It’s Reformation Day! On this day in 1517, the monk Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenburg. This started a movement that aimed to measure everything by the standard of Scripture. Instead of accepting all kinds of traditions and papal pronouncements, the practice of Christians was to be …
All of us follow the example of others, even if we don’t actively mean to. Children adopt mannerisms that their parents have. Teenagers dress the same as their friends. Houses in the same street tend to present in a similar way to one another. We take our cue from what we see around us. Sometimes, …
Christians are called to be content, to be satisfied with what we have at the moment (in places like Phil 4:10-13). That’s an easy thing to say but a difficult thing to do. One of the reasons it is so difficult is that so much in our culture is pushing us to be discontent. Here …
Jesus is the solution to our deepest problem. I am convinced that is true, but I do understand that it sounds completely crazy to someone who has no experience of the Bible or church. After all, Jesus was a historical figure who lived on earth around 2000 years ago. I wouldn’t think that Julius Caesar …
The coronavirus is big news. Every day we find out something new. We find some shocking statistic about infection rates or the number of deaths or lack of containment. Flights in and out of China are stopped. People who have recently visited China are banned from school or work for 14 days. This latest epidemic …
There are many people who think Christians are uninformed anti-scientific people who believe things disproved by scientists years ago. Richard Dawkins famously said that faith is believing something that you know isn’t true. This prevents quite a few people from even considering the claims of Christianity. Why would you bother? Surely science has proved that …
Holiday time for most people in Perth has now come to an end, with school officially starting this week. I have also had the privilege to have a holiday for a couple of weeks. It is relaxing to break the normal routine, to be away from responsibilities and have a mental rest. God set up …
The Christian church is called a family, a household and a congregation at various points in the New Testament. The church is not a building or a service but a people. And it is a people who should function quite differently to how usual families and groups of people function. Usually, we are attracted to …