Viewing entries tagged
John
Our jobs play an important role in our lives. After all, our jobs and the work we do take up at least a third of our lives.
Thus, we need God to teach us how to work. Today, we want to ask ourselves about the work of Jesus, the carpenter and Saviour of the world.
In the last study, we spent our time in Isaiah 27:1 looking forward to the day when God will slay Leviathan, and put to death once and for all sin. Where is human history moving towards?
In today’s passage, Jesus begins to interact with four people and these four seem to be important only in John’s gospel! As we read it, let us consider what we can learn from these four apostles. What do their interactions with Jesus mean for me?
In the preceding studies, we learned about the Word who was God that was made flesh and dwelled among his creation. A creation that though was created through Him, denied and rejected Him and desired to live life apart from him. From His fullness, God’s people received an alternative way to righteousness: grace and truth as opposed to the law from Moses and its unachievable requirements. For an arrival as important as this, we learned of the messenger, John the Baptist whom God set apart and prepared to herald the coming of Jesus Christ who is God’s Word made flesh. Last week we focused on who John was and what his mission was. Today, we hear the content of his message.
John the Baptist is a herald and his main job is to announce the one who is coming. But who is he preparing the way for? Why is the coming one important?
As we will see through John’s message, the King is coming and John is here to announce that. The people of Israel are finally going to see the promised King and they ought to respond appropriately in worship and praise.
These first 18 verses in John 1 form John’s prologue here, John trying to provide some background information for us. In this week’s study, we will focus on the last 5 verses of this introduction and we will unpack the passage with 2 main questions: What do we know about the Word? What is flesh?
Christmas nears, but some of us might feel more of the Grinch’s grimace than Santa’s cheer. Gift-giving, cosy gatherings, and bright lights are great. But there are some of us who feel that Christmas is wrapped up in too much plastic happiness. There is a sense that our bells and jingles only paper over harsher realities that many experience on a daily basis. Orchard Road lights can feel like vain and superficial joy when economies tumble around the world, and COVID-19 death tolls surge.
If that’s how you are feeling, then Advent is for you. These 4 weeks matter, because it’s how Christians get to Christmas. It’s the road that we travel before arriving at Bethlehem. And this road we travel will bring us to contemplate the world’s darkness with somber humility, so that our hearts would be prepared for Christmas’ true and deep joy.
This is the first of our Advent series. Advent simply means “coming”, and it is the period before Christmas where we remember and celebrate all that God does for us in sending Jesus Christ. It recalls how God’s people waited for Jesus’ first coming as they held onto his promises, and today we long for his second coming while looking back to his first.
This is the last study in our Doctrine of Scripture series. We started our series with a speaking God, and we went through some of the attributes of Scripture — sufficient, clear, authoritative and necessary. Then we studied about the Canon of the Bible, how we have the set of books in our bibles today. Last week, we spoke about how Scripture cannot be broken. And we come to this week, where we want to trace the storyline of the Bible, because we know that what God says will come to pass!
In this study, we will see what Jesus Himself thinks about Scripture! In this series on the Doctrine of Scripture, we’ve been spending so much time reading the Bible and understanding its characteristics, thus seeing what Jesus Himself has to say will also help us to understand the importance of Scripture too.
The topic of the “authority” of Scripture raises questions about who has the right to tell us about ultimate reality, and how life ought to be lived. A good place for us to begin is to take reference from Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, and to see how He views the Bible. Seeing how He views the Bible, and how He responds to it should help us form our expectations about the Bible’s authority. Even more fascinatingly, the passage we’ll look at sees Him engaging with Satan, a competing authoritative source and how the Bible, for Jesus, was clarifyingly authoritative.
This is the second study in out Lent series. As we read the passage today, let us keep in mind that this text is written so that we may believe in Christ. It has been written so that we may believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that we may have life in his name!
In this season of Lent, we will be working through the final chapters of John’s gospel, looking at the events before, during and after Jesus’ death. The first verse of John 19 takes us straight into the events that take place just before Jesus is crucified, as Pilate took Jesus and flogged him (John 19:1).
Every year, to wrap up our Advent series and to mark Christmas, we will hold a “Lessons and Carols” session at the Fellowship. This year was no exception. At this session, instead of our usual Bible study format, we read from select texts in the Bible and also sang hymns fit for the season.
We are going to walk through Scripture to construct a spine to understand the person of the Holy Spirit and to apply it to truths. The big idea in this study is that the Holy Spirit is God, worthy of worship and praise, and He intends for us to experience Him clearly. We will anchor our study in John 14-16 because Jesus lays out what we need to know about the Spirit.
If you met someone who was really struggling in great pain and deep sense of personal loss, what would you do to comfort this person? Some of us might tell them that everything will be okay. Others might sit there and just feel their pain with them. But most of us honestly just don’t know what to do in these situations. In John 11, Jesus meets people like that. What did He do?
How would you describe a "bad person"? Perhaps you would even identify yourself as one, and think that you are "too bad" for God to save you? Tonight we’ll explore what it means to be a bad person and what it means when Jesus meets with someone like this!
Jesus meets the “seeker” Nicodemus. What it really means in this context is Jesus meeting someone who is looking for truth, meaning, enlightenment in this life. Many of us might actually find Nicodemus relatable! Despite all that we have, there could be a quiet (or loud) voice of discontent. What did Jesus have to tell him?
Last week we read of Jesus meeting a skeptic. This week we continue and see Jesus' encounter with another group of people -- people at a party, who weren't at the party to seek Jesus, but He found them. What can we learn from this encounter?
We’ve been walking through components of TULIP acronym over the past 3 weeks, and we’ve learnt how each component reveals something challenging and comforting about God’s grace to us. Today, we'll see something of the attraction and beauty of Jesus and the grace He has shown to us!
