‘If one thing lies at the basis of the whole biblical teaching about God it is that God knows all things.’ (J. Gresham Machen)
Nothing in all creation is hidden from his sight; his eyes are everywhere, 2 Chron 16:9 ‘For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth’. Psa 147:5 ‘his understanding is infinite’ ; Prov 15:3 ‘The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good.’…
Text: 1 Chron 29:1-20; 2 Corinthians 8:1-10
This sermon was not prepared for a special Sunday devoted to the church’s finances, but for an ordinary Sunday when our text happened to be all about giving.
How many people are like me? They’ve had it on their minds for some time to review their giving to the work of God, but not quite got round to it.
Here are two very different situations. In the first, King David, right at the end of his earthly life, is passing on the responsibility for building the temple to Solomon, and is holding a fund-raising day.…
Historically, Christians have often distinguished themselves from their surrounding cultures by championing the cause of the poor.
Since the Second World War, Western countries have experienced very considerable economic growth and corresponding affluence. At the same time, the general population of the world has expanded hugely, leading to an alarming increase in poverty.
Christian thinking and action has not always kept pace with these global changes.
One response to these trends began in the late 1960s with liberation theology. …
‘It is astonishing,’ writes Craig Blomberg, ‘to see what Westerners spend their money on.’ Compared with what Americans spend on overseas Protestant ministries, they spend approximately
Neither Poverty Nor Riches, IVP, 1999, p19
[Although these figures date back to the 1980s and early 90s, there is no reason to suppose that the general trend has reversed.]…
1. The rational approach. Of the world’s nearly 6 billion inhabitants, ¼ live in severe poverty. An estimated 1.3 billion people survive on less than the equivalent of $1 per day. Nearly a billion are illiterate. About 840 million go hungry or face food insecurity.
a) We take for granted our access to clean tapped water. But in the developing world only 68% of the population have access to safe drinking water; in the leaste developed countries this drops to 38%.…
Richard Foster offers some practical suggestions of how we can get to grips with what he calls ‘the dark side of money’:-
1. Let’s get in touch with our feelings about money. Let’s acknowledge our fear, our insecurity, our guilt about it. Let’s realise that we often feel threatened by the whole subject of money. We may be afraid that we have too little, or afraid that we have too much. If we have been raised with little we may develop a hoarding attitude; if we have been raised in affluence notions of frugality may seems like vices rather than virtues.…
Richard Dawkins is no philosopher, nor theologian, nor biblical scholar. None of which automatically disqualifies him from expressing his opinions on religion, but all of which should make him exercise a little more care and caution in expressing those opinions.
For a man so committed to evidence and reason, it is remarkable that Dawkins pays so little attention to both in certain sections of The God Delusion. It is clear that before he wrote that book, he had read Alister McGrath’s Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (2005). …
We do not affirm the divine inspiration of the Bible in such as way as to deny or to minimise its human authorship. Geisler (Baker Encylopedia of Christian Apologetics) outlines this as follows:-
…First, every book in the Bible was the composition of human writers.
Second, the Bible manifests different human literary styles, from the mournful meter of lamentations to the exalted poetry of Isaiah, from the simple grammar of John to the complex Greek of Hebrews.
Money, sex and power, writes Richard Foster, are inseparably intertwined:-
…Money manifests itself as power. Sex is used to acquire both money and power. And power is often called ‘the best aphrodisiac’. We could discuss at length the interlacing connections. There is, for example, an important relationship between sex and poverty: sex is the poor man’s holiday and the poor woman’s disaster. Note also the connection between power and wealth: power is frequently used to manipulate wealth, and wealth is used just as frequently to buy power.
I like this entry in the Handbook of Bible Application:-
Sometimes we wonder how to pray for missionaries and other leaders we have never met. Paul had never met the Colossians, but he faithfully prayed for them. His prayers teach us how to pray for others, whether we know them or not. We can request that they
All believers have these same basic needs.…
