Malachi 2:1-9 Holding Leadership Accountable
OUTLINE The unheeding Levite The ideal Levite The wayward Levite INTRODUCTION Robert Murray McCheyne said once that his people’s greatest need was his personal holiness. Why is it that a church’s greatest need is for the minister to be as holy as he can be? I think John Benton said it well, it is rare for the spirituality of the group of Christians to exceed that its leaders. Leaders set the tone for worship, they give direction, they give teaching and instruction and they are supposed to model the Christlike life as Paul does, 1 Cor. 11:1, ‘Be imitators...
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Psalm 2 The Kings of the Earth: Political Leaders and Us
Our Political leaders don’t always act rightly. How should the people of God respond?
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Ephesians 6:4: Instructing our Children
John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, was born in 1725 and at the age of 7 his mother Elizabeth died of tuberculosis. She was sickly the whole of his childhood. One biographer writes: ‘Though Elizabeth was unable to function as she might have wished, she did not squander her days. Knowing that time with her son might be short, she determined to make the most of what remained. She took on the role of teacher and spent hours with John each day. She was a good instructor, and he was an eager, bookish student. He progressed quickly. “When...
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Ephesians 6:4: Fathers
Father’s Day is approaching soon, but it has been called ‘an awkward holiday.’ It will not only be awkward because of the token gifts which seem to trivialize it, as has happened to Mother’s Day. It will not only be awkward because of the many who have toxic fathers who have been a source of trauma and abuse. It will be awkward because of the sexual revolution we are a part of and the attack on the nuclear family. The transgender revolution has created a situation where natural women identifying as men who give birth to children do not...
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Luke 9:1-9: The Sending of the 12 Apostles
We are about half way through Christ’s 3 ½ year earthly ministry. We are in the final stretch of what is known as Christ’s Galilean ministry before He sets His sights on His cross-work in Jerusalem. 9:51 is a turning point in His ministry, ‘When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.’ We are still in the middle of a key section that is putting on display the identity of Christ. We have seen by His miracles that He is the one with authority over nature, demons, sickness...
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The Government and Covid-19
We have recently experienced something which none of us will have experienced in NZ, the government ordered churches not to gather for worship. Of course, they did not single out religious groups alone to be closed down, but for the first time that any of us have experienced in this context, we were forbidden to meet for worship. Questions arose in our minds about the rightness of this act, and these questions were multiplied as we hit the various alert levels, and especially as we were coming out of the stricter levels into those with more freedom. Questions like...
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Luke 7:11-17: The Lord of Life
Have you ever heard of the irresistible force paradox? Have you heard the phrase ‘the unstoppable force meets the immovable object?’ Maybe you have heard it in the context of sport where two powerful rugby teams are going to compete. Technically it is an impossibility for an unstoppable force to move an unmovable object, or vice versa because then the object would by definition no longer be immovable, or the force unstoppable. Nevertheless, ‘the unstoppable force meets the immovable object’ is a way in which several commentators have described the next section we are looking at. In this section...
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Luke 7:1-10: The Faith of the Centurion
There is a lot of confusion around the idea of faith today. In our post-religious age faith is now a form of ungrounded optimism towards the future, a keep-your-chin-up sort of attitude that helps motivate you. Some see it as a self-development tool in a materialistic age. Since we have impoverished ourselves in an age of consumerism we need to have some spirituality, and any sort will do. Biblical faith is something different, Biblical faith is informed by the Bible, and it has an exclusive object—Christ. In the Scriptures we come across those who have no faith, those who...
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Luke 4:38-44: Jesus the Healer
Why do we get sick? The Bible teaches that we get sick and die because of the curse upon sin. Adam would have lived in a world full of bacteria but because his body was whole and had not suffered any of the effects of sin He would have been immune to the powerful miniature agents God had created. Adam’s genetic code would have been flawless and the process of cell multiplication would have happened without a hitch so that no cancerous growths would form and no genetic diseases would have been passed on to his progeny. Adam would...
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Luke 4:31-37: The Authority of Jesus
A biblical counsellor tells of a couple he was counselling: ‘Cynthia, a woman I counselled, once cast a demon from her toaster when it failed to work! More seriously, she and her husband Andrew had a remarkable—and remarkably destructive—way of arguing with each other. For the first five minutes they warmed up with the normal person-to-person bickering. But at a certain point, when the fighting turned nasty, they shifted gears and wheeled in heavier artillery. They would bind, rebuke, and attempt to cast out demons of anger, pride, and self-righteousness from each other. In Cynthia’s words, ‘I saw the...
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