Prayers For Today From Psalms 10. Praying For/With An Undivided Heart Psalm 86: 11 “Give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name.” NASB -"Unite my heart to fear your name." CEB -"Make my heart focused only on honoring your name.” ERV - “Help me make worshiping your name the most important thing in my life." MSG - “Put me together, one heart and mind; then, undivided, I’ll worship in joyful fear.” I like that because it sounds like the way I often pray: “Put me tog

Finding home here. Key Text: 1 John 1:5-10 Every single one of here have a deep and profound need to belong. It drives our interactions, and how we see ourselves. The irony or the tragedy is that so many of us live life with a chronic sense that we don’t belong. Now we have addressed alienation several weeks back and how the gospel answers this. However, I want to take this reality a step further in our application of belonging. The need to belong is so fundamental so cor

Genesis 9: 18 - 29 If you come to this text with no prior history and no preconceptions, you may wonder about the connection between this strange story of drunkenness, nakedness, family trouble and the curse on Canaan and the problem of race relations in the 21st century. But there is more to this story than meets the eye. For a long time certain groups used this text to justify slavery and segregation. Lurking underneath this misinterpretation was the belief that people sho

Prayers For Today From Psalms 9. Praying With Praise Psalm 136 When you are young, you feel invincible. I have always thought this was a good thing, this feeling of being strong, brave and able to conquer any obstacle, because it gives to the young the courage to attempt great things. It is a pity that youth is wasted on the young. By the time we gain the wisdom that comes from experience, we have lost that innocent and carefree spirit.

The Gospel week 6: The Gospel’s complexity part 3 – Kingdom Key Text: Luke 6:17-26 We are in the final week of our series “The Gospel” we have looked at what the gospel is and isn’t we have established the simplicity and the complexity of the message we have. Tonight, we conclude that with the message of the kingdom. We read in Mark 1:14-15; 14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The ki

Prayers For Today From Psalms 8. Praying When You Doubt Psalm 73 Have you ever stopped believing? It can happen to any of us at any time because life is hard and sometimes very strange. If you live long enough, your faith is bound to be challenged many times. Psalm 73 is the story of a godly man who felt his faith slipping away. Even though these words were written 3000 years ago, they might as well have been written today. If

6 November (evening): The Gospel week 5. The Gospel’s complexity part 2 (Yahweh and covenant) Key Text: Duet 29:2-15 Have you ever heard someone say, “I believe in God, but I don’t go to church, because all that matters is that I love him!” to this we have the mantra, “Only God can judge me.” Many of us say this can’t be true, however, sometimes our understanding of grace makes this seem relevant. And then we all fall into the debate of what really matters; works or faith?

Prayers For Today From Psalms 7. Praying When the Foundations are Destroyed Psalm 11 How much dynamite do you need to blow up a dam? It all depends on where you put it. It’s a lesson in the power of cracks in the foundation. If you know what you are doing, you don’t need an atomic bomb to wreak havoc. A little dynamite in the right place will do the trick. All it takes is a few cracks, well-placed, at the right moment, and the whole thing comes crumbling down. That brings me

The Gospel 4. The Gospel’s complexity part 1 (Exile and homecoming) Key Text: John 5:39-40 We all have a sense that we somehow don’t belong. This is not a cultural problem, it is definitely not simply a teenage problem, it is a human problem. Carl Marx (Father of Communism) and Martin Heidegger (Existentialist) both agreed that you cannot understand the human condition without the concept of alienation. We have a feeling that we are not at home in the world. This is such a