Page 26 - Dainfern Precinct Living Issue 6_2023

Food for Thought

AMAZING GATES

BY PETER STOFFBERG

t used to be no more than a weak joke, BUILD A MARRIAGE
teasing residents of areas that were a tad
too far outside our comfort zone, that we 4 WEEK COURSE: 9 JULY | 16 JULY | 23 JULY | 30 JULY
Ineeded a passport to visit them. Now it’s
not so funny. Gone are the days, too, when
it was simply a case of providing details and All welcome - dating; engaged; happily married; unhappily married
awaiting our host’s confirmation. Now, we
need to scan our driver’s licence, vehicle disk, TOPICS INCLUDE:
fingerprints, eyes and perhaps even a spot God’s plan for marriage
of DNA, and that, just to get into the gated Gender roles
community around the corner. Commitment
Communication
Access control is everywhere and it’s getting Conflict resolution
more complicated. We wish it wasn’t Raising Godly Children
necessary but we’re probably all grateful for its Financial faithfulness
protection, even as we’re constantly striving to Intimacy
make it more efficient and effective. It’s nothing
new either. Walls and gates have been around VENUE
for as long as humans have been plagued by Dainfern College
the desire to take stuff that doesn’t belong to TIME Four Free
them – longer actually. 11.30 - 13.30 Dates!
In 2003, Peter Agre was awarded the Nobel
Prize for identifying and describing gates that
have always existed in biological cell walls. The
cell walls keep undesirables out while the gates
let pure water molecules in. Agre identified
these gates as a family of proteins, now called
Aquaporins. They are essential to the existence
of plants, animals and bacteria. Their design is
ingenious and supremely efficient. God makes
awesome stuff. Each gate admits thousands For more info visit www.familychurch.online
of millions of water molecules per second
and nothing impure gets past them. They
restrict access based on what’s actually coming bad. This idea may have been derived from the Bible,
through, not on how it’s behaving, or what it appears but it is not what it teaches. Jesus teaches that we
to be. enter into an eternal loving relationship with God
based on what we are, not on what we’ve done.
There’s another set of gates that are also the subject What we’ve done is merely evidence of what we are
of jokes, the so-called Pearly Gates. There, after we (Matthew 25:31-46).
die, we are supposedly welcomed or refused eternal
access based on whether our good outweighs our He shows us that by faith in Him and what He’s done
for us, He transforms us into a new creation (John
3:1-21), one specifically designed for eternal life with
Him - a beloved creature that has passed from death
into life, one who knows that we are undeserving
and guilty of awful offences against God and others,
imperfect, but humbly yearning for perfection; a
creature who knows that God, by His grace, will
eventually completely purify us. Eternal paradise is
only a paradise if there is nothing impure in it. Thank
God that by His grace, He’s made a real way for us to
enter, not through a gate, but through a person, His
perfect and pure son, Jesus Christ.

6 DPL
8 DPL
6 DPL
issue 11 2022
issue 10 2022
8 DPL issue 2 2023
issue 5 2022
6 DPL issue 10 2022
8 DPL issue 11 2022
26 DPL issue 6 2023
8 DPL issue 5 2022