The story is told that a man once encountered Abraham Lincoln walking down the street with his two young sons and both boys were howling. "What's wrong with the boys Abe?" the man asked. "What's wrong with the boys is what's wrong with the world" Lincoln responded "I have three chestnuts and they both want…
7 The Kingdom of Heaven is like Wheat and Weeds
When I was in High School we did the musical "The Music Man" and in that play is the line by the lead character Professor Harold Hill, the Music Man himself, "what we have here is trouble, trouble right here in River City." In the musical Hill tells the people the trouble "starts with a…
The Kingdom of Heaven is Like Yeast
For seven of the eight parables that Jesus began with the line "The Kingdom of Heaven, or the Kingdom of God is like. . ." he used everyday events that were happening around those he was teaching, outside, but in one instance he took them out of the fields and vineyards, away from the sea…
The Kingdom is like a farmer
When I was a ten or eleven years old my sister somehow conned my parents into buying a horse, it wasn't long and 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.…
4 The Kingdom of Heaven is Like a Fishing Net
It seems strange to mix the sacred with the everyday, to describe the eternal with the ordinary, the infinite with the finite. And yet that is exactly what Jesus did when looking for a way to illustrate the Kingdom of Heaven, a treasure in a field, a merchant looking for a pearl the tiniest of…
The Kingdom of Heaven is Like a Pearl
He had it all, at least on the surface. A good business, a fine family, status in the community. He had everything it would appear, but not quite enough. Some men craved after gold or silver or jewels not this man. Those things were all so cold and inanimate, forged and moulded deep inside an…
The Kingdom is like a Treasure
It is a serendipitous story, which is a story about serendipity. Serendipity, isn't that a great word? It is probably one of my favourite words. You know what serendipity means right? Serendipity means an unexpected discovery. You know when you are looking for something and you find something else. You know you drop the remote…
The Kingdom of Heaven is Like an Inukshuk
You see them everywhere now, along the road, in people's gardens, as jewellery, they are everywhere. Correct me if I'm wrong but most of us never knew what an inukshuk was before the Canadian Heritage commercials. But now most of us know at least "now the people will know we were here", even if we…
The Nature of Love
And that is the sum of the New Testament teaching, All you need is love. Paul wrote exactly the same thing in Romans 13:8 without the catchy tune, Romans 13:8 Owe nothing to anyone—except for your obligation to love one another. If you love your neighbour, you will fulfill the requirements of God's law. That's…
The Nature of Holiness
If there is one concept in the bible that seems to be foreign to us in 2010, almost to the point of incomprehensible is the concept of sacrifice. Not the concept of making sacrifices for something or someone, we all do that on a fairly regular basis. As parents we make sacrifices for our children,…