Sunday 5th May – Abdicate, delegate or collaborate?
At his Ascension did Jesus, in effect abdicate? Did the Apostles delegate and then supervise? If so, what does the Bible mean by “fellow workers in Christ”? And where do church biscuits come into it?!
Sunday 28th April – Bringing a tent peg to a sword fight
Who on earth would bring a tent peg to a sword fight?! A woman called Jael, that’s who, in Judges 4. It seems God likes getting his people to use ordinary everyday tools, rather than weapons, to fight battles, But why?
Sunday 7th April – Lent – Eggs #5 – Eggs not Scorpions
No-one in their right mind would serve their kids toasted and buttered soldiers with a scorpion instead of the expected boiled egg. But isn’t that what we half-expect God to do when we ask him for something? In Luke 11, Jesus sets us right about how we should pray.
Sunday 31st March – Lent – Eggs #4 – The Partridge
The prophet Jeremiah presents us with a partridge (or IS it a partridge?!) hatching out another bird’s eggs, as a mental image to help us understand the difference between the man or woman of God and the rootless opportunist (Jer 17.7-13). God, he says, sees into the heart and mind of man. That, of course, […]
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 […]