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“ You can tell what God thinks of money by the kind of people He gives it to! ” This is typical wit from the 19th Century Baptist preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. We could probably say the same thing about fame, power, and many talents and abilities which enable people to get on in the world. The things by which we measure success frequently come at a great cost to character. As the old adage puts it “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The pursuit of worldly riches often advances at a great expense to the soul. But not always. There are examples of people who have used their wealth and power sacrificially and with tremendous generosity for the benefit of others. There are also poor people who are bitter and selfish. So are wealth, power, and gifting a blessing or a curse? The truth of the matter is that there are no absolute blessings or absolute judgments in this world. Absolute blessing and absolute curse are reserved for eternity, for heaven and fo...

Separating time and space is the stuff of science fiction. Marty McFly can stay in the same place, Hill Valley, California, but travel backward and forward in time. The Star Trek transporter can move people from one location to another in an instant. I am not a physicist but as I understand it, one of the implications of the Theory of Relativity is that space and time are inter-connected. As well as  knowing where different objects are, you need to know when they were there. So the Captain’s Log doesn’t just begin with the ‘stardate’ it also records the location or intended destination of the USS Enterprise. Many churches that are holding online communion services have opted to approach it using password-restricted ‘Zoom’ meetings. They see this as necessary for at least two reasons. Firstly, it recognises the need to maintain some level of eldership oversight. Those taking part need an ‘invitation’, and are typically members or at least regular adherents of the local church. Sec...

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...