^”Love one another with brotherly affection.
Outdo one another in showing honor.’
Romans 12:10 ESV

When Jesus washed his disciples’ dirty feet he took a swipe at their competitive nature, a not so subtle dig at their itch to be ‘first’ in his Kingdom. In this third brief post on the theme of pride, C S Lewis suggests that our competitiveness may be the best barometer of our problems with that particular sin.

‘If you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, ‘How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or show off?’The point is that each person’s pride is in competition with everyone else’s pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed…

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”

Every once and a while I’ll turn my radio back on and expose myself to the theology of popular Christian music, only to be reminded again why I don’t listen to it. The other day was no exception.

To be fair, there are also many good songs being written.

” . . . everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ”.
Philippians 3:8 (NLT)

Knowing Christ is what makes us Christians. We know Christ and have decided to follow Him. We want to know Him better. We wouldn’t be following Him if we had never met him or realised his worth. But how well do we go at explaining, in practical and understandable terms, what it means to “know Christ”, to “know God”. This is something that non-Christians really want to know. What does it mean to have a relationship with God, what does that look like? We need to get a whole lot better at explaining this.
Probably a good place to start is to talk about what it means to…

God loves doubters too and he is just
as concerned with caring for them as correcting them.The comments in this third post on the theme of doubt come form Os Guinness and C.S.Lewis.

“Interestingly, God’s remedy for Elijah’s depression was not a refresher course in theology but food and sleep… Before God spoke to him at all, Elijah was fed twice and given a good chance to sleep. Only then, and very gently, did God confront him with his error. This is always God’s way. Having made us as human beings, He respects our humanness and treats us with integrity. That is, He treats us true to the truth of who we are. It is human beings and not God who have made spirituality impractical.”

From Os Guinness, God in the Dark

It is often the devil working through some defect in our health, and in extreme cases it needs a…

It just dawned on me that though I have been blogging for almost a year now on the subject of music and grace, I haven’t even made a single mention of that most famous combination of music and grace: John Newton’s “Amazing Grace“. It has been an anthem of hope and faith for generations.
But why has this hymn had such an impact? What does Newton point out about God’s grace that resonates with us so strongly? Is there something in the music which made it so popular?

At the time Newton penned Amazing Grace, hymnbooks did not contain music; they were simply religious poetry books. The first time Newton’s lines were joined to music was in 1808, in A Companion to the Countess of Huntingdon’s Hymns, set to the tune “Hephzibah” by English composer John Jenkins Husband. More than twenty musical settings of “Amazing Grace” circulated…

From I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek

It turns out that atheists have bigger gaps in knowledge because they have far less evidence for their beliefs than Christians have for theirs. In other words, the empirical, forensic, and philosophical evidence strongly supports conclusions consistent with Christianity and inconsistent with atheism. Here are a few examples of that evidence:

1.. The scientific evidence overwhelmingly confirms that the universe exploded into being out of nothing. Either someone created something out of nothing (the Christian view), or no one created something out of nothing (the atheistic view). Which view is more reasonable? The Christian view. Which view requires more faith? The atheistic view.

2. The simplest life form contains the information-equivalent of 1,000 encyclopedias. Christians believe only an intelligent being can create a life form containing the equivalent of 1,000 encyclopedias. Atheists believe…

A friend who knows I’m sick at the moment has passed on a deep theological question, probably just to keep me busy and distracted from the headcold and sore throat. Here is the question: is God teaching us stuff in sickness always, or is sickness just bad stuff that happens as a result of being in a sin filled world, or is it both? Well I could just say ‘both ‘and be done with it! But let’s ponder for a little while.

It seems that we all have become convinced that the default setting of our body should be 100% health. We think that eternal youth is possible if we just eat well, sleep well, exercise and use the right face cream. From the moment we are born our bodies begin to visibly grow and blossom, but at the same time we are degrading! Skin cells die and flake off…