The monster within us, this sinful nature we’ve got that has us completely captive to “sin and death,” was in for a shock when God sent Jesus. Up to that moment, it had complete freedom to do whatever it wanted with us, because anything we threw at it was useless. Our determination to [...]
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Paul talked as if he was two people with two separate minds that could think completely different thoughts. “I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law,” he wrote in Romans 7:25, “but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.” He was in two minds, each working totally [...]
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It would do us all good if, today, right now, in one great universal cry of anguish, we could cry out as Paul did in Romans 7:24, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” – because at least it would be admitting our problem, that [...]
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When we find ourselves moaning away about life, judging other people for how they dress or how they talk, or we’re worrying ourselves to death about family, health, finances and the future of the Free World – who, in actual fact, is thinking those thoughts? Paul has a shocking surprise for [...]
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Imagine discovering you’re not an independent being after all, but two beings at war with each other. It was a shocking discovery for Paul, too. Wherever he went, Romans 7:21, ”I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me.” There was never a [...]
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Paul talks of sin as if it’s a person. Sin is something living inside him, like a separate being. It has its own personality. It can act independently, doing whatever it pleases, and it’s very clever, as well. It can somehow twist God’s law – which is holy, righteous and good – into [...]
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Paul tells us in Romans 7:6 ”we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” Does that make the “old way” bad, then? No, its job is done, that’s all. Its job was [...]
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A 4-part series on TV has been tracing the almost insurmountable difficulties of a choirmaster putting a choir together out of school boys who think singing is for girls. Their school hasn’t had any singing for 30 years, and only 2 boys out of 1200 are in choirs already. The choirmaster is starting from scratch. [...]
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The Shack remains a best-selling book of fiction, which is amazing because it’s about God restoring the faith of a Dad whose daughter has been kidnapped and killed, a most unusual subject for a best seller. So I read the book, many times over, to try and follow the author’s train of thought as to [...]
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