Luke 18:1-8: The Parable of the Persistent Widow
INTRODUCTION Prayer is something that every Christian does, but nobody does well. Prayer is the native tongue of faith, but we trend towards doubt. Prayer is the hearts’ expression of love to God, but we are often cold towards God. Prayer is the outlet of holy desire, but we are full of sinful desires. We struggle to pray and we struggle to pray well. This could be because of sin in our lives that we withdraw from God’s searching gaze. This could be because of the business of life where the urgent drives out the important. It could be...
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Luke 15:11-32: The Parable of the Two Lost Sons
The parable of the prodigal son is probably the most famous parable in the gospels. But I think like many that it has been misnamed. Some have thought to call it the parable of the Prodigal Father, this is because the word prodigal means ‘spendthrift’ and the Father who represents God and His restoring grace is so generous. But I think this is a bad title as ‘prodigal’ has many bad connotations. Some have thought to call it the Parable of the Older Brother, this is a good title which is better than the parable of the prodigal son...
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Luke 15:1-10: Seeking and Saving the Lost
God loves sinners and He seeks for them to save them. John Stott shares this truth from the experience of Augustine: ‘He was born in North Africa (in what we now call Algeria) in the middle of the fourth century. Already in his teens he was leading a dissolute, even promiscuous, life, enslaved by his passions. He wrote in his Confessions: “Clouds of muddy carnal concupiscence filled the air. The bubbling impulses of puberty befogged and obscured my heart so that it could not see the difference between love’s serenity and lust’s darkness. Confusion of the two things boiled...
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Ephesians 5:28-32: The Realities and Responsibilities of Union
The Bible often argues from what you are to what you should do. Because you are a new creature in Christ, act in a new way. Because you are in a one Spirit union with believers of other races, put away racism. Because your life is joined to the resurrected Christ consider your life in His and live appropriately. Because you are in a one flesh union with your spouse love them as yourself. What you are, or what realities are true about you imply how you ought to live. This is a basic truth which the bible assumes....
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Ephesians 5:25-27: Words of Life and Death
‘Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.’ Prov. 18:21. One of the most effective weapons and one of the greatest fertilizers in marriage is our speech. What we say and how talk to one another will either make or break your marriage. James 3:6, ‘And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell.’ We can all think of words that have...
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Ephesians 5:1-2: Imitators of God
Motivation is something we have wrestled with all our lives. You will remember when your parents gave what appeared to you to be unreasonable rules and when you asked why you had to do them, and they responded, ‘Because I said so,’ you know how you felt. You might have been willing to obey but you needed to know why, you needed the proper motivation, especially when what was required went against your desires. Paul is the master teacher who tells us what to do and then motivates us to do it as well. The pattern of Paul’s method...
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Luke 11:3-4: The Lord’s Prayer: What we Really Need in Prayer
We are all bad at prayer and Jesus is the master teacher when it comes to prayer. No human being has ever prayed more perfectly than Christ. He is sinless; He is divine and He has been in eternal fellowship with the Father. He as God has both received prayer, but also as man prayed. He has both answered prayer and had His prayers answered. So when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, they could ask no better person. We have looked at the first half of the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer outlined for us to...
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Ephesians 4:29: New Speech
‘There is a story in the Jewish Talmud about a king who sent two jesters on an errand. He instructed them, “Foolish Simon, go and bring me back the best thing in the world. And you, Silly John, go and find for me the worst thing in the world.” Both clowns were back in short order, each carrying a pack-age. Simon bowed low and grinned. “Behold, Sire, the best thing in the world.” His package contained a tongue. John snickered and quickly unwrapped his bundle. “The worst thing in the world, Sire.” Another tongue! (Paul Lee Tan, Encyclopaedia of...
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Ephesians 3:7-13: Preaching the mystery of Christ
The Bible is full of little people being given big jobs. Imagine you were Abraham for a moment. God has given you a new name, it means father of nations, yet you have no children. God wants to bless the whole world through the offspring of a couple who cant have children. Or think of Moses, he used to be in favour with the Egyptian court until there was a warrant out for his arrest because he murdered someone. And now God wants to use this man who has been away from Egypt for 40 years to go as...
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Ephesians 3:2-6: Steward of the Mystery of Christ
The word mystery has various connotations. If you are a book lover it may cause you to think of a favourite genre of who-done-it crime thrillers. The common English word means something that is difficult or impossible to understand it, it is often used in the sense of defeat: ‘It is a mystery, we will never know.’ In the ancient world there were various mystery religions who had secret knowledge which only the initiated could understand. The mysteries were the secret truths revealed to those who had proven themselves worthy of ascending to being indoctrinated in this higher knowledge....
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Ephesians 2:1-10: ‘But for the Grace of God….’
‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ This is a well-known statement which recognises that apart from God’s gracious intervention left to ourselves we would be lost. This statement is credited to the martyr John Bradford, once while walking past a gallows and as criminal were being led to be hanged, he looked over at them as said, ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’ It is this grateful recognition that Paul is trying to prompt in the Ephesians in 2:1-10. The body of chapter 1 is only two sentences in the Greek, the first...
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Luke 7:36-50: A Forgiven Sinner’s Love for Christ
When do you know if someone is truly a Christian? This can be a difficult question to answer for on the one hand you and I cannot read the heart of another and so will always have an imperfect ability to make a judgement. However, there is also a call in scripture for us to evaluate a person’s credible confession of faith. The true test of someone’s faith is not the amount of religiosity they indulge in, a person can go to church a lot and not be saved; the amount of theologically correct doctrine we have, for some...
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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 6:37-42: Thou Shalt Not Judge!
The eleventh commandment is ‘Thou shalt not judge!’ At least in our modern pluralistic context where all religion is now equally irrelevant this is deemed to be a cardinal rule. At times it seems as if the only thing people know about Jesus teaching is that He taught that we should not judge. It is to this section that we turn now in the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6:37-42. Key to understanding this section is the context. Jesus has divided the people of Israel into two groups, the godly and the ungodly, but here is how the...
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Ephesians 1:1-14: Our Eternal Salvation
Ephesus, the 5th largest town in the world when Paul wrote this letter. A town that would have been a difficult place to be a Christian, and so the church there was in need of encouragement. Ephesus, was the capital of the Roman province of Asia and a bastion of the Emperor Cult, where deifying the Roman Caesar was a badge of patriotism. A clash between those who thought the Caesar was Lord and Jesus is Lord is inevitable. It was also the centre for Diana/Artemis worship, the temple of this goddess of fertility was one of the seven...
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2 Peter 3:18: Regeneration
It is 2 days away from the end of 2019, and I’m sure you have all thought about this as the year draws to a close. New Years resolutions. As the clock clicks past midnight on Tuesday, the realisation dawns upon Christians and non-Christians alike, that they probably weren’t as good as they intended to be last year. Perhaps you wanted an improvement on your health, but that gym membership didn’t get the same amount of use as you hoped. Perhaps you wanted an improvement on your finances, but you just didn’t save as much as you hoped. Perhaps...
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