Tag: john

  • "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.…

  • Water into wine: what’s going on?!

    Water into wine: what’s going on?!

    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…

  • 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…

  • The Woman at the Well

    And by ‘the woman at the well’ I mean the ‘woman of Samaria’ of John 4. You know, the fattest woman in the Bible (the “woman of some area”… geddit? GEDDIT? HAHAHAHA! Sorry.) Anyway, we were studying John 4 in our class a couple of weeks ago, and I really enjoyed it. In our class…