| By Andy Moyle | 4 mins 52 secs | 0 Comments
Okay God! It never ceases to amaze, how much truth, help and blessing there is in our daily readings. I get fresh insights from the Lord most days, even from passages I have read many times. The temptation is to read familiar passages quickly, even skimming them – don’t! Try reading the passage out loud […]
| By Andy Moyle | 2 mins 37 secs | 0 Comments
Wait for it… TripAdvisor places the Book of Kells higher than the Guinness factory tour for things to do in Dublin. It’s a set of wonderfully illustrated Gospel manuscripts from around AD800. If you were to go to see it, you wouldn’t get to see the gospels themselves straight away. Oh no, you go through […]
| By Andy Moyle | 3 mins 5 secs | 0 Comments
Is it or isn’t it? Today’s reading contains a large portion called the ‘long ending’ that is prefixed in many translations with “The earliest manuscripts and some other ancient manuscripts do not have Mark 16:9-20”. The gospel would come to a crunching and rather odd end if it finished in v8, so the theory goes […]
| By Andy Moyle | 2 mins 18 secs | 0 Comments
My God, My God why have you forsaken me? The thing that is glaringly striking to me from this passage is that for the first and last time Jesus addresses his Father, not as Father, but God. As all the wrath of God for sin is heaped on him and the Father turns away; at […]
| By Andy Moyle | 2 mins 51 secs | One Comment
Barabbas – a divine exchange Barabbas is one bad dude. He gets more space in the four gospels than Judas though. Jesus exchanged his life for Barabbas and for us. The name Barabbas – Bar-Abba, literally means “son of the Father”. He turned out a freedom fighter, insurrectionist, terrorist. His proudest moment was his downfall […]
| By Andy Moyle | 1 min 42 secs | 0 Comments
Betrayal Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss – an act of ultimate hypocrisy. Outwardly it was a show of love, a friendly greeting in the culture. But the reality was Judas was betraying Jesus to be crucified. The challenge for us, who have probably all been betrayed at some point or other, is to forgive […]
| By Andy Moyle | 3 mins 26 secs | 0 Comments
The greatest gift Over the course of our lives we may accumulate keepsakes or mementos that remind us of people we have cherished or events that have impacted our lives. I have a little woolly sheep on my mantlepiece that a dear friend bought me as a birthday gift a short time before she died. […]
| By Andy Moyle | 1 min 42 secs | 0 Comments
No-one knows when As Kees stated yesterday, the events prophesied in this passage ended up happening in AD70 when Nero destroyed the temple. Matthew’s parallel passage used “prophetic telescoping” where one describes two mountains that look side by side when viewed at a distance, but as you fly over them are actually many miles apart. […]
| By Andy Moyle | 2 mins 32 secs | 0 Comments
The end of the age A difficult passage today, full of doom and gloom. The biggest problem with this passage is the depressing ‘end of the world’ theology that seems so prevalent with some very vocal Christians in this day and age. Up to about 150 years ago the Church’s understanding on these and related […]