Hi there! I don’t know what it is like to be you as I write my blog this morning. I do know that God loves you! There is grace and mercy from God the Father through Jesus Christ for you today – whatever your life looks like – whoever you are! I feel in my heart to write this blog to you who are living through deep and prolonged stress and turmoil in your life. If you are able to…
“……..for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, which have not benefited those devoted to them.” Heb. 13,9 “…….I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength…
The question above is deliberately framed to focus, not on God’s ability to help us – which is without limit, but on our ability to receive help from him. WE NEED GRACE! Grace (χαρις/charis in Greek) is a very important New Testament word. It denotes first of all the undeserved favour God shows us in that: “when we were yet without strength, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly!” Rom. 5,6 But in making us the gift of…
We may need to be persistent in prayer when the storms of life threaten to strike us down, remind God of his promises, keeping our situation before him. That must not mean, however, that we are fear-stricken, finding no peace! We need to find a resting place in God. In this respect, the first image that springs to my mind is that of Jesus asleep on a pillow (Mark is the only one to record that detail) in the stern…
A situation in my family, has forced me to postpone the blogs I had planned to write until a later date – I will return to them God willing! Instead there will be other blogs. In this one, I revisit the theme of prayer (see my blogs on prayer in Archives, October 2019). JESUS TEACHES ABOUT THE FATHER AND PRAYER ““Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to…
“give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” 1 Thess. 5,18 In ALL circumstances says the scripture! IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES; but note: Not FOR all circumstances – not for evil! We need to give thanks even in the very darkest hours of our lives – because he is still God, because he is still on the throne, because he still loves us, and because he is still mighty to act…
I am currently writing a blogpost about the body of Christ. Before I publish that, I want to share something from John’s Gospel. It’s about the Holy Spirit. In John chapter 4,13-14, Jesus speaking to the Samaritan woman by the well says: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a…
If you are like me, you are prone to worry about many things. Young people might worry about their futures, about school or friends. Parents of course worry about their children. We can all worry about our health, money, employment and what the future will bring for us. Some areas of our life we may reasonably think that we have control over (perhaps before the advent of the coronavirus), other areas of our lives, we know are outside of our…
This morning I want to challenge you to see the film Chariots of Fire, from 1981. This is a film which has a lot to teach us about faith. It’s about two runners who participate in the Olympics in Paris in 1924. One is a Jew, the other is a Christian. It is a true story. It is the Christian, Eric Liddell, who captures my attention. At one point he says, «I want to compare faith to running in a…
Reading through my last blog: “The Law and the Christian”, I have chosen this week to make 3 comments on points I made – points which I felt needed further comment, to avoid misunderstanding. 1. To the statement that Christians have never believed they had to keep the whole Torah: This is true after the final break with Judaism. However, the first Christians did not think they had started a new religion, separate from their ancestral faith, Judaism. They believed…
So, this text (John 1,1-18) affirms, as do the ones in Matthew and Luke, that God became man. John goes further than Matthew and Luke in defining the relationship between God and Christ, between the Father and the Son. The Prologue also expresses more unambiguously the fact of the Incarnation, and anticipates many of the themes in the body of the Gospel. All these texts then affirm our faith – and it is faith! That God really became Incarnate in…
“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may…