[Notes of a sermon preached in June, 2004]
What’s in a word? “Stick & stones” – “Careless talk costs lives” – “Guilty or not guilty?” – “I do”
When that word is God’s… “God said…” – “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” – “Out of his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword” (Rev)
We see God’s word in action in this passage. Verse 1 – ‘In those days the word of the Lord was rare.’ …
‘Should you believe in the Trinity?’ asks this JW article.
…‘IF PEOPLE were to read the Bible from cover to cover without any preconceived idea of a Trinity, would they arrive at such a concept on their own? Not at all.
‘What comes through very clearly to an impartial reader is that God alone is the Almighty, the Creator, separate and distinct from anyone else, and that Jesus, even in his prehuman existence, is also separate and distinct, a created being, subordinate to God.’
What follows is largely a precis of an article by Michael Quicke:
Is our thinking (and preaching) sufficiently Trinitarian?
‘The incredible shrinking God’
Authentic preaching and authentic worship are intimately connected. And both must speak meaningfully of God: that is to say, God in three persons.
Sadly, much contemporary preaching and worship does not do this. It speaks of God as less than three persons. So, when the average church-goer hears the word ‘God’, he or she does not think of the Trinity. …
‘All of God’s acts are consistent with all of His attributes. All that God does agrees with all that God is, and being and doing are one in Him. He cannot act out of character with Himself.
‘I think it might be demonstrated that almost every heresy that has afflicted the church through the years has arisen from believing about God things that are not true, or from over-emphasizing certain true things so as to obscure other things equally true.…
It has been said that this is the ‘one thing in the world really worth pursuing’ (Robert H. Benson).
A.W. Tozer called it ‘the easiest and the most difficult thing in the world.’
What am I talking about? Knowing God. The Bible itself teaches us that:-
(a) it is what God himself desires,
Hos 6:6. For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.
(b) it is the gift that Jesus brings,
…Jn 17:3 And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
Christianity: boring, untrue, irrelevant?
“I was brought up in a Christian home….” I wonder how many times I’ve heard those words from people who have some kind of Christian background, some awareness of Jesus, yet for whom, perhaps for many years, Christianity seemed a dull and lifeless thing. If you’re admitted to hospital, it seems you’re expected to be able to state your religion, and ‘C of E‘ will do as well as any other.…
An affirmative answer to this question underpins Christopher and Richard Hays’ book The Widening of God’s Mercy:
‘Contrary to the common idea that God’s decisions are eternal and immutable, there are numerous stories of God changing God’s mind in the Bible, and others in which God declares that past judgments were too extreme.’
On the basis of this, the authors develop a ‘trajectory’ argument, according to which sexual behaviours once rejected by God in Scripture have now become acceptable.…
This was the intriquing title of a book which was published in 1967. The editor, James Mitchell, collected a number of essays, written by well-known personalities, which described the sort of God the authors were willing to believe in.
More recently, the Rev. Dr. Clay Smith, the lead pastor of Alice Drive Baptist Church in Sumter, has written a piece with the same title. It demonstrates well the gulf between ‘the God I want’ and ‘the God I need’; between a God of human fabrication and the God of divine revelation.…
4:7 Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been fathered by God and knows God. 4:8 The person who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 4:9 By this the love of God is revealed in us: that God has sent his one and only Son into the world so that we may live through him. 4:10 In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.…
I have sometimes wondered if enthusiasm for Christ-centred preaching can lead to a neglect of God-centred, or, indeed, a fully-rounded Trinitarian approach.
This is touched on by Sidney Greidanus, in chapter 5 of Preaching Christ From the Old Testament.
Greidanus agrees that ‘christological preaching’ can indeed sometimes slide into ‘Christomonism’, the preaching of Christ isolated from God. Some, such as Wilhelm Vischer, held that
…‘the theological exposition of the [Old Testament] writings within the church can be nothing other than Christology.’
