I went for a walk a couple of weeks ago. Truth be told, I was in a foul mood. I was preparing for the following week’s Sunday morning service and, being honest, the thought of having to announce once more “Let’s try to engage with this song as others sing it,” and “Please limit the […]
How do you imagine God? For all of us the danger is that the God we have in our minds is different to the God who is really there. Truth be told, that’s true all the time. I remember a comment from Julian Hardyman in a sermon- “None of us have ever had an adequate […]
A few weeks ago I was thinking about the church in the autumn, hopefully when normality has returned. What should be our goal? Instinctively my mind went to programmes and activities. How could we look like a bustling and vibrant church? And then I reflected a bit. As I wrote last week, a reputation for […]
I’m currently doing some work on Revelation 2-3 for an event that I am speaking at this summer. It is the section where Jesus addresses seven churches and speaks into their spiritual condition. Often we look at each of those churches in isolation. But as you put them together it is hard to escape one […]
Towards the end of his life John Stott, one of the great church leaders of the 20th century, said this: “I am sometimes asked whether at my age I have any ambitions left. I always now reply, “Yes, my overriding ambition is that I may become a little more like Christ.” God’s purpose is to […]
I wonder what you see as you look at the cross. It was hideous ugly- the “supreme penalty” according to Cicero. And yet throughout Jesus’ ministry he never seems to regard it as a place of shame. Three times in John’s Gospel Jesus uses the same description of the cross- it is the place where […]
One year on. It is a year to the day since the Prime Minister told us that we must stay at home. We still live under the same command. In the meantime the equivalent of the non-student population of Oxford has died of coronavirus in the UK. At noon the nation will fall silent to […]
Let me be honest- I am decidedely fed up of lockdown. The way to get me muttering under my breath (or sometimes out loud) at the moment is to get somebody on TV telling us how essential it is to prolong restrictions even beyond the time when the vulnerable have been vaccinated. Lockdown is dehumanizing […]
In my last couple of posts I have suggested that lockdown is a time for us to see the importance of the inner life. In our sermon series in January we considered Jesus’ invitation to come to Him- and I know a number were struck by the image of drinking deeply of Jesus from John […]
I spent a fair chunk of February and early March announcing that disaster was on the way. This wasn’t special insight- the pandemic was as much of a suprise to me as the next person. But in the early part of the year as a church we considered the first few chapters of Jeremiah- looking […]