Sermons, Articles, and Other Things

These verses have been favourite ones with the Lord’s people because they have given to them a wonderful view of heaven as their eternal home. Home is wonderful imagery for most people, and of course heaven was the eternal home of Jesus. Spurgeon commented, when preaching on this passage, that the words were better than any sermon as far as consolation was concerned. The consolation Jesus gave to his disciples Verse 1 is obviously connected to the previous statements of Jesus which concerned the soon denial of Peter. No doubt the disciples were disturbed by this prediction. Perhaps Jesus was seeing the concern on their faces. This consolation was given to a group who were preoccupied with their own place in an imagery kingdom, who were about to deny him, who were not listening to his teaching. Jesus knew all this about them, but because he loved them he proceeded to comfort them. Jesus encourages his disciples by telling them not to focus on their surroundings but on his div...

The phrase about the communion of saints was a later addition to the Apostles Creed. The idea contained in the term ‘communion’ is fellowship or sharing. So we need to ask here with whom to saints have fellowship and with whom do they share spiritual realities. The answer to those questions is twofold – they have communion with one another and they have communion with God. We will consider the latter in this sermon and the former in the next. What is a saint? There is a clear sense of limitation in this statement of the Creed because it limits these forms of communion to those it calls saints. At the same time, the statement affirms a great breadth because it says that all the saints participate in this communion. No doubt, they chose the word carefully because other descriptions could have been used such as the communion of believers or the communion of the children of God. The word ‘saints’ is a biblical one, although I am not aware of any occasion when it occurs in the si...

In the preceding passages, Solomon comments on various unfair aspects of life that he had observed including injustice, oppression, greed and achievements. Yet he also realised that one dark shadow lurked over all people and that was death. Therefore it was not surprising that life seemed meaningless because no matter what one did it would end. In the verses we are going to consider he turns his penetrating eye on to another common activity – religion. I suppose from one point of view his comments here are connected to something he had done for the benefit of the people. After all, he had built the house of God for the purpose of them gathering there to worship him. Did the fact that some people used it wrongly cause him to have a sense of pointlessness? Of course, he could hardly point the finger at others since he had later build places of worship for false gods. Solomon would have seen large crowds gather in the temple in Jerusalem to worship God. He himself would have part...

Preached on 30/3/2014 The Saviour has just instructed his disciples that they should love one another, with the guaranteed outcome that the world would then know that they are his disciples. Therefore, one would have expected the reaction of the disciples to involve asking Jesus in what ways they could love one another. Yet there is no hint that this type of question crossed their minds. Instead Peter asked a question about a matter that Jesus said they could not appreciate at the time. We could say that Peter was guilty of inappropriate curiosity and this attitude prevented him seeing the importance of a loving, practical, Christian outlook.     Jesus revealed his patience towards Peter by expanding on where he was going and what it would mean for Peter. Jesus may have referred to his going to the cross when he said that Peter would eventually follow him because Peter suffered crucifixion many years later. But it is more likely that Jesus was referring to heaven beca...