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God's Plan for salvation

  Romans 4: 13-end   Imagine you are a church leader planning a visit to St Barnabas in Swanland.    What would you write to them?    What ground work do you want to do? Is everything OK, or are there some things that need sorting out?    What are they getting wrong?    You wouldn’t want to make them feel miserable or failures so they give up; you want to encourage them. What do you think they need to know?   This was the position the Apostle Paul was in.    It’s about AD57, so around 25 years after Jesus.    After the events of Pentecost, the early church was growing in different regions and had spread to Rome. The book of Romans in our Bibles is actually a letter from Paul, written to the church in Rome - probably meeting together in 5 house church.    Although it actually reads more like the sort of essay written at theological college.   It’s quite dense, and the commentaries ...
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Trinity

 Matthew 28   The lectionary for Trinity Sunday usually picks out a short passage that just contains the words “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” – and suggests, “There you go – there are the three words, preach on the doctrine of the Trinity!” The verses, or usually very short passages, don’t give us much to unpack the mystery of the Trinity itself; it just picks out where someone says or writes…Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Actually, the bible doesn’t explicitly say anything about the doctrine of the Trinity. What we call the Trinity is just a theological construct that helps us make sense of how God has revealed himself to us….and in truth, I’m sure our attempts are woefully inadequate. How can we fully explain and contain the nature of God? There has to be room for mystery! So, I’m sorry to disappoint you if you thought you’d get a nice neat theological message tying up all those uncertainties and controversies over what we actually mean by Trinity! There is peril if ...
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