word | spirit | world | church
Over the Summer, on Mondays, I'll be reposting some of my favourite posts from nuakh. This post explores why Adam names the woman Eve in Genesis 3. In Genesis chapter 3, after the events that we usually call ‘the fall’ where the man and the woman are cursed along with the snake and the woman… Continue reading Repost: The Naming of Eve
We are in a discipleship crisis. Caused, perhaps, by the many other crises in the air, but here in the UK our faith is shallow. To be more precise: our churches are not forming us into deep and rich faith. I’ve been writing around this for a while, but I don’t think we’re talking about… Continue reading The Discipleship Crisis
When I started a blog during the long tail of Lockdown in 2020 it was already a long dead medium. I'd been encouraged to write regularly as a way of improving my writing and had tried working regularly on a few projects without managing to build a rhythm. I stumbled across Tim Challies' article on… Continue reading On Blogging
I’ve been blogging around Matthew Lee Anderson’s Called into Questions over the last few months. It’s a great book, though difficult, that Pastors should give some extended reflection to. We turn at the end to God’s questions. Anderson comments: “Hearing God’s questions is the cost of our freedom to question God.” Called into Questions, 23.… Continue reading God’s Questions
“In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way … of ignorance” says Eliot in East Coker. Commenting on this, Matthew Lee Anderson says, “It is a truth that is easy to write, but difficult to live out. Yet we can only learn when we are free to… Continue reading Learning not to know
Your church shouldn’t be too easy to join. This is probably counter-intuitive to many, we spend such a lot of time trying to remove barriers to welcome people into church and often in really helpful ways, but let me try and show you my thinking. Nor is this a bait-and-switch where I’ll end by saying… Continue reading Don’t be too easy to join
Knowing your heart is harder than you think it is. Your intentions are often not transparent, even to you. Sin’s dark shadow means we must always think that there’s an iceberg of ourselves we haven’t fathomed, with much unseen and looming beneath the surface. The motivations for our actions, our thoughts, our feelings, even for… Continue reading Know Thyself
How do you tell what’s good and what’s bad? How do you tell the difference between wisdom and folly? It’s not like it’s just intrinsic to all of us, or we would make fewer bad decisions. I think it’s tempting to suggest that our difficulty here is because our minds are blinded by sin. There’s… Continue reading Wisdom is Work
A few weeks ago, I taught a session that I called ‘Understanding the Cross’ at my church. We went through some of what sin is and what crucifixion was like and the Old Testament sacrificial system. In the second half we looked at passages of the Bible to find out what happened theologically on or… Continue reading 12 things that happen on the Cross
Getting your head around the sacrificial system in the Old Testament can be difficult. Here’s my attempt to briefly summarise the various sacrifices. I’ve been helped by Leithart’s summaries in In Earth as it is in Heaven in this, but I haven’t followed him entirely (mistakes mine etc!). Tribute Offering The first sacrifices we find… Continue reading 7 Kinds of Sacrifices
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