Restless Wonderer

One of the unusual things about preaching in various different churches is that I find myself having to preach under a title and on a passage I didn’t choose. Sometimes when I begin my preparation, I get a wobble of thinking there won’t be anything helpful for me to draw out of this obscure story or lesser-known psalm. I really must stop that, though, as invariably when I get started in earnest I find more in there than I can fit into a single sermon. That’s certainly the case with Psalm 111, which is my assigned passage for this coming Sunday in Belfast Chinese Christian Church. I still have the challenge of working out how to preach by translation into Mandarin (morning) and Cantonese (afternoon) but I’m not short of material and I’m feeling challenged by the passage myself, which is always the best place to preach from. Psalm 111 is an acrostic poem, meaning that each line begins with a sequential letter of the Hebrew alphabet (already a challenge to explain in a non-alphabetic la...

  Pondering what to write for an article in this week's bulletin of the congregation I'm a member of, I stumbled upon something I never knew.  Today is a special date.  It is … [drumroll] … National Handwriting Day [fanfare].  Who knew that 23 rd January is the day to celebrate the diversity and beauty of hand-written script? In my original profession, there wasn’t much to celebrate (apologies to fellow medics!) and things have not improved since I left it behind. Barring occasional signatures, I write with a keyboard, not a pen. The resulting letters are legible (even if not always rightly ordered!) and uniform (how boring!) There’s something sad about this loss of individuality. I’m sure you’ll agree that hand-written letters connect with the heart in a special way. A person’s personality and passions are conveyed in their handwriting. The apostle Paul knew this. He made a habit of adding a handwritten greeting to his letters, the bulk of which were written do...

This series has followed a journey through salvation history by considering references in the Bible to God’s writing.   We have seen how God wrote intelligence into our nature in creation, both through DNA and in our conscience.   We saw that God remains intimately involved in our world and in our lives in His providence.   We considered how He has revealed Himself in words in Scripture and how He records our deeds as the righteous Judge.   We have also encountered the forgiveness inherent in the not guilty verdict that is ours in Jesus and the transformation that the Spirit brings about as He writes God’s Law on our hearts.   In this episode we reach the end of the story, or perhaps the beginning of the new story, as we reach the book of Revelation.   In last week’s post, I emphasised that the gospel is not just about us being saved to go to heaven – it is also about our transformation so that we can serve God on earth.   It is important to remember...

The gospel has sometimes been truncated in an unhelpful way.   It is sometimes told as if it ends with the forgiveness of our sins, the cancelling of our debts, and declaration of our acceptance by God.   All of this is true, but it isn’t everything!   It leaves the impression that we are saved and ready for Heaven so we might as well just sit back and wait for the next bus.   It rightly emphasises that we were in the wrong, in debt to God, and that this dishonourable past is now blotted out, but it fails to describe the riches that are credited to us on account of Jesus.   The gospel is not only about forgiveness – it is also about transformation.   So far in this series we have seen God writing in creation, in providence, in revelation, in judgement and in forgiveness, but we need to see that God writes in transformation.      In the first post of this series I discussed the conscience and the moral standard that is written on our he...

So far in this series we have seen God writing in creation, in providence, in revelation and in judgement.   God’s standard of justice is written in our hearts, it was written on tablets of stone and it is written in the books that record our actions, just as God’s verdict was written on the wall in Belshazzar’s feast.   If this was the whole story of the Bible, there would be no good news and no hope.   Yet to understand the message of the gospel we must understand the justice of God and His righteous wrath because of human sin.   God will not and cannot ignore our sin – it is not only a violation of the laws of morality; it is a personal offence against God.   When we measure ourselves against the standard of perfection described in the Ten Commandments, we inevitably find ourselves, like Belshazzar, seriously lacking.   What hope is there, then, for us? As we come to the next occasion of God’s writing in the Scriptures, a word of caution is in order. ...

Readers of the Bible might be forgiven for thinking that Israel was at the centre of history in the centuries before Christ, but in reality for most of their history the people of Israel were under the dominance of other great powers.   Only in the time of David and Solomon (around 100 years before Christ) did Israel make its mark on the world stage.   Before that, Egypt was the mega-power and other local enemies, including the arch-enemy, the Philistines, continually threatened the tribes descended from Jacob.   After Solomon the united tribes fractured into two kingdoms and their power was gradually eroded in the face of the growing power of kingdoms to the northeast – first the Syrians (or Arameans), then the Assyrians and lastly the Chaldeans (or neo-Babylonians).   Eventually the two kingdoms of the people of Israel fell – the northern kingdom to Assyria in 722 BC and the southern kingdom of Judah to Babylon in 586BC.   From a purely historical persp...

So far in this series I have written about God’s ‘writing’ in creation (biologically through DNA and morally through the conscience) and in providence (His foreseeing of our lives).   We have seen that God created the cosmos and that He continues to be actively involved in its unfolding story.   The question this raises is how we can recognise where He is at work and how we can know what He is like.   The answer is that God has revealed Himself to us.   The great religions of the world can be broadly categorised into two types.   The religions of East and South Asia can be described as ‘mystical’ – they originated in the reflections of individuals on the nature of human existence and ultimate reality.   In China Confucius and Laozi and in India the Buddha and various Hindu sages developed theories about the basic problem with human existence and its solution through reason or meditation.   Their philosophies often display considerable uncertainty abo...

In our home group this week one of the younger members asked the question: “Does God decide everything that is going to happen to us?”   He had been wondering since a Christian friend had said that he didn’t need to worry about the future because God had it all planned out for him.   The question isn’t a new one, but it certainly is important.   Do we have real choices, is ‘free will’ a reality, or is everything already determined?   This question isn’t just one for Christian theology, within which there is a rich tradition of debate about how divine sovereignty and human responsibility can coexist.   It is also hotly debated in the realms of philosophy and neuroscience, with a significant number of neuroscientists suggesting that we live in a deterministic world – our actions are merely the result of chemical and electrical processes in our brains – and the majority of philosophers insisting that free will must exist.   This debate isn’t far removed from...

At the root of the mysteries of the human body lies an amazing chemical called DNA.   It is the stuff genes are made of, its sequence coding for the protein building blocks of our bodies.   DNA itself is composed of four molecules called nucleotides and the sequence these appear in determines which protein is built.   In other words, there is a sequence in the DNA which codes for a specific protein sequence.   This microscopic assembly line is truly amazing and it parallels our experience of human communication.   DNA is like a language, with nucleotides combining to code for proteins, which represent a pattern for complex organs and systems, just as letters combine in a written language to code for words, which represent ideas which can be realised in the physical world.   At the basis of life, then, is information which is intelligible and useful.   Of course, this information is only useful if the apparatus in the cell that is necessary for produc...

Writing is a distinctively human skill.   It has no equivalent in the behaviour of any animal species.   It allows ideas to be recorded and preserved in a way that crosses the generations.   In theory (notwithstanding the limited durability of physical materials), it allows a permanent record to be kept of what a person thinks.   It relates the world of the mind to the material world in a concrete way.   Writing also connects the mind of one individual with the minds of others in a powerful way – it sparks imagination and stirs the heart.   As with so many aspects of human nature, the capacity to write is a reflection of the nature of God. The Bible speaks in several places of things that are written by God.   This series of posts was inspired by the decision of a church I spoke in recently – Hillside Community Church in Ballymena – to run a four part series on occasions in the Bible when God’s handwriting is mentioned.   I spoke in the second p...