Month: December 2024
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Romans 8 v1: ‘there is now no condemnation’
I was at a big church in the centre of a major town. The preacher was speaking about Romans 8 and kept repeating its opening, when a someone interrupted from the back. The text in question says (NIV): Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus…
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God hardening hearts: what does Exodus’s perplexing idea mean?
In Exodus, Moses is trying to persuade the ruler of Egypt, the Pharaoh, to let the enslaved Israelites go and worship God. But God, who is committed to making this happen, is said to “harden” the Pharaoh’s heart. God tells Moses in Exodus: When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all…
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Why liturgy matters
The culture within evangelicalism sometimes leads churches to bin liturgy. After all, if we want to have a modern, real faith that’s grounded in what the early, first century church did, why do we need to do all this old-fashioned, stuffy prayer book malarky? But, as an evangelical, I love the liturgy for four reasons:…
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Five things to watch and read this Christmas
1. Scot McKnight on Mary’s song New Testament scholar and Anglican deacon Scot McKnight has a fascinating discussion on the meaning of Mary’s song in Luke 1:39-56. He says that there are echoes between what Mary says and the Lord’s Prayer, adding: Mary’s song evokes dozens of lines and terms from Israel’s scriptures, and you…
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The significance of light at Christmas
It was pitch black. I was cycling on a path a the side of a river when the my front light ran out of battery. Rivers don’t run in a straight line, so I had to slow down and hope I was going in the right direction. Needless to say, light can be a pretty…
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The debate over tax collector Zacchaeus
When I was young, preachers would sometimes cause minor amusement in my family by highlighting the greedy and immoral nature of tax collectors in the New Testament. My mother worked for what is now called His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs as an actual tax collector, though didn’t get a cut of what she raised. Zacchaeus…
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What does Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’ refer to?
When I was 20, I started a massive Handel phase. In those days, CDs were dominant and I bought Handel’s Zadok the Priest and then a recording of his oratorio Solomon. Although we’d covered some of King David’s life in Sunday school, the events at the end of his days recalled in Zadok the Priest…
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Richard Dawkins calls this a ‘disgraceful story’
Imagine if someone told you that a deity they worshipped wanted them to sacrifice their child. You’d get social services involved, pronto. So what are we to make of the Genesis story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice the son he loved, Isaac? In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argued that this “disgraceful story” is an…
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What should we make of ‘the wrath of God’?
In the modern hymn, In Christ Alone, we sing that “The wrath of God was satisfied” (on the cross). But some Christians have objected to the phrase, believing that it should be softened or the the phrase takes away the focus from the big idea that God is love. The team behind a Presbyterian hymn…
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How to fill churches at Christmas
Filling up churches at Christmas could be as simple as inviting people, research into church attendance has suggested. Over half of Americans who don’t go to church at Christmas would likely attend if they received a personal invitation. That’s according to a survey from Lifeway Research, part of the Southern Baptist Union. Lifeway found that…
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The lost verse from ‘Hark! The herald angels sing’
Hark! The herald angels sing is one of the most popular Christmas carols, and justifiably so. The words, originally drafted by Charles Wesley but improved upon by his friend George Whitefield, celebrates the purpose of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. It begins with the distinctive line: to ‘hark’, meaning listen, because angels, doing the work of…
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Shame is an emotional weapon that evil uses
Shame is supposed to be a good thing. We want criminals to feel a sense of shame so that they are less likely to reoffend. On both sides of the Atlantic, there have been television series called Shameless about families who, we are supposed to assume, don’t feel any shame about how they behave. Yet…