We are only saved by grace. That is a wonderful truth. We can only be counted as one of God’s people by what Jesus has done for us in his death and resurrection. He paid the debt we could not pay. Jesus took our sins upon himself. All we need to do is trust in …
Biblical teaching about the church assumes that there will be a mix of older and younger people present in the congregation. We see instructions directed specifically to older people (like 1 Timothy 5:9-11) and to children (like Eph 6:1-3). There are instructions on how younger people should treat older people and vice versa (1 Timothy …
Sometimes we can feel like the Christian life is all about trying to stop doing things we shouldn’t be doing. After all, we’re all sinners. God, in his great mercy, often points out our sin to us as we read his Word and hear it explained. We can always do a better job of being …
Rest is a wonderful gift from God, as the previous blog post explained. God has been so gracious to his people to set up our lives with a rhythm that includes rest as well as work. It is a reminder of his goodness and our limitations and helps prevent us relying on ourselves too heavily. …
In our church, the entire congregation is in the main hall together for the first half of the service. This means that we sing and pray together with older people, young children, and everyone in between all together. There is something wonderfully encouraging about this! And then, when the time for the Bible reading and …
Singleness doesn’t often get talked up in churches. There is a lot of focus on families, on Biblical teaching on marriage, on ministries aimed at covenant children, and on pre-marriage counselling. If you are unmarried in the church, you can sometimes feel that you are a second-class citizen of some type. Add to that the …
People who have never read the Bible tend to think that the people of God in the Bible were all perfect models of morality and faithfulness. The kind of people who we are glad are out there somewhere, but people who are not really like us. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The Bible …
Have you ever heard someone say that they had prayed about an issue they were facing, and they had “a sense of peace” that a particular decision was the way to go? This internal peace is seen as confirmation that God approves of the decision being made. It sounds like a holy, Christian way to …
I just finished a fascinating book called ‘Everybody Lies: What the Internet can tell us about who we really are’ by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. The author is an economist who specialises in what is known as ‘Big Data’, information collected from Google searches and large databases. In our world where everything is online, it is much …
One foundational truth that the Bible teaches is that all people are made in the image of God. It’s right there in the first chapter of the Bible, in Genesis 1:26-27. This means that all people in some way are like God. An image of something in the ancient world could mean a statue that …