Centre for Christian Living podcast

Of the many insults and accusations that were flung at Martin Luther and the other Reformers, one of the most common (and stinging) was that their “gospel of grace” de-motivated people from actually living a godly life. If heaven came free without works, what was the point of trying to be good? And it wasn’t just in the Reformation: Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously wrote in the early 20th century abou...

Dan Wu grew up with one foot in an Asian “honour/shame culture” and the other foot in a Western “guilt culture”. So he was more than a little interested when he read that the Bible was supposedly a “shame culture” book and that we Westerners misread it from our “guilt culture” perspective. The result was a fascinating journey of scholarship into the meaning of honour, shame and guilt in the Bible....

What do you feel when you hear the claim that one in four Australian women have experienced domestic violence? Are you shocked (or even sceptical) that it could that many? Do you feel anger, abhorrence, or a sickening lurch of recognition? Whatever we feel, it cannot be indifference. As painful and as difficult as the subject is, domestic violence (DV) is a reality that we must understand and resp...

The Reformation was a revolution in the lives of ordinary everyday people. It changed family life and work life. It radically altered daily spiritual devotion and the weekly experience of going to church. Tony Payne speaks to Carl Trueman about this "everyday Reformation".

Tony Payne talks with Andrew Shead about how the extraordinary collection of poems we call ‘Psalms’ can shape and form our Christian lives.

There are two Bible verses that capture the tension this episode explores: on the one hand, there is Ecclesiastes 2:24: “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God …”. On the other, there is a verse like Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and ch...

Spurgeon famously said that defending the Bible was as necessary as defending a lion. But if the Bible is where the powerful Lion of Judah speaks to us, challenges us, comforts us, changes us, why do we so often find it difficult to slow down and actually listen—even in “Bible study groups” that most of us meet in each week—groups that are supposed to be specifically for this purpose? In this epis...

What dignity, value or significance does our daily work have? Does it really matter to God? Or are gospel preaching and Christian ministry the only things that really matter in the end? This much-discussed question (at least recently) is the subject of Episode 3. Moore Theological College lecturers Chase Kuhn and Peter Orr speak with Tony Payne about the dangers of both over-valuing and under-valu...

Christians have always grappled with how they should relate to the world around us. Is the idea or category of ‘exile’ a good one for thinking about that perplexing relationship? In this episode, Tony Payne talks with Phil Colgan and Lionel Windsor about what ‘exile’ means in the Bible, whether or not we should think of ourselves as being in ‘exile’ in our culture as Christians, and what differenc...

How can you become the best possible version of yourself? In this very first episode of the Centre for Christian Living podcast, Tony Payne interviews David Höhne about the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the self—who we really are and who we long to be—and shows that the seemingly elusive and impossible quest to become our best selves is indeed impossible, but at the same time, it's also very poss...