Author Archives: tim

Earthy humility, shameful suffering, effervescent joy.

This morning we are looking forward to Lent, and especially the way in which many of the folk of St Andrew’s different congregations are going to be exploring Lent with the help of this book,“Learning to dream again”. In the introduction the author suggests three themes that can help us to develop a Christian wisdom: […]

Bible Sunday 2015

Every year we go to New Wine, a great big Christian conference/holiday. One of the things about that type of event is that you have the opportunity to get some in depth Bible teaching. One year, there was something about the way the guy doing the Bible teaching held his Bible that really hit me. […]

Why read the Bible?

Why read the Bible? Well, there are lots of levels of reasons for all kinds of things that we do, and it’s just the same for reading the Bible, and I think that the part of Paul’s letter to Timothy we’ve heard read this afternoon can help us to think about some of these levels. […]

What is the Bible?

Over the next few months we’re going to be thinking about the Bible. Between now and Christmas we will look at the questions: What is the Bible? Why do we read the Bible? How do we read the Bible? This afternoon we’re starting with “What is the Bible”. Andrew has already started us off down […]

Greatness

How do you measure greatness? This question crops up perennially in the sports sections of the newspapers and internet. A few weeks ago Wayne Rooney scored against Switzerland and became England’s all time leading goalscorer. Cue lots of media discussion if this meant that he was now the greatest England striker of all time. Was […]

Praying for the City

How do you eat an elephant? A bite at a time. Now, when Nick asked me to speak on Praying for the City that is a bit what it felt like. Cities are big places and prayer is a big subject, no just one elephant, but two! You’ll be glad to hear that I’m not […]

Don’t Worry. Rejoice.

When I was last in a prison I was sorry to leave, but was also very glad that I didn’t have to stay. I’d been there as part of my work experience placement from college when I was training to be a vicar. I’d spent two weeks with the chaplains, getting a bit of a […]

Bleeding. Dying.

There is an American writer called A.J. Jacobs who a few years ago published a book called, ‘A Year of Living Biblically’ In this book he recounted his attempt to live for twelve months, keeping all of the Old Testament laws and regulations. He describes a time when he was having an argument with his […]

That I may hear

Today’s reading is from the account of Jesus’ life written by John. In the first half of his book, John shares some of Jesus’ teaching and the miraculous signs that he did to show that he was the Son of God. In the second half of his book, John shares in detail the things that […]

That I may see

In a moment I would like us to go on a journey in our imagination to Jericho, to experience this meeting between Jesus and the blind man. Before we do that, though, I would like to fill in a bit of the background for us. The first bit of background is to do with what […]