. We do not need gold carvings in a temple building, this is a picture of the real thing. The river is flowing through the city — like the waters flowed out of Eden and into the world — out from the throne. Not rivers of fiery judgment but watery life. Not a crystal sea working as a barrier, but life flowing from the throne (Revelation 22:1–2).

As the water flows, trees grow — especially the tree of life. It bears fruit constantly, monthly, giving life to all who dwell with God, and its leaves heal the nations, bringing peace and tranquility (Revelation 22:3). No longer will there be any curse. Nothing is separating us from God, from life in this place. We are no longer exiled from the tree, or from the gardener who plants it. Life is no longer secured through toil in a world turned against us (Revelation 22:3–4).

The throne is there and we will live before it, as God’s people, serving him. That is a worship word. He delights in giving light and life and love to us. We will see his face — a heavenly encounter impossible to conceive fully in the Old Testament, hinted at in the life of Jesus as people saw God’s glory in human flesh. Again — no more night, because God will give light, and he will reign forever (Revelation 22:5).

This is earth — all the goodness and wonder of God’s creation, heaven-on-earth spaces, being fused with heaven, all the glory and wonder of God’s throne room, and the heavenly human who rules on the throne with God, being brought together.

This is the story of the Bible — this is our hope. It seems beyond our capacity to fully comprehend, right — and I think all of this imagery is analogy — giving us images and language to shape our hope. At the heart of this hope is life; intimate life with the God who loves us and will make us new, and will give us life with him and with each other forever.

But it is not our present. Our present is life in this now and not yet. Now those who have God’s Spirit dwelling in us, so that through us — God’s living temple — God lives in the world. We are those who are reconciled to God and are a picture of heaven and earth being reconciled as we inhabit space and time. We are those who are raised and seated and can come before the throne of heaven — with all this splendour surrounding it — in prayer and worship, so that we carry the presence of the God who rules into the world. With the hope that all the curse, and tears, and pain — will pass, must pass — and that all things will be made new as we are being made new.

So what difference does this make for actual life on the ground? What difference do all these pictures make for us?

Well, for starters, I think, this changes how we understand and articulate the Gospel, and how we live as those who believe the Gospel. The Gospel is not just about our souls escaping to some cloudy disembodied life with harps. It is about God working to reconcile all things to himself — undoing the separation between us and him, and finally the separation from the beginning of the story of the Bible — between heaven and earth.

This happens and is secured through Jesus becoming human, shedding his blood on the cross, being raised from the dead, and exalted to the heavenly throne room as the Son of God and the Son of Man — the heaven-on-earth king becoming the human-in-heaven ruler.

With this comes the idea that we are not just saved from sin, but saved for life. We are saved for life with God, and life as God’s ambassadors of reconciliation; his heaven-on-earth people; his living temple who live lives that picture and enact our hope. Not because we can bring the transformation that only God can at the end of the story, but because through our witness God delights in bringing that transformation life by life through the Gospel, and bit by bit through the parts of the earth we cultivate in our work and service to tell this story.

And this salvation — this restoration and reconciliation with God — flows out through our individual lives into our communities and the things we create together as we work, perhaps in ways that give whole nations and societies glimpses of God’s goodness. It does not always. So often Christian attempts to bring heaven to earth look more cursed than blessed, and I reckon this happens most when we embrace the violent power games of the world, rather than encountering the God we meet in the crucified Lamb so that we see God brings heaven to earth through sacrificial, reconciling love that first seeks to embrace enemies, and to cultivate life not death, as witnesses to God’s nature.

I think our outworking of this story — this Gospel — goes wrong because we are not dwelling in God’s presence; in prayer, in worship, in meditating on his word — in ways that shape our vision and then our action. And it goes right, in truly beautiful ways, when we do; when our actions in the world are grounded in our life before the throne; where our acts serving God are shaped by worshipping God as God is.

But this is our job — right — bringing heaven to earth in a tangible way as temples, or as Paul says elsewhere, ambassadors, or citizens of heaven (Philippians 3:20-21). This is where we belong in a life-defining way, and our hope is that Jesus, who dwells there, will bring transformation by his power — the power that will bring everything under control — and will also bring that transformation to our bodies so that they will be glorious like his body is glorious.

In Philippians this hope — this citizenship — produces rejoicing, even in suffering, and a life marked by gentleness (Philippians 4:4-6). It frees us from being caught up in the worries about earthly things. This is not to say our bodies will not experience anxiety or be marked by trauma, or that we should not engage earthly help for those real phenomena. But we do approach these threats, our experience of pain and suffering, the scars and wounds we bear, knowing these are not ultimate. We are not bound by those who would limit our citizenship to our bodies on earth, and seek to destroy us by breaking our minds and bodies and conforming us to their desires.

Instead, we live as those near to God; those who have access to this heavenly throne room even in the midst of our worst embodied, earthly moments. We are not prisoners. Paul, though, writes this letter when his body is physically imprisoned. Instead, in every moment, in every situation, we can enter the presence of God; enter his throne by prayer and petition. We can close our eyes to earth and open them to heaven; to the wonder we see described in these visions, presenting our requests to God, being healed and transformed by encountering him.

This, I think, is what Paul is praying for his readers in Ephesians, where we started all this — that we might comprehend, as much as is possible, that this reality is really our reality now. That it makes a difference. That comprehending this power is the basis not just of our hope for the future, but our life in the present.

This is what Paul models as he prays in Ephesians; a prayer we might pray kneeling beside Paul — perhaps physically — as those who come before God.

Paul prays that we might really see the one on the throne; that we might really know his goodness and love as we dwell here — that this is all about something beyond our imagination, but that grappling with this begins with an act of imagination; of opening our hearts to where the Bible says we are.

September 25, 2025 1 Comment