Conservative Christian Blogs in New Zealand

My blog has linked to the Christian News New Zealand blog for a long time, and today I came to be introduced to three more in this country.

___ Christian News New Zealand

Gives you news that would interest mainline evangelical Christians in New Zealand.

___ The Adventures Of A Homely Wife

For birdbrains like me, this is the nicest of the three I’ve been shown today—easy and enjoyable to read. The blogger is a mother named Liz. If post categories are anything to go by, she writes about books, Christianity, family, gardening, housekeeping, parenting, politics, recipes, sewing, and more.

___M and M

This blog is not easy to read and is authored by Matt and Madeleine Flannagan. I have come across this website before. In fact, it was my team leader at work who showed it to me many months ago, saying that it would appeal to my “libertarian” view. (I  googled  “libertarian” and gave up after coming up with much that went over my head.)

___ Thinking Matters

This is an apologetics site for lay Christians in New Zealand.

True women set for counter-cultural lives

A conference for women took place this week in the States. I am excited about it because many of the speakers are people I have respected and benefitted from.

I would like to reproduced some paragraphs written by my friend David Porter who followed the conference and wrote about it in his blog:

As I am now later composing this blog post, I am listening to Dr. John Piper address the audience of 6,000 women.  Here is his main point:

“True Womanhood, is a distinctive calling of God, to display the glory of God, and His Son, in ways that would not be displayed, if there were no Womanhood.”

Speakers at this conference include Nancy Leigh DeMoss, John Piper, Marry Kassian, Karen Loritts, Dannah Gresh, Janet Parshall, and Joni Tada. You can now listen to these messages, online here.

Another important part of this conference was the True Woman Manifesto, which thousands of women, all over the world, have signed on with their hearts.

This was clearly a powerful conference, and the word of God was clearly proclaimed to the 6,000 women in attendance.

I thank God for encouraging news like this. I read the two-page manifesto mentioned above and was amazed that it manages to include so many important points that Christian women today need to believe, affirm and declare.

The coming days will hopefully see these women and other godly women around the world continue on a path that is very different from that of modern women of the world, as the Manifesto says:

As Christian women, we desire to honour God by living counter-cultural lives that reflect the beauty of Christ and His gospel to our world.

Massacre of The Innocents: Contraceptives (for married couples and those contemplating marriage)

Dear Young People,

Children are always a gift from God. Some children are born in a planned way. Children are sometimes conceived unexpectedly. Whichever way they come, they are all gifts. No child is a ‘mistake.’

This article is written in the hope that it will help young couples in our assembly who want to plan their babies carefully to do so without inadvertently harming a child in the womb. Contraceptives are useful for planning, but some of the contraceptives available today actually kill the child shortly after conception.

In the first part of the article, Massacre of The Innocents, we studied the subject of abortion. This part on contraceptives forms the concluding part of the same article Massacre of The Innocents because some contraceptives, instead of preventing conception, actually kill newly conceived babies. So as Christians who value human life, we must arm ourselves with this information.

Massacre of The Innocents: Abortion

Dear Young People,

Thousands of innocent people are secretly killed everyday, and you rarely hear about this terrible massacre. They are the only group of human beings on the face of this earth who have no rights of their own. The law does not protect them.

Who are these unknown people? These are the unborn children who are killed in the womb for the convenience of their guardians. It is estimated that the number of unborn children killed in the world each year is 30 million.

Marriage—Honour the weaker vessel and joint heir

Dear Young People,

I wonder, where you are as you are reading this. I hope you are not hanging precariously from a tree or waiting at a bus stop for a bus. If you are at home, please do make sure that you have a Bible with you to look up the references.

We learnt that husbands are the leaders in the home. So who gives honor to whom? It goes without saying that the wife should honor her husband. This is also traditionally expected of wives in our country, isn’t it? But is this all that the Bible has to say about honouring in marriage?.

Husbands ought to be leaders

Dear Young People,

How does the Bible describe marriage in Ephesians 5:31-32?
A great m_ _ _ _ _ y

Here is one facinating and truly baffling question about marriage:
Whose position is more difficult—the husband’s position as the head of the wife or the wife’s position as the submissive partner?

Marriage—Curse and hope

Dear Young People,

Curse in Marriage
In the garden of Eden, when our first parents sinned, God cursed Adam first, Eve second, and the serpent third. In this lesson, let us see what God said to Eve.

Gen 3:16 . . . “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

There is no ambiguity about the husbands role in the curse—he rules over the wife. But the wife’s role—having a desire for her husband—is not so clear. Why could possibly be wrong or cursed about having a desire for one’s husband?

Symbol of marriage

Dear Young People,

Long before the foundation of the earth was laid, God decided to create for Himself a special kind of race. He would give these creatures many of His own qualities. So they would have the power to reason, to be creative, to love deeply, to be compassionate, and so on. But the most amazing thing that God planned for them was that He would give them a free will with which they would freely choose Him. God loved them so much that he spent time with them everyday. You know, how parents love to watch their children play and listen to their children talk? God loved these special creatures much much more.

Leaving and cleaving

Dear Young People,

Marriage is a mystery—a mysterious union of a man and woman. From the day of the wedding, the woman and man belong to one another. Until the day before the wedding, they belonged to their parents and families. But mysteriously, they now belong to each other.

Do you know what the first instruction about marriage was?
You’ll find it in the first book of the Bible. Look in your Bibles and find the reference. G________ ___:___

The verse reads like this:
Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

The verse as it appears in the King James Bible is good to know as it contains a set of rhyming words.
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
The rhyming words are ‘leave’ and ‘cleave’. They speak of two important principles in marriage.

The purpose of marriage

Dear Young People,

One day, when I was commuting to work, I asked my non Christian friends the question, “Why do you think people marry?” Here are some good answers that they gave me.

• Because society expects it as the normal thing to do
• For companionship
• To care for someone and have someone care for you
• To keep people from temptation by satisfying the sexual urge
• To have children
• Because it has been destined by God Almighty

Let’s see what the Bible has to say about some of these things. Please fill in the blanks by looking into your Bible.