Episodes

Commenting on how we understand Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), Rebecca McLaughlin writes: ‘we hear a call to care for strangers in need. But Jesus’s first audience heard more. They heard a story of love across racial, religious, and political difference, in which the moral hero was their sworn enemy’ (The Secular Creed, 2021: p.11). To which we might add, ‘Yet how many in the wider community today are aware of the parable of the Good Samaritan let alone understand its sig...

Sixty years ago the writer, M.E. Macdonald wrote: The real menace to life in the world today is not the hydrogen bomb… but the fact of proximity without community (M.E. Macdonald, The Need To Believe, 1959, p.82). And nothing has changed. We see it exemplified on the New York subway where everyone avoids one another’s gaze by focusing on their phone or reading a book. Yet the barriers fall away when the unexpected occurs – perhaps the performance of a group of acrobats that can awaken smiles an...

How can we weather the challenges of our changing and uncertain world? Come with me to Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 21 where we find one of the great prayers of the Bible. The curtain over Paul the Apostle is drawn aside and we are given a glimpse of him at prayer. I kneel before the Father, he begins, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. Genesis chapter 1 tells us that God created us in his image and it is therefore true to say that all humanity has its fath...

The Fourth of July celebrations yesterday bring to mind the words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Interestingly, Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian and philosopher, observes in Sapiens: A brief History of Humankind (2015: p.109), that the equality of humanity is not self-evident: ‘The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all sou...

Alienation is a word often used to describe our human plight. Everywhere relationships are broken – between or within nations, in the workplace, between friends and within families. The phrase ‘the power of love’ or ‘love is everything’ is said to be the cure-all for brokenness and division. But what do these expressions really mean? What does real love look like? Throughout the Bible, especially as it relates to God and his relationship with us, we find a radically different way that love is u...

In an article, ‘Our politicians and media are letting us down’ in The Weekend Australian (June 17-18), Chris Kenny observes: ‘When we see the open deceit and toxicity of politics and the media in the Canberra bubble (Canberra is Australia’s DC), it is tempting to despair … We see persistent tension between truth and lies. We are informed about political systems we do not trust by media we do not believe.’ He comments, ‘The depressing reality is that politics and media are manifestations of huma...

AA Milne’s, Christopher Robin’s prayer, ‘Little Boy kneels at the foot of his bed…’ has touched the hearts of millions. The poem is a picture of childhood innocence, a mixture of God language and the distractions of inner thoughts: ‘Wasn’t it fun in the bath tonight?’ and, ‘If I open my fingers a little bit more, I can see Nanny’s dressing-gown on the door’. For adults it raises questions about prayer. Is it something we grow out of? If we do pray, what should we pray: ‘God bless the family, fr...

With the anticipated arrival of summer in the northern hemisphere, the Word on Wednesday will offer a series of reflections on the Letter to the Ephesians entitled, ‘Summer Growth’. The substance of the Letter goes to the heart of quintessential Christianity and plumbs the depths of biblical truth, providing riches that shape the mind and warm the heart. The Letter was written to be read in churches in the region of ancient Asia Minor, modern Turkey, starting with the church in Ephesus. It may ...

‘Do you want to live forever?’ was the catchy question leading into an article, ‘From Here to Eternity’ in The Weekend Australian magazine, (May 27-28, 2023). ‘Coming back from the dead, then living as an immortal?’ the article begins. ‘It sounds like science fiction,’ the article continues, ‘but the pioneers behind this wild venture are true believers’. The article takes up personal stories of a small number who believe in the science of freezing their body at death, and holding it in ‘cryonic...

Over the last twenty years or so God’s people have been increasingly put on the defensive about their faith. In a climate where people of faith are dismissed as intellectually inept and even as ‘terrorists’, many are fearful of speaking up about what they believe. Come with me to a significant scene that occurred on the day of Jesus’ resurrection. It’s recorded in John chapter 20, verses 19 through 23. That Sunday evening, the first day of the week, Jesus suddenly stood in the midst of his disc...

Why don’t we pray more often than we do? And how often when we do pray, do we look to the model prayers we find in the Bible – and not least from the lips of Jesus? Dr. JI Packer once commented, ‘I believe that prayer is the measure of God’s people, spiritually, in a way that nothing else is, so that how we pray is as important a question as we can ever face’. Come with me to the prayer that Jesus’ prayed on the night of his arrest. We find it in John chapter 17. In verse 1 we read: After Jesu...

The loss of someone deeply loved awakens a profound anguish and grief within us. Even some time after a loved one has gone from us, we can unexpectedly find ourselves tearing up. In the course of his last evening with his close followers Jesus told them he was going away and that they could not come with him (John 14:3). He knew what his going would mean for them and likened their state to orphaned children – destitute and alone. Significantly, he didn’t offer glib platitudes about his going bu...

Glen Scrivener’s recent book, The Air We Breathe (2022) compellingly explores the way that Christianity has shaped the moral values of the West. It is a book for those who believe and those who don’t know what to believe. It especially awakens those of us who believe, to why we need God’s strength to honor him in our lives as well as promote him afresh. Yet how often are we silenced through our fears, forgetting what the Bible reveals about Jesus Christ. For example, at the opening of John chap...

Elections and the resulting political discourse remind us how much most people long for a leader who will bring us justice and peace, protection and prosperity. However, on every occasion our aspirations are dashed as leaders reveal their flaws and failures and self-interest. No one proves to be the ideal leader. Let me suggest one exception: Jesus who said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). Many today view shepherds through rose-tinted ...

In his book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? Dr. John Lennox, emeritus Professor of Mathematics Oxford University, writes, ‘To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power’. Transcendent Power. Yet in today’s world where influential voices sometimes angrily dismiss such a possibility, it is easy to overlook the tran...

In his book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? Dr. John Lennox, emeritus Professor of Mathematics Oxford University, writes, ‘To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power’. Transcendent Power. Yet in today’s world where influential voices sometimes angrily dismiss such a possibility, it is easy to overlook the tran...

Easter Day that we celebrate this Sunday is a gala day as we remember Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. His resurrection underscores the validity of the Christian faith. Without it, we are lost. That said, our joy with Jesus’ resurrection raises interesting questions: Why isn’t an empty tomb the symbol of Christianity? Why is the symbol a cross? In today’s age when feelings and political correctness trump facts it would surely make much more sense if we focused on the themes of the new life an...

Royal events attract the attention of millions around the world. It is estimated some 4 billion people watched the funeral of her late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II – more than twice the population of the world when she was born. How different was another royal occasion, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem to the acclamation of the crowds calling on him as God’s King. A King’s Welcome. The Gospels tell us that Jesus deliberately set the scene for his entry into Jerusalem that day. Riding into the cit...

The subject of death is not something we usually discuss. It’s too personal and confronting. Yet it’s the ultimate certainty we all face. It’s why literature, film and philosophy so often dwell on the themes of our mortality. But it’s rare that anyone claims they can do anything about it. Death is assumed to be the inevitable end for everyone. In John chapter 10 we learn that life had been heating up for Jesus in Jerusalem. The Jewish leaders had attempted to stone him for his apparent blasphem...

In our troubled world many long for the days of the great revivals – perhaps the days of the Wesleys and George Whitfield in England and in the US, or the years of Billy Graham, or the days of great revival in East Africa. Let me suggest we shouldn’t be discouraged. Jesus himself began with a small group of men and women and look what happened: by the 4th century AD the influence of God’s gospel had had spread throughout the Roman Empire. This hadn’t happened through armed conflict but through ...

In his Pensées Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French mathematician and philosopher wrote, ‘Everyone seeks happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. They will never take the least step but to this object…’ John the Gospel writer tells us of a woman at a well in Samaria two thousand years ago who would have agreed. Like...

In today’s world, God is not so much dead as cancelled. He is not to be spoken about. If he does exist, there’s nothing good to say about him: he is grim and uncaring. How different this is from what the Bible actually says about God. Consider the most well- known words in the Bible: For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). They occur in the context of a conversation Jesus had with Nicodemus, ...

Human relationships on the personal and international level must rate as the greatest challenge for the world’s future. As I remarked this day last year, the invasion of Ukraine reveals an unspoken issue that confronts us: humanity is flawed. The Russian author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once commented, If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cut...

Aspects of Christianity can seem far-fetched to our 21st century minds. The miraculous elements can make it feel like the story of Santa Claus or fairies at the bottom of the garden. But before we dismiss the supernatural events of the Bible as fiction, it’s worth remembering GK Chesterton’s words about truth and fiction: ‘Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it’. I make these comments because today we turn to ...