SPCK - N T Wright
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Rescued by God's Power
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Rescued by God's Power
by SPCK - N T Wright
Rescued by God’s Power Judah 17-25 Sometimes a quick burst of biblical dialogue catches a truth in sharp relief. After many generations in which the people of Israel had gone from bad to worse, led by a succession of wicked kings, God finally sends the prophet Elijah to sort it a…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Contend for the Faith
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Contend for the Faith
by SPCK - N T Wright
Contend for the Faith Judah 1-4 In my teens and my early twenties, one of my passions was rock-climbing. I wouldn’t say I was an utterly fearless climber; I had a proper respect for danger, and didn’t try to do things which were too far outside my competence. But I relished the c…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Authority and Example
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Authority and Example
by SPCK - N T Wright
Authority and Example 3 John 9-15 One of the many things I relished about serving as a bishop was the way in which my life would swing sharply from dealing with national and international issues one minute to dealing with small, sharp and tricky problems in this church here or th…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Hospitality for God's People
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Hospitality for God's People
by SPCK - N T Wright
Hospitality for God’s People 3 John 1-8 One of the more exciting and entertaining parts of the Internet revolution is the kind of software that lets you zoom in, all the way from satellites in space, on a particular country, then a particular town, then a particular street, and f…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Don't Be Deceived
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Don't Be Deceived
by SPCK - N T Wright
Don’t Be Deceived 2 John 7-13 I was going to quote a Beatles song, but then I remembered that you have to pay a lot of money even to quote a single line. But the song is well enough known, declaring that the only thing one might need is love. It’s ironic, of course, that you have…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Sign of Life
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Sign of Life
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Sign of Life 2 John 1-6 When I was doing research on life after death, and on what people believed about it, I came across some disturbing material from the nineteenth century. People had realized that sometimes the doctors made a mistake, supposing someone to be dead when th…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The True God
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The True God
by SPCK - N T Wright
The True God 1 John 5.13-21 Sometimes a short story will play a trick on its readers. Sometimes the author has told the story cleverly so as to lead us in one direction throughout the narrative, and then, with the last sentence, will reveal something which changes everything. Thi…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Faith Wins the Victory
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Faith Wins the Victory
by SPCK - N T Wright
Faith Wins the Victory 1 John 5.1-12 The first time I went snorkelling on a tropical reef, I was overwhelmed by the sight. Face down in the water by the Great Barrier Reef, off the north-east coast of Australia, I knew at once that this was a totally new experience. All around me…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - God's Love
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - God's Love
by SPCK - N T Wright
God’s Love 1 John 4.7-21 Statistics aren’t everything, but sometimes they are quite revealing. The word ‘love’, or some form of it, occurs no fewer than twenty-seven times in these fifteen verses. No need to ask, then what the subject-matter is here. In fact, we seem to be at the…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Challenge of Love
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Challenge of Love
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Challenge of Love 1 John 3.11-4.6 One of my favourite stories from the Old Testament is found in the book of 2 Kings, chapter 6. The context is one of continual skirmishing, and sometimes open warfare, between Israel, the northern half of the people of God, and Syria, their n…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Born of God
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - Born of God
by SPCK - N T Wright
Born of God 1 John 3.1-10 There are many stories about people who are blind who then receive the gift of sight. One of the most remarkable, of course, is found in chapter 9 of John’s gospel, where Jesus heals a man who had been born blind. But there are plenty more such stories i…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - People of the Lie
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - People of the Lie
by SPCK - N T Wright
People of the Lie 1 John 2. 15-29 The late psychotherapist M. Scott Peck once wrote a book called People of the Lie. It wasn’t, perhaps, as famous as his remarkable (though still controversial) book The Road Less Travelled, but I found it more thought-provoking. In People of the …
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - God's New Commandment
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - God's New Commandment
by SPCK - N T Wright
God’s New Commandment 1 John 2. 3-14 Sometimes when we sing hymns, the hymns tell a story. They move from one idea to another, in a linear fashion. There is something satisfying about this. We all like stories, and even when the ‘story’ is a sequence of ideas, it makes sense to u…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - God's Light and our Darkness
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - God's Light and our Darkness
by SPCK - N T Wright
God’s Light and Our Darkness 1 John 1. 5-2.2 Elizabeth faced a difficult choice. She had moved into her new home a few weeks before, and her parents, who had been overjoyed when she got the new job and so could set up on her own, had been determined to do something special for he…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Word of Life
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Word of Life
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Word of Life 1 John 1. 1-4 ‘I have seen the future; and it works.’ That notorious statement was made by an American journalist, Lincoln Steffens, in 1919. He had just returned from a visit to the recently established ‘Soviet Union’, formed on Marxist principles after the Russ…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - God's Patience
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - God's Patience
by SPCK - N T Wright
God’s Patience 2 Peter 3.11-18 Early Christian Letters for Everyone 11Since everything is going to dissolve in this way, what sort of people should you be? You should live lives that are holy and godly, 12as you look for God’s day to appear, and indeed hurry it on its way – the d…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Day of the Lord
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - The Day of the Lord
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Day of the Lord 2 Peter 3.1-10 The late Bishop Stephen Neill spent some time, early in his life, as a missionary teacher in India. Once he suspected that the class he was teaching had been cheating. The boys who were not so good at the subject had been copying from the work o…
Early Christian Letters for Everyone - From Bad to Worse