Search results for: faith

Our faith is not blind

WORLD SIGHT DAY is on the 13th of October, celebrating our physical sight – a wonderful gift and a vital sense that helps us interpret and evaluate our environment.

However, there are many real and important things that are not visible to us like energy, love, and gravity.

What about faith? An oft-quoted Christian phrase is “we walk by faith and not by sight” but is it really true that “faith is blind”?

Homicide detective J. Warner Wallace, in his 2013 book entitled Cold Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels, discusses how, as a religious sceptic, he investigated the death of Jesus Christ and the evidence for God in the same manner he investigates cold cases (unsolved murders of the past) in his job.

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Mad Hatter Faith

One of the most convincing arguments for Christianity for me is how bizarrely counter-intuitive it is. It is a crazy Alice in Wonderland religion that turns “normal” ideas on their head!

What person would have been able to invent a religion where paradox is paramount? Where the more you give, the more you gain? Where the rich are poor and the poor are rich? Where dying (to yourself) is living and living (to yourself) is dying? Where you have to give everything up to gain the whole world? Where you treat your enemies like your friends, instead of exacting revenge on them? Where you love those who hate you and hate those who love you? (The last in the context of loving Christ Jesus so much that you are willing to disregard or abandon those you love to follow His will.)

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A smorgasbord of faiths?

By Alan Bailey

SOME people eat very simply. Perhaps because they have no choice. Others have a great array of possible delights in front of them, especially at times of celebration. Decisions, decisions. What looks nice? What tastes good? What is actually good for me? Will this upset my diet? So the questions flood through the mind.

These days the whole of life seems like a smorgasbord. So much is available and accessible. Just look at the stock in a thousand shops. Think of the devices available to us and the maze of things on offer on the Internet. Take your pick—if you can afford it.

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Statement of faith

DOCTRINAL BASIS

We subscribe to the following basis of faith –

We desire to co-operate with all who similarly believe that salvation is not by
human merit or achievement, but by faith alone in the Lord Jesus Christ; such
faith involving not only mental assent but personal trust in the Saviour.
(Ephesians 2:2-9, Acts 16:31, Romans 10:9.)
We accept revelation of the triune
God given in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments and confess the
historic faith of the gospel therein set forth.

We here assert doctrines, which we regard as fundamental to the understanding
of the faith and a necessary basis for cooperation in evangelism:

a) The sovereignty and the grace of God the Father, God the Son and God the
Holy Spirit in creation, providence, revelation, redemption and the final
judgement.
b) The divine inspiration of Holy Scripture and its consequent entire
trustworthiness and supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.
c) The universal sinfulness and guilt of fallen man, making him subject
to God’s wrath and condemnation.
d) The substitutionary sacrifice of the incarnate Son of God as the sole
and all-sufficient ground of redemption from the guilt and power of sin,
and from its eternal consequences.
e) The justification of the sinner solely by the Grace of God through
faith in Christ crucified and risen from the dead.
f) The illuminating, regenerating, indwelling and sanctifying work of God
the Holy Spirit.
g) The priesthood of all believers, who form the universal Church, the
body of which Christ is the Head, and which is committed by His Command to
the proclamation of the gospel throughout the world.
h) The expectation of the personal, visible return of the Lord Jesus
Christ, in power and glory.

Tina Turner and forgiveness

By Rob Furlong
As I write this, news of the death of Tina Turner, the “Queen of Rock and Roll”, has broken. Reading through a tribute to her, I was interested to learn that she had converted to Buddhism. If you are familiar with her story, you will know that for many years she was physically and emotionally abused by her husband, Ike Turner, until she found the courage to leave and regain her life.
As with all women who have been abused, she was left with deep emotional scars and so she turned to the Buddhist faith to learn how to forgive her former husband. Despite her best intentions however, she admitted she was unable to come to the place of truly forgiving Ike.
I don’t tell this story to condemn Tina Turner or any other person who has been abused in any way – forgiveness in situations like these is an incredibly difficult and complicated process and requires thoughtful, sensitive, counsel.
We know forgiveness is essential to the peacemaking process, but we also know it is incredibly hard to extend.
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My beef with the series Beef

By Harriet Coombe
Have you heard of the new Netflix television series Beef?
I had heard it was wildly popular and thought I would check it out.
It’s a dark comedy drama series by Korean director Lee Sung Jin. In the first episode, we are introduced to the titular “beef” – Danny and Amy are involved in a road rage incident. Neither will let the incident go, and the strangers quickly become enemies. Over the course of the season, their acts of revenge only escalate.
Without wanting to give too much away, the series does not end well for anyone.
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Not always easy … but always worth it

By Jody Bennett
People might think that being a Christian is easy, a crutch that gets you through your traumas, a Father Christmas in the sky to pray to, a list of dos and don’ts that you do your best to follow but get forgiveness for when you fail.
However, as a Christian of several decades, I can tell you Christianity is not for cowards; being a Christian requires you to do some very, very hard stuff.
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Why not tie the knot?

By Alan Bailey

Getting married is still fairly popular but not as popular as simply living together. We have husbands, wives and partners. And who should question it? After all, what people do in relationship is their business.

Well now, if the de facto position is defensible, why should it all be a taboo subject? Let’s take a quick look at two sides of the question.

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The cosmological constant

Peter’s Corner
I fitted another piece to an empty spot in my jigsaw puzzle, and marvelled at finding the only piece that perfectly fitted the shape and picture required for the empty spot. That reminded me how marvellously our universe is put together. It is like a jigsaw built not from cardboard pieces, but from physical and mathematical laws and numbers.
Did you know that scientists have discovered stunning coincidences between the values of some physical constants and the requirements for life? The numbers have amazingly exact values. This is called “fine tuning.” According to Michael Turner, famed astrophysicist, the fine-tuning of some of the constants is as unexpected as throwing a dart across the universe and hitting a precise one millimetre wide target.
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Believing six impossible things before breakfast

I had a discussion with someone the other day who liked Challenge News but disagreed with our stance

on creation. He felt that six days couldn’t be taken literally and that, in the light of textual criticism and evolutionary science, we should take those verses as instructive myth, rather than history. It got me thinking. Christianity is considered a religion of history, full of actual places names, dates and backed up by thousands of archaeological finds. So, if we discard the first bit of Genesis as not historic, at what point do we then agree that history begins?

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