Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don’t light a candle in a room that’s already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that’s so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are.
To get overprotective about particular readings of the Bible is always in danger of idolatry.
Love is not just tolerance. It’s not just distant appreciation. It’s a warm sense of, ‘I am enjoying the fact that you are you.’
The gospel is not itself about you are this sort of a person and this can happen to you. That’s the result of the gospel rather than the gospel itself.
The imminent demise of the church has been predicted since the middle of the 18th century. This is the regular secular mantra if churchgoing declines. I could take you to plenty of churches that are full to bursting and new churches being built.
Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex.
God has taken us utterly seriously. How can we not do the same with him?
I didn’t write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.
But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold – and yet if you’d never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn’t believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed.
We have to train ourselves to use words accurately. And there’s so much loose Christian talk, for which I’ve no doubt been as guilty as any.
People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor, and means Jesus died and was glorified – in other words, he went to Heaven, whatever that means. And they’ve never realized that the word ‘resurrection’ simply didn’t mean that.
All Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.
Of course there are people who think of ‘heaven’ as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that’s a problem as old as the human race.
Without God’s Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God’s kingdom. Without God’s Spirit, the church simply can’t be the church.
Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That, as we saw, is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage.
One of the things I find depressing about some of the upper echelons of Anglicanism on both sides of the Atlantic is that it’s sort of taken for granted that we all basically know what’s in the Bible, and so we just glance at a few verses for devotional purposes and then get on to the real business.
The word “salvation” denotes rescue. Rescue? What from? Well, of course, ultimately death. And since it is sin that colludes with the forces of evil and decay, sin leads to death. So we are rescued from sin and death.
God is the Creator God, he doesn’t want to say, “Okay, creation was very good, but I’m scrapping it.” He wants to say, “Creation is so good that I’m going to rescue it.”
I have met many Roman Catholic theologians who will emphasize as much as any good Protestant preacher that everything comes from the love and grace of God.
I knew that I had to be a preacher. I had to be a minister, which was a puzzle to me because my dad was a businessman. It was a family company and I assumed that I would take it on from him.
Having lots of members of my family who were in ministry in one form or another, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that at quite an early age, I was very, very conscious personally of the love of God.