Packer on Spirit baptism
In Acts 1:5 we read that the Risen Jesus ordered his disciples ‘not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father which you heard from me; for John baptised with water, but you will be…
Category Bible
The Hiding Place
“You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance.” (Psalm 32:7). I’m writing on the 15th April 2023. I note that because I discovered that today marks 40 years since the death of…
Whose Story is it?
Who Gets to Narrate the World? This is a great question and is the title of a short and stirring book by Robert Webber. It’s subtitled: Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals. Webber believed this question…
Living in the cinema
“Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:28). My wife and I went to the cinema last Monday. We used to go to the…
Genesis 38
Genesis 38 is one of the most intriguing chapters in the book of Genesis. My own take of how to approach it, especially when it came to preaching the passage, has been to summarise the plot in Genesis 38 so:…
The Protestant Story
I’ve been re-reading Alister McGrath’s book ‘Christianity’s Dangerous idea’. I find it so helpful in understanding the story of the origin and development of the church of which I am a part. I’ve read and studied Church History over the…
Who decides?
Alister McGrath’s book is titled ‘Christianity’s Dangerous Idea’ (see last post). Here’s why as he explains in his introduction: “The idea that lay at the heart of the sixteenth-century Reformation, which brought Anglicanism and the other Protestant churches into being,…
The obedience of Faith
A couple of posts ago I reflected upon the city of Jericho. I didn’t note that it was known as the city of Palms (Deuteronomy 34:3). The Hebrew word for palm links to the word is spelt the same as…
Shut up John
I was browsing Marcus Loane’s book ‘Mark These Men’ which provides 25 very short biographies of men who influenced the Anglican Diocese of Sydney in the 20th century. I’ve had a bit of a chuckle over these lines about Richard Bradley…
Jumping over Jericho’s walls
“As he drew near to Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging. … He entered Jericho and was passing through. And there was a man named Zacchaeus.” (Luke 18:35, 19:1). I was preaching on Luke 18:35-19:10 recently.…