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B.M. Palmer was a well-respected Presbyterian minister who preached the Christian Gospel in New Orleans in the 1800’s. His excellent Theology of Prayer is not the easiest book to find but is full of helpful insights and is well worth the effort of working through its antiquated style and comprehensive arguments. One of the topics he explores is the relationship of the Sovereign will of God and our human will, which we voice in our prayers. He stresses that prayer is not a means by which we rub the divine genie lamp. Prayer is the channel by which God gives us blessings which He has pre-planned.  True prayer has to be answered because it involves asking for the things which God already intends to give us when we pray . “The scriptural principle is, not that favours are by our importunity wrung from the reluctance of the Divine Being, but that they antedate the prayer in the determinations of his sovereign and gracious will”. How do we know what God intends to give? Objectively...

The spiritual and the psychological are not the same thing. This is a fact which Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones emphasised at several points in his ministry. It is possible in preaching to exert a pressure on people’s feelings and imaginations which can move them to action, quite independent of any understanding or faith response to the gospel message. Lloyd-Jones used the example of a preacher who described a burning building to illustrate the need to flee the judgment to come. The word-image became so vivid that his congregation literally fled, not from hell fire and the wrath of God, but from the church building, convinced that it was on fire! For the same reason, Lloyd-Jones was critical of some of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons, such as the famous “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”, because he felt that its intense descriptions could terrify people quite independent of the gospel truth being proclaimed. In 1957 William Sargant, a controversial researcher in psychiatric medicine, publishe...

“ We don’t need to think about this too deeply. Doing communion online is just a necessary compromise. It’s a pragmatic response to the extraordinary circumstances we are in. That’s too philosophical for me. Surely as Christians we should be able to settle this with our Bible’s open. ” This is what I imagine some people were thinking if they read my last two blogs ( here and here ). I understand that sentiment and would not normally choose to take a philosophical approach to something as sacred and important as Communion. Why did I think it was necessary in this situation? Not because I think philosophy has the answers, but because I am convinced it does not. I am offering counter-arguments to the philosophical arguments used by some who are speaking in favour of online communion.  In short, if you agree to drop your philosophical arguments and stick to Scripture, I’ll drop mine! Everyone agrees that the biblical words require us to ‘come together’ (1 Cor 11:20). We disagree ...

One of the reason the Matrix films were so popular is that they resonate with our real world fears of brain-washing . In the Second World War, a whole nation was swept into the moral abyss following the delusions and propaganda of a deranged and tyrannical dictator. During the Cold War, western soldiers who spent time in Communist captivity would sometimes return holding beliefs which were polar-opposite to those they had held previously. Some never recovered. Not to be outdone, western intelligence agencies experimented with their own mind-control drugs like LSD and ‘truth serums’. We occasionally read of individuals who join extreme cults, somehow taken in by the most bizarre beliefs. The fear is there: What if someone else is holding us captive by controlling our thoughts? In fact, psychologists suggest that brain-washing is not all that different to ‘normal’ learning. Re-education occurs using the same processes as education, with the pressures, rewards, forfeits, and speed cran...

A man goes about his daily business on a pretty ordinary day. The sights and sounds are familiar. Everything smells, tastes, and feels just as it normally does. But he is in for a rude awakening. As it turns out, none of these experiences are real. In fact his body is attached to a machine and is being farmed for use as an energy source by hostile beings of great intelligence. Knowing that the human ‘batteries’ work best if they are kept psychologically comfortable, these malevolent entities feed a constant stream of sensory stimuli direct to the mind. A small resistance force has broken free of this unconscious captivity. They break the hero out of his happy delusion and offer him two pills. One will take him back into this purely mental experience, detached from physical reality. The other will bring him out of it into a world of real lived experience. This is the basic plot of the popular film series, The Matrix . It is also a helpful illustration of what has been called the ‘brai...