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The Laodicean church is a picture of lukewarm faith. Our faith can so easily become lethargic and apathetic, but God is so committed to our relationship with him that he lovingly disciplines us to refocus us on him. God’s discipline is not comfortable, but is motivated by his love and delight for us.

Jesus’ letters to the churches in Pergamum and Thyatira call the church away from accommodating to the Empire and back to faithful allegiance to God. In our modern day empire of consumerism this is a warning we need to hear as our hearts are so easily gripped by greed.

In this passage we meet the churches in Ephesus and Smyrna who are struggling with quite different issues. What was Paul instructed to say? The Ephesians seem to have lost their first love while the church in Smyrna are being persecuted for their faith. What can these ancient letters to these churches teach us today?

Jesus appears to John in a vision that communicates a great deal about who he is. This vision reveals Jesus to be the world's rightful king, priest and judge.

Time is a fundamental dimension of our existence. God is the centre of time—the one who is, who was, and who is to come. Our challenge is to centre our experience of time around him and build practices into our lives that help us mark time in reference to God.

Revelation is not a timetable for the end of the world, or a book of obscure fantasy. It is a timely message given to some first century churches living in the shadow of the Roman Empire, through which God continues to speak today.

Matthew 15:21-28 We live in a world that divides people into categories: those you embrace and those you exclude. In this, one of the strangest stories in the New Testaments, Jesus demonstrates that God does not exclude anyone, and that he calls us to embrace one another – just as he has embraced us.

This week begins a four week series on the book of Ruth. We encounter a brief, little story set in a devastating famine. Where is God in these hard times? Through this first chapter we start to discover the way God surprises Naomi and Ruth and includes them in the wider redemption story. What does this book have to do with our lives today?

Grace is not a thing. It’s the loving action of God who gives us new life, sustains and empowers us, and promises us an unimaginable inheritance. By appreciating the past, present and future dimensions of God’s grace we can be set free to experience and express grace more fully in our everyday lives.

Paul describes the church like stars shining in the sky. Our mission is to hold out the word of life to others and invite them into life with Jesus. And we demonstrate this life through expressing faith, hope and love to those around us and in the broader world.

The church is described in Ephesians 2 as a ‘new humanity.’ We are a reconciled community that should be characterised by peace (shalom) toward one another. That means working against the social fragmentation in our world and celebrating diversity within the new humanity.

1 Peter 2 describes the church as a holy priesthood. Our role as a priesthood is to mediate between God and the world, reflecting God to the world in our character and representing the world to God in our worship.

Whether we know it or not our personal lives and consequently the lives of our family, our community, our country and our world is shaped by the way we conceive and understand the human story. 

This is the second message in a two-part series on the Big story of Scripture. In this message Reuben talks through the story of the New Testament, from Jesus to the new creation.

Ecclesiastes finishes with a discussion of what it means to human. In the fullness of the biblical story, being human is about knowing Jesus and being conformed to him. This is a lifetime journey in which we apprentice Jesus until he makes us human at last.

The Quester encourages us to remember our Creator while our bodies and society deteriorate. How can we do this? How does this relate to Communion? Why is remembering so important?

The Quester struggles to find wisdom and meaning in an unpredictable world, much like our own. What is the result of his findings? What can we discover about wisdom through Christ? How do we live with this life-giving wisdom?

Wisdom is a hard thing to pin down, but we know it when we see it. This story of the poor, wise man parallels Jesus - the one embodies true wisdom. His life and death give us a mode of what genuine, self-giving wisdom looks like in action.