Oxygen Conference

We spent from Saturday till Thursday in Sydney with 3 other guys from church. Our main reason was to attend the Oxygen conference where John Piper and John Lennox were the main speakers. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday during the day 2000+ people met in Redfern at Technology Park for talks and electives. On Wednesday night 10,000 people gathered at the entertainment centre for the "One Night".

I don't have any pictures yet. I forgot my camera and my phone isn't fancy enough to do decent photos. I have done a bit of googling to find pictures of the places we went.

We were billeted by some of the ministry team at St Pauls, Chatswood. Follow this link to find Sunday's sermon (It is not up yet but it should be any day now). I highly recommend it, but a word of warning: it stings!

Technology Park

It's hard to know where to start. The last week has been full of amazing lessons and by 11.59pm Wednesday I though my brain would explode. Steve Jeffrey's sermon on Sunday was something I've needed to hear for a while. Judgementalism in one's heart just continues to grow like a malignant cancer, and even when you try to deal with it, very little seems to change. I'm starting to realise how pervasive it is and how much it affects one's attitude. To manifest and grow, judgementalism relies on selfish ambition and vanity. I have come to realise the judgemental thoughts I have about people only serve to temporarily make me feel better about myself. It comes with a cost: if I don't deal with judgemental thoughts when they come, my attitude towards the person/people gets effected, sometimes to the point where it's almost impossible to think well of the person. From there flows gossip and slander. Right now I'm at the point where I can see I really need to change but I feel as though I'm too far gone. My short term goal is take it one day at a time with God's grace.

The main sentence I took away from Piper's talks was "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him".

Something Lennox emphasised was if we truly believe the next world is as real as it is, we'd be preparing for it.

I feel very challenged to not waste my life and to desire God more.

Is God a Megalomaniac? Right Answer. Wrong Reason.

I was browsing the Desiring God blog and that heading caught my eye. This is what John Piper had to say:


Is God a Megalomaniac? Right Answer. Wrong Reason.

I have spent 40 years seeking to understand and explain why God’s relentless self-exaltation in all that he does (for example, Isaiah 48:9–11) is the most loving way for him to be, and is not megalomania.

Some have tried to argue that the problem of God’s self-exaltation is solved by his intra-Trinitarian other-orientedness. That is, God the Father and God the Son do not seek their own individual glory, but the glory of the other, and in that sense God seeks his own glory.

It is true that the Father and the Son do seek the glory of the other (John 14:13; 17:1). But this is not a solution to the problem of divine self-exaltation. The reason it’s not is that in the Bible the Father does exalt his own glory.

For example, Paul prays to the Father in Philippians 1:9–11,

It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more . . . so that you might be filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

Consider: Paul is praying to the Father. He is asking the Father to do something, namely, to fill the Philippians with the fruit of righteousness “that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”

So it is clear that Paul expects God the Father to be motivated to bring about his own praise. The Son makes it possible by working righteousness in the saints. But the one Paul is asking to work for his own glory is the Father.

This is no surprise, if we remember the first petition of the Lord’s prayer: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name” (Matthew 6:9). Jesus tells us to ask the Father to make much of his own name.

There are other examples that could be given (like Philippians 2:9–11), but let this suffice. It is true that the persons of the Trinity love to make much of each other. But this is not the solution to the problem of God’s self-exaltation.

That solution, as far as I have been able to see through my dark glass, is this: God must uphold his own glory as the supreme value of the universe because 1) he is true, and it would be false to hold up any other glory as supreme; and 2) he is loving, and it would be unloving to offer us as supremely satisfying anything less than what is infinitely and eternally satisfying—namely, himself.