These Lively Oracles

I’ve worked in many, many building sites and work environments over the years. From heavy industry like shipbuilding on aircraft carriers and oil exploration ships, to very small stuff like fixing a fuse, fitting a plugtop or changing a light fitting for a pensioner. And, while working for so many companies I met countless people who were all there for the same reason that I was – To earn a living. If any of us could have found another way to make money then we certainly wouldn’t have been working. But one thing I learned to do amongst all my work colleagues was this. Get to know the person behind the boiler suit. It’s a strange world when you start to get to know the real person that you’re working alongside. I’ve met angry churchgoers and kindly ex-prisoners. In one factory there were ex-offenders and active preachers among my daily connections. There were people who led youth sports teams. Others who sang in choirs. Successful artists. Martial Arts instructors, canoeists...

These Are difficult days. Society is facing challenges and attacks like they have never faced before. Ideologies and cultures are being challenged and dismantled before our very eyes. The traditional family definitions of husband and wife, mother and father, son or daughter, male and female are all being dismantled and reinterpreted right in front of us. And I’m not entirely sure that people who in times past claimed to live in difficult days could even comprehend what is happening in these days. I watch all that is going on in the news. Riots. Migration. Wars. Banks. All of politics and banking leadership has become nothing more than nameless computers to process and make decisions about the ordinary person. Ideologies and lifestyles are being attacked from the outside and corroded from the inside. Churches. Schools. Hospitals. The innocence of children is being hijacked by adult deviants. (I use the word “deviant” within the context of someone or something that deviates from the ...

I remember when I left school and started work. The first building site that I worked on was already well underway with it’s tradesmen, cement mixers, diggers and dumper trucks. It was a new and daunting experience for me being thrown into the maelstrom of hard working men who took no nonsense and were very quick to put a young upstart like me in my place. But these men were my teachers. They would teach me how to wire houses, mix cement. How to stay warm in the outdoor cold rain and how to fry eggs and sausages over a campfire using a shovel as my frying pan. It was an education into working life that no school or schoolteacher could ever provide. But one small memory came to me a few weeks ago about this particular building site. The building site guard dog. I use the word “guard” loosely since the dog just wandered about sniffing at everything and everyone. The first time I saw this rough, wirey, unkempt animal roaming the site it came over to me and started sniffing. I locked...

The great Christian apologist John Lennox recently shared with us this great illustration of the difference between God’s Grace and God’s Law. He says….  “Imagine a betrothal between a man and a woman. Imagine the man was to offer the prospective bride a recipe book showing how to bake an apple cake. He’d say to the woman, ‘If you make this apple cake specifically to this recipe for the next forty years then I will marry you. But if you fail, or change the recipe at any time then I won’t accept you in marriage’.” That’s what Law does. But Grace is different. Grace means that the man and woman get married at the start and then use the recipe book as their guidelines throughout their marriage.  And I think he got the premise exactly right. I don’t pray, worship and study to be saved. I pray, worship and study because I AM saved. Just as I am, without one plea, But that thy blood was shed for me, And that you bid me come to thee, O Lamb of God, I come. I come.