Articles
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- Written by: Administrator
- Category: Weekly Reflections
Before you pray: Whom do you know? 1
At the heart and foundation of prayer - as of the whole Christian life- lies the knowledge of God. Unless we know God we will not pray. Unless we know God we will not know how to pray.
Knowing God means knowing that he is (Heb 11.6). It means knowing that he is the LORD (Ex 6.6-8). But it is more than knowing "that".
Knowing God means we are known by God. This is the kind of knowledge we need. Knowing God is always a personal relationship. Whether it was the relationship of Israel as his chosen people, or the relationship of disciples to the Father of Jesus, the knowledge was found in the relationship.
Solomon understood its importance when he wrote,
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- Category: Weekly Reflections
What about evil spirits?
Do evil spirits exist or is just people's superstition or imagination? Whether you believe that they exist might depend as much on your understanding of the Bible as on the environments in which you have lived.
Both Paul and Jesus came in contact with what the New Testament describe as “unclean spirits”, “evil spirits” or “demons”. Nowhere does the New Testament use the word “possessed” even though some translations use that word. The usual phrases are that a person “had an unclean/evil spirit” or that they were “demonized”. The reason is that except for cases like the Gadarene demoniac, the other examples relate to the affect a demon has on an aspect of a person's life, eg that they are dumb or deaf, not the control of their whole life.
It is worth observing Paul's approach to evil spirits.
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What about the dead?
and Halloween
In the early years of the church from the times of the great persecutions, Christians began to remember those who had died. The commemorations of the “saints” who had died, especially the martyrs eventually developed as an annual festival at the beginning of November. As time went on all Christians who had died were included.
The invention and development of the doctrine of Purgatory led to a distinction between those who were officially regarded as Saints, and the souls in purgatory, the latter being remembered on the following day; All Souls Day.
At the Reformation the English reformers abandoned All Souls Day. All Saints Day (the day before) is meant to include all the faithful departed.
Archbishop Cranmer (the main architect of the English Prayer Book) not only left the commemoration of that day behind but also got rid of the unbiblical ideas to do with what happens after death.
The strange medieval fear of the souls in purgatory being able to roam the earth on the eve of All Saints (All Hallows) and frighten the living is not the most significant left over from this period. We rightly think the present Halloween nonsense is just that. But modern western culture has a much more serious problem with death itself.
You can see the problem at most funerals.
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- Category: Weekly Reflections
It’s a Miracle!
How do you know something is a miracle? That depends of course on what you mean by miracle. If you have an old dictionary published in the mid 20th century it will tell you a miracle is an amazing or wonderful event.
If you look up a modern dictionary you will see the definition has changed. It is now an event that is contrary to the established laws of nature and attributed to a supernatural cause.
This is a significant change in meaning. The old definition followed the meaning of the idea in the Bible. The new meaning has developed from a skepticism about the events described in the Bible. Although most of our Bibles use the word miracle, it is actually a translation of words that mean a wonderful event, or a powerful work. Certainly some of the events described in the Bible are hard to explain using the “established laws of nature”. But most aren't.
But did any of these “wonderful events” happen? Can you believe it? Here is another twist in the meaning of words. Faith in the modern dictionary is “strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.” But that is never the definition in the Bible. Faith is always based on knowledge. It is based on a foundation that is reliable. So if we want to know whether the “wonderful events” happened, we need to check out whether the stories are reliable.
The disconcerting thing about most of the stories of Jesus is that they turn out to be both reliable and confronting. They don't say what we think they should and don't do what we expect. Believing Jesus turns out to be quite a miracle itself.
Dale Appleby
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If I could say one more thing...
It would be that it is the Word of God that changes lives and grows the church. I could tell you this because I have seen it over a long time working in a variety of congregations in six quite diverse dioceses.
But that would be anecdotal evidence. Or perhaps testimony. Notoriously unreliable some would say.
I suppose I came to this belief from two foundations a long time ago. One foundation was my own experience of growing to know Christ. I know I grew as I read and heard the scriptures expounded. The other foundation was the scriptures themselves. They are not merely religious history, or a kind of Christian life manual. They tell us what God has done and said. And it is clear that a great deal of what he has done is a result of what he has said.
By his word he created the heavens and the earth. He spoke to Abraham and made promises which he fulfilled because he had said he would. He spoke through prophets and fulfilled those promises through his Son.
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If I could say one thing...
It would be a miracle. Preachers can rarely say just one thing. And the older they get the more they have to say and the more they repeat themselves and say the same things over again in different ways, so that you feel as though you have heard the same thing again and again – like a cracked record (do you remember cracked records?).
The one thing to say, about Christian ministry at least, is that it is all about Christ. Paul said, “For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.” (2 Cor 4.5). It is easy, in the church, to highlight many things because there are many important aspects of the Christian life which we share in the church. But all of the important ones depend on Christ. The church itself is Christ – not the organisation or the services, but the body of people who belong to Christ and who meet in his name.
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Who am I?
The church is obviously a mixing pot of all the different groups of people who live on the face of the earth. Although mixing pot may not be the best way to describe it. “Mixing pot” implies a kind of confused mess, a bit like the youth group game I heard of once where everyone brought a tin of food with the label removed (back in the days when there were removable labels). All these tins were opened and put into a single pot – baked beans, peaches, peas, beetroot, soup, apricots … and that was supper that night!
But each of us values the things that give us our identity. Perhaps it is our ethnic heritage, perhaps something in our family history, maybe our education, or experiences, or gender, where we live, or where we were born. There are many things that go to make up our identity.