Christian Life

Finally, we have an announcement. It was announced this morning that the new Bishop of Rochester is to be Rt Revd James Langstaff, currently Bishop of Lynn in the Diocese of Norwich.

In the next week or two, The Well, the magazine that the church produces and distributes free of charge to all 5000 residents of our two parishes, will land on people's doormats.

As usual, page 4 has a letter from me:

Dear friends,

We’ve just come through the most unpredictable General Election for many years; people are talking not only of there being a new government but of a whole new way of doing politics. Time will tell what difference these changes will make, and whether they are great or small.

People sometimes worry that the 4 Gospels don't tell the resurrection story in exactly the same way. This is to worry needlessly. If the 4 Gospels told the resurrection story in contradictory ways, that would be a different matter. As it is, we simply have a difference in perspective. Look at the story from different angles, you include different details and stress different things. It couldn't be otherwise. The four Gospels are not an assortment of favourite deeds of Jesus, thrown together haphazardly.

Then enjoy the wisdom of William Cowper, as found in two verses of his hymn What various hinderances we meet:

Have we no words? But think again;
words flow apace when we complain
and fill our fellow-creature’s ear
with the sad tale of all our care.

Were half the breath thus vainly spent
to heaven in supplication sent,
our cheerful song would oftener be,
‘Hear what the Lord has done for me!’

There is a danger in any area of Christian thought that we talk past one another, objecting to caricatures of what another Christian thinks, rather than to what they actually think. It is a tragedy whenever it happens, because it means that careful understanding (which is the grounds for charity) is replaced with a climate of suspicion. So we need to express what we think with great care, and that is as much about affirming what we do believe to be true as it is about denying what is not true.

A very striking observation from Alec Motyer (paid link) on James 3:13-14:

“James does not yet tell us anything that we must actually do, any course of conduct to follow. He offers us an ethic not of verbs (do this), nor of nouns (naming this or that item of good conduct), but of adverbs (about the sort of people we are to be whatever we do). Everything (his good life … his works) is to be done in the meekness of wisdom, or, to unwrap the phrase slightly, ‘in a wisdom which always bears the mark of meekness.’.” (Page 131)

I've just finished posting through the 19 chapters of the Jehovah's Witnesses primary study text, What does the Bible really teach? You'll find a table of contents for those blog posts in the post that opened the sequence of them: http://www.oakleys.org.uk/blog/2010/01/what_the_bible_really_teaches_in….

Now that I've finished, there are a few more things that need to be said.

This post is part of a series of posts summarising chapters of the Jehovah Witnesses' booklet, "What does the Bible really Teach?", and seeking to evaluate those chapters against Scripture somewhat briefly. Those posts were introduced at the Introduction, and a contents page will be added to that entry once this run of posts has finished.

Chapter 19: Remain in God’s love

Life has many hard times, during which we need to keep ourselves in God’s love.

This post is part of a series of posts summarising chapters of the Jehovah Witnesses' booklet, "What does the Bible really Teach?", and seeking to evaluate those chapters against Scripture somewhat briefly. Those posts were introduced at the Introduction, and a contents page will be added to that entry once this run of posts has finished.

Chapter 18: Baptism and your relationship with God

This post is part of a series of posts summarising chapters of the Jehovah Witnesses' booklet, "What does the Bible really Teach?", and seeking to evaluate those chapters against Scripture somewhat briefly. Those posts were introduced at the Introduction, and a contents page will be added to that entry once this run of posts has finished.

Chapter 17: Draw close to God in prayer

We are small, but God will draw near to us in prayer – if we pray in the way he approves.