Dear friends, Just me this week, with Phillip away on holidays. And I’ve found myself thinking quite a lot in the past few days about … thinking. In reading Romans 7 and 8 in recent weeks, I’ve been struck by how much Paul talks about the ‘mind’. The contrast in Romans 7 is between what we know with our mind to be good and true, and what the ‘fleshly’ part of us just goes ahead and does anyway. And in Romans 8, there’s a very clear dichotomy—between the new mind that is set on the Spirit...

Dear friends, Reading the book of Romans is like hiking in the mountains. You come to a high point, and think that it couldn’t get more grand or majestic than this, only to discover that there’s another glorious mountain peak to come. Romans 8 is one of those mountains, coming after the valley of Romans 7. It’s a very ‘spiritual’ chapter—Paul has mentioned the Holy Spirit only three times so far in Romans, but there are more than 20 references in this chapter. But in speaking so much about...

Dear friends One of the first resources I was given as a keen but confused young Christian in the early 1980s was a little book called The Fight. I can’t find my copy any more, and don’t remember a great deal about the book’s argument—apart from its main metaphor and message, which was pretty much summarized in the title. The Christian life is wonderful, joyous, liberating and ruled by the peace of God—but it is also a fight; a lifelong conflict with the world, the flesh and the devil. In...

Dear friends, Would you say that the modern Western world we live is a very open, permissive culture in which people are free to do whatever they want, without being judged for it? Or would you say that we’re a quite intolerant culture that scolds and criticises and cancels each another without mercy? The strange thing is that we seem to be both. Perhaps it’s a case of mercy for me, but judgement for thee. But we can’t seem to cope with the need for law and justice on the one hand, and grace...

Dear friends, On holidays recently I watched a harrowing but uplifting film called The Sound of Freedom. It’s about child sex trafficking in Latin America, and the extraordinary efforts of one particular American agent to free some of these children. At one point in the movie, there are some scenes of rescued children starting to behave like kids again—talking, singing, laughing, playing games. One of the characters says, ‘You hear that? That’s the sound of freedom.’ It was the sound of kids...

Dear friends, Every week or two the pattern seems to repeat itself. Some terrible thing happens in our world. Outraged or grieving victims cry out that something must be done, that the system has failed, that there’s a need for change, that enough is enough, that the government must do something. What the government is supposed to do exactly isn’t always clear, but because being seen not to care about the issue would be politically fatal, they usually do promise to be fully focused on the...

Dear friends, This week, Marty Sweeney (from the US branch of Matthias Media) joins Tony as they discuss the challenges of evangelism in our churches today–both in Australia and the US–as well as suggesting some ways to overcome these challenges. They also discuss what is truly at the heart of evangelism, and how doing it as a body is more crucial than we might realize.  We hope this conversation is edifying and encouraging for you to take into your own churches and communities. We would love...

Dear friends, In light of Anzac Day last week, Phillip and Tony converse about how our current lives are not as far removed from our forefathers and those who have gone before us as we might think. Through the lens of Romans 5:12-21, we see how all the more true this is in our spiritual lives, and how much more powerful is the one whose sacrifice can change the entire course of our lives. We hope this conversation is edifying and encouraging as we remember the sacrifices of the people who has...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Dear friends Thanks for the positive feedback a number of you have sent in about our new series chatting our way through the book of Romans. It’s a slightly different way of driving a podcast conversation, and of exploring a Bible passage—so please keep letting us know how you think it’s working. Today, we come to Romans 2, and its discussion of moralistic hypocrisy. This is something that Christians have often been accused of—of proclaiming great moral standards in public but grossly...

Dear friends We’re back with the our second excursion into the book of Romans, this time on the second half of chapter 1, with its very bracing discussion of human wickedness and God’s angry response to it. When we were recording this episode, the internet was awash with people discussing the Super Bowl ad that featured foot-washing Christians accepting and loving the marginalized groups of our society, with punchline ‘He gets us’. I started our discussion by asking Phillip what he thought...

Dear friends, Quite often on Two Ways News, we start with some issue that’s current or that Phillip or I are particularly exercised by, and think through what the gospel and the Bible as a whole say about it.  But it’s important to go in the other direction as well—to start with the Bible, and see what God is saying there, and let that set our agenda. In this week’s episode, we begin a little series where we’ll be doing just that, with the book of Romans as our point of departure, starting...

Dear friends One of the most widely viewed editions ever of Two Ways News was our discussion of the morality of voting Yes or No in last year’s ‘Voice’ referendum here in Australia.  That episode touched only very briefly on the problem that, for many people, was a key issue in the referendum—and that is the historical alienation, prejudice and disadvantage that Aboriginal and Torres St Islander people have suffered at the hands of white Australians over the past 200 years.  The recent death...

Dear friends, With Phillip away this week, I’ve taken the opportunity of chatting to our regular North American correspondent—Marty Sweeney, director of Matthias Media USA. We talked in particular about a debate that’s broken out in recent months in the US over the ‘gospel-centred’ label—and we could even have a squabble about the spelling of ‘centred’ if we wanted to! To be ‘gospel-centred’ is a kind of motherhood statement and aspiration, but some are questioning whether it has become a...

Dear friends This week I’m hoping that you can help me prepare for a major talk that I’m giving in a few weeks time at the Nexus Conference (on March 11 here in Sydney).  Nexus is an annual ministry conference for the evangelicals of greater Sydney to get together in person for the day, to encourage each other, and to stretch and challenge each other. (If you’re in Sydney and haven’t signed up yet, here’s where you can do that!)  This year the conference is about how to move from theology to...

Dear friends It’s nice to be back for 2024 and chatting with Phillip again, although I can’t say I expected death and grieving to be our first conversation topic for the year. But that’s the nature of suffering, sorrow and grief. You can’t plan around it, or avoid it when it comes. But we can be prepared to respond Christianly to it, which means bringing the gospel to bear. That’s the nature of the Christian life, and the tagline of this podcast—‘Gospel thinking for today’—and that’s...

Dear friends Welcome back to a new year of Two Ways News. Tony is not quite back yet—he’ll be with us on next week’s episode—but in the meantime I hope you enjoy this conversation with Talar about ‘first order’ and ‘second order’ issues in ministry.  It’s a common way of talking about things we disagree about in ministry or in the Christian life—that there are ‘first order’ questions of prime importance that we must resolve and be unified about, and then there are ‘second order’ issues that...

Dear friends, In today’s episode we will be talking about different Bible translations and the various factors that we must consider when reading and choosing different translations. We hope it is an edifying conversation. Yours, Phillip PS. This will be our last episode of the year. Thank you for your partnership with Two Ways News and we will be back again in January. In the meantime, look out for reposts of some top favourite episodes on the Two Ways Ministries Instagram and Facebook. ...

Dear friends, Christmas is a great time to see how our society responds to the gospel, and how we can use the opportunities of Christmas to proclaim Jesus to the world. I am once again joined by Talar Khatchoyan while Tony is away on long service leave. Yours, Phillip 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