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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 …
Paul for Everyone The Prison Letters - Chasing on to the Finish
Paul for Everyone The Prison Letters - Chasing on to the Finish
by SPCK - N T Wright
Chasing on to the Finish Philippians 3.12-16 The athletics match had reached a critical stage. One of the final races was left to be run: the 440 yards (the old version of today’s 400 metres). The athletes were bunched together as they came to the first bend, and one of them was …
Acts for Everyone part 1 - Healed by Peter's Shadow
Acts for Everyone part 1 - Healed by Peter's Shadow
by SPCK - N T Wright
Healed by Peter’s Shadow Acts 5.12-16 Imagine you are the manager of a great concert hall or opera house – the Metropolitan in New York, say, or the Albert Hall in London. For generations now this has been the place to which concert-goers have flocked in their thousands, week aft…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Love: The Bridge to God's Future
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Love: The Bridge to God's Future
by SPCK - N T Wright
Love: The Bridge to God’s Future 1 Corinthians 13.8-13 When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a young man, living with his father Leopold (himself a fine musician) in Vienna, he is said to have played a trick on him from time to time. Young Wolfgang would come home from spending a riot…
How God Became King - 3 The Inadequate Answers
How God Became King - 3 The Inadequate Answers
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Inadequate Answers So what have the churches normally done with the ‘middle bits’, with the ‘body’ inside the ‘cloak’? I have on occasion challenged groups of clergy and laity to tell me what they or their congregations might say if asked what ‘all that stuff in the middle’ w…
Acts for Everyone Part 2 - A Light to the Gentiles
Acts for Everyone Part 2 - A Light to the Gentiles
by SPCK - N T Wright
A Light to the Gentiles Acts 13.44-52 Everyone who works with words – the poet, the journalist, the philosopher, the translator, the theologian – knows it all too well. We use a word one day and it seems perfectly all right. It does the job. The next day we are told it now means …
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Everything Belongs to You
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Everything Belongs to You
by SPCK - N T Wright
Everything Belongs to You 1 Corinthians 3.18-23 I remember a wise address given at a graduation ceremony by a respected senior professor. (I was present in order to say the opening prayer.) In his address, the great man said many things, and gave a lot of good advice, but the one…
Mark for Everyone - Signs of the End
Mark for Everyone - Signs of the End
by SPCK - N T Wright
Mark For Everyone MARK 13.1–13 Signs of the End... ...The place to start to understand this passage is in the middle, at verse 8: ‘These are the beginnings of the birthpangs.’ Jesus’ disciples would have known more about birthpangs than most modern men. I watched three of my four…
Paul for Everyone Romans part 1 - The Triumphant Reign of Grace
Paul for Everyone Romans part 1 - The Triumphant Reign of Grace
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Triumphant Reign of Grace ROMANS 5.18-21 God has done it; God will do it. That is the message of this dramatic little passage, summing up the whole story of the letter so far. That might sound strange, since the word ‘God’ doesn’t occur in these verses. But what Paul has done…
John for Everyone Part 1 - Division among Jesus' Followers
John for Everyone Part 1 - Division among Jesus' Followers
by SPCK - N T Wright
Division among Jesus’ Followers John 6.60-71 I once went to a lecture that was supposed to be an introduction to philosophy. It quickly appeared that the great philosopher wasn’t interested in introducing the subject, but in talking about it at a high level to the small group of …
Hebrews for Everyone - No Way Back
Hebrews for Everyone - No Way Back
by SPCK - N T Wright
No Way Back Hebrews 6.1-8 I have a vivid memory of learning my ABC. Actually, I learned to read a bit before I went to school, but during my first weeks there I remember the whole class, all 50 of us, singing through the alphabet to a well-known tune. We liked our young teacher a…
John for Everyone part 2 - Glorify the Son
John for Everyone part 2 - Glorify the Son
by SPCK - N T Wright
Glorify the Son John 17.1-8 Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is full of action. Ghosts, murders, love scenes, plots, accidental killings, betrayals, recriminations and more plots. The play highlights the indecision of the hero when faced with huge problems, and this results in pauses he…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - God's Strange Wisdom
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - God's Strange Wisdom
by SPCK - N T Wright
God’s Strange Wisdom 1 Corinthians 2.6-13 When my sister celebrated her 21st birthday, she and I were at university, a long way from home. So a cousin of my father’s, who lived nearby, invited the two of us to dinner to celebrate. He and his wife had no children of their own, and…
The Pastoral Letters - God's Revealed Plan
The Pastoral Letters - God's Revealed Plan
by SPCK - N T Wright
God’s Revealed Plan Titus 1.1-4 ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ It’s the standard question children face from well-meaning adults. Often the answers are surprising. A ballet dancer. A gardener. This girl wants to run a bookshop. This boy wants to play the oboe. Sometim…
New Testament Prayer for Everyone - The God of Peace
New Testament Prayer for Everyone - The God of Peace
by SPCK - N T Wright
PART 2 PRAYERS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT OTHER EARLY CHRISTIAN PRAYERS THE GOD OF PEACE Hebrews 13: 20-21 This great blessing, the crowning glory of the final passage of the letter to the Hebrews, is still used regularly in many churches, especially in the Easter season. The writer ha…
Matthew for Everyone Part 2 - The Great Commission
Matthew for Everyone Part 2 - The Great Commission
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Great Commission Matthew 28.16-20 You sometimes wonder, when listening to some of the great classical composers, whether they really know how to bring a piece to an end. One of the most notorious is Beethoven. There are times when, at the end of a symphony, you think you’re j…
Mark for Everyone - The Rich Young Ruler
Mark for Everyone - The Rich Young Ruler
by SPCK - N T Wright
Mark For Everyone MARK 10.17–31 The Rich Young Ruler... ...When I was a boy, grown-ups used to divide their history into two periods: Before the War, and After the War (or Since the War). The Second World War had torn a hole in their world. Everything was different now: a differe…
Twelve Months of Sundays Year B - Proper 23 Year B