Tom Wright
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Suffering as the Messiah Did
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Suffering as the Messiah Did
by SPCK - N T Wright
Suffering as the Messiah Did 1 Peter 2.18-25 Not long ago, at the height of a snowstorm, our house, and two nearby villages as well, were without electric power for fourteen hours. Our heating system is controlled by electricity, so the house became very cold. We could burn logs …
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Living in a Pagan World
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Living in a Pagan World
by SPCK - N T Wright
Living in a Pagan World 1 Peter 2.11-17 I woke up gradually that morning. I had been tired out by the events of the previous day, and I had been sleeping so deeply that I seemed to be emerging slowly from a warm, dark tunnel. It’s not an unpleasant feeling, but when eventually I …
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Living Stone
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Living Stone
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Living Stone 1 Peter 2.4-10 I have never been a great gardener. Among many other reasons – lack of patience, moving house too often – I would name the problem I met the very first time I tried to take control of the small garden outside our first house. It was overgrown and n…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Newborn Babies
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Newborn Babies
by SPCK - N T Wright
Newborn Babies 1 Peter 1.22-2.3 I was in the car the other day when a programme came on the radio which won my admiration – for sheer daring. An interviewer had gone to a farm where they were raising different kinds of deer, whose meat they were selling as venison to smart restau…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Ransomed by Grace
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Ransomed by Grace
by SPCK - N T Wright
Ransomed by Grace 1 Peter 1.10-21 John went into a junk-shop the other day, in a little town not far from here. He was looking for something in particular, and after wandering around for a while he thought he saw just the thing. It was a bowl, about eight inches across. Someone h…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Genuine Faith and Sure Hope
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Genuine Faith and Sure Hope
by SPCK - N T Wright
Genuine Faith and Sure Hope 1 Peter 1.1-9 I am sitting in a newly built room. It was, before, simply a garage, without even a door: almost an open shed. But we needed to transform it into a place where I could work. So, for the first time in my life, I had to deal with architects…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Praying in the Faith
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Praying in the Faith
by SPCK - N T Wright
Praying in the Faith James 5.13-20 There are many things in life which look extremely odd to someone who doesn’t know what’s going on. Imagine watching someone making a musical instrument if you’d never heard music in your life. What, you might think, can such an object possibly …
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Patience and Trust
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Patience and Trust
by SPCK - N T Wright
Patience and Trust James 5.7-12 When my sister and I were reckoned to be old enough not to need a babysitter any more, my parents occasionally went out for the evening, leaving us on our own. Normally this worked fine. We could see to ourselves, the front door was locked, and in …
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Warnings to the Rich
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Warnings to the Rich
by SPCK - N T Wright
Warnings to the Rich James 5.1-6 Suddenly we find ourselves in two quite different worlds – and we realize that James has been thinking this way all along. Reading through the book casually to this point, we might suppose it was a ragbag collection of different moral commands: a …
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Living by Trust in God
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Living by Trust in God
by SPCK - N T Wright
Living by Trust in God James 4.11-17 One of the most memorable minor characters in C. S. Lewis’s famous ‘Narnia’ stories is the strange and increasingly sinister ‘Uncle Andrew’ in The Magician’s Nephew. Uncle Andrew is, in fact, the ‘magician’ of the title, and his nephew Digory …
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Humanity and Faith
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Humanity and Faith
by SPCK - N T Wright
Humanity and Faith James 4.1-10 Schoolchildren of a certain age form exclusive friendships. Great human dramas are played out on a small scale when your daughter comes home in tears because her ‘best friend’ has declared she isn’t her best friend any more, but has taken up with s…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - True and False Wisdom
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - True and False Wisdom
by SPCK - N T Wright
True and False Wisdom James 3.13-18 It all began with a wrong diagnosis. I came upon the obituary of a famous actress in the newspaper just the other day. She wasn’t particularly old – in her early 70s, quite young these days. Her doctor hadn’t seen the early warning signs. By th…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Taming the Tongue
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Taming the Tongue
by SPCK - N T Wright
Taming the Tongue James 3.1-12 Some while ago I was asked to give a talk about my early life and why I had chosen the path I did. I was surprised, when preparing the talk, to discover how many of the key moments in my first fifteen years were to do with my teachers. Like many oth…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Faith and Works
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Faith and Works
by SPCK - N T Wright
Faith and Works James 2.14-26 That’s the wrong way round, isn’t it? That’s what we are inclined to think as we read that final verse. If I were to use ‘the body and the spirit’ as a picture for ‘faith and works’, I would make ‘faith’ correspond to the ‘spirit’ and ‘works’ to the …
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Word that Goes to Work
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Word that Goes to Work
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Work that Goes to Work James 1.19-27 Human wisdom regularly produces proverbs. ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ And so on. One of the proverbs I learned very early in life went like this: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will n…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Snares of the World and the Gift of God
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Snares of the World and the Gift of God
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Snares of the World and the Gift of God James 1.9-18 ‘Listen for the echo,’ said my friend. We were standing at the back of a great cathedral, and the choir was about to sing a powerful, beautiful anthem. Sure enough: the conductor knew what he was doing. As each part of the …
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Challenge of Faith
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Challenge of Faith
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Challenge of Faith James 1.1-8 I used to think the waves had come from far away. Standing by the sea and watching the grey-green monsters roll in, it was easy to imagine that this wave, and then this one, and then the one after that, had made the journey from a distant land. …
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Introduction