Sermons, Articles, and Other Things

It is common knowledge among those who are aware of them that Paul’s prayers are very worthy of study and imitation. We can see that he regarded it as important that his readers should be aware of his prayerful interest in them and their circumstances. Usually his petitions were connected to what he knew of their situations and that is the case here. At the same time, his petitions are expressions of doctrines connected to prayer. The comfort of a praying person Paul here reveals some details of his prayer methods. One detail seems to be than whenever he thought of someone he prayed for him or her. As far as the Philippians were concerned, he rejoiced whenever he recalled them. This is no doubt a very challenging reality of the Christian life – do we provide others with good memories that enable their prayer lives to be marked by joy? The activity of the Philippians which caused Paul such joy was the ways in which they supported his work in the gospel. He regarded it as a c...

Jesus was determined to teach his disciples about the cross. He had been doing so ever since Peter’s great confession of his deity at Caesarea Philippi. Why did Jesus want to do this, since obviously it would be a distressing event? An obvious reason would be that the ignorance of the disciples had to be rectified. Among many other reasons, there are at least four that we can remind ourselves of. First, the death of Jesus by crucifixion was part of the eternal plan of God. That plan was conceived lovingly and wisely. It was not an impulsive response to an unforeseen disaster. The cross was where the Father and the Son had decided together in eternity as the place to which they would travel together after the Son was conceived in the womb of Mary. Second, it was what the Scripture predicted would happen to the Messiah. The list of predictions began early, right from the beginning when it was announced to the devil, in the ears of our first parents, that a Rescuer would come and suf...

​ A long time had passed since Paul and Timothy had seen the Philippians and yet we can see from the letter that there was a very strong bond between them, which is a reminder that the passing of time is not always a barrier to brotherly love. Moreover, there was a large distance between where they were – Paul and Timothy were in Rome, which was a long way from Philippi. Yet the geographical distance was not a barrier to the expression of brotherly love. In addition, the change in circumstances had not brought about a loss of brotherly love. When he was in Philippi, Paul had been taken out of prison because he was a Roman citizen. Now he was in prison in Rome because he had used his privilege as a Roman citizen to be tried there. Still, the Philippians expressed their love for him. No one knows if the original members of the Philippian church – Lydia, the jailer and the demon-possessed woman – were still alive. Maybe Lydia had moved elsewhere with her business and perhaps the jail...

Jesus was a master storyteller. His parables are often graphic and usually surprising in their contents. Often they invite listeners to discover something about God, as in the parable of the prodigal son or in the parable of the lost sheep. To ask, when we read a parable, ‘What are we being told about God?’, is a good way to respond to it, and it is the question that we should ask with regard to this parable. The point in this parable is not the time that the workers were employed but the graciousness of the owner of the vineyard. After all, to give a day’s wage to someone who has worked only an hour is exceptionally generous. That would not happen in everyday life. But we are not being asked to consider everyday life. Instead we are being asked to think about God and what he does. In the Old Testament, the idea of God’s people as a vineyard is used. Isaiah speaks of God having a vineyard that he looked after carefully and this illustration informs us of the great care that God g...

It was the case that when people heard what Jesus had to say they had a variety of responses. Some were intrigued and others were offended. Some dismissed what he said and others were drawn to follow him. The disciples had been following Jesus for a while and maybe if we had asked them to describe his teaching one word that they might have used was ‘surprising’. Or they might have said his teaching was at times unexpected. And there are at least four surprising statements, perhaps also unexpected announcements, from Jesus in this chapter. Surprise 1 – divorce and marriage It is inevitable that at times the demands of discipleship will have connections with ideas proposed elsewhere in society and we see an example of this in the issue of divorce. The background to this question from the Pharisees was that there were two views on divorce advocated at that time within Israel. One view, linked with a man called Hillel, made divorce very easy and the other view, linked to a man call...