I’m constantly amazed at the loving heart of our Father in heaven. He has made so many promises to us throughout the Bible and the onus is on us to believe that He will act on those promises. Take this one in Exodus for example: If you worship the Lord your God, I will bless your bread and your water. I will take away sickness from you (Ex. 23:25 New Century Version). Worshipping from the heart is the key to walking in perfect health. Worshipping is more than singing hymns of

I frequently have people tell me that they are a Christian but they have no idea about what they are saying. The minute they start to understand what Jesus said and did they shudder. This happened in Jesus’ day, too. Jesus didn’t come to start a huge movement – He wasn’t afraid to tell it like it was and lose followers by the masses. After feeding the 5,000 with a little boy’s lunch of 5 barley loaves and 2 small fish, Jesus told the people that they had to eat His flesh and

“Our fight is not against people on earth but against the rulers and authorities and the powers of this world’s darkness, against the spiritual powers of evil in the heavenly world” (Eph. 6:12 NCV). Jesus modelled the behaviour we are to have when we are confronted by the mostly unseen evil spiritual realm. In the Mark 5 record Jesus was confronted by a crazed demoniac and Jesus ordered the unclean spirit to come out of him, “You evil spirit, come out of the man” (Mk. 5:8). T

Did you know that when you are not joyful, it is actually against the will of God? God expects you to be joyful no matter what! Take Habakkuk, for example. He knew that God was going to send the Babylonian empire to execute judgment on Judah for their sins, a very frightening prospect. Listen to how Habakkuk writes while he waits for Babylon to attack: “I heard and my heart pounded, my lips quivered at the sound; decay crept into my bones, and my legs trembled. Yet I will wa

Worship is the ultimate need of your life for it brings you into a relationship with the Lord, “the Rock of our salvation” (Psa. 95:1).There are 4 things about worship that I want to briefly highlight from this psalm. 1 Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. 2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song. 3 For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods. 4 In his hand

Half a lifetime ago when I was a teacher I took a class of girls to the local courthouse to observe the proceedings. A woman was brought in who had been caught shoplifting. She was a repeat offender but none of the girls that day heard that small detail. What they heard was that this woman was given months in detention for stealing a pair of sox. They heard her screaming and pleading for mercy, all to no avail. They talked about nothing else for days. They even retold this ex

Tūrangawaewae is a beautiful Māori word that literally means “a place to stand”. This well-known and powerful concept expresses the basic human need for a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves, a sense of identity and independence associated with having a particular home base and foundation. Tūrangawaewae is a yearning inside every human heart. We long to belong, to be a part of something that gives us identity. The irony is that we can believe we have identi

In the Harry Potter series there was a magical mirror, the Mirror of Erised, "desire" spelled backwards, which revealed the deepest, most desperate desire of the heart, that, if a person possessed that quality or thing, they would be completely happy and satisfied. The quality that was shown in the mirror supposedly would give their life true meaning. We all ascribe values to things that we believe, if we have them, we will be truly happy. The objects or values that we yearn

Jesus went into Galilee, where he preached God’s Good News. “The time promised by God has come at last!” he announced. “The Kingdom of God is near! Repent of your sins and believe the Good News!(Mark 1:14-15 NLT). Jesus asked people to repent. The ultimate evil in us is to make ourselves the ultimate authority, to worship the self rather than look to God. Repenting means to reject belief in the self as sovereign of our lives and believe in Jesus as Lord and Saviour. To do th

There are gifts from the Holy Spirit such as gifts of healing, discernment, wisdom, miracles, prophecy, tongues and interpretation of tongues and these are wonderful when you see people using these gifts. I particularly want to focus on the gift of healing today. Only last week I witnessed a man use the gift of healing to pray for numerous people to be instantaneously healed of accident damage and chronic health conditions. Such gifts all advance the kingdom of God because th

"I tell you the truth, anyone who believes in me will do the same works I have done, and even greater works, because I am going to be with the Father. You can ask for anything in my name, and I will do it, so that the Son can bring glory to the Father. Yes, ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it!” (John 14:12-14 NLT). Since Jesus said that, you can rest assured that it is the truth. This means that you can do the same things that Jesus did when He was in the flesh o

In the Bible God has been given various titles and today I want to look at one of these, Yahweh Ropheka, “the LORD who heals” (Ex. 15:26). The Hebrew word “rophe” means to “heal”, “cure”, “restore” “make whole”. It, or a derivation of this word, is mainly used to refer to physical healing but can also be used to refer to healing the whole person, mind and soul or even healing from sin as the cause of illness. Since God has ascribed one of His functions into His name, we know

Last Sunday we sang a hymn which included these lyrics: Christ, who once came to bring on your redeeming wing healing and sight, health to the sick in mind, sight with illusions blind: now to all humankind let there be light. The same Jesus who brought healing when He was walking on the earth is still bringing healing through the Holy Spirit who He left on the earth. It was Jesus’ promise that the Holy Spirit would bring the believers power to do what He had done and mo

Cornelius was a Gentile who came to believe in Jesus. It is recorded that the Holy Spirit fell on everybody who was with Cornelius as Peter began to preach the gospel (Acts 11:15). (Acts 10:45). Peter and the Jews who were with him were surprised that God poured out the Holy Spirit on the Gentiles in the same way that he and his fellow Jews had received the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:4,11:17). In Acts we are told that the Holy Spirit also was given to people when a spirit-filled per

Are you facing a hopeless situation? King Jehoshaphat of Judah was facing an impossible battle against nations that were plotting to wipe his kingdom out. He did 4 things. 1. He got everyone in the kingdom to fast – to stop eating and be totally focussed on the urgency of the situation and to seek God. 2. He prayed in front of all the people that God was the one who could deliver them from sword, judgment, pestilence or famine (2 Chron. 20:9). 3. He told the pe

A few days ago I was having dinner with a few friends in a restaurant. We started playing reciting from memory verses from the Bible and a waitress came up to our table to clear away the used dishes. She listened attentively to our 8 year old recite John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”. She commented that she had stopped attending a church at the same age and was amazed a

On the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, the priests would bring water to the temple and pour it out as an offering to God. When that was happening, Jesus proclaimed: “Anyone who is thirsty may come to me! 38 Anyone who believes in me may come and drink! For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from his heart.’” (John 7:37-38 NLT). In order to understand just what Jesus was meaning here, John offered the interpretation: 39 (When he said “living water,

How often have you gone to a funeral and heard the officiator say that that person is in hell? Never, I bet! It has always amazed me that when I have gone to the funeral of a professed atheist or anti-Christian, it is always said that they are in a better place or up there in the sky enjoying themselves or looking down on us smiling. Heaven is Jesus’ house and what makes people think that Jesus will let them into His house when they haven’t even read His letter to them? If yo

A few years ago I was going through a very significant amount of heartbreak and I turned to food for comfort. In the midst of crying and eating I distinctly heard God say to me, “This is not the way I taught you to eat!” I was really surprised. I had always believed that it was my parents who had taught me to eat. I couldn’t understand how God could have instructed me how to eat. It got me thinking. Certainly God wants us to enjoy our food. Solomon wrote: “There is nothing be

What is it you are thinking about? Did you know that the way you think will actually affect the way you act? If you think toxic thoughts, you will behave in a toxic manner. Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices (William James 1862). In other words, many people think they are being objective but they are not examining the facts and forming a judgment independent of their pre-conceived ideas. So what I am saying is that people ten