Friday, January 29, 2016

The Mission of God and the Mission of the Local Church


God has a mission. God’s mission is to redeem a broken creation, broken as a result of sin and disobedience. He has done this through the life, death, resurrection and exaltation of Jesus and through the gift of the Spirit to God’s people. And He has done all this in order to bring creation back into its perfect order. Of course, I speak here of God’s final Kingdom, but the challenge of God’s people is to live into that kingdom now. That is God’s mission, and because God has a mission, there is a church. Because God has a mission, there is the local church.
Therefore, it follows that the church exists for mission. Mission is to the church what flames are to the fire … no flames, no fire. No mission, no church. What is our mission? Our mission must be to align with God’s mission. And what is God’s mission?

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Keep Shining, the World Needs Your Light

We continue our journey through Acts. As you might know Acts, or the Book of Acts, is properly called The Acts of the Apostles … but really its most accurate name ought to be The Acts of God Through the Apostles … because that is what the book is about: What God did, and still does, when the Church is set on fire by His Holy Spirit, or … what God does when individuals are set on fire by the Holy Spirit. The person recognised as the leader of the 18th century evangelical

Friday, January 15, 2016

Pilate: The Great Prevaricator


The intriguing thing about Pilate is the degree to which he tried to do the good thing rather than the bad. He commands our moral attention not because he was a bad man, but because he was so nearly a good man. One can imagine him agonising, seeing that Jesus had done nothing wrong, and wishing to

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Some Words of Encouragement on Prayer

 
This evening is our first prayer meeting of 2016 and I have been asked to say a few words of encouragement regarding prayer. Well, it’s always good to begin with Jesus, what did He say about prayer that might be encouraging?

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Epiphany or Twelfth Night

                                                                   Image sourced here

Saturday  6 January is Epiphany, or, The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. "So what?" you might well ask. I ask the same question in my sermon entitled Eureka (read it here) and ask (and hopefully answer) the more important question: What is an epiphany and can I have one today?

Wesley has a Huge problem with his Testicles


Jan 4 1774: Three or four years ago, a stumbling horse threw me forward on the pommel of the saddle. I felt a good deal of pain; but it soon went off, and I thought of it no more. Some months after