In writing about Christians and slavery (Guest column, ET January 2018), I suggested that men and women from an earlier era were, like us, people of their time. Therefore, cultural and social factors affected their view of many things, including slavery. So, we should not judge them by 21st century standards. Some were eminently…
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Evangelicals rightly celebrate William Wilberforce. His Christian beliefs motivated his historic effort to secure the abolition of the slave trade, in the British empire, in 1807 (see ET, December 2017). What we don’t talk about so much is how a number of godly Christian leaders, particularly in the Southern USA in the nineteenth century,…
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This month marks the end of Kingston upon Hull’s year as the UK’s City of Culture. One part of Hull’s celebrations has been remembering William Wilberforce, ‘the friend of humanity’ and Hull’s ‘most illustrious son’. Wilberforce’s untiring efforts to abolish the slave trade were rewarded with that famous Act of Parliament of 1807, an…
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It is the glorious privilege of every believer to be able to say, ‘I know the Lord’. But how well do we know him? That is the issue we began to look at last month. The Saviour is ever with us, as he promised, and his Spirit is ever active within us. Yet our…
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‘It is a wonderful thing to know Jesus!’ We would all agree with that. It is something we sing about and rightly rejoice in. Indeed, it is what God promised his people: ‘No longer will they teach their neighbour, or say to one another, Know the Lord, because they will all know me, from…
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In responding to suffering, some Christians have wrongly thought that God can only meaningfully comfort us if he suffers with us in his divine nature and experiences our pain (ET Guest Column, July 2017). This is a tempting point of view, but it is the wrong answer to suffering, because God is transcendent and…
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Suffering is a reality we all experience. Although it is used by some to reject God’s existence, when properly understood, it confirms just how much we need God. But what kind of a God do we need? It is important that we find a thoroughly biblical answer to this question, because many sincere people…
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One thing common to all humanity is the perplexing experience of suffering. Notable examples, like wars and earthquakes, make the news headlines, but most suffering is not on the ‘news’. Yet it is known to all as it walks among our friends, family and communities: the loss of a spouse, the death of a…
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It could be argued that there is something very wrong with the prevailing subculture of much evangelicalism today. We preach the brokenness of life in a messed-up world, but expect our churches to be full of near perfect people. The story is told of a church, outside of which was the following notice: ‘Workshop…
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The words of the angel to the two Marys, ‘He is not here; for he is risen’ (Matthew 28:6), changed everything. Despair was vanquished by hope, faith triumphed over doubt, and weakness gave birth to strength. As then, so now. We rightly emphasise the centrality of the cross to our Christian faith. At Calvary,…
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This year is a big one for Evangelicals. 31 October will mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. That event sparked what we call the Protestant Reformation. Luther and his friends rediscovered the gospel. At its heart is the glorious reality…
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In an unbelieving world, people still desire miracles to take place. They want an outcome of a given situation to be positive, even when all the indications are negative. Often such emotional expressions come to the fore when someone in the family is gravely ill, especially a child. What they would like is the…
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