Sermons, Articles, and Other Things

It is the case that Paul in his letters does not refer in great detail to the birth of Jesus. He does not mention most of the details that we associate with the arrival of Jesus into the world and is silent about most of the events that the Bible elsewhere records such as the angelic visits to Joseph and Mary and the shepherds. Paul would have known about them, of course, and although it is not necessary to argue from it we can be assured that, for example, he and Doctor Luke, his companion, would often have spoken about the events the doctor records about the birth in his Gospel. Paul does refer to the birth of Jesus in this verse and although it is a short verse he does mention several details that we can immediately see are connected to what the Gospel writers say about the birth of Jesus. He mentions the time when it occurred, he mentions the activity of the Father, he mentions, the role of Mary, he mentions that Jesus was under the Jewish law, and he mentions why Jesus came. I ...

James has been offering advice to Jewish Christians who were suffering for their faith in Jesus. We know that there are different ways of coping with situations that come our way in life. It looks as if some of his readers were making wrong deductions about the troubles they faced. We are told by James what one deduction was, which was that God must have wanted them to sin because they were being tempted to do so. The presence of temptation during a time of trial is a reminder that the devil can get involved in tempting us when things are going badly. It is also a reminder that we can misread situations and make unwarranted assumptions about how we should respond, perhaps more so when we are facing difficulties. Of course, we know that there are further teachings about temptation elsewhere in the Bible. For example, Jesus instructed his disciples to pray daily that they would not be led into temptation and Paul encouraged the Corinthians by reminding them that when temptation occurr...

It is good to see couples serving the Lord together. In the New Testament, several couples are mentioned, although sometimes the names of the wives are not recorded, with the wife of Peter being an example of this. Usually, when both names are mentioned, the husband’s name comes first, with Philemon and Apphia being an example of this. One couple have their names mentioned on six occasions in the New Testament, and they are Priscilla and Aquila (Paul always refers to her as Prisca). Usually when they are mentioned, her name comes first. I would like us to look at the various descriptions that are made of them, and to do so in chronological order, using generally accepted dates for the different places and events that Paul mentions about them. We will see that the period in which they were involved in the ministry of Paul is quite long. Corinth – AD 52 (Acts 18) We first come across Priscilla and Aquila in Acts 18, during Paul’s second missionary journey. Paul, we may recall, was...

It is generally assumed that James wrote his letter to Jewish Christians outside Palestine who were facing troubles of different kinds for their faith. Since James was martyred about AD 62, the periods of trouble that brought about his letter obviously occurred before then. Also, since James was a leader of the church in Jerusalem, it is likely that he wrote this letter as a pastoral help for believers whose lives had been disturbed, which would be a reminder that there was contact between different groups (it is hard to imagine, for example, that the persons converted on the Day of Pentecost did not have some kind of system for staying in touch). A reasonable suggestion that some give for the background is that James wrote his letter to help deal with the consequences for the Christians who were forced to leave Jerusalem during the period of persecution that followed the martyrdom of Stephen and now found themselves needing help from other Jewish believers wherever they went. Wheth...