In the ethical universe, there are no ideas bigger than good and evil. If good and evil mean anything, then they indicate something bigger than me, greater than the present, more important than any culture.
Yet even when confronted with the largest concepts, we humans are wonderfully adept at turning the focus on ourselves. So very easily [...]
There is a simple way to see that faith comes before reason.
We universally hate being lied to.
That probably requires some explanation, I accept, but it captures all that I will say.
Firstly, though, why bother thinking about this? It’s because there’s a prominent line of thought that places an absolute divide [...]
At Albury Bible Church, we recently put together a tool to help us plan what we do. We think there are three main things: Welcome. Grow. Serve.
Welcome: in the gospel of Jesus, God welcomes us to his family. Therefore we will tell people of that welcome, as well as welcoming them into our church family.
Grow: it’s normal [...]
Equipping Counselors for Your Church: The 4E Ministry Training Strategy by Robert W. Kellemen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I confess – I had to give up reading this book. This was because of the style of writing, rather than the content. Consequently, I will make [...]
It was a surprising realisation to me: that it’s good to think of public prayer as a performance.
It came from reading the apostle Paul’s letter to Corinth. In Corinth, church members used their gifts. Wonderful!
Not wonderful, according to Paul. The trouble was that they used gifts selfishly, for their own benefit. Gifts without [...]
In Albury-Wodonga, the weekly free newspapers used to include a column of reflections. They were written by local ministers, or similar (authors included a local Baha’i leader, as well as someone from the local humanist society branch). I don’t know why they stopped. Equally, I don’t know if they achieved anything!
Cleaning up my computer, [...]
This beautiful picture represents the three-dimensional structure of a human enzyme, alcohol dehydrogenase.
There are a few types of this class of enzyme. And their biochemistry is way beyond me. In simple terms, they all do something in the body with chemicals which include an alcohol group (-OH).
As such, this enzyme becomes quite busy [...]
Romans 7 is astoundingly moving. Paul speaks of an awful internal conflict: loving right while doing wrong.
Romans 7 is also a bit tricky. Exactly who is the person feeling this internal conflict? Is it a Christian? Perhaps it’s a Jewish person who loves the law but does not yet trust Jesus. Or someone else [...]
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Here’s a novel where the central voice is a Congragationalist minister, whose whole life has been in the small Iowan town of Gilead.
The setting is definitely small – backwater, even – but the matters are both [...]
I’ve been a Christian for going on 30 years now, and I learn more every day. If there’s so much more depth for me to learn, how hard is it to understand the message of Jesus for the very first time?
I often say, ‘The gospel is simple’, and it’s true! Christianity is not a [...]
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