Read Matthew 6:9-13.
What does the Lord’s Prayer tell us about who God is, and who we are?
Why not pray the Lord’s Prayer slowly, stopping at the end of each phrase to allow each person in the group an opportunity to offer a short prayer of their own?…
When we read a narrative from the Old Testament, we want to honour it as God’s word written, and yet we may be unsure how to do so. So we end up – all too often – mistreating and misapplying it in one or more of the following ways:-
No, this isn’t advice for parents reading The Chronicles of Narnia to their children at bedtime.
It is, rather, a set of tips to help the preacher get inside a piece of biblical narrative in order to find out how it is put together and how it works as a story. This is the preliminary work that a preacher needs to do in order to preach from the story in question. It is specific to narratives: letters, poems, proverbs, and parables required other approaches.…
When John Loftus (God or Godless, chapter 5) claims that ‘archaeologists have shown us there was no…exodus by the Israelites from Egypt’ I believe that I can easily show this to be mistaken and misleading.
Of course, if I were to point to the standard Christian reference works, then my assertion that most or all of them accept the historicity of the exodus might be met with the response, “Well, they would, wouldn’t they?” …
Richard Bauckham offers vivid demonstration of how reliable eyewitness testimony can be. I was particularly drawn to this pair of accounts relating to the same incident, because it took place in my home county of Norfolk, England.
In June, 1901 a local newspaper carried the following report:
William Jennings Bryan is reported to have said: “I believe the whale swallowed Jonah because the Bible said it, and if the Bible said that Jonah swallowed the whale I would have believed it simply because the Bible said so.”
Much more recently Peter LaRuffa, who is on the staff of Grace Fellowship Church, Northern Kentucky, said:-
Going back over some back issues of Third Way magazine, I came across a piece by Stephen Tomkins in which he takes some of the more awkward bits of the Bible and compares what it actually says with what we would like it to say. Of course, issues of genre, idiom, culture and so on come into play here. But it’s a good reminder to read and interpret the Biblical text with integrity, facing up to its challenges and not wishing them away.…
All God’s promises (including those relating to the temple, the people of God, and the land) are fulfilled in Jesus, 2 Cor 1:20. It is in him that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden, Col 2:1-3. It is this which gives a reliable hermeneutic for understanding the entire Bible. We are not at the mercy of idiosyncratic interpretations of individual verses.
How are we to understanding Christ as the fulfilment of the Bible’s teaching about the Temple?…
I have previously listed and summarised the forty ‘urban legends’ discussed by David A Croteau.
Here are some more New Testament passages that are frequently misunderstood or misapplied:-
1. ‘Going the second (or ‘extra’) mile’ (Matthew 5:41). When people are willing to make an effort above and beyond the call of duty, they often refer to this as going the second (or extra) mile. This is not a complete misapplication of the text, but common usage does tend to mask its radical nature. …
Urban Legends of the New Testament: 40 Common Misconceptions. By David A Croteau. Published by B&H Publishing Group (1 Aug. 2015).
This book discussed 40 misinterpretations of New Testament passages. Strictly speaking, only some of them could be regarded as ‘urban legends’ (i.e. they are misreadings that have passed uncritically into public consciousness). Others are passages which are liable to interpretations that simply add something to the text that isn’t really there, or subtract something that really is there.…
