I was reflecting this morning on what James tells us about Elijah and prayer. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not…
Genesis 5 brings us the first of numerous genealogical lists in the Bible and it’s worth taking a few moments to consider it. 5:1-2 The opening, introductory verses contain an expression, with a slight variation in this case, frequently found in Genesis. It is one of the 10 incidences of the “toledoth formula”, from the…
Unlike most people I have come across, I am someone who finds the genealogies of the Bible utterly fascinating. One of my main leisure pursuits, for many years, has been family history research and, building on a great deal of careful work done my mother – all without the aid of a computer, it has…
In his devotional comment on Ezra 7:10 – “For Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the Lord, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.” – Don Carson highlights a danger for students of the Scriptures: Ezra devoted himself to the observance of the Law. For…
I suspect that the word most uttered by human beings on planet earth over the last few days, in one language or another, is the word happy, as in ‘Happy New Year!’ As I read in a blog post a couple of days ago, “Ask people what they want out of life, and they’ll answer,…
I love it when I see – or am shown – something in God’s Word that I have read a thousand times without noticing! It is one of the great joys of Bible study. It happened again today, as I continued to read through Don Carson’s devotional notes on M’Cheyne’s Bible reading plan that I…
As a follow-up to my two posts about reading through the Bible in a year and doing a more in-depth study of a Bible book, I was planning on doing something on ‘how to study the Bible for yourself’ when I learned that Peter Mead has just begun a series of blogs on that precise…
In yesterday’s post I made the first of two suggestions as to how get more familiar with the whole of Scripture, namely adopting a reading plan that will help take you through the whole Bible in a year, so that there are no NO GO or NOT GONE parts of Scripture. My second suggestion has…
It still surprises me, and indeed saddens me, when I come across Christians, sometimes of longstanding, who have never read through their whole Bibles. That simply ought not to happen!. I am a great advocate of the principle that when it comes to the Bible there should be no NO GO and no Not GONE…
“And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me”. Now, in our 13th study in this precious prayer we actually come to the first of Jesus’ specific requests for his disciples. Previously I said that there are four requests…