When you are early on in a romantic relationship, everything about the one you love is fantastic. You cannot find a flaw. They appear perfect to you in every way. Their laugh, their mannerisms, their jokes, everything is just ideal in your eyes. This is what it meant by the phrase “love is blind”. Driven …
Song of Songs is a book that is full of passion. The woman dreams of being with the man, and the man looks at the woman and sees the one who has captivated his heart. They speak to one another in poetry and use colourful metaphors to describe each other’s body parts. When they are …
I fear that many people think that the Christian teaching on sex is “it is bad, don’t do it”. After all, many of the public statements from Christian sources on this topic are to oppose something that doesn’t fit the Biblical ideal. There are many “thou shall nots” when it comes to Christian teaching about …
Christians tend to be nice people. That’s a good thing, of course! But it does mean that many people make the mistake of thinking that being nice or good in some moral sense makes you a Christian. That is a very long way from the truth. In fact, the truth is pretty much the opposite. …
It is easy to become defeatist about being a Christian in this world. We can see how difficult it is to resist temptation. We can see the prominent people on Instagram speaking about how they deconstructed their faith and are feeling so much happier with life apart from church. We see laws being passed or …
The books of 1 and 2 Kings are lengthy books that chronicle the decline of Israel and Judah from the death of David through the exile. A great many kings come and go in those few hundred years. Kingdoms split, tyrants ruled, famines and wars happened, and generations of people were born and died. You …
Something really unusual happened to Jesus in Matthew 26. He was having dinner with his disciples and some friends when a woman poured some incredibly expensive perfume on his head. By incredibly expensive, I mean that most scholars estimate the value of the perfume at around a year’s salary for a worker. A year’s salary! …
In some circles, Christians are directly taught that if they are faithful to God, they will be blessed with an abundant, happy and healthy life. It is a compelling message. We’d love it to be true. A neat life where faithfulness directly leads to an easy life right now sounds fantastic! And this is not …
When the Bible describes the local church, it often uses the language of family or body. We are the household of God, brothers and sisters in Christ. We are a body with many parts, where every part is important (such as in 1 Cor 12 and Eph 4:15-16). These word pictures communicate our connection to …
All of us care what people think of us. Let’s be honest. We are built up by praise and torn down by criticism. And even when others do not tell us what they think of us, we look to see where we think we fit with those we know. How does our lifestyle compare to …