Posts from 2010

Jesus’ miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 speaks of the compassion of Jesus, but also of the grace and power of Jesus. And it was clearly intended to confront both His disciples as well as the crowd with who He was. On the question of the power of Jesus John MacArthur writes: As we look back on the scene from our two-thousand-year vantage point, it seems impossible…

In Joshua 9 we read of how Joshua, using human wisdom and human counsel instead of God’s wisdom and God’s counsel entered into a covenant of friendship with people he later realised were inhabitants of Canaan and under God’s judgement. It proved to be a wrong decision, involving the sin of not seeking God’s counsel on Joshua’s part, and in no small measure the…

There are many ways of reading the Bible, by which I mean that there are various themes that you can trace through the Bible, such as Faith. But today we face one that has a strong yet terrible pedigree. I speak of ‘unbelief’. There are people in this world who have what are colloquially called wrap sheets of their crime(s), listing occasion after occasion.

Suffering is one of the great dilemmas of life, challenging many people’s faith, extinguishing it on others. Yet for some it stimulates faith and draws out worship. Listen to Job, perhaps the epitome of suffering in the OT, who yet in faith and worship cried, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21)

Today is Father’s Day and so I want to give a message from God’s Word that is in defence of children and family but also of women, wives and mothers; but in particular of what it means to be truly a man, indeed a king among men. So today we turn to the opening section of this final chapter of Proverbs, a chapter more familiar to Christians for what it teaches about a…

In a sermon preached on 20th October , 1889 C H Spurgeon commented on the parable of the mustard seed: It was one single seed, and that seed a very small one; so very, very small that the Jews were accustomed to say, “As small as mustard seed.”

The Scribes rightly believed that there in an organised kingdom of evil. They clearly held that Satan (Beelzebub) could control the activity of demons so as to order them to move out. This is a belief that Jesus was quick to set His seal to by comparing the host of wicked angels under Satan to an organised house. The devil and his forces are real, exercise a real…

In entering Mark’s Gospel we need to remember that we are entering into 1st Century Galilee. We need to see Jesus’ deeds and hear His words first of all within that context. This is especially true in the passage we turn to today in Mark 2:13-17. Here Jesus comes into purposeful controversy and dispute with the religious leaders to establish the point of His mission. But…

Mark 2:1-3:6 forms a unit showing the expanding opposition to Jesus from the religious leaders – and it all begins with the deepest human need: forgiveness. In 2:2 we read that Jesus was preaching “the word” to a crowd gathered in a house – -that is the good news of the gospel (1:14-15), that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, for the forgiveness of sin.