les Davey de France

It's a good time to think about how to give to the Bible the place it deserves in your life. I'll begin by trying to suggest we still engage our common sense as we think it through. Make reading the Bible the first thing you do every day : Yeah. Right. That will be great for some people, but for others it's a disaster. Some of us provide the best supportive evidence for the theory of human evolution every morning as we slowly pass through various stages - emerging from the depths, discovering the ability to stand erect, communication by grunts, then the first words emerge... it takes quite a lot of coffee to push-start our one remaining synapse and get it to fire. Hey - find the time that works best for you. Read 30 minutes a day. OK... But might it not be better to have a more constructive goal? Imagine if we advised people to cook their main meal for 1/2 hour a day. "Cook 30 minutes then eat whatever you got." That's nuts! Or "let's drive 1/2 hour...

 I greatly enjoyed this short and sweet little article .

The weekend's cyberpreaching began with a train wreck when livecasting to North Wales. I'd carefully set up my rig by balancing my phone on top of my computer screen, checking I can broadcast via Facebook live in portrait format and so on, as taught by numerous YouTube experts. All was good. Notes were on screen. All ready. Saturday morning comes. I switch on, find the button - and I'm sideways... So I sign off quickly and race off to get my laptop and send the video from that. It's OK, except that the phone was at a good angle, right by my notes, and now I'm gazing down at the slightly rubbish webcam on my laptop. Oh well... For Sunday we use Zoom, and each week we've taken another baby step forward. This week we were planning to sing together, as well as time of prayer, readings, message. I set up a Powerpoint file and learned how to share my screen. On Saturday, in response to criticism over security, Zoom imposed passwords, so I put that on the F...

http://www.veritas.org/can-scientist-believe-resurrection-three-hypotheses/

The conference had four basic threads. First thing in the morning, addresses from Leviticus from Jonty Rhodes, one of the International Presbyterian Church worthies. He talked about the offerings from the manual for communicants and the manual for celebrants in the early chapters of Leviticus. Then Richard Gaffin gave addresses on the work of the Spirit. Professor Gaffin has written several very useful books and it was fascinating to hear him speak to us, he must be well into his eighties. Lunch was foraged in the emporia of Ealing. One day I spotted Geoff Thomas, Gary Brady and Richard Gaffin sat at a pizzeria. I took a photo of them. "Come and join us for pizza", said Geoff. After lunch was Sinclair Ferguson's spot. His manner is wonderful now. He has his material so mastered that he can proceed at a slow pace, searching out the way as he goes, and be lucid, coherent and luminous. Each day he gave us something special to ponder. For example, the first day was on...

Daniel Liechti is a missiologist who works for the Conseil National des Evangéliques de France to encourage new churches. He says, "We'll long remember Easter 2018... If usually Christians, with their faith in Jesus who died for them, are not always understood, by the example of Arnaud Beltrame, giving his life to save others, this act is seen in all its strength and its love."

OK. Here we go. I began pastoral ministry in 1991as an assistant pastor in a church where preaching was consecutive, systematic and expository. Thus it was that the first Sunday I preached my passage was Mark 6:14-29, the beheading of John the Baptist. I say this just to establish that I am used to the expository method. I've never been subjected to some of the horror stories that go around, of sermons on the triumphal entry from the point of view of the donkey, the identification of the stones David had for his sling, etc. I am deeply committed to preaching the Bible and by systematic consecutive exposition. Which simply means taking a passage and explaining what it meant for the first hearers, what it means in the context of the whole Bible and what it means for those who hear today. OK. However, I am more than a little bothered at the moment, for the following reasons. 1) Systematic consecutive exposition of the Scriptures is not a magic method. The power does not lie in...

At the Maison de la Bible, a tall elegant couple in their fifties comes to the counter. The lady speaks: Lady : Do you have any French translations of the whole Bible that date from before the Council of Nicea? Alan takes deep breath and remembers to try to avoid mansplaining: OK, well you know that at the time of the Council of Nicea the French language didn't exist, everyone spoke Greek or Latin. But the translations we have here are all based on Greek and Hebrew texts that have been edited from copies that date from before the Council of Nicea. Lady : The thing is that at the Council of Nicea the Vatican suppressed the text in the Bible that speaks of reincarnation. Alan : We have Bibles here from Roman Catholic publishers and from Protestant publishers who are not at all influenced by the Vatican or the Roman Catholic Church. (Thinks) Have you ever seen this little book, The transmission of the Bible. (Thankfully the lady bought the book) Lady : Do you have any book...

It's not easy, is it, and the beginner preacher can get into some rather sticky situations. Here's some thoughts: 1) It isn't easy and I don't think our task is necessarily to make it look easy to talk about the incarnation. The degree of unease and discomfort that people see can reinforce what we're talking about; people can see and hear that we are somewhat outranked by the truth that we're struggling to convey. 2) Be familiar with the classic systematic formulations. For example, the definition of Chalcedon really helps if you will think about it and master it, or rather allow what it expresses to master you: We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach people to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manho...

I had a colleague years ago who attended a church where you could be healed of your money worries. Needless to say, the queues for this were long, and never seemed to diminish. I've read stuff about the prosperity gospel and encountered the edges of it in the pressure put on folks from some backgrounds to succeed in their studies and so prove their faithfulness to God. In fact, years ago in a Christian bookshop in Wales I overheard a conversation where a student's first class honours degree was hailed with "What a testimony!". Well maybe, or maybe not... Anyway it's been a very different experience to talk recently with someone coming from a prosperity gospel background and to discover what a full-on culture of that produces in your life. The person concerned summed it up under four headings : What did Jesus die to secure for us?  Did Jesus go to the cross to buy us wealth, health and worldly success, or to secure our holiness and fellowship with God? Sa...

1)  ‘The degree to which people are self-absorbed is pretty shocking’: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. in the Guardian 2) Blog posts that begin - the first words : "I have...", "I am...", "I am...", "I was...", "I'm going to...", from the front page of a popular Christian blog. 3) Contemporary Christian Culture with its big conferences where guys are up talking about big stuff. 4) I read recently that sanctification consists largely in thinking of oneself  less.   5) C S Lewis famously said that humility is not thinking less of yourself so much as thinking of yourself less. 6) B J Thompson (who's he?) recently said "the most obvious sign of pride isn't boasting, it's lack  of prayer." 7) Jason Meyer :  The Bible’s answer to our fallen self-obsession is a great work of grace in the gospel that creates a worshipful obsession with God. Pride is defeated decisively at conversion, progressively in sanctificati...

Public transport seems really easy in London now, helped, of course, by the fact that EMA runs from 10:30 to 4:30, so allows you to avoid all the mad dash on the trains and underground. From Cricklewood there's a train that takes you almost to the Barbican, where the conference was to be held, and that first day my host guided me flawlessly from Farringdon station, past Smithfield Market to the huge concrete brutalist garden. Singing for the conference was led by a pianist and two guitarists. The two guitarists were miked to sing, too. We currently believe that it is very difficult for any congregation of any size to sing without a miked up lead singer. I don't know why we developed this strong conviction or where it came from. Not long ago we managed pretty well without. Anyway, I digress. The talks at EMA were divided into four strands: Strand 1 : Morning Exposition, from Andy Gemmill. These were "working out" sessions where Mr Gemmill examined Ephesians tryi...

There were four main threads to the Colloque: 1) Alain Joly, from the Evangelical Lutherans, gave us an outline of Luther's life and thought. 2) Paul Wells, ex-Dean of John Calvin Seminary in Aix-en-Provence, gave a comparison of the thought of Luther and of Calvin with regard to Free Will 3) Edouard Nelson, Baptist pastor from Paris, preached from Luke's gospel 4) Charles Nicolas gave us a very warm and encouraging comparison of the pastoral role in the 16th and 21st centuries. It was a good, intensive time and super to spend time with friends and heroes.

Phil A Newton helps us think it through here .

http://www.institutbiblique.be/IMG/pdf/le_maillon_-_final-non-vectorise-web-2.pdf

I know pastors who have been fired for it. I have seen quarrels over it. Plagiarism in the pulpit. Pastors who download sermons and then deliver them to their folk. Now to put this in context - when I was training for pastoral ministry I remember someone teaching us that when time is short and you're stuck you can do a lot worse than to find a sermon outline from Spurgeon or Whitefield, take the skeleton and put your own flesh on it. This was WAY before we had access to the internet, of course. Many years ago I remember buying a commentary on a particular book of the Bible and being surprised to find structures, approaches, illustrations, sections that I remembered hearing just a few Sundays previously from the preacher in my church. Not only that, but in my early days in Deeside when preaching through Acts I found one particular book so helpful that I wrote to the author and told him, confessing that much of what I said depended largely on the spade work he had done. Tha...

and give three Biblical references for each. The question put to me is about "basic ministry values", but it struck me as an interesting and useful question. What principles are absolutely non-negotiable? How much does your list reflect your personality and how much your convictions?

Who here thinks that you can live a perfectly fulfilled and normal life without ever having a sexual partner? Not a hand raised. Who here thinks that Jesus lived a perfectly fulfilled and normal life? You see the problem we have with our society and its propaganda?

Again this morning I noticed that people I know from separate worlds - France, Wales, UK, Mission, etc - discover each other or know each other, without me introducing them or knowing they knew each other. It's a bit alarming sometimes. Everyone I know also knows each other. I dare not sniff, I am surrounded! It's not that surprising, really, though, is it. Birds of a feather and all that. Six degrees of separation. I thought about this the other day. Someone described a church I know and love as "just scraping in as conservative evangelical". I was surprised. The church in question is eminently conservative evangelical and more or less in the centre of the spectrum of evangelical churches in its city. Of course, we could do with defining our terms - what is a conservative evangelical anyway? Not only that, but you ask the more "right-wing" of our brothers and they'd agree that the church barely cuts muster, but ask folk on the left-wing and my frien...

sat opposite me. My shopping bags were everywhere. I apologised and she said it didn't bother her at all. We got talking about politeness and stuff, and she talked about how she had enjoyed the presence of the Irish fans. "And the Welsh?" "I wasn't in town when they were there. You have a little accent. You're American?" "No, I'm Welsh. I've never been so proud to be Welsh and I've never been so disappointed." "Why?" "Well, the performance of our team, the behaviour of our fans, and that stupid vote to leave the European Union." "Ah yes. The European Union has been a great force for peace, but our real hope is elsewhere." "Oh yes. One day all these nations will count for nothing." "Yes, it's true." She got out her tablet and opened a Bible programme. "Look." She showed me one verse from Psalm 46 : He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth. He break...