Mostly what I want to do with this website is express my love for Jesus Christ, who has saved me. And brought me back from the dead to the living.

Even if you don't (yet) believe this can be possible in a supernatural or spiritual sense — it has absolutely, definitely, 100% been true in a worldy sense. That is, my mortal, biologically-alive life on this Earth right now has been completely changed and transformed by Christ. And far more so than I would have ever imagined possible before I was a believer myself.

The next main hope I have for Christ.net.au is to somehow describe the love, peace, and happiness I now experience in a way that would make sense to someone like I used to be, for most of my life, before I knew Jesus. And before I accepted the teachings of Christ as being true and real.

The website will be a work in progress for a while, as I have many other things to occupy my time, and less time to add things to the site, and fix it up, than I'd like ideally. But I will get it together eventually...

I'm still fine-tuning a lot of things and probably a lot will change as the website develops, grows, and becomes more complete.

Becoming a Christian

Becoming a Christian is the best and most important thing you can ever do in this life.

If you don't see how that could be true, it's only because you haven't had it explained clearly enough; or in a way that made sense enough to realise it's truth. This website is my attempt to explain these things of Christ, in a way that makes sense, and in a way that exposes their undeniable truth.

There will also be a lot of other Christian material for potential Christians, new Christians, and long-term Christians. I started Bible College (at Morling College, in Sydney, Australia) in 2018, so a lot of the things I learn there will end up on the website also.

How to Remember the Domain Name

"Christ" is easy to remember. To remember the top-level domain .net.au (with the "net" in it), think of "fishers of men". It's got .au on the end because I'm an Australian. The Bible verses below describe the beginning of the ministry of Jesus Christ, including when Jesus found his first disciples:

From that time, Jesus began to preach, and to say, "Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Walking by the sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers: Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen.

He said to them, "Come after me, and I will make you fishers for men." They immediately left their nets and followed him.

Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets. He called them. They immediately left the boat and their father, and followed him.

Jesus went about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing every disease and every sickness among the people. The report about him went out into all Syria. They brought to him all who were sick, afflicted with various diseases and torments, possessed with demons, epileptics, and paralytics; and he healed them.

Great multitudes from Galilee, Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and from beyond the Jordan followed him.

Originally I looked for Christ.com.au — but it was already taken. But then I figured .net.au is better anyway. As described above, ".net" reminds me of fishers of men. Also ".com" (which means commercial) sounds just that little bit more like "Christ.biz". And "Christ.biz" doesn't really create the image I'm aiming for with this website.

Why this Website?

I had a few ideas in mind when I began this website. I want it to be something that, if I had seen and read many years ago, I might have understood it and believed it myself. I've been a Christian for about 10 years. I often feel regret about the way I lived before that, and all the things that went wrong in my life because of it. And wish that I'd decided to follow Jesus a long time before that.

Though part of being a Christian is learning that God has a better idea of how my life should be than I do, so there must be good reasons for the way I lived, and the mistakes I made. One reason is that I've learned so much about how not to do things. If I share some of that, perhaps others can be spared from some of the same kinds of problems.

The Original Idea for this Site

The original idea for this website came to me while I was working on an essay for Bible College. I began studing for a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree at Morling College in Sydney this year (2018). The essay was about the speeches in the Book of Acts. I was writing about the speech the Apostle Paul makes to the Greeks in Athens in Acts 17:15-34.

One of the key ideas behind this speech is the way Paul speaks his message (of the good news of Jesus Christ) in a way that the audience can understand, and relate to enough to make sense of it and absorb it. This speech was contrasted with the other speeches in Acts which were given to Jews and to non-Jewish believers in the Tanakh (the Old Testament) and the religion of Judaism. When speaking to the pagan audience of Ancient Greece, what Paul says is very different to what he (and other early Christian evangelists) say to Tanakh-believing audiences.

This difference made me think about the traditional methods of presenting Christianity to people in Western countries. And how they were more like the approach used to those who already believed in the Old Testament, or at least some of the ideas found there. I also realised that most people in recent years have a very different background to those of decades (or centuries) ago. A background which is a lot closer to that of the Ancient Greeks. Then I realised that this approach (as used by Paul in Athens) is largely what was missing from the exposure to Christianity I'd had as a child — which did not convince me to become a believer.

Based on the Bible

The next idea is that I want the site to be strongly Bible-based. As a Christian I believe that the Holy Bible is God's word. As the word of God, the Bible is sufficient of itself. But it's a long and complex document (actually a collection of many individual historic documents), with many ideas completely foreign to modern non-religious culture. So it takes a fair amount of time and thought to well understand it. Imagine that you were to start completely from scratch, and pick up a Bible, not knowing anything at all about it or about Christianity. You might start reading from the start, or you might flick through and pick out verses that catch your eye, in a fairly random fashion. Either way, you'd likely have to spend a long time reading and studying before you arrived at a good understanding of the fundamentals of Christianity.

So apart from the Bible itself, there's also a need for it to be explained in a way that the listener can understand. Which is one of the reasons for going to Bible College (to learn how to explain the Bible to others). Hopefully with this website I can achieve some of this. At least, it will be a record of my attempts at learning how to make the Bible more accessible. These attempts should improve as I learn more.

What's On this Website?

Currently Christ.net.au is brand new, and there is much to be added. This page will also be added to and improved over time.

What I have in mind for the site is an introduction to Christianity (as explained above), attempts to explain how and why my faith in Christ has made me happier than anything else in this life, a blog section where I write about whatever is on my mind (that's more-or-less related to my Christian faith), and probably many other things that I can't think of right at this moment.

Retrospective Editing

On most websites (especially blog-style ones), a post is written, posted, and then left in that state forever. On this site, many of the existing pages will be edited in the future, so they will change and improve over time. This is especially true now while the site is brand new. You can see the pages which have been updated most recently on the Newest Page Updates page. The Homepage is also currently showing pages in order of most recently updated. Though eventually, as the site becomes more complete, this will change to the newest written pages (like most websites).

Totally Random Bible Verses

Each page loads a random Bible verse, which appears at the right hand side of the pages on wide enough screens, and underneath the main page content on smaller screens. If you click the link under the verse you can read the entire chapter it's from.

It was the idea of the random Bible verses that led me to putting the whole Bible on the site. Because it turned out that by far the easiest way to display a random Bible verse was to already have the whole Bible on the website. From there is wasn't a lot more effort to add the Bible chapter display pages. In future there will be more integration with the Bible. Which will help anchor the website in the Word of God.

The translation starts off as the World English Bible, which is (as far as I know) the most recent/modern public domain English Bible translation available. If you select another translation (including Greek or Hebrew) from any of the Bible pages, the site will remember that, and keep using it until you choose another translation, or until your browser session times out (which I think is about 30 minutes).

Eventually I'll improve the site so the quoted verses at the top of the pages stay in the translation you selected, currently they are from the World English Bible unless otherwise labelled.

Books

I get a percentage of the revenue from books purchased by links from this site from these sellers. The price to you (the buyer) is the same as otherwise. I am not expecting to make a lot of money from this, but hopefully it will offset somewhat the hosting costs and time spent working on this website.

If You Are Located Internationally or in Australia

I get a percentage (I think it is about 4%) of the price of books purchased from Amazon.com or Amazon.com.au via this website. It is meant to work for any books (or products) that they sell, not just the ones I have mentioned — so if you get to Amazon.com via any of the links on this website, and you search for and buy anything at all from them (even a giant screen plasma TV), christ.net.au will get a percentage of that.

What Next?

If you're new to Christianity, you could continue reading here.