I recently talked a little about Vicky Beeching’s book – Undivided – and why I think it is dangerous for the church. I stand by what I said there – but, at the same time, I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately and I think there are reasons to be grateful to Vicky Beeching. […]
Tag: gospel
"Knowing me, knowing me…": on knowing ourselves
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. […]
Sexuality and Friendship: Good news after all?
I recently added a morning conference entitled Human Sexuality: Discerning a Biblical Vision, hosted by the Chelmsford Diocesan Evangelical Association. It was a good morning with three different speakers talking about various issues – theological, pastoral, and practical. One speaker was Lis Goddard, talking about the pastoral issues involved. Of the three sessions, I probably […]
The Spirituality of Deal or No Deal
Over the past week or two, I’ve been watching “Deal or No Deal”. It’s not a show I’ve ever watched before, but given that our former next-door-neighbour has been on it, I thought I’d watch to see her on TV. If you’re not familiar with the show, then I’m not going to explain it here […]
Sermon: John the Baptist – Herald (Luke 3:1-6)
This evening, I preached my first sermon at St John’s. My first post-ordination sermon! To be honest it didn’t feel any different to preaching before ordination – it’s simply a great privilege to bring God’s word to God’s people. The passage was Luke 3:1-6, part of a series on John the Baptist. Unfortunately no audio […]
Sermon: The Wedding Banquet (Luke 14:15-24)
This is the text of a sermon preached at the 9AM service at Christ Chuch Cockfosters this morning. It was part of a series going through ‘Uncover‘, the subtitle of this talk was ‘Go Out’. Unfortunately no audio is available but I stuck pretty much to the script on this one! Hope you enjoy. The […]
Sermon: The Witness of John the Baptist (John 1:19-34)
This is the text of a sermon I preached last Sunday morning at Christ Church Cockfosters. The audio isn’t available on the website (which means it may not have been recorded) – if it does appear I will update this post. The theme was a traditional one for the third Sunday in Advent – “John […]
The Story of the Jews
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) – […]
John 19: Jesus’ Trial and Crucifixion
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 […]
The Raising of Lazarus
As I mentioned in my post on the woman at the well, I’ve been doing a class on John’s Gospel the past couple of months. It’s probably been my favourite class of this year, which is no small feat! John is such a rich gospel, and it’s been a real privilege to spend some time […]