TRAC Chapel

Do oaths really work? Are they are an illusion? Was that Jesus' beef with swearing oaths or is there some deeper truth to our truth-telling?

Jesus’ words on divorce jar us today. He might have got away with it back in the day when marriage was all sacred—or was it? Perhaps Jesus was just as jarring back then as today, perhaps even more?

After another Christian leader falls prey to sexual temptation it can be tempting to skip over this part of Jesus' sermon. These are jarring words, perhaps, but they may also be the balm we need in a world where sexual sin causes such pain.

What do words weigh? The sound waves created by our words are virtually weightless, but according to Jesus our words bear a deadly weight.

The passing of Shane Warne has struck a chord with all of us, but it's especially got me thinking about the idea of doing something to the max in a way that no one has seen before or since. In that way, Warnie and Jesus might have more in common than first thought. Show Note: If you want to see the Warnie advertisement I mentioned during the talk, you can find it here

After Jesus lays down his guidelines for the blessed life, he starts talking about being salt and light. These are curious phrases for us today, but in a world where salt was jam-packed not just with flavour, but meaning, these words would have lit up their hearts and minds.

Forgiveness is fashionable, but doing the forgiving is not. We love being shown mercy, but it is hard to show. Perhaps we're a little out of fashion?

We all have an inkling about what a blessed life might look like, but we'd be reluctant to admit that we've achieved it, even if our circumstances suggest otherwise. While we might be affronted by the inequality of living standards in our country, we should certainly be confronted by the upside down description of the blessed life with which Jesus opens his Sermon on the Mount.

We begin 2022 chasing the new normal once again, but what if we could always be resting in a new normal that is so normal that you may not even realise that life was ever any different? What if you could actually rest in a world turned upside down? We begin the year at TRAC in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount; a message we will sit in slowly for most of 2022.

TRAC Chaplain's Christmas message for 2021

Hallelujah is one of those words that has passed from biblical vocab into simple exhalation in our speech. We might use it a lot or a little, but we probably don't use it as it was intended. Psalm 148 helps us recapture our hallelujahs and challenge us to consider how our planet still sings God's praises today.

Why do we struggle with our diaries? Is it just disorganisation or does an aversion to record keeping run deep in all of us? Psalm 130 is by no means dated as we consider this question today.

Today we come to Psalm 23, arguably the most famous of passages in the Psalter, if not the whole Bible. Yet with such familiar words we can easily gloss over their meaning can't we? Let's hear them afresh today

We kick off a new series in the Psalms this term. We're shuffling our way through some greatest hits and mixed bag songs from the Psalter as we discover the many and varied words God has given us to sing to him in prayer. Today we consider whether Psalm 121 is trustworthy travel advice, or whether it's speaking to something more than a road trip.

Guest presenter, Mrs Lister, continues her two part journey looking at episodes in Luke's Gospel where Jesus confronts the good guys of 1st century Palestine. This week Jesus tells the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

Guest presenter, Mrs Lister, takes us on a two part journey looking at episodes in Luke's Gospel where Jesus confronts the good guys of 1st century Palestine. This week Jesus meets Simon the Pharisee.

As we wrap up our series on the questions you’ve asked about Jesus, the final question to consider is even if there are credible answers to each of our tricky questions about Jesus, does Jesus really matter? Can he just be someone that Christians are into, but everyone else can just follow their own path? Essentially, can Jesus be true for you, but not for me?

No one likes to talk about Hell, not me, not you, not even Jesus; it brought him to tears. But Jesus spoke about Hell more than anyone else in the Bible. Hell must then be not a topic of choice, but a topic of urgency. Even so, it raises many questions for us about our loving God.

I broke this topic up into the 5 key questions I get asked in the classroom. There's more resources for each of these questions in the show notes. The Galileo Incident? Six Days? Evolution or Creation? Dinosaurs and the Bible? Humans and Monkeys? Watch Dicko on Q and A Check out the rest of my Genesis 1 Chapel series from 2020 See how it all rests on the Cross

It's the question that obliterates faith in God, it did for President Bartlet anyway. How could a loving God allow suffering? Today we hear why Christians shouldn't be embarrassed about asking or answering this question.

There seem to be a lot of religious people out there who are bad, so if I want to be good, then perhaps I should avoid religion? Maybe I should avoid God altogether? How does humanity fare without God?

There's some wacky stuff in the Bible and you might struggle to take it literally, because you think that doing that means believing it's true. But is that how speaking literally or metaphorically works? Is literal the only type of truth, or does a metaphor have truth too? How can we take all the words of the Bible to heart when so much of it is metaphor and so much of it seems literally unbelieva...

There's no specific denouncement of the entire system of slavery from Jesus in the New Testament, in fact there are lots of rules surrounding the procurement and treatment of slaves throughout the Bible. At the same time, it has been Christians who have been at the forefront of abolishing slavery, and they still are today. How can these seeming contradictions sit together? This is the conundrum of...

You might have noticed that I called this series in 1 Samuel ‘Unremarkable’. We began asking the question, ‘Where is God in the unremarkable parts of life?’ Of course, if you’ve been paying attention you might think that the events in 1 Samuel are in fact remarkable. Priests sleeping with prostitutes, a heavy man rocking on his chair and breaking his neck, a magic ark that can make statues fall ov...

If God is real then we would probably like him to make his presence known. He should step in a bit more. It would be nice to have him around. But we rarely consider that it might not be so nice for us to be around him! This is the mistake that the Israelites make today in 1 Samuel 6.