Dr Paul Allen

Give us this day our daily bread. (Matt. 6:11) These words draw our focus to a particular time—this day. It is recurring, a petition to be made again with each sunrise. These words would have reminded Jesus’ hearers of the Exodus, a period in Israel’s history when God provided just enough manna daily for the people to survive (see Ex. 16). They were wandering in a wilderness on their way to a promised land where God would be their king. They would have loved a grand stockpile of food. But God taught them to trust him afresh each morning as they awakened to find new manna on the ground. Trusting God for basic necessities would form the foundation for trust in greater matters. Similarly, Jesus prepares his followers to trust God for what they need as they await the new kingdom that God is establishing through him. What was difficult for a first-century peasant may also be difficult for us, albeit for different reasons. Reliance requires that we see our position in the world clearly. We a...

We need to understand Genesis 3 if we are to understand the gospel. Everything else that follows in the Bible does so as a consequence of the events that took place in the Garden of Eden.  And they were events, not myths. Underlying all the actions of Jesus and all the teaching of the New Testament is the fact of human sin and the doctrine of the fall of man. By the Fall we mean man’s fall from the perfect condition in which he was created to a state of sin. Our responsibilit y Whilst it is clear from Genesis 3 that Satan is behind sin, this does not excuse us, nor does it remove our responsibility for our actions. The words which the Bible later uses to describe human disobedience to God emphasise this. • Sin means to fall short of the standard God has set. • Transgression is to trespass outside the boundaries God has set. • Iniquity means crookedness, not straight, moral distortion, and refers to our nature. Read Psalm 32:1–2 NKJV, where all three words are used. The three words ...

If our thinking about God is not correct, then every other doctrine we apply our minds to will also be incorrect. This is the most important doctrine, yet people seem to think they are free to make up their minds as to what God is like.  So some who call themselves Christians say, ‘My god would never send anyone to hell.’ Such a statement is only possible if you ignore all that the Bible has to say and just impose your own thoughts on the subject. This attitude is responsible for what is possibly the greatest sin a person can commit—to reduce God to terms that are acceptable to us (Psalm 50:21).  This is why in the Old Testament one of the sins that grieved God the most was idolatry. This is to substitute man-made objects and ideas in the place of the one true God (Jeremiah 10:3–5). It is a slander on the character of God, and all worship that flows from it is worthless. What is God like? The answer to this question is that he is not like anything we have known or experienced....

Jesus considered the baptism in the Holy Spirit so important that He expressly forbade His disciples to begin their ministry until they had received it. He knew it was essential for them to have the power which baptism in the Holy Spirit provides. And while staying with them, He charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me, for John baptised with water, but before many days you shall be baptised with the Holy Spirit.”(Acts 1:4–5) There are many reasons why the baptism in the Holy Spirit is important. Rufus Moseley listed the following reasons in a little pamphlet entitled The Gift of the Holy Spirit. 1.It is only through this heavenly gift empowering us, guiding us, and transforming us that we have immediate union with the glorified Jesus and are given power to do His work and His will and to grow up into His likeness.  As blessed as was the ministry of Jesus in the flesh, and as glorious as was His redemp...

  By John Starke THE CRAB NEBULA is an exploding star about forty-two hundred light years away. I first learned about it in Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk . Light from this exploding star first became visible to earth in 1054. It was a supernova then, so bright it could be seen during the daytime. A thousand years later, the star is still exploding. What explodes for a thousand years? What has the density and size to keep up this pace? If you look at the Crab Nebula today through binoculars, it looks like a little ring. If you stare at it, even with earnest stillness, you will see no movement. The naked eye clothed with binoculars looks at this exploding star, and it seems more like a statue. “Photographs of the Crab Nebula taken fifteen years ago seem identical to photographs of it taken yesterday,” and yet the Crab Nebula is expanding at the rate of seventy million miles a day, and it’s been doing that for millennia. 1 We are in a universe where something that has incr...