"to the praise of his glorious grace" (Eph 1:6)
Every so often I record a short ‘thought’ for the Tendring Talking Times. My previous thought is available here. There is a huge amount of division in society at the moment. The biggest culprit is of course Brexit – friends have fallen out with each other over this one. I personally have lost friends over…
Over the last few weeks I’ve been spending a bit of time in Matthew 5 preparing for various sermons. As well as being struck by how rich the Sermon on the Mount is – you could easily do a sermon series on the Beatitudes, for example – I’ve been struck by how profound Jesus is…
Three years ago, I lamented the use of the word “bigot” especially in the context of same-sex marriage. In the last week or so, I’ve read a couple of other things which have really said what I wanted to say much better. Firstly, Brendan O’Neill writes about “The New Bigots” as he considers the treatment…
“How do I see Jesus?” Not a question people ask very often, but nonetheless it has a lot of answers. Do I see Jesus by trying to be a good person? Do I see Jesus by praying a lot? Do I see Jesus by looking deep inside myself to try to find out what God is…
Aristotle once said, “knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom”. What do you think about that? Do you agree, disagree? Let’s park that there, I’ll come back to it in just a moment. At church yesterday I preached a sermon about Jesus’ famous words from John 8:12: “I am the light of the world….
Yesterday at church the theme was ‘Jesus turns water into wine’, from John 2:1-11. It’s a well-known story – if you’ve ever been to a wedding in an Anglican church, for example, you will have heard it mentioned in the introduction – but the story is nonetheless quite puzzling. To be honest with you, I’ve never really…
“You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” – Matthew 22:29 I’ve come across a lot of people recently who seem to pit Jesus against the Bible. It seems like this is a growing trend. People say things like, “Jesus is the only Word of God. The…
One of the things which interests me about modern-day Judaism is how different it is from my understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures (i.e. the Jewish Bible or the Christian Old Testament). Given that Christians and Jews have so much shared Scripture (most of the Bible – 75% or thereabouts – is the Hebrew Scriptures) –…
As I mentioned a while back, I was preaching a few weeks ago at Christ Church Cockfosters. We were going through a series on the Nicene Creed, and my particular line was “On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures”, i.e. Jesus’ resurrection. I didn’t really cover the ‘in accordance with the…
As alert readers will no doubt be aware, I have been studying John recently (you can read my previous blog posts on the subject here and here). I promised in my last post that I would blog about John 19, and I thought this would be as good a time as any – particularly while…
