Sharing some thoughts

  There is a small detail about the Bible that often surprises people when they first hear it… That is that for most of Christian history, people read the Bible without chapter numbers or verse numbers. Chapters were only added around 1205 AD, and verses came later, in the 1500s. Before that, people simply read the Bible as one flowing story. When scholars divided the Book of Isaiah, they gave it sixty-six chapters, the same number as the books in the whole Bible. They also divided it into two main parts. The first part has thirty-nine chapters, and the second part has twenty-seven. Those numbers match the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. Whether that was planned or whether it just happened that way, Isaiah seems to reflect the story of the whole Bible. The first part contains many themes we find in the Old Testament: warnings, judgment, covenant, and God's call for his people to return to him. The second part is filled with co...

  We’ve probably all had times when we realise just how much we try to hold everything together by ourselves. We patch things up, we keep going, we smile when we’re tired, we pretend we’re fine when we’re not. We try to be strong, capable, sorted. And sometimes we manage it for a while. But sometimes the cracks show, and we realise that some things cannot be mended by our own efforts. Paul understood this. In Romans (10:5-15), he speaks to people who were trying to make themselves right with God by sheer determination. They were trying to climb their way up to God, trying to be “good enough”, trying to earn righteousness by the law. And into that struggle Paul speaks a simple truth - the word is near you. This is the heart of Paul’s argument. The righteousness that comes from the law demands achievement, “the person who does these things will live by them.” But the righteousness that comes from faith is different. It does not require heroic spiritual effort. It does not ask us ...

  Romans 8:26–39 and Matthew 13:31–33, 44–52 Sometimes in life words seem to completely fail us. We stand in front of a situation, an illness, a grief, a fear, a hope, or perhaps just something that seems absolutely ridiculous, and we simply don’t know what to say about it.   Sometimes we may try to pray, but the sentences don’t actually come out. We try to make sense of things, but our thoughts feel all confused. And it’s precisely there, in that honest, vulnerable place, that Paul gives us one of the most comforting promises anywhere in the Bible: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness.” When we don’t know how to pray, the Spirit prays in us. When we don’t know what to ask for, the Spirit prays with feelings too deep for words. And that’s a reminder that the Christian life is never about our strength, our clever words or our spiritual performance. It begins with God, continues with God, and is sustained by God… We are held by God long before we ever realise we are being held...