Weekly Bible Reflection

It’s easy to miss such opportunities. I say this because many today have only eaten a diet of secular progressivism when it comes to the subject of a Jewish celebrity of the 1st century – Jesus of Nazareth. Yet perhaps unsurprisingly, today’s generation which tends to focus on self, is not interested in learning from the past, let alone taking an interest in the primary documents that tell us about him.

What do most people like about Christmas? The lights, the food, time off work, getting together with friends and family, the carols? But how many are thinking, ‘We know it isn’t true’!

Because today’s western society insists there is no absolute truth, it follows that there is no agreed norm to guide human behavior. This makes life and the choices we make, entirely arbitrary. Robert Letham in The Holy Trinity makes this comment about the...

When the subject of religion comes up we often hear comments like: ‘Religion is for the weak-minded’, or ‘it is poisonous’. We also hear, ‘All religions are the same’. And if the conversation continues, we might get told, ‘Religious people are so self-righteous!’...

With concerns abounding over the tensions within nations and between nations we wonder what the future might hold. Psalm 146:3 says: Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs he returns to the earth;… How...

We regularly hear that social media and governments have powerful tools which reach into so many aspects of our personal affairs – phone calls, email, social media and our online searches. Psalm 139 tells us of another powerful source that looks into our lives – not...

‘Count your blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done,’ are the words of a Christian song. How easily we forget to thank God for the countless good things he provides for us. We take it all for granted. But there is something...

People go to church where they love going to church. It’s a fact of life in our consumer society. They love the music, the architecture, and the popular preacher. What’s more, it’s the church where the family has its ties and friends attend.

Wednesday, July 10, 2019Doubt. One of the things I love about the Bible is its earthy realism. It understands the world we live in – the good and the bad, the joys and the sadness. It also understands how we feel about life’s injustices especially when we see people...

Hippocrates, the 5th century Greek physician, identified four kinds of temperament: the sociable extroverts – the sanguine; the driven leaders – the choleric; the analytical and reflective – the melancholic; and the relaxed and inward looking – the phlegmatic. While medicine today has much more sophisticated models identifying the complexity of personality, certain characteristics may dominate.

Was C.S. Lewis right? Is there real joy in our lives? I am not talking about a manufactured, false kind of joy – putting on a brave face when we are anxious or when things go wrong in life. I am talking about, and I am sure Lewis was talking about, the deep joy that springs from a clear conscience.

Writing in The Spectator magazine in 2013, Dr Jonathan Sachs, former Chief Rabbi in the UK, said, “I love the remark made by one Oxford don about another: ‘On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s superficial.’ That sentence has more than once come to mind when reading the new atheists….

‘If God is great and good why is there so much suffering?’ A question we regularly hear, especially when the topic of Christianity comes up. Certainly this is one of life’s tough questions that we all want answered.

Why would an unbeliever say that ‘Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history?’ Is it the power of his words, the magnetism of his personality, the integrity of his life even in the face of the gross injustice perpetrated against him? Or is it his extraordinary feats, noted by 1st century historians such as Josephus? Or is there something more?

The reality is that when we declare the message of Jesus the responses vary enormously. In the end they depend, not so much on how we preach, but upon the attitudes of the people present.

The question of meaning has plagued humanity through the ages. In his recent book, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Eerdmans: 2018), Steven D. Smith helps us to see links between the culture wars of today and questions that arose in the ancient world.

Easter Reflections (4) – May 15, 2019Grand Design... Voices around us insist that we exist by chance and that our experience of life now is all there is. And many of these voices want to shut down any opposing view, no matter whether it is grounded in history or makes...

A popular view in the culture today is that Christianity denigrates women. When we hear such views expressed it’s worth having a creative response at our fingertips – such as sensitively opening a way to take our interlocutors to the biblical narrative.