Author Archives

How shocking does this sound? You may not want to visit Grace Baptist Church when I tell you what we believe. But we have very good reasons for believing it and I have very good reasons for telling you about it. So do read on! Total depravity. It is certainly not the happiest name that […]Read more

Imagine being miserable in heaven! Not everyone, of course, believes in heaven. Nor in hell. Either there is no after-life at all or we are simply absorbed, at death, into the broader life of the universe. For many of you, however, heaven is a given. There may be things in the Bible that are not […]Read more

In the Best of Hands One of the unique things about us as humans is our ability to ponder the future – to wonder, to imagine, to look forward to, to fear what lies before us. And we all make use of it! Our minds turn every day to the future and what that future […]Read more

Great grammar – and a great deal more Benbecula is a tiny island off the north-west coast of Great Britain. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it. I’m not sure how many people in Britain itself would know where it is. My sister-in-law (who lives in Carlisle, England) once went to book a […]Read more

Great grammar – and a great deal more And first, a quotation: “A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. ‘Why?’ asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual […]Read more

Hope for our Planet Apparently it’s the Bible that’s to blame. The book of Genesis teaches that humankind is to exercise dominion over the planet and its resources. Such teaching, it is claimed, is toxic. According to one writer, “all of the destruction and all of the despoliation accomplished by western man for Read more

Blessed Either Way I begin with a confession: I am incurably British. I drink British tea, listen to British radio, write with British-bought ink, my sermons are on British-sized notepaper, and I keep a British diary. The diary is a page-to-a day job and I haven’t missed an entry in over twenty years. It’s my […]Read more

Can we believe in a God who is loving? To listen to some people, you’d think there’s nothing easier. But with others it’s different. They think of all the bad things that are going on – in their own lives and in the world – and they wonder how a God who allows these things […]Read more

An Outstanding First President It was the name that first piqued my interest: Charles Nisbet. Nisbet is one of my middle names and I wondered if this might be a fellow Scot, perhaps even a distant relation. I was right about the first. Not so sure about the second! Charles Nisbet was born in the […]Read more

Discovering the real and the true Ever paid a lot of money for something that turned out to be fake? That sometimes happens to people. They think that what they’ve bought is the genuine article and worth every cent they paid for it. Then they find out the truth. It isn’t genuine after all. They’ve […]Read more