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,…
The Nature of God’s Love
As we read through the book of Romans there seems to be some common themes that we see over and over again. The common topics are: The Law, Sin and Grace. And in case you are thinking those are probably common themes throughout the Bible, or the New Testament or even Paul's letters, they are,…
The Nature of our Nature
Wow that was depressing. I would have expected more from Paul, but this just sounds like whining. I half expected him to check himself into a rehab centre by the time I got to the end of this section. But at some time in our Christian life most of us could probably identify with what…
The Nature of Grace
It seemed to make perfect sense: If the "Grace of God" was a good thing, and if the "Grace of God" was demonstrated through the forgiveness of sin, then the more we sinned than the more the Grace of God would be demonstrated. It seems to make perfect sense but it didn't. It was an…