Many churches claim to be “Bible teaching churches”. And many churches do indeed have sermons based on the Bible or which work through a single Bible text. (If any church doesn’t even claim this, we should avoid it!) Yet it more than possible to preach from the Bible and not be a gospel preacher. I …
Some Christian traditions have a very spiritual-sounding Bible reading method: you just open up the Bible, and whatever verse is in front of you is the one you read and apply to your life. Some devotional guides also encourage this bite-sized approach to Scripture, having a verse for the day with a long explanation by …
There is an old saying: practice what you preach. It doesn’t only apply to preachers, of course! The message is that you should live a consistent life. If you say something is important, you need to live it out yourself. Nowhere is this more important than in churches. Preaching and Bible teaching of various forms …
Genesis 1:2 describes what the earth was like after God’s initial creative work. “Without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep”. That sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? The Hebrew of the first section is very poetic; “without form and void” in Hebrew is “bohu and tohu”. The earth was a dark …
The church is not an event run by professionals who do all the ministry while everyone else receives it. No, the Biblical model of church has everyone involved in service. We see this clearly in Ephesians 4. Ephesians 4:11-16 set up a pattern of how the church is supposed to operate. And it is so …
Have you found yourself constantly complaining about everything? Only seeing the negative, and always being angry? Those of us who know Jesus have so many reasons to see the world in a more positive light! We have so much now, and such hope for the future. My third book is being published this month through …
Christians are people who love and honour Jesus. We think that Jesus is the greatest gift and most important person ever. Jesus taught people to love God and one another; so why then are people so offended by us speaking about Jesus? Galatians 6 can help us understand this. In v12, Paul returns to the …
It is Reformation Day this week! (It happens to coincide with a large cultural festival marked by pumpkins, skeletons and ghosts, which is far less encouraging). Reformation Day is when we remember the time on October 31, 1517, when the German monk Martin Luther made his complaints about the state of the Roman Catholic Church …
There are some parts of the Bible that are so familiar that we skip through them and don’t notice what we should. I have found myself doing that too often; it is easy to assume you’ve seen all there is to see in a certain passage. Yet as I have started preaching through Genesis, I …
Christians are to be fully devoted to God, with changed minds and new ways of living in this world. This does not only influence how we live in our workplaces and our families; it also influences how we think about church. We see this in Romans 12:4-8: 4 For as in one body we have …