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GOSPELS 13 THE BREAD OF LIFE  Today we are continuing in the story of the feeding of the five thousand and the disciples rowing across the lake and finally arriving at the other side at Capernaum. In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark and John we looked at the stories of Jesus walking on the sea and we saw the different points of emphasis that the writers had about what happened when Jesus entered th...

GOSPELS 12 JESUS WALKS ON THE SEA  John 6 Matthew 14 Mark 6 When we come to the end of the story of the feeding of the five thousand which was included in all the four Gospels, we see that the crowd wanted to make Jesus their king… ‘Jesus saw that they were ready to take him by force and make him their king, so he went higher into the mountains alone to pray’( John 6:15). And in the Gospels of Joh...

GOSPELS 11 FEEDING THE FIVE THOUSAND Matthew Mark Luke and John all have the same account of the feeding of the five thousand with the five loaves and two fishes, and this account is placed early in the ministry of Jesus. Luke and Mark place the event just after Jesus had sent the twelve apostles out to preach the Kingdom of God and they had come back with a good report. Mathew Mark and Luke also...

GOSPELS 10 YOUR KINGDOM COME In Gospels 10 we are staying in Matthew Chapter six where Jesus taught his disciples the Lord’s prayer, and the parallel verses are also in Luke Chapter eleven. But even before he taught the disciples about prayer Jesus had referred to his Father four times as ‘Your Father’ in that section of Scripture, teaching what many called his ‘hard sayings’, the revolutionary te...

GOSPELS 9 FAMILY  Today I’m doing number nine in the Gospel series and I’m calling today’s word Family. I’m looking in Matthew and Luke, the two longest gospels, where Jesus teaches his disciples about prayer and then teaches them the Lord’s prayer - The ‘Our Father’ – the Father of his family in the earth. The accounts of this are in Matthew chapter six and in Luke chapter 12.  Matthew has a bit...

GOSPELS 8 LIVING WATER  We have been going through the four Gospels attempting to put together a consistent account of the early ministry of Jesus. But some of the early chapters of John tell us things that the other Gospels do not mention, such as the wedding feast at Cana in Chapter two and today in Chapter four we will look at the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.   John 4...

GOSPELS 7 IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD  We started the Gospel series where all four Gospels gave of the account of the beginning of the ministry of Jesus, being baptised by John the Baptist. Some of John the Baptist’s disciples began to follow Jesus, and after his forty days of temptation in the wilderness he regathered some of these disciples by the sea of Galilee and they followed him into grea...

  THE SPIRIT THAT RAISED CHRIST FROM THE DEAD  On the day of the Resurrection of Jesus some of the Apostles heard the startling report of the women who had visited the tomb where the dead body of Jesus had laid and found it empty, so John and Peter ran there to see for themselves. John arrived first and let Peter go in before him. ‘Then John who had reached the tomb first also went in (after Peter...

GOSPELS 6 KINGDOM WORDS OF BLESSING When we spoke about the wisdom of the words of Jesus in Gospels 5 we saw Jesus being confronted with criticism and antagonism by religious people who were threatened by his undeniable aura of authority. Even his own disciples weren’t quite sure why Jesus was doing the things that he did until they heard Jesus answering his religious critics, so Jesus was teachin...

GOSPELS 5 THE WISDOM AND THE WORKS OF JESUS We are now going to look at some of those powerful works of Jesus in Capernaum and greater Galilee that led up to the homecoming visit of Jesus to Nazareth, and his subsequent proclamation of the Jubilee Year. Those events reveal a fascinating balance of the powerful works of Jesus and the unprecedented and challenging words of wisdom that stunned all th...

GOSPELS 4 NAZARETH AND THE YEAR OF JUBILEE  After the six weeks of temptation in the wilderness Jesus made his way to Galilee on his way back to his hometown of Nazareth. That journey took quite a long time because he performed miracles and healings and regathered his disciples by the sea of Galilee.  The arrest of John the Baptist by Herod would neatly fit anywhere into those six weeks of Jesus i...

 GOSPELS 3 OUR IDENTITY AS A CHILD OF GOD. Luke 4:1 Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being tempted for forty days by the devil. It was into the farthest extents of the dry and almost uninhabitable region of the wilderness area where Jesus went, to come head-to-head with the powers of darkness and overcome the tem...

PRAYER OF PEACE  There is a beautiful Scripture of our spiritual communion with God in Philippians 4:6-7 which says ‘Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.’   The wonderful promise of the Prayer of...

THE GOSPELS 2 THE BAPTISM OF JESUS  We saw in the previous story of the Gospels, which was about John’s baptism of repentance, that the four Gospels were written by four different men of different temperaments and backgrounds who wrote from different perspectives and at different times.  This means that there were variations in detail and emphasis in the narratives and there were certain gaps in s...

GOSPELS 1 BAPTISM OF REPENTANCE  The combined accounts of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, give us a comprehensive narrative of the life of Jesus from his birth through to his resurrection and ascension into Heaven. The four Gospels are written by four different men of different temperaments and backgrounds who also write from different perspectives, so there are variations in deta...

ALL ABOUT DEDICATION  After Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph had to bring Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem to be dedicated, and Luke describes the dedication ceremony of Jesus in the temple in symbolic detail. ‘Then it was time for their purification offering as required by the law of Moses, so his parents took him to Jerusalem to dedicate him to the Lord. The law of the Lord says, “If...

THE GOD WITH US CHRISTMAS STORY God spoke to a man called Abraham two thousand years before Jesus was born a word of promise that through him all the families of the earth would be blessed, and the Hebrew nation that came from Abraham and that prophetic word of promise became the light that directed the path of the Hebrews.  That nation of Israel became the witness of God to the world through the...

Galilee of the Gentiles    Isaiah prophesied around 720 BC about a time and a place where great light would confront great darkness (Isaiah 9:1). The great light that he writes about occurred with the birth of Jesus, the first Christmas almost two thousand years ago, and the place was in the Middle east in a region called Galilee of the Gentiles, where the darkness of the tyranny of the Roman empi...

YOU ARE NOT ALONE We begin reading in Acts Chapter twenty-seven  Acts 27:1 Paul finally leaves Caesarea and starts his voyage of some two thousand seven hundred kilometres to Rome, along with Luke and another Christian named Aristarchus, and other prisoners, all in the custody of a Roman imperial guard named Julius. After battling headwinds, they landed at Smyrna on the coast of Turkey, and from t...

THE ENIGMA OF HOPE  We saw at the end of Acts chapter twenty-one, after the Turkish Jews tried to kill Paul and started a riot, the Roman centurion that rescued Paul from the angry mob gave Paul permission to speak to all the Jews from the steps of the temple of Jerusalem.  Acts 22:1 Brothers and fathers, listen to me as I offer my defence … Paul speaks in Hebrew to the Jews recounting his religio...

GODS SOVEREIGNTY AND OUR FREE WILL 1 We read in the last half of Acts Nineteen how Paul sets up a Bible school called the school of Tyrannus and teaches both Jews and Greeks the Gospel there for two years, and God works powerfully through Paul, so that people who even touched Paul's clothing and handkerchiefs were healed. Many evil spirits came out of people through Paul’s ministry and many people...

BAPTISM OF FIRE After Paul’s ministry to the Greek philosophers of Athens in Chapter Seventeen Paul left Athens and went to Corinth and met Aquila and his wife Priscilla and lodged with them, working together with them at their common trade of tentmaking. Aquila and Priscilla had just arrived from Italy after being expelled from Rome along with many other Jews by the Roman Emperor Claudius Caesar....

ONE BLOOD  Continuing the narrative in Acts seventeen from verse one we see that Paul and Silas and Timothy arrive at Thessalonica in the northern part of Greece, where Paul preaches in the synagogues as usual, teaching from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, and many Jews and devout Gentile Greek men and women believed. But Paul and his company encountered the usual opposition...

THE MIDNIGHT HOUR  We are continuing in the narrative of Silas now becoming Paul’s partner instead of Barnabas as Paul goes on his second missionary journey back to Lystra and Iconium  We now read in Acts Chapter sixteen and verse one that Paul and Silas go to Lystra where they meet a new Christian named Timothy, who had a Jewish Christian mother and a Greek father. Paul was so impressed with Timo...

GOD  ISRAEL  PAUL  US  We saw in the first part of Acts fifteen from verses one to eighteen last week how James interpreted the prophecy of Amos concerning the rebuilding of the Tabernacle of David. That prophecy foretold the future history of Israel and also that there will be a restoration of the house of God’s presence in the earth called the Tabernacle of David – and also called the church of...