Queen's Road Cell

We considered the question: Could God have created a world without the Fall, with perfectly obedient and happy people, and without consequent suffering? I said we could break up this question into at least 2 parts: 1. Did God institute of redemption only as a 'Plan B' after the Fall, or was the Fall something He planned from the beginning? There is clear teaching in Ephesians 1 that we were chosen by the Father in Christ " before the foundation of the world" (v.4). This would indicate that, before the Fall, before anything we could have done, we were already part of God's "plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth." (v. 20). Romans 8 tells us that God foreknew and predestined us for glory (v.29). "Foreknowledge" is sometimes taken to mean "knowing that an individual would make a decision to receive Christ, resulting in predestination to salvation. But "foreknowledge" is p...

We noted that discipling (mentoring one-on-one) is not necessarily something all of us feel comfortable doing. Some feel that we need mentors, although we know that needing a mentor does not mean that we are not able to mentor someone else. We can mentor as long as there is a "spiritual gradient" between mentor and mentoree. There are prerequisites (e.g. spiritual hunger, calling, commitment) that need to be present to make a mentoring relationship secure. We should be praying for someone to mentor. I would add that if you need a mentor, you should be praying for a mentor as well! We had a side discussion on whether Jesus failed to take Ian Malin's advice when He chose Judas. John 6:64 assures us that Jesus used foresight to choose someone 'right' for the role of betraying him after 3 years. But in general, we should choose mentorees who are i) faithful (loyal, trusting, dependent) to God and ii) able to teach others what they have learned. We side-tracked into ...

We talked about reactions Pastor Daniel's sermon topic on homosexuality over the past few weeks. The overall feeling was that Biblical clarity regarding this topic was appreciated. Scripture teaches that homosexuality is: 1. A sin (e.g. Lev 18:22, 20:13, Ro 1:26-27, 1 Ti 1:8-11, 1 Co 6:9) 2. A sin not amongst other sins ( 1 Ti 1:10, Ro 1:29-29) 3. A judgement(Ro 1:26-27) - "God gave them up". The preceding reason ("for this reason" Ro 1:26) Paul cites (Ro 1:22-25) as the reason why homosexuality is a judgement is because the greatest idol in our lives is the one in the mirror - humanity loves, serves and worships itself above the true God. So man's love for man is seen in the living parable of homosexual relationships: instead of the male giving seed to the female and engendering life (and this is why we also speak of God primarily in 'male' terms - He is the giver, and the Church/Bride the recipient). the union of male and male as well as fem...

We looked back at the previous study we did 2 weeks ago on mentoring to remind ourselves of the broad definition we used then: "a means of disciplemaking that involved a commitment for a mentor to walk alongside a mentoree." Our study book identifies different ways of mentoring, although most of us would say that 'passive/remote' mentoring without the active knowledge of the mentor is just having a good role model. So disciplemaking is the broad effort, mentoring of different types a subset of that, and intentional discipling a subset of mentoring. The practical implications of different mentoring roles are that: 1) we may 'mentor' someone all unawares, which is encouraging but a little alarming 2) we can mentor in less intense and more specific ways than 'discipling'. 3) This means that we can try out mentoring in little ways before growing in self-understanding and spiritual maturity such that we are prepared to be a discipler. We looked at the mem...