Our ‘better story’ for sex and marriage begins as we are welcomed into God’s reality.
Five truths underpin this.
1. God has spoken. We no longer have to strive to construct our our ‘reality’. God has spoken in his Son and in his Scriptures.
2. We are God’s creatures. This is his reality, not ours. Our nature and purpose need to be understood in the light of our creaturely dependence on him.
3. We flourish when we work with the grain of God’s reality. …
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, recently put it like this in a Tweet:-
‘Each of us is made in the image of God. That’s why we have the chance to encounter Christ in every person we meet – especially those on the margins.’
It’s an attractive thought, and one that seems to be becoming increasingly popular. But it involves some rather loose thinking, because we can agree wholeheartedly with the premise (‘each of us is made in the image of God’), while observing that the conclusion simply does not follow (‘that’s why we have the chance to encounter Christ in every person we meet’).…
Atheism must regard the existence of the cosmos as inexplicable. Pantheism (which undergirds Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism) robs God of his transcendence, by subsuming the divine within the universe (‘all is one and all is God’). Paganism believes that the divine is immanent in nature, and that spells, incantations and rituals enable the individual to control people’s destiny. Gnosticism posits a dualism between spirit and matter, and has as its aim the ascending, through illumination and secret knowledge, up to God. …
So Richard Dawkins is out on a lecture tour, promoting his new book, Science in the Soul. Rory Shiner writes about attending the Dawkins event in Perth, Australia.
Dawkins treated his audience to a passage from the book, in which he substitutes belief in God for belief in Thor, thus demonstrating (to his own satisfaction) the absurdity of the claims of theologians and believers.
Of course, humankind has had its gods for millennia: Thor, Zeus, Baal, Marduk, Ra, Mars, Jupiter, and so on. …
Important to Richard Rohr – important enough to use it as the title of a book – is the idea of the Holy Trinity as a dance.
Rohr explains:-
…‘At the heart of Christian revelation, God is not seen as a distant, static monarch but— as we will explore together— a divine circle dance, as the early Fathers of the church dared to call it (in Greek perichoresis, the origin of our word choreography). God is the Holy One presenced in the dynamic and loving action of Three.’
I’ve just finished reading The Divine Dance: The Trinity and your Transformation, by Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell (SPCK, 2016).
The essential message of the book is that we’ve all got it wrong about the Holy Trinity. And, as a consequence, Christians have failed to enter fully into the life of God. Rohr and Morrell invite us to re-think, and to re-experience, the Trinity less as personhood (noun), and more about relationship (verb). Although the headline metaphor is that of a divine dance, Rohr continually returns to the notion of ‘flow’. …
John Owen ‘picked up on a theme found in Augustine, namely, communion as the “enjoyment,” or possession of and delighting in the triune God. In Augustine’s “On Christian Doctrine,” one chapter is titled, “The Trinity the true object of enjoyment.” There, Augustine wrote, “The true objects of enjoyment, then, are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are at the same time the Trinity, one Being, supreme above all, and common to all who enjoy Him.”’…
Matthew 6:9
Notes for a short group Bible study. They were going through the Lord’s Prayer, one line per week, and I was asked to take this line with them.
Share something about your name
Names in Scripture
Deborah (Bee); Jonah (Dove); Esau (hairy); Benoni (Son of my sorrow); Ichabod (The glory has departed)
Change of name – Abram/Abraham; Jacob/Israel; Simon/Peter; Saul/Paul
Names of God
Ex 3:13-15 (“What is his name?” … ” ’… The Lord, the God of your fathers…has sent me to you.’” …
“Live in the fear of the Lord always”, says Prov 23:17. “Fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”, says our Lord, in Matt 10:28. “In all things obey … fearing the Lord”, writes Paul in Col 3:22.
Clearly, the fear of the Lord is not optional. But what effect does it have on people, when they truly perceive God in this way?
The account of the ten plagues of Egypt frequently refers to the ‘hardening’ of Pharaoh’s heart. Because ‘hardness of heart’ suggests to us something to do with the emotions, Goldingay prefers to think of this as ‘the closing of Pharaoh’s mind’. There are four aspects to this:-
Alexander refers to the ‘strengthening’ of Pharaoh’s heart. …
