Two Ways News Tony Payne & Phillip Jensen

Dear friends,
It has been marvelous to keep receiving your emails and bumping into people who have been listening to the podcast and say thank you for the encouraging discussions that Tony and I have had.
However I do find there are also a lot of people who say to me they don’t know about the podcast yet. So if you like this podcast, please do get the word out as word of mouth is the most powerful way of spreading it.
And the second thing is, if you like this podcast, please consider supporting financially as it costs money to produce this podcast. You can do so through this link to subscribe and join the supporter’s club for a certain amount each month.
Yours
Phillip


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Dear friends
Tony is away on leave for the next few weeks, so I—Jessica Sutandar from the Two Ways News production team—will be introducing the episodes in his stead. The following weeks will feature some episodes that Tony and Phillip recorded before Tony went on leave.
Today, in this long-awaited letterbox episode, Tony has recorded his response to some of the questions that you have sent over the past few weeks, dear listeners.
Below is an edited transcript of select answers (in response to Paul Grimmond’s comment on theological application and to Sam’s question on how we interact with our homosexual friends.) If you would like to listen to the full episode, you can click the audio player above.
We hope this helps as you continue to consider the various aspects and challenges of living for the gospel.
Blessings,
Jessica


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Dear friends
Easter is now in the rear-view mirror—and we hope you had a joyful and spiritually refreshing celebration.
For many Christian traditions, and indeed for many Christians, the centre of gravity of Easter is Good Friday, the day of death and atonement. Easter Day with its resurrection is a nice, happy ending to the story, but it’s not the main event.
But in a way that is deeply puzzling to many us, the preaching of the apostles in Acts is kind of the other way around—it focuses much more on the resurrection of Jesus than on the atonement. For them, the resurrection was a massively significant event, anchored in the Old Testament’s understanding of who the Christ would be and what he would do.
In this post-Easter episode, we talk about what the resurrection of Jesus really means, and why it can’t be an afterthought in our gospel.
Your brother
Tony


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Dear friends
It’s hard to know how to introduce a discussion of ‘faith’. We speak about it all the time as Christians, often without really stopping to think about what we mean by the word. And when we hear it spoken of in by politicians (‘we value the contribution of faith communities’) or by secular critics (‘faith is a cop out for thinking’), we instinctively feel that they don’t understand ‘faith’ or those of us who ‘have’ it.
So in today’s episode, as we come to one of the Bible’s classic discussions of ‘faith’ in Romans 4, we have a bit of baggage handling to do—some clearing up of what we (and our society) really mean by the word. But what Romans then teaches us about this fundamental concept is life-changing and world-changing.
Your brother
Tony



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Dear friends
Martin Luther described it as “the chief point, and the very central place of the Epistle, and of the whole Bible”. Australian biblical scholar Leon Morris went even further and called it “possibly the most important single paragraph ever written”.
It’s the paragraph we locate in our Bibles as Romans 3:21-26, and it’s where we’re up to in our podcast series walking through the opening chapters of this extraordinary book.
In Romans so far, Paul has been slowly building up to this point. He started by saying that his gospel is the ‘power of God for salvation’, and that it reveals the righteousness of God. But the only righteousness of God we have seen so far is his completely righteous and justified judgement against the universal rottenness of humanity. So if all of us—Jew, Greek, everybody—is under the power of sin, how can God be a righteous God and yet bring salvation to people like us?
It’s the age-old and very pressing question of how perfect justice can co-exist with grace and free forgiveness. And this world-changing paragraph has the answer.
I hope you find our discussion of these momentous ideas as encouraging as we did in the conversation that follows.
Your brother
Tony


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Dear friends
This week in our journey through the book of Romans, we come to a summary of the argument thus far. Having introduced the idea that his gospel reveals a righteousness from God for both Jews and Greeks (back in ch 1:17), Paul has been unfolding why this ‘righteousness from God’ is needed—in fact, why it can only come from God in the way that he will soon explain.
And that’s because of the comprehensive and universal unrighteousness of humanity—of Jews, Greeks, barbarians, all of us.
In today’s passage (Rom 3:1-20), he dispatches any final excuses or objections to this idea, and draws this part of the argument to its conclusion. In doing so, he takes us to the very depths of the human predicament, and to the reality of evil.
It’s a sombre, sobering passage. But the night is darkest before the dawn.
Your brother,
Tony


This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe