Sunday 24th March – Lent – Eggs #3 – Vipers
“They hatch the eggs of vipers and spin a spider’s web.” In Isaiah 59 a dark and depressing picture is presented to us of how badly things can go wrong when a nation or an individual builds a barrier of their own sins between themselves and God. During a period of nearly a thousand years, much […]
Sunday March 17th – Lent – Eggs #2 – The Ostrich
The ostrich and her eggs break lots of records in the bird world, and in Job 39.13-18 God points out something we need to learn from her. Should we be flying, running or burying our heads in the sand? What are our particular gifts and abilities? And how do we compare with everyone else in […]
Sunday 10th March – Lent – Eggs #1
Today is the first in a series of Lent Sunday sermons, loosely linked together on the theme of biblical references to eggs. In this first one, based on Deuteronomy 22.6-7, we consider the place that the conservation & stewardship of nature should have in the Christian’s mission.
Sunday 3rd March – Too big to cancel?
Over the past few years many famous people have been revealed not to be what they seemed, as far as their personal lives were concerned. Individuals that we admired, and almost saw as heroes have turned out to have feet of clay. For some of them, their work and their influence has so permeated modern […]
Sunday 24th February – Fatalism, destiny and freewill
Are you on a quest to find your destiny? Is everything preordained? If these things are already decided, isn’t that just fatalism by another name? “It is what it is”? And where does freewill come into it all? What does the Bible really say about these question?
Sunday 17th February – Healing and casting out demons
The main purpose of the Church is set out by Jesus in Matthew 28 v 18-20. He also describes the means, or strategies by which we are to achieve that purpose. But on top of that, throughout the Gospels and the Acts we find the boots-on-the-ground tactics that Jesus and his first disciples used. In […]
Sunday 10th February – Old dogs & new tricks – Judah
Is character change possible, even in people of a mature age? What sort of man who would sell his own brother into slavery, and then persuade their father that the boy had been eaten by wild animals? Who would sleep with a prostitute but then, finding his widowed daughter-in-law to be pregnant, supposedly as the […]
Sunday 3rd February – Unlikely women #4 – Tamar
Tamar, this week’s “unlikely” woman, is one you probably won’t have heard about in Sunday School! Her story will probably shock you but it has lots to teach us about sin & punishment, grace & forgiveness, men & women, and about how none of us are too “unlikely” for God’s plans.
Sunday 27th January – Unlikely women #3 – Bathsheba
The next “unlikely” woman on Jesus’ human family tree – as listed in Matthew chapter 1 – is Bathsheba, the widow of Uriah the Hittite and the mother of Solomon. Why was Bathsheba having a bath in sight of the palace? Why did King David succumb to temptation? Who murdered Uriah, and why? And how […]
Sunday 20th January – Unlikely women – #2 Ruth
Apart from Mary, Jesus’ mother, only four other women – unlikely women, as we might see them – are given a place of honour in the list of Jesus’ human forebears, in Matthew chapter one. We thought about Rahab of Jericho, in the first two of our series on the book of Joshua, back in […]