New Testament

Once every 2-4 months, we have an informal evening service in Kemsing under the name of "Digging Deeper". We sing a few songs, and say a few prayers, but most of our time is devoted to taking some topic addressed by the Bible and digging deeper together in what the Bible says. We've thought about the Trinity before, and we've thought about the inspiration of Scripture. Last night, we considered our hope as Christians - where is history heading, what is our part in it, and how certain can we be?

This week, I've been pondering how the individual paragraphs of Matthew 7 fit into the whole chapter. It's always a mistake to take a paragraph of Scripture away from its context, and to read it with no regard to where it comes. In this case, these paragraphs were spoken by Jesus, but he said them as part of what we call the Sermon on the Mount.

On Monday, I posted about the difficulties in reading Matthew 7 as a whole. Far easier to read a paragraph in isolation; hard to articulate what the chapter as a whole is about and how each paragraph contributes to that.

I'm just coming to the end of a preaching series in 1 John. (11 sermons down, 1 to go on 1 John 5:13-21). This short letter will get another outing in September in a different context.

As I've preached through 1 John chapter 5, it has increasingly felt that this chapter has a summing up and drawing together function. The main threads of the letter come together.