When I prepared sermons for Jail Ministry, my main goal was to bring to the men the message that God’s heart had for them (and me) that week. And most of the time I felt that that was best done by letting whoever the story was about speak in their own words. If the story was about Jesus, then what did Jesus say in that passage? If it was Elijah, or King David, or the Samaritan woman at the well, then, what did they say?

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I am sure you have seen posts on social media that lambast believers as illogical or claim the Bible is full of contradictions. What is the motivation? Did those people posting just discover that we believers have been scandalously misled over hundreds of years? And, therefore, out of their own sense of civic duty, they are telling us for our own good? Yeah… right.

One of the most common stumbling blocks I have heard people cite, when they explain why they have difficulty understanding (or accepting) the God of the Bible, is the concept that God knows the future. The difficulty they find lies in claiming that if God knows the future, then that future is fixed, and therefore none of us has free will.

We have been going through the book of 1 Samuel at Church. And last week we covered chapters 4 through 7. My task was to comment on a subject that stood out to me in those chapters, in 5 to 10 minutes. This is my take…

We are now winding down the study through the Gospel according to Mark. Last time we covered the story of the crucifixion. It is a story so well known that on re-reading it we can easily miss something, involuntarily skipping something, because we assume we know every detail. But that is true of the whole Gospel, isn’t it? Mark’s version is short, compact, and every word, every scene, counts.