When you feel weighed down with burden, anxiety and concern, it seems getting out of bed puts you in proximity of such reality but unprepared. Closing your eyes and continuing lying down delays that process, and gives you more time to ‘charge’ up to face the world. As we arise, but with burden, we are encouraged to face the day with the dawn of the heavenly trumpet, bringing about a new life of righteousness. As we arise, in the claim that God has brought us life out of sin and death, we recall God in his laws spoke through his […]
Monthly archives: April 2020
10 posts
All are forgiven so we can start again. Forgiveness is not an easy word to say. There is cost to forgiveness. Forgiveness without addressing cause of problems might lead to further problems. Forgiveness is an awesome concept. It will never be an option when both parties are locked in their own interest to the extent they could or would not consider that of the other parties. It sounds like you need a bit of coolness of head (and heart) to consider forgiving the other party. You need to get out of yourself, view yourself and the situation you are in […]
Can people acquire guilt when their minister or clergy sin? What about their worship leader or pastor, their organist or music director? What sounds like ‘transmission of guilt’ is a difficult concept to grasp, let alone explain. Leviticus 4:3-4. The high priest represents God’s people, intercedes (to God) for them, and worships God to obtain God’s promised forgiveness for them (from God) individually and corporately (as a church). Maybe in those days they did not yet have privacy laws or ‘best practice’; unless people agree to not tell the truth (or tell lies) and so the truth of a sin […]
Leviticus chapter 4 is not your reading of choice when you enjoy your morning cup of tea / coffee, or on your headphone while you are out walking the dog or doing your 10-mile run. It closely resembles some of the materials in earlier chapters 1 to 3. The first section, about unintentional sin committed the priest, has a pattern that is closely followed by not once but three times in the rest of the chapter. What’s going on? Do we need this? Or does God need to tell us this? A few points might be useful as background: Leviticus […]
Series starts here. Music focus – musical instruments and voices Challenging. Think of when you only have a very small amount of ‘information’ to send down the line. Or like a spacecraft going to beyond our galaxy further into space, it could communicate back to earth, but only tiny portion of maybe 10 lines of text, at any one time. And yes, in the case of online meeting software, you will have some delay, though not in light years as with space travel! But the delay is enough to annoy anyone. There is hope, please read on! The following is […]
Series starts here. Congregation focus Showing multiple faces on screen gives a sense of community. Where your application can show faces across people who have logged in, this can greatly create that sense of community – while they are not individually looking or relating to some other individuals, it seems that they are looking to the screen gives their presence their a lot more strongly than we might think. When we are collectively listening e.g. someone sharing, a story, the sermon, or prayer, and each of us can see all the faces doing this, visually that is very powerful. It […]
It might be an alarming sight if you go to your church and find that on the entrance is a notice to say your church is closed but proceed to a certain address to find the same activities taking place there. A change of venue does not happen in some places, because the church building is a centuries-old venue that double as town hall and many other purposes and functions. As we learned from the 2020 lockdown, the effect might be felt in the same magnitude of previous flu pandemic or major wars, closure of such activities do happen, and […]
Series starts here. The cost you pay to run an online church is huge. It might cost you some money, but how long, just how loooooooooong, have you spent doing something to get it suitable for use in online church. It’s far beyond what we have done for a single church service, or a whole term, a whole year! Humble-speak set in, the monks, or the modern-day monks (they might look and live along with the rest of us) might be one of few groups of people who are used to labouring faithfully for a single cause. So, what do […]
All things online don’t work well for churches. Church is about people. Having a church online goes against what you want to do as a church. The whole point about reaching out to people is they come to learn and share about the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is about teaching, caring, praying, sharing, chatting, helping, supporting, and often over a cup of tea, coffee or some other drinks, and often in the midst of family members, the younger ones, the older ones, next to us or close by. Why do this online at all? At the time of writing […]
More than a year had passed since my last blog. Lots of things have changed; the need to come back to the blog became less and less of a need. Lots of things have remained the same. As of today, or this month, this quarter, lots of things become the same for a number of us, that is, the lockdown in relation to the outbreak of an infectious disease yet defined, referred as Covid-19. It’s more than a number of us. Let’s come back to that further down. The fragility of life, in all its insurmountable proportion. That is before […]