When asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus answered with the words of Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt 22:37). That seems pretty straightforward, we might think. Put God first. Sure, I can do that. It’s one …
I have just published my first ever book! It is entitled ‘Fear not: What the Bible has to say about Angels, Demons, the Occult, and Satan’. The cover looks like this: Why would I want to write a book? A significant part of my ministry involves studying and explaining the Bible to people. A major …
In 1 Kings 12, King Jeroboam decided to set up a new religion. He set up golden calves to worship as well as installing his own priesthood and festival system. We are told that he did this for political reasons, but it appealed to the people for a range of reasons: It was more convenient. …
I have had the privilege of leading a group of people from my church on a whirlwind tour of church history in recent weeks. There was something great about seeing so many great themes and issues that God’s people had faced throughout the centuries. One thing that struck me was the way that God used …
Life is not like a children’s storybook. Things don’t always work out in the end. People don’t always walk off hand in hand living happily ever after. Sinful people living in a sinful world tend to break things and then learn to live with the consequences. This is not a new idea; you can see …
I have spent a lot of time with elders in the past week. My denomination holds a National Assembly every 18 months, which was planned to be held in Queensland before any of us knew what 2020 would hold. We were forced to have a two-day Zoom conference instead. While it would have been great …
If you’d like to know more about the Bible, where can you start? It’s a big book. Sometimes the size of the Bible intimidates us and we never actually start reading because we don’t know how to do it. Here are some useful principles you should consider so that Bible reading actually happens instead of …
If you ask any Christian what the order of priorities is in their life, they will probably reply that Jesus comes first. Then family, then work, then everything else. It sounds like the right answer. It is easy to say and perhaps we will sound kind of virtuous when we do say it. But is …
In Matthew 13, Jesus compares his followers to yeast (with ‘leaven’ simply being an older word for ‘yeast’): 33 He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” (Matt. 13:33 ESV) As far as parables go, …
What to wear is not the deepest or most pressing question that preachers need to keep in mind as they prepare to open God’s word with his people. The most important issue is being faithful to the Biblical text, followed by usefully applying that text to the specific congregation of people they are preaching to. …