And You Shall Call His Name Immanuel, Not! Matthew 1:23 “Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’ ” Now, that’s a familiar verse, isn’t it? We hear it every Christmas. We read it with every reading of…

Imagine that you are standing out in your driveway, marvelling at the fact that it’s the third Sunday of Advent, and tomorrow they are projecting a high of 11.   In your imagination, you do not live in Alberta.   Suddenly, a UFO lands in the middle of your front lawn, and the door slowly…

Have you noticed that every year, people seem more intent on secularizing Christmas? They wish you a “Happy Holiday” or “Seasons Greetings” and then have presentations at school that make no mention of the Manger or the Wise Men, let alone the Christ Child. Now, I may be a little overly sensitive, but somehow, I…

Therefore 2 Peter 1 When I was at university, one of the courses I had to take was homiletics, which is simply defined as the art of preaching or writing sermons. The goal of the class was to teach us to do both things: how to write sermons and how to preach sermons. My professor…

Part of my misspent youth was spent hanging around Racehorses and those who bet on horse races. I’ve mentioned before that my sister and I both had horses when we were teenagers, and when we lived in Hammond River, just outside of Saint John, New Brunswick, we boarded them at a farm that provided stabling…

It’s one of those things that preachers say.  It is kind of like, “After the but comes the truth,” or “I’m almost finished.”  I’m pretty sure if you’ve been in church for any length of time that you’ve heard this particular phrase, perhaps you’ve even said it yourself from time to time, and it is…

Have you ever been high? I mean, really high. I have, and I have discovered that it adds a certain clarity to your vision. There is very little like the experience of standing high above the crowd and being able to see for miles. What did you think I meant? I was an army brat,…

He looked up, and all he could see was a circle of blue. He looked down and watched the mud squish between his toes. And he wondered how he had ended up at the bottom of a pit hated by the very people he wanted to save. His name was Jeremiah, and he was not…

Have you ever had to work with someone who just doesn’t get it?  Whatever it is?  Maybe you’re trying to explain how a particular program works, or perhaps you’re trying to get them to understand the ethos of your company.  Why and how you do what you do.  But you have to keep coming back…

When I was ten or eleven years old, my parents went insane and bought my sister a horse, it wasn’t long before one horse led to another, and before you knew it, I had been introduced to the concept of farming, at least in the sense that we had a small barn and livestock.  When…