Exciting times in the office this week with filming well underway for our innovative new product, Wonderfully Made.
Wonderfully Made is a pre-evangelistic resource for use within toddler groups - using DVD clips to promote discussion of parenting topics from a biblical perspective.
Watch this space for more information!
Home groups are coming to an end. Christian Unions are in abeyance for the next few weeks. Church meetings slow down as pastors and congregation members alike go off on their holidays. For a brief period of time, diaries can seem refreshingly empty ...
It may be that you're looking forward to a much-needed rest over these warmer months - if that is the case, please don't let me stop you! But if you'd like to keep on learning through the summer months, then why not consider using the summer break to dig into a short course in practical ministry from The Good Book College?
Since 2006, The Good Book Company has offered a range of distance-learning courses and some of our most popular are available to be studied over the summer vacation period.
So whether you're looking to dip a toe into Pastoral Care, Women's Ministry, Administration or Christian Mission and Ministry - we have a short course for you.
Each course takes in the region of 70 hours and is done in the comfort of your own home - with optional, practical assignments to help you consolidate your thinking.
Why not take a tour of our short courses here and consider fuelling up this summer with some biblical, accessible training that comes to you ...
It was a hot afternoon yesterday - text messages were flying about: partly reflecting on the sermon just heard, partly making plans for some midweek cake - and in the midst, a new word was born: intereveallenging. Yup, you read that correctly: intereveallenging.
In all honesty, I'm not convinced it will catch on... but it encapsulates what many of us appreciate most in a talk.
Interesting
Relevant stories that resonate with our lives. Pertinent questions - the kind of things our friends ask all the time. And an engaging style that makes us want to listen (no matter how tired and grumpy we - well, I - might be feeling at the start of church).
Revealing
A faithful exposition of Scripture. We're not there to be entertained - we want (and need) to hear from the Lord and there's no substitute for getting in to the text. An in-context foray into God's Word brings light to the dark places of our lives, helping us to see just how awesome God is.
Challenging
Talks that merely inform bring burdens - talks that encourage change bring life. There's no greater joy than becoming like Jesus and being spurred on to do that in the middle of a Sunday service is a simply wonderful.
So ... if you give talks, why not aim to be intereveallenging as you prep in the coming days. And if you listen, pray that your pastor will be unswervingly intereveallenging week by week ...
[Intereveallenging ... See, my friends, - I DID manage to use it in a sentence today!]
Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.’
John 6:35-40
Anyone who has been a Christian for any length of time will have experienced the pain of seeing people who had professed faith stop believing in Jesus. When I was at university, my Christian Union was very encouraged because a first-year student went forward at an evangelistic event and said she had become a Christian. A few weeks later she said she wasn’t a Christian after all. Last year I was preaching at a church and met the ex-wife of a man who had seemed to be wonderfully converted. Having been a committed Christian and church member for several years, he tragically announced that he was no longer a believer and was leaving his wife.
The first thing we should do when our friends fall away is to pray for them and seek to share the gospel with them again, urging them to come back to Christ. They may be suffering a temporary crisis of faith, but even if they turn away for a long time, we should not give up hope for the possibility of their salvation. They may be as bewildered as everyone else is at their decision to renounce their faith, and value some help in unpicking the reasons why they have changed their thinking. But they still need to trust in Jesus as Lord just as much as anyone else who is not professing faith. We should continue to love them and demonstrate to them the truth of the gospel in our own life (see Jude v 22).... continue reading
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Disclaimer: The Good Book Company is not responsible for the content of external sites and does not necessarily agree with the content of articles listed.
In this extract from his book published today, John Stevens talks about his own experience of doubt in himself and others. John is the National Director of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches in the UK.
I became a Christian in 1988 while I was a law student. I had grown up in a non-Christian family, and started university as a convinced atheist. I became a Christian through the witness of a number of friends from my course, who shared the good news about Jesus with me and invited me to numerous evangelistic meetings.
I resisted God’s call on my life for more than a year, but finally trusted in Christ at the beginning of my final year. Given that I had already had to overcome my scepticism and unbelief to become a Christian, I started out with a confident faith in Jesus. I was conscious of growing in faith and enjoying a new relationship with God. However, over the years I found that I had to face new doubts. I continued to struggle with sin and was frustrated by my failures. Sometimes God felt distant and I wondered whether my relationship with him was real. I discovered new theological and philosophical challenges to my faith and the truthfulness of the Bible. I felt the frustrations of seeing little fruit from my ministry and the disappointments of being let down by church and other Christians.
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When did you last have a conversation like this over coffee after church?
"Hi, how are you?"
"Not so good actually - I've spent the whole week wondering if God is even real.
How about you?"
"Hmmm... thinking that I'm not sure I'm a christian at all after this week…"
Though we often struggle to admit it, doubt comes the way of every Christian in the course of their life of faith. Doubts of various kinds can overwhelm believers of any age and stage - even those who are mature in their faith and heavily involved in Christian ministry. But we find it difficult to even admit it to others, let alone find the help we need to deal with it sensibly and productively.
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Many Christians today believe that Jesus’ second coming will happen in phases. According to this view, Jesus will first come unexpectedly and invisibly in order to gather believers out of the world, and then come again later in the visible, awesome way described here in Matthew 24. This prior coming is sometimes called the “secret rapture.” It’s secret because the world won’t see Jesus at this event and won’t have any warning of his coming. And it’s a “rapture,” which means that Christians will be “caught up” out of this world to be with Jesus. However, we should remember that “rapture” is not a word found in the Bible.
At the secret rapture, all the Christians will mysteriously vanish from the world and those who are left behind will suffer the terrible judgments and tribulations described in the book of Revelation. The period between the secret rapture and the visible return of Jesus is often referred to in this view as “the tribulation.”
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In this extract from How will the world End? Author Jeramie Rinne helps us see why this is a confusing question for many Christians, and how we can get a proper perspective on things.
Where were you when you first realized the world might end? I was a pre-teen, at home, watching television.
I happened upon a program that dramatized what the Bible said would occur in the “end times.” Terrifying images crossed the screen: warfare, natural disasters, and, of course, grainy footage of atomic mushroom clouds. I can’t remember what the show taught exactly, but I do remember that it scared me.
My next brush with the apocalypse (end of the world) came as a teenager in a church youth group. We saw a film entitled A Thief in the Night. In it an unfortunate young woman ignores her family and friends who urge her to follow Jesus. Suddenly the true believers are whisked away in a secret “rapture” up to heaven, leaving her to face the horrific global tribulation (period of suffering) of the last days. On the one hand, the film stoked my curiosity. What would it be like if millions of people disappeared all at once? But the film also made me nervous. Would I be one of the people who gets beamed up by Jesus before the world goes to pieces, or would I be left behind?
And then there was my youth leader. During a Sunday-school class he explained the biblical teaching about the end of the world using a time line. Actually, it looked more like an electrical-wiring diagram. There were arrows and boxes and symbols all mapping out a complex cascade of final events, like the rapture, the seven-year tribulation, the millennium and the white-throne judgment.
He introduced me to characters from the book of Revelation like the beast and his sidekick, the false prophet, both of whom would serve the dragon by presiding over a one-world government that somehow featured Europe, Russia and China quite prominently. This was after the beast was assassinated and then miraculously revived thee-and-a-half years into the tribulation, of course.
Like A Thief in the Night, that teaching had a contradictory effect on me. At one level, it intrigued me. It was like learning a top-secret code that suggested I could decipher the true meaning of current events. But the explanations and charts also confused me with their sheer complexity. Furthermore, how exactly did my youth leader see those things in the Bible? The book of Revelation mystified me, but somehow he could make perfectly good sense of its apocalyptic visions. And on top of it all, that sense of dread and foreboding still seemed to haunt any discussion of the world’s grand finale.
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