blog

  • Just a Thought... 17 January

    The Gospel is amazing! The wonderful truth of grace: God’s love for us in the Lord Jesus, His gift of eternal life as we put our faith in Him alone to save us through His death on the cross and resurrection from the dead – it’s all beyond our understanding and deeply humbling! Yet because it’s so beyond us, and God’s plan for the world is so amazing, we may be tempted to listen to hearsay rather than properly understood Bible! Indeed, our own sinful hearts can easily convince us that what we have in Christ...

  • Just a Thought... 10 January

    Prompted by our church motto verse for this year (1 John 3:1), last Sunday we paused with the children to think about what it means for God to have lavished us with His love. (If you missed that illustration you catch-up here , about 34mins in.) Thinking about the extent of God’s love, I’m reminded of an old children’s song I learned in Sunday School and still sing on Beach Missions with simple but profound words: Jesus love is very wonderful (x3) So high you can’t get over it, So low you can’t get...

  • Just a Thought... 3 January

    Astonishing adoption “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1) Those who’ve gone through an adoption process can tell you that there’s a whole lot of paperwork involved. It doesn’t just happen quickly. But once the process is complete, the child is truly adopted; truly your child, with all the rights, privileges and obligations that involves. Why would people start this big hassle? Out of love! They want the child to be their child, to...

  • Just a Thought... 28 December

     God with us “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things... by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (Colossians 1:19-20) If you’ve been at the beach as a child, perhaps you share one of my memories. You dug a big hole and used a little bucket to try to fill it with water. The sea never got any emptier; neither did the hole fill up, no matter how many buckets you emptied into it. You wondered: does the...

  • Just a Thought... 20 December

    The greatest gift of Christmas What do you REALLY want for Christmas? When your head is on your pillow and you close your eyes to think about what nobody else can see or hear – maybe to admit to yourself that what you really want is what nobody else could imagine. Now we’re at the end of 2022 we may have got past many of the issues of Covid19, but there’s plenty more things for us to worry about and what most of us really want is, surely, peace! The great news is that the greatest gift of...

  • Just a Thought... 13 December

    He came! Most of us are familiar with the nativity story: Mary, Joseph, the baby, Bethlehem, a stable, shepherds, wise men and so on. It’s easy for us to smile at the familiar and get on with the busyness of Christmas: cards to send, presents to buy, food to organise, family visiting and so on, while still having to go to work, pay the bills and deal with the day to day challenges (like snow!) that don’t let up just because it’s Christmas! This year it’s all complicated with industrial action by those who run some...

  • Just a Thought... 6 December

    A right perspective. We may believe that the idea of ‘not getting above your station’ sounds like something from a – thankfully forgotten - era, yet whatever the truth of how society is divided, the issue of what other people think still dominates. Research on the damaging effects of social media indicates that presenting our ‘best selves’ both visually and emotionally is a pressure that many, not least on young people, find too hard to bear. Things have gone beyond simple peer-pressure to obsessing about what others think. Yet these pressures aren’t restricted to social media: ...

  • Just a Thought... 29 November

    God knows me? How many people do you know? Is it dozens, hundreds, more? It rather depends how we define ‘know’ as we ask the question. Most of us can probably number acquaintances in the hundreds, though we may not know most of those people very much more than their name and approximately what they do or where they live. To describe that we actually ‘know’ someone is an entirely different idea: we probably ‘know’ a few people well enough to understand their past experiences, attitudes, priorities, hopes and dreams. To ‘know’ someone in those terms...

  • Just a Thought... 22 November

    “What’s in a name”? The topic of how people are to be addressed is increasingly complicated. The use of gender-specific pronouns such as ‘Mr’ or ‘Ms’, or those that indicate a marital status such as ‘Mrs’ or ‘Miss’ are fraught with complexity. For some people the decline of formality in business is a cause of sadness, whereas for others the familiarity of first-name relationships is the only way they feel able to function with trust. For Government, the press has long-ceased to speak of the ‘Prime Minister’, preferring instead to...

  • Just a Thought... 15 November

    Led by the Law? We love to say that Christianity isn’t a religion it’s a relationship. Yet it depends what you mean: If ‘religion’ is earning your way to heaven by keeping the rules, then it’s true that Christianity ISN’T that! Yet, there ARE rules in the Bible, so what are they for? Last Sunday morning we saw the apostle Paul explain what the rules are for to the Christians in Galatia in chapter 3 of his letter, who had heard a whole variety of false information. “We were held in custody under the...