It was our first cell group meeting. There was Victoria, a committed student leader in her second year of university; Paula, a new person in her first year of study; and me, the missionary who had arrived to accompany and train leaders. The other people who were invited didn’t come.
A collection of things worth reading from around the web in the last week.
It sometimes can be hard to know what to pray for workers, especially if there haven’t been any recent prayer points. However, the Bible is full of gold when it comes to praying on behalf of God’s people.
The third in this series on reading the Bible well. This time John looks at how knowing that God's word is his changes how we approach it.
Amidst all the sound and fury about same-sex marriage, it’s often hard to find a straight-forward, clear, thoughtful Christian defence of what marriage is. Sandy Grant has had a crack, and a very good one, in this recent public lecture at St Michael’s Wollongong.
I am a reluctant convert to the Swedish Method for Bible study. I read the Briefing article all of those years ago and decided to try it out in a couple of Bible study groups. It didn’t work! It didn’t seem to make group members think deeply enough about the passage, and it seemed to promote surface-level easy answers.
Sympathy cards address the sadness death causes, but few acknowledge the rage. Yet that rage is real. It should be: death is the very opposite of God and all that he has created. We should hate it. Christ did.
"Do we have to forgive people who aren't sorry?" How would you respond? Our instinct can be to rush in with some kind of ‘yes/no’ answer. What we may fail to do is consider whether or not answering the question as asked is the most helpful response.
Learning how to observe Scripture well enables us to get to what a text is really about. One of the best ways to observe well is by asking questions.
Bible reading with ready ears and an open heart is engaging and fruitful. There’s something fresh about letting God speak for himself, especially when you search the Bible yourself, making the effort to hear.