Category: Bible

  • So what?

    I recently heard a sermon that got me thinking, “So what?” Well, it actually got me thinking a lot more than that, although it was primarily because I didn’t agree with a lot of it – or, at least, felt it was ‘lacking’ in certain areas. But it was the ‘So what?” question that got…

  • Progress

    I was at the evening service in my home church last night and, I must confess, didn’t particularly engage with the theme of the sermon. It struck me as bordering on eisegesis rather than exegesis. To be fair, what it was doing was asking questions of the text that weren’t (I would have said) inherent…

  • Stories (again)

    Apologies up front – this is very much a ‘thinking out loud’ blog entry and may well descend into a bit of a rant. You have been warned! Even so, I’d appreciate your thoughts. On Sunday I was leading the whole service and the choice of hymns, reading, sermon, etc was entirely mine. Over Advent…

  • Bible in 5 statements

    Stewart has challenged me to: Summarize the Bible in five statements, the first one word long, the second two, the third three, the fourth four and the last five words long. Or possibly you could do this in descending order. Tag five people. So… here goes… Witness God’s Love Humanity turns away Jesus died for…

  • Oooo – pretty

    No, not a shiny new sports car or fancy techno-toy, but a Bible. An NLT Mosaic Bible to be precise. Actually, to be even more precise, the ‘deluxe’ version: I ordered one a little while back and collected it today. And very pretty it is too. Lots of ‘niceness’ about it, including dictionary/concordance, Hebrew and…

  • More petition thoughts

    Warning: (some) sarcasm/irony ahead – read with discernment. I’m wondering if Lochcarron and Skye didn’t miss a trick with their overture. Or indeed, if those in Aberdeen presbytery didn’t miss the same trick. Rather than re-ignite the homosexuality debate, perhaps it would have been much safer ground to oppose Rev Scott Rennie’s appointment on the…

  • GA09 and petitions

    It can’t have escaped your attention that there’s a serious row brewing for this year’s General Assembly. It concerns the Rev. Scott Rennie, an openly gay minister living with his partner. He has been called by a congregation in  Aberdeen. Pesbytery have upheld the call, but a significant minority raised an official objection and the…

  • Substitution revisited

    About this time last year I posted some thoughts on substitutionary atonement. At the time I expressed my concern about some of the problems with it. In light of another blog discussion I ended up diving into, I reread what I’d written and realised my thoughts needed refined. In hindsight, there have been a number…

  • Carry on regardless

    I was preaching today at my placement church and it was one of those times when you really wish it was someone else in your place. Everything started off well enough but one young lad had been brought back in from junior church by his mum a little earlier. That was fine until about 5…

  • Confusion

    I’ve uploaded the short talk I used for my speech training session to the downloads page (and fixed the non-working downloads while there). It’s called ‘Confusion’ and is a slightly different take on John 4 and Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. It developed out of a passing thought as I was…