Recently I’ve been thinking about how attractive the idea of surrender is to me. I wrote in a previous post how I seem to spend most of our lives clinging on to control when the fact is that I cannot do life on my own. Surrender is the way to freedom. The way to life is in giving up – giving up control and the idea that I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul, to quote William E. Henley.

I have no power to live life the way I want to live it, and so I submit to Christ in full surrender. But the more I realise that this is the way to life, the more I find myself resisting. For me, it is a matter of trust; trust that God really is good and that the life God wants for me is not too good to be true. Just like Peter who, when Jesus had just demonstrated the outrageous grace of God, could only say ”go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8), I don’t believe I deserve the grace that God gives. And truth be told I don’t deserve it. No one does. But give it he does, and when I accept it, I enter into that life that is truly life, where I am free from having to perform, free from having to strive, where I am free.

Paul said “when I am weak then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). True Christianity never aligns itself with power. It always aligns itself with weakness, with failure, and with powerlessness. Richard Rohr, as usual, sums it up brilliantly:

When Christianity aligns itself with power (and the mindset of power) there’s simply very little room for the darkness of faith; that spacious place where God is actually able to form us. 

So when we speak of paradox, I’m trying to open up that space where you can “fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31), because YOU are not in control. That is always the space of powerlessness, vulnerability, and letting go. Faith happens in that wonderful place, and hardly ever when we have all the power and can hold no paradoxes. Thus you see why faith will invariably be a minority and suspect position.

Surrender, faith, and paradox. The combination that gives the life that transforms our hearts, and then transforms the world.

This morning I spoke at my church about how I think Christians should think about the issue of how to vote at our Federal election next Saturday. The following is an extended version of a post I put on this website on 7 August.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach this, because politics of course is a very sensitive issue; it brings out both the best and worst of us. It can cause normally rational people to be irrational, and so I’m aware that I need to be very careful about what I say. That’s why I want to bring across some points as to how I want to approach this topic and how I think a Christian ought to think when deciding their vote.

Firstly, I come at this topic first and foremost as a follower of Jesus and not to endorse any political party. These thoughts do come out of a deep concern for biblical faith and as a follower of Jesus who asks for God’s will to be done in his life every day. I can’t be so arrogant as to claim to know who Jesus would vote for, but I do believe there are particular biblical principles to keep in mind when deciding which way to cast our vote next week.

Secondly, we are amazingly privileged in this country. We are a peaceful democracy where we have the freedom to vote for who we wish. Dave Andrews recently related how he was speaking to someone who I think was from Pakistan, and they couldn’t believe that we could place our vote and there could be a change of Government without any talk of corruption, that the losing party would hand over power without any resistance and that it would all happen peacefully. He couldn’t believe it. Yet this is what we take for granted.

Thirdly, Christianity is not a set of values. When talking about an election and how we should vote, it obviously does relate to a set of values and which party we think will live that out. But ultimately, Christianity is not about that; it is about God transforming the creation, not just societies but the human heart as well.

Fourthly, Christians of all persuasions are politically active, and Christians have a right to vote according to how their faith informs their vote. And there are Christians in all political parties, which just shows the different ways in which our faith is expressed, and what God has called different people to.

Fifthly, it is vitally important for Christians to be involved in the political process in one way or another. God loves this world and we are called to love what God loves and seek the betterment of the world around us. In fact the word ‘politics’ in its Greek root means of and for citizens – for the people. So political involvement in some form or other is a godly way of living out your faith. For some that might mean writing letters to your MP, while for others it might mean joining a political party or even running for office. Some people say that the best way to effect real policy change is to join a political party while others would say that to be part of a lobby group has the best effect at change. Personally I believe that prophetic political engagement is one that has access to those in power but is able to remain neutral and speak God’s Word without compromise and without endorsing a particular party overall. Some can do that from the inside, such as the prophet Daniel in the Old Testament who was high up in the Government of his day. So God uses people in all sorts of ways.

Sixthly, I don’t agree that the pulpit should ever be used to promote any particular political party, either subtly or overtly. What matters is that, whoever you vote for, that we vote according to Christian principles and that we vote as a follower of Jesus. The pulpit is not a place to endorse a particular political party.

Seventh, I think it’s important to expose ideas which claim to be Christian but which clearly are not. Of course there are different interpretations of what is Christian and what is not, but some things are clear. In some cases I believe it is right to name names. Paul did so in 2 Timothy, and Jesus did so as well. However as I have not met the Christian leaders who I believe have made some dangerous statements in this election campaign, I will not name them here. You can look them up for yourselves. I do believe though that when people make public statements they need to be open to public scrutiny. We should never attack them personally though; we should only attack their policies with a reasoned argument that is biblically based. I believe in these people’s sincerity as people who love God, but I also believe that it is possible to be sincerely wrong. I am also open to the possibility that I am sincerely wrong. So whatever I say about this topic in this sermon, don’t just blindly accept it. Acts 17 says that “the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” So rather than just accepting what I say, go back to your Bibles and check it out for yourself.

Eighth, I believe that any reading of the Bible simply has to be done in context, and therefore the issues that Christians claim the Bible has a clear statement on need to be looked at in the context in which they were written and in the context of the overall message of the Bible. It has been said, rightly I believe, that we often read the Bible too devotionally ie. we take little passages or verses and don’t read them in the light of the overall message of what God is saying to us through His Word.

Along those lines one of this country’s more prominent Christian leaders, in a recent newsletter, effectively said that you cannot be a Christian and not vote Liberal. Here’s what he said, and I quote – “If you still say “I will vote Labor” that is your choice. That’s the freedom we enjoy in a democracy, but I must say you definitely cannot be a Christian who has a proper relationship with Jesus if you vote this way.” And many of us here will no doubt think the opposite.

I was also at a wedding on election day 2007 where the MC said he hoped the Liberals would win. I thought that was inappropriate at that time, just as I think it would be inappropriate for someone to get up in the pulpit and say you should vote for a particular party if you are a real Christian. There will be people in churches all over this country with a diverse range of opinions.

One guide as to how a Christian should vote that you may have come across recently is the Australian Christian Values checklist. This checklist shows a large number of issues and where the parties stand on each of them. Each party then receives a tick or a cross depending on whether or not they support these ‘Christian values. This list however simply does not represent the full spectrum of Christian values. There is literally nothing on refugees and asylum seekers, nor anything whatsoever about caring for the poor. Thank goodness for that. Here I have been all these years working on these issues thinking they were Christian(!). It seems I can take a rest for a while.

The language that is used to endorse the Australian Christian Values checklist is deliberately aimed at supporting particular parties and denigrating others. Terms like ‘the abortion holocaust’ clearly imply a particular voting position. Now please don’t misunderstand me on this. I am not saying that abortion is not an important issue. Just like issues of poverty are often ignored by those on the right, issues like abortion are equally ignored by those on the left). But you will notice that in the advice given on the website that endorses this checklist, there is not one word about the holocaust of 24,000 children dying of poverty every day around the world. As Jim Wallis from Sojourners has said, why is it that for some Christians, saving the lives of children in the womb is paramount, but as soon as they come out of the womb we don’t care about them anymore? The same could of course be said the other way too.

Now when asked why his position did not include anything on issues of poverty and asylum seekers, one Christian leader who endorses this checklist says that the Bible is clear on some issues like abortion, and that’s why they were featured in his articles and in the Australian Christian Values checklist. Then he says that the Bible gives some leeway on other issues but there is room to move on ways to achieve things like economic justice. So is the Bible not clear on issues of wealth and poverty, and are there not different ways of dealing with the abortion issue? This is not a neutral checklist. It clearly promotes certain parties against others. Where I believe these people have it wrong is that I believe that everything we know about God we know through Jesus who loved those who were powerless and marginalised. It seems that is not the position taken by those who have put together this checklist.

Thankfully though the other side is also being reported. The ABC had an article a couple of weeks ago in which a candidate from another party who is a Christian tells her side of the story about why she is a member of that party.

So to promote issues of wealth and poverty, I think it is best to show a list of issues that the Sojourners community in the US put forward prior to a recent election over there. They released these statements before the 2004 election under the heading, ‘God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat’. While the statements released by Sojourners were intended specifically for the US election, they apply equally to our own election in Australia. And so we can say that God is not a Liberal, nor Labor, nor a Green, or tied to any other party. They are a very useful guide when we think of who to vote for on August 21. You can also find this list in an article by Tim Costello in this month’s Eternity magazine. The points listed are as follows: 

• We believe that sincere Christians can choose to vote for any party for reasons deeply rooted in their faith.
• We believe that poverty—caring for the poor and vulnerable—is a Christian issue. Do the parties’ budget and tax policies reward the rich or show compassion for poor families? Do their foreign policies include fair trade and debt cancellation for the poorest countries? (Matt 25: 35-40, Isaiah 10: 1-2)
• We believe that the environment – caring for God’s earth – is a Christian issue. Do the parties’ policies protect the creation or serve corporate interests that damage it? (Genesis 2:15, Psalm 24:1)
• We believe that war—and our call to be peacemakers—is a Christian issue. Do the parties’ policies pursue ‘wars of choice’ or respect international law and cooperation in responding to real global threats? (Matt 5:9)
• We believe that truth-telling is a Christian issue. Do the parties tell the truth in foreign and domestic policies? (John 8:32)
• We believe that human rights – respecting the image of God in every person – is a Christian issue. In our case, do the parties have a compassionate approach to asylum seekers? (Genesis 1:27)
• We believe that our response to terrorism is a Christian issue. Do the parties see evil only in our enemies but never in our own policies? (Matt 6:33, Proverbs 8:12-13)
• We believe that a consistent ethic of human life is a Christian issue. Do the parties’ positions on abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, weapons of mass destruction. HIV/AIDS – and other pandemics – and genocide around the world obey the biblical injunction to choose life? (Deut 30:19)

Barney Zwartz, the religion editor of The Age, wrote a couple of weeks ago something which is really pretty obvious but something which we don’t always consider, and that is that no party is perfect. He highlights this by saying that “whenever we get the perfect candidate, she or he has a habit of disappointing us the most.” Witness the outpouring of hope that came with the rise of Barack Obama. I remember thinking at the time, paraphrasing Monty Python, that he’s not the Messiah, he’s just the President, and he’s inevitably going to disappoint. Whoever you vote for, they are going to disappoint you.

As well as this, there are going to be policies in every party that we won’t agree with. You might vote for a particular party with your Christian conscience and someone will come up to you and ask how you could possibly be a Christian and vote for them?

One of the issues that has arisen amongst Christians in this election campaign is that of voting for someone because they are a Christian. I think that is one of the most irresponsible actions that a Christian voter can take. It shows a profound ignorance of the issues that different parties stand for. Tim Costello sometimes tells the story of the South African government during the apartheid years. They were all Bible-believing Christians. They believed all the right things but they were inherently racist and therefore an evil regime. Recently there’s been talk of Julia Gillard’s atheistic position. I agree though with Tony Abbott when he says that we should vote for a person not because they are a Christian or not, but because of their policies. Real faith is lived out, not just proclaimed.

Whichever party you plan to vote for, there are certain things that Christians need to take into account. The core of this is about voting for those less fortunate than ourselves. It has been said by quite a few people over the years that the measure of a society lies in how it treats its most vulnerable citizens.

In recent times the place of Christian faith in politics has gained traction in the media. Of course we all knew about the previous Prime Minister’s faith position, and how the current Prime Minister’s own position as someone who does not profess a Christian faith. And a couple of months ago we had Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott speaking to Christians across the nation in a live feed from the old Parliament House in Canberra. I think it’s great to see Christian faith getting an airing during this campaign, all sides of the story being laid out for all to see and decide on.

In the end we need to vote prayerfully and with our conscience. The final word is probably best left to the Brotherhood of St Laurence, who came out with a pearler during a past election. It simply said “vote for somebody else.” Amen.

I was recently asked to write a piece looking at the question of whether or not the Bible tells us how the world will end. This topic is the source of much conjecture for millions of Christians all over the world, as it has been since Jesus left this earth to be with the Father.

My thoughts have changed over the years from when I was a young Christian in my teens. Check the article out here and let me know what you think.

Many people will by now have seen the video put together by a handful of Christians urging people to vote on certain issues, and particularly to not vote Green. The main people involved include some from the Christian Democrats.

Barney Zwartz wrote a balanced view of it in The Age this week where he condemns the distortion of Greens’ policies. He also points out the obvious which we don’t always see, and that is that no party is perfect. He highlights this by saying that “whenever we get the perfect candidate, she or he has a habit of disappointing us the most.” Witness the outpouring of hope that came with the rise of Barack Obama. I remember thinking at the time, paraphrasing Monty Pyton, that he’s not the Messiah, he’s just the President, and he’s inevitably going to disappoint.

Whichever party you plan to vote for, there are certain things that Christians need to take into account. The core of this is about voting for those less fortunate than ourselves. It has been said by quite a few people over the years that the measure of a society lies in how it treats its most vulnerable citizens.

One of the issues that has come out of the release of the above-mentioned video is that of voting for someone because they are a Christian. I think that is one of the most irresponsible actions that a Christian voter can take. It shows a profound ignorance of the issues that different parties stand for. Tim Costello sometimes tells the story of the South African government during the apartheid years. They were all Bible-believing Christians. They believed all the right things but they were inherently racist and therefore an evil regime. One Christian leader in Australia has shown his colours in this regard by effectively saying someone cannot be a Christian and vote Green, and seing a Labor victory as a step backwards for the nation, and then in the next breath saying that God is “far too big to be adequately represented by any one political party or position”. He can’t have it both ways.

Thankkfully the other side is also being reported. The ABC had a great article during the week in which a candidate from another party who is a Christian tells her side of the story.

It’s encouraging to see faith getting an airing, all this dirty laundry coming to the fore, and both sides of the story being laid out for all to see and decide on. In the end we need to vote prayerfully and with our conscience. The final word is probably best left to the Brotherhood of St Laurence, who came out with a pearler during a past election. It simply said “vote for somebody else.”

Here’s another stunner from Richard Rohr. Richard has a knack of cutting straight to the depth of God’s character. I reckon he can do that because he spends alot of time being still before God – something I don’t do very well. Check this out:

God cares, for some wonderful reason, despite all of our smallness and silliness. Divine love does not depend on our doing nice or right things. Divine love is not determined by the worthiness of the object of love but by the Subject, who is always and only Love. God does not love us if we change, as we almost all think; but God loves us so that we can change. 

No matter what we do, God, in great love and humility, says, “That’s what I work with. That’s all I work with!”  It’s the mustard seed with which God does great things. Our life experiences, “good and bad alike,” are invited to the great wedding feast (Matthew 22:10). They are the raw material that God uses to prepare the banquet.

U2′s song ‘Moment of Surrender’ has a line which simply says ‘to be released from control’. It is yet another line from a U2 song which hit me like a brick.

Just about everything we do in life is designed to keep us in control of our lives. But the life of the cross is about relinquishing control to the only one who is ultimately trustworthy. Oh to be released from control on that day when we will have new bodies and new minds in the fully consummated kingdom of God.

I realized this morning that until my dying day I will be forever having to surrender the desire, no, the demand, to control my own life. C.S. Lewis described himself at his conversion as the most reluctant convert in all England. I think many of us can relate to that. Through the years of our lives we are constantly backing away from our hell instead of marching on our knees into heaven.

The paradox of the way of Jesus is that life is found only when we die to ourselves. The life of surrender is the life if victory – victory in defeat as Irish singer Sammy Horner puts it. God help me to surrender all to You every day.

Today’s daily reading from Richard Rohr is another classic. It looks at the question of why Jesus commands us to love and tells us to look beyond ourselves for our own good.  Here is some more of what Rohr says:

We must learn to move beyond ourselves, to set limits on our own needs and somehow to meet other peoples’ needs. We actually need to do this for our own good!  That’s why Jesus commanded us to love—to get us started.  So love is not a feeling, but a decision, yet a decision that increases our inner freedom each time we do it.  You will know this only after you act on love.

Jesus didn’t say when you get healed, love; when you grow up, love; when you get it together and have dealt with all your wounds, then love. No, the commandment for all of us is quite simply, “Love!” Once we know it is not a feeling, but a grace empowered decision, we can all do it. And each time it is a growth in freedom—and flow.

As I read this I thought of the issue of how many many Christians, including Christian counselors, bring across the unbiblical message that you cannot love others until you love yourself. I wrote about this in an article a couple of years ago. reference to my article on self-esteem. The point that Rohr makes and which I didn’t make in my article, is that love is a grace-empowered decision. We are only able to love because of God working in us. We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19).

Those Christians who say you can’t love others until you love yourself take grace out of the equation, take God out of the equation by assuming that love has to be done in our power and that we need to get ourselves together before we are able to love others. I believe this is such a serious issue in the Christian church as to be a heresy. As I read elsewhere recently, the gospel of Jesus is about self-denial, not self-fulfillment. The Way of Jesus is only by denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following him.

Part of what I want this website to be includes just random thoughts I have while waiting for the bus in the morning. I will often write these thoughts in my phone and then use them in articles later on. As I just bought an iPhone and I’m not sure how to transfer the notes from my previous phone onto my PC, I thought I would add them here periodically. Here’s the first one, on belief and conviction. I first heard Rob Coyle from Youth Dimension talk about this many years ago and it has stayed with me.

Belief is commitment to a set of ideals or, in the case of Christianity, to a person – Jesus. Conviction is a knowing; it is something deeply entrenched in the core of our being and it is a foundation for our lives.

In our Christian culture, with its emphasis on glitz and noise, it is important to look back at times on some of the great hymns that have come to us down through the ages. Some of the greatest hymns of history were written in the most unlikely of circumstances. Consider the most famous of all, Amazing Grace. Its author, John Newton, would later be a mentor to William Wilberforce in his fight against the evil of slavery. But in 1779, when this hymn was written, Newton was a slave trader and wrote Amazing Grace while waiting in a port for a shipment of slaves. 

Another famous hymn, Abide with Me, was written by H.F. Lyte when he was suffering from severe ill-health. Mark Sayers recounts the story of the writing of this hymn in his recent book, The Vertical Self. Sayers says,

on September 4, 1847, the Reverend H.F. Lyte preached his last sermon. Suffering from ill-health, he would be dead before the year was out. He left his chapel, which was filled mostly with fishermen, went back to his home, and wrote the classic hymn, Abide with Me…When you consider that ministers like Reverend Lyte feared that the intellectual foundations of their faith were collapsing around them, the hymn takes on a different tone. It is a plea for God to stay with humanity, because religion seemed to be leaving Western culture.

Probably the most inspirational story of a hymn being written in unlikely circumstances is that of Horatio Spafford when he wrote It is Well with My Soul. Spafford wrote this hymn in the context of losing almost everything he owned in a fire, followed by his 4 year old son to Scarlet fever, and then shortly after, his 4 daughters in a tragedy at sea. The clip below tells the story in moving detail of Spafford’s extraordinary faith in a God who is close to the broken hearted and who provides hope for those who have none.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3lgJrLhb5Y]

Next time you sing these hymns, remember the stories behind them. They are not just boring old songs of a bygone era. They tell a rich history of the work of a God of grace and restoration in the lives of ordinary people like you and me.

Mark Sayers’ second book, The Vertical Self, further develops the theme of his earlier work, The Trouble with Paris, by emphasising that only a deep and passionate relationship with Jesus can save us from falling prey to the whims and whispers of our culture of consumerism.

The book is generally aimed at the young adults of Generation Y. This generation is often known to be one that is characterised, at least in part, by self-centredness and a sense of entitlement. What makes me both sad and angry is that this level of self-centredness is almost equally characteristic of many Christians who really live no different to the rest of the world. What a far cry this is from the Christians of the 1^st century. Author Robert Wilken says that the early Christians often did not have an answer to the philosophical attacks thrown at them by the pagans of the day. But that wasn’t how they won the Roman Empire. They won the Empire by the quality of their lives, to the extent that by the time Constantine made Christianity the State religion early in the 4^th century, half the Empire was Christian. It is a tragedy of modern-day Christendom that much of the church has nowhere near that level of influence and impact. An example of this is seen when Sayers reveals the seduction and confusion that many Christian leaders are exposed to, leading to them “unconsciously starting to confuse their calling with self-promotion as they were lured into the cult of cool”.

It is difficult to review this work without wanting to quote large slabs of it; such is its importance to and insightfulness of the malaise of the 21^st century church. Like the frog placed in cold water that is slowly being brought to the boil, much of the church is not even aware that it is being held captive more to the culture of the day than to the liberating life and message of Jesus. To this end, Sayers makes the point that “in earlier centuries, the belief that humans were made in the image of God was…the cornerstone upon which identity was built”. No longer is this the case today though. Sayers believes that “we are now in an age where, for the first time since the birth of the church, the vertical self is not the dominant influence on Western culture’s understanding of self”.

Sayers defines the vertical self as a combination of Judaeo-Christian belief in God-given identity and a Greek belief in virtuous living. It explains the way that identity is developed by being part of a greater order. Further on, he says that the idea of the vertical self is a worldview that leads to a belief in the eternal, the desire to cultivate one’s spirituality so that one moves upward on the path toward becoming more like God. Compare this to the horizontal self, where we try to gain our sense of identity from our peers and from trying to measure up to what is sexy, cool, and glamorous. In fact, this book is divided into chapters that take into account such cultural phenomena as the social self of sexy, the social self of cool, and the social self of glamorous, all of which are ways we act out an image of ourselves. This is what Sayers calls our public image, and it is what many Christians now base their sense of self on instead of basing it on the fact of being made in the image of God.

The message that Sayers conveys throughout this book is one which I believe needs to be the core message of the church to the 1^st world; that is, that only more intimacy with Jesus will save us from being sucked into the lie that the lure of our current culture will bring us the life we have always wanted. Tragically, it is a message that the church needs to hear just as much as the rest of the world.

The roots of the malaise of the horizontal self go deep indeed, so deep in fact that they speak to the very core of who we are as human beings. One of Sayers’ most profound insights is that “in a secular culture…religion, spirituality, tradition, and culture cannot tell a wider story that offers the individual a sense of place and meaning, hence the creation of the horizontal self and the creation and cultivation of a public image being paramount”. The meta-narrative of the Bible is no longer the foundation of our culture.

Sayers goes on to say that, in our culture, we no longer try to find ourselves. Instead we act. Identity is exchanged for imagery. Said in this way, Sayers’ message reveals Jesus’ message of building one’s house on the rock of the vertical self rather than on the shifting sands of the horizontal self as being incredibly relevant to our 21^st century Western culture. For those who are tired of the failed promises of the horizontal self, Jesus once again shows himself to be the answer. The age-old words, ‘come to me all you who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest’ whisper across the ages to a culture lost in a sea of failed promises and long-forgotten ideals. The tragic result of a culture lost in the sea of the horizontal self is a life that gradually tears at our psyches.

An interesting observation that Sayers makes in this book, and one with which I agree, is that, often, the more you embed your identity in a vertical sense of self, the more people living under a horizontal self will see something I you that will draw them to you. The vertical self can be recaptured when we commit ourselves to the God who has set eternity in the human heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

Overall, the main ideal that Sayers is calling people to in The Vertical Self is a mark of character that seems so old-fashioned that even for many Christians it conjures up negative connotations. That mark of character is holiness. Holiness, as Sayers describes it, is when we are the people God created us to be. It is wholeness, centredness and connectedness. Christians have often given holiness a bad name. We have given off an image of holiness as being closer to legalism than grace. We have given off the image that a holy person is someone who doesn’t swear, doesn’t smoke, and doesn’t have extra-marital sex. All of these things may indeed be marks of a holy person, but they do not by any means define holiness on their own. Ultimately a holy person is a person of grace. And the best example of a holy person I know is Jesus. Being God in person, we are told in the Old Testament that we are to ‘be holy as I am holy’. Then in John’s gospel, we are told that grace and truth came through Jesus. The irony of how holiness is often viewed compared to the life of Jesus is seen in the fact that Jesus was the one who spoke out against the Pharisees for their excessive legalism, and he was the most holy person who ever lived.

Having said all of the above, I did not find myself agreeing with all of what Sayers was bringing across. For instance, he says that, in a culture ensconced in the view of the horizontal self, when we see public figures found out, we chide them for being caught, for not being able to keep up the game of illusion. However the recent example of Tiger Woods would seem to contradict this view. The case of Woods’ infidelity is one where I believe the huge media interest was not because he failed to keep up an illusion, but because he really was living a lie, especially as he claimed to be a family man. And Australians still don’t buy in-authenticity.

That criticism aside, The Vertical Self is a must-read for church leaders today, particularly those in ministry to Generation Y. For me, the marvel of this book is seen in its final paragraphs. Sayers sees this book as his gift to us, the readers. In words that could have been peened by C.S. Lewis or Philip Yancey, he describes his hope that this gift will “work as a key, opening a doorway out of the cramped, stale confines of the horizontal self, filling you with the gusts of fresh air perfumed with the scent of eternity”.

It is only when we are enmeshed in Jesus, in the life of the vertical self, that we are able to resist the lies and deceptions of our culture which tell us that we can have the life we have always wanted and we can have it now. The Vertical Self is a wise and timely book that speaks volumes not just to our culture, but to the culture of the church in the 21^st century. Sayers’ thinking has matured since The Trouble with Paris. I don’t know Sayers personally, but this latest book reveals a maturity that I believe is borne only out of a deepening faith and passion for Jesus and His ways – a life lived in the vertical self. That is what makes it so authentic.