Bridge of Reason

8 in 10 individuals who were hospitalized by COVID-19 said they wished they had used the Bible more.’ I posted this originally in the Spring of 2021. Maybe it's a good time to remind ourselves of these things at the beginning of 2023. As we begin a New Year Reachout Trust is committed to encouraging Bible reading, which is in a poor state across the church. We have more and better access to a dizzying choice of Bibles, electronic Bibles having become very popular over recent years. It is reported YouVersion’s Bible App gives us free access to 1,839 Bible versions in 1,275 languages. And yet... Christianity Today reported Bible reading in the US has fallen away during the pandemic: ‘ Between early 2019 and 2020, the percentage of US adults who say they use the Bible daily dropped from 14 percent to 9 percent, according to the State of the Bible 2020 report released by the Barna Group and the American Bible Society (ABS).’ This is dissonance on a grand scale. A feast of the b...

I sat in a church meeting in which people were encouraged to ‘share.’ There was no shortage of candidates to walk up to the front and tell what they ‘felt God was saying to me.’ Some of it was encouraging and to the point, but some ranged from puzzling to outright wacky. One stood out for me as instructional in all the ways the speaker probably hadn’t intended. What was said was sufficiently couched in Christian lingo as to sound broadly biblical but ultimately so vague as to be as applicable as the words of a fairground fortune-teller; almost anyone could have identified with them. What was striking was the failed attempt to bring biblical content into ‘what God is saying to me.’ This was because the speaker’s knowledge of the Bible was patently and woefully inadequate to the task. It is troubling when people who don’t know the Bible, God’s written Word, nevertheless feel God can and does speak through them, that they can be God’s immanent word. You hear these things where someon...

  ‘ But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers. ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the customs of Moses, you cannot be saved.’’ (Acts 15:1) In Acts 15 we see people who follow Paul around, questioning his message of grace, pressing the case for rules that they alone, of course, would teach and apply. These were likely the Pharisees of verse 5. Setting themselves up as authority figures , they insisted Gentiles needed to become Jews in order to become Christians. Y ou may throw at them as many grace verses as you like, their answer will always be the same familiar, ‘I know what it says, but this is what it means. Believe me, I am an authority on these things. I have been to the top of the mountain and have the anointing ’ Former cultists will find this so familiar, indeed I remember saying this myself. The message of the gospel of grace - saved by grace, through faith in Christ, works following - is so clear in the Bible. Yet there will always be th...

Image by  Pedro Ivo Pereira Vieira Pedin  from  Pixabay   When you are struggling with a problem, when your plans don’t seem to be working out, when you wonder, ‘why is this so intractable, have I missed something?’ there is great wisdom in going back to first principles. This is especially true of Bible understanding. Writing at some length about the priestly role of Jesus, the writer to the Hebrews goes on: ‘ About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.’ Hebrews 5:11-14 W e notice several things in this passage: T...

 8 in 10 individuals who were hospitalized by COVID-19 said they wished they had used the Bible more.’ As we begin a New Year Reachout Trust is committed to encouraging Bible reading, which is in a poor state across the church. We have more and better access to a dizzying choice of Bibles, electronic Bibles having become very popular over recent years. It is reported YouVersion’s Bible App gives us free access to 1,839 Bible versions in 1,275 languages. Christianity Today reported Bible reading in the US has fallen away during the pandemic: ‘ Between early 2019 and 2020, the percentage of US adults who say they use the Bible daily dropped from 14 percent to 9 percent, according to the State of the Bible 2020 report released by the Barna Group and the American Bible Society (ABS).’ The troubling headline above comes from that report, saying , ‘Individuals were most likely to report an increase in Bible engagement if a family member in their household or a neighbor died from C...