The Rest Is History is a wonderful resource, as well as hugely fun, but we need to process it before it pops into the sermon.
Category: apologetics
‘Do you understand what you’re reading?’, asked Philip of the Ethiopian. We can ask that, and other similar questions. Do you understand what you’re listening to? Do you understand what you’re looking at?
There are some church leaders who only plan and prepare each sermon in the week before, being committed to the idea that God speaks in the moment, and they don’t want to silence him. I respect that, but my experience is that planning a sermon series ahead of time, doesn’t do that. In fact, if
Let me make a prediction: if you read this brief book, and rethink some of your preaching and evangelistic conversations in the light of it, you will do yourself, the gospel cause, and the people you’re speaking to a huge service.
How do we give those Christmas truths a cutting edge? How can we be fresh, while still working with the familiar?
It is becoming harder for TV programmes to shock enough to get ratings, and that’s only partly because they up against an unrated internet. It’s also because as a culture (and Evangelical sub-culture) we have become much, much harder to shock.
The culture sees independence as maturity, but for us that’s not good enough. Interdependence is maturity.
This brilliant history of the growth and impact of Christianity in Europe will make your brain fizz.
Make no mistake: this area of medical science is going to pose some new ethical questions, that our teens are probably already on the brink of asking.
There are three basic ways to describe any sin – not three different sins, but three ways to analyse what is going on. I’m increasingly convinced that our evangelistic and apologetic impact will be sharpened if we choose the right biblical language. These three are not in tension, although they give us different biblical language
I was revisiting some Francis Schaeffer the other day, and it reminded me how sharp he was. I know there are those who would quibble about some aspects of his reading of philosophy – quibbling’s what philosophers do best. But in one regard he was absolutely stonkingly right. The history of Western thought, from Plato
The only time I’ve been booed by an audience, was when I was explaining to a large crowd the story of Jesus wrapping a towel round his waist and washing his disciples’ feet. The crowd, mostly Muslim, thought this was an action quite unbecoming the dignity of a prophet. That’s a critical insight into the
Every preacher is a communicator, and every good preacher thinks hard about that part of the work. We think about difficult concepts, and how to make them clear, about whether minor grammatical issues are actually ideas on which a whole argument turns – and so on. We know that
I’ve just reviewed Robert Harris’s latest thriller, An Officer and a Spy, based on the Alfred Dreyfus affair, and William Boyd’s new take on James Bond, Solo. It was for the Oak Hill magazine Commentary, and you can read it here: http://www.oakhill.ac.uk/commentary/13_winter/pdfs/books.pdf
There’s a little flurry of atheist ‘churches’ at the moment. Meetings of like-minded secularists who listen to some music, hear a talk, reaffirm their views, have a collection, and then afterwards have a cup of coffee and some home-made cake. It’s very earnest (and therefore very funny), but they are deliberately trying to put into
So you come to the end of your evangelistic course, and you make it clear that there’s a decision to be make. Yes or no, life or death, Christ or an idol. It’s a clear choice. To the people who want to decide for Christ you have a warm welcome, some books to recommend, maybe
I reviewed this book when it first came out. Now it is about to come out in paperback, I want it to get as wide a readership as possible. I think it is one of the most significant books, and probably the bravest, I have come across since I first read Solzhenitsyn – and I
The end of an evangelistic talk is usually commendably frank. It doesn’t matter wither this is a friendly over a BBQ, a major service, or the end of a course: we lay out the two ways, and invite people to lay their lives down for Christ. If they do that, we have resources, books, groups.
When Jesus underlined the first and greatest commandment he added to it. ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength’ (Mk.12:30). What was implicit throughout the Old Testament, that truth and words and wisdom are aspects of God’s character and therefore of
Some things just work, and because they work well they give pleasure. If you doubt that, think about what happens when something doesn’t work, and how you experience the opposite of pleasure. A fork is an elegantly simple solution to a problem, and it has hardly changed since its introduction. The robotic explorer on Mars
