Dear Friends, As persecution goes, there are perhaps worse things than being prevented from fostering children. That’s what has happened to the Christian couple Eunice and Owen Johns from Derby. They have been told they can no longer foster children aged five to ten, even though they have a good record of fostering almost twenty
Read moreDear Friends, What are we to make of the recent turmoil and uprisings in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Libya? Isaiah had some astonishing words to describe how God saw the nations of his day: “Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket; they are regarded as dust on the scales …
Read moreDear Friends, In our morning sermon series, we have seen how the apostle Paul finished strong in the Christian race, passing on the baton of gospel ministry to his friend Timothy, and so to the next generation and beyond. In my own reading, I have just finished Don Carson’s moving account of his own father’s
Read moreDear Friends, This week, a report published by the Relationships Foundation estimates the annual cost of family breakdown in this country to be a staggering £41 billion (yes, that’s billion), including the costs of welfare expenditure, legal and care costs, and spending on education, health and justice. Further, research consistently...
Read moreDear Friends, When did you last think of heaven? And do you think of heaven with confidence, hope and joyful expectation? I have just re-read Mark Ashton’s little booklet On my way to heaven, written in his last months before he died last year of cancer. There he writes, “The oncologist estimated I might have
Read moreDear Friends, Admittedly, my title is not nearly as snappy as Dickens’ original ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. However, it is what came to mind as I reflected on the news this week that a Christian couple who run a hotel have been found guilty of discrimination because they refused to allow a homosexual couple
Read moreDear Friends, What is the greatest thing in the world? There are a number of ways of answering that question truly. But we would be wide off the mark if one of our answers wasn’t ‘love’. In 1 Corinthians 13, the apostle Paul goes as far as to say that, among faith, hope and love,
Read moreDear Friends, I‘m what they call a ‘late adopter’. That is, I wait to see which way a new technology is going before I adopt it – in fact, it‘s usually on the way out by the time I get around to it! Some people would just call me slow. Being a late adopter does
Read moreDear Friends, It’s a challenge to know how best to encourage and inspire God’s people at the start of this new year. Some of you will be excited about what God may do this year, some apprehensive about what might happen, others disillusioned and not really expecting anything from God. Whichever of those best describes
Read moreDear Friends, We don’t know much about the shepherds who were the first to hear the news that, “Today in the town of David, a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11, NIV). They were simply doing what shepherds do, living out in the fields and keeping watch over their
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