Renewed in Faith This week’s topic in our 40 Days of Renewal series is Faith. Faith is one of those words that’s used a lot and can mean different things. So I thought it might be helpful to try to understand what faith is, particularly from a Biblical point of view. What is faith? The schoolboy put his hand up “It’s believing something you know isn’t true!” Haha! But deep down, I wonder if we don’t secretly worry about whether…
It’s a great thing to look at and understand the Holy Spirit. He is the third person of the Trinity, which makes him equal with the Father and the Son. But he can be the hardest to understand. We can easily relate to the idea of Father and Son, because they are a part of our everyday lives and vocabulary. But the Holy Spirit is somehow more mysterious. I’m not going to launch into an exhaustive examination of the Holy…
Earlier in the week, I spoke about some verses which have been quite important to me, which started off on a hospital bed! “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you” (Isaiah 43:2). Today I want to look at how that might work. Something that’s helped me quite a lot is an incident that happened in David’s life. In 1 Samuel 13 the Amalekites have been along and kidnapped the wives and children of David and his…
This is a slightly longer version of the video message that was shared on Monday at the start of week 2 of 40 Days of Renewal. I was 17. I’d had a road accident, and I was in hospital. I had a variety of injuries in varying degrees of severity, but the biggie was a broken leg, and the treatment for the broken leg was traction. Without going into the gory details, traction involved a frame across the bed with…
As part of TFW’s 40 Days of Renewal, I’ll be posting each week on the theme of the week – which to start with is on Forgiveness. I’ve also done a video on this which was sent out with the Tuesday Daily Devotional. This is the transcript. I’ve been reading through the book of Hebrews recently. And one of the things the writer talks about is the Old Testament, how the Old Covenant is not as good as the New…
For the past few weeks I’ve been going through the book of Hebrews in my daily studies. It’s quite a long book and contains some rich theology as well as practical teaching in everyday living. I did have to smile when I got the the last few verses and read ‘bear with me… for I have written to you briefly’! (Hebrews 13:22) If it has an overall theme it’s this: You can’t go back – press on. At the time…
In may last post I mentioned spiritual disciplines. Things like prayer, Bible reading etc. Then I was reading in Hebrews 12 about how God disciplines us as sons (and daughters). The context initially looks to be about God correcting us for our sins. Heb 12:6. But there’s also a sense of training, the way athletes discipline themselves when preparing for a race. In fact the chapter goes on to talk that way in Heb 12:12-13. This shows another aspect of…
I’ve previously posted about being In my Chair. A place where I meet with God, sometimes called a ‘devotional’ or a ‘quiet time’. I included a couple of posts about some of the things I do that help me focus in those times.They’re all well and good (I hope!). In previous times these have been called ‘spiritual disciplines’. A title which is correct, if a little off-putting. ‘Discipline’ is not a particularly positive word these days, especially in a culture…
“every life matters … because we’re made by God in his image”We’ve all seen the ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘All Lives Matter’, ‘White Lives Matter’ slogans – even movements – that have sprung up recently. Some of this is proving to be a force for good, but some of it seems to merely inflame existing, and deep-rooted tensions.Rather than enter these debates for now, I wanted to take a step back and ask: why does any life matter? And to whom…
When the lockdown started we all had to hunt around for ways of communicating with each other. Right from the word go, it was the most natural thing in the world to want to engage with other people.Technology played a massive part in this, with one app that most people had not heard of becoming so popular it became a verb. We ‘zoom’ one another.That’s interesting to me – as someone whose whole career has been in IT. Why should…