Pastoral Message (Page 83)

By Not Known The kingdom of God was central to the words and deeds of Jesus. The kingdom of God relates to God’s saving rule through his appointed king, Jesus. Through Jesus, God defeats our enemy of sin and death and brings us under his lordship or rule. Jesus’ preaching announced the coming of God’s kingdom and summons people to enter it. His teaching…

By Not Known Parents of adult children can easily identify with Jesus’ parable of the father and his two sons (Luke 15:11-32). We may know, or can imagine, the pain of the father. The family business was threatened as the son wanted to cash up and ship out. The filial bonds were torn as he went far off and lived the life of a wastrel. These are the times when…

By Not Known We think of a fool as a person of limited intellect or knowledge. The Bible defines a fool as someone who knows about God but who denies that knowledge deep inside. Thus: the fool has said in his heart ‘There is no God’ (Ps 14: 1). We saw a fool last Sunday. Moses met the Egyptian Pharaoh. Pharaoh heard God’s message and saw God’s…

By Not Known Small is sometimes beautiful. A newborn child, a tiny diamond or a one-line poem all show us beauty in a miniature. Small is not always best. It’s like that with the Christian message. For various reasons, people sometimes strip the gospel of important elements. This is the ‘gospel minus‘, just as others sometimes create the ‘gospel…

By Not Known Philip was elected to help serve food from the church kitchen (Acts 6: 1- 6). In our terms, that makes him a deacon. He sets us an important example in seizing the day for God (Acts 8: 26- 40) One day Philip found himself on the road south west from Jerusalem to Gaza. ON the way he met an African civil servant riding in a chariot. The civil servant was…

By Not Known Don’t sweat the small stuff. This well-known saying makes a good point. We all have things that we don’t like and may even think are wrong. But most of us have a sense of relative importance. It’s not worth starting WWIII over small things. The Apostle Paul had a keen eye for small stuff. Thus he could write of his willingness to become all…

By Not Known Some have asserted that giving is difficult because giving requires us to let go and to give up. It means losing something. Our culture tells us to hoard and to gather. When we give up and lose, we are being disadvantaged. Therefore to give is to lose control or to give our power away. Something that is contradictory to what we have been taught. We were…

By Not Known It’s fascinating to watch a building under construction. Effective construction means that every action of every sub-contractor and worker is directed to the shared goal. All is done to complete the building according to design, within budget and on time. The same applies to the building of God’s church. Paul uses a building illustration several…

By Not Known A Google search of the word ‘love’ produces about 1,810,000,000 links. That’s a lot of words. Love inspires many and great words of poetry, literature and song. These many words take our souls soaring and hearts heaving with their lofty abstractions and grand declarations. But, is love just words? Paul gives us yet more words about love in 1…

By Not Known Most religions are tribal and local. This is not our faith. The Scripture teaches that God made all, for, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1:1). All remains under his Lordship, even if in a state of rebellion, for:the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it(Ps 24:1). Further, all are within the scope of his redemption. All…