Matthew

Listen to the gospel writers: Jesus and his family

Wed, 22/03/2017 - 11:48 -- James Oakley

I often tell people that we need to listen to the gospel writers whenever we read the gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke or John are teaching us something by recording the things they do. We need to let them do that. The words Jesus spoke within the gospels were spoken to other characters in the narrative, not to us directly. Our job is not to apply those words to us, but to ask what the gospel writer is wishing to communicate by recording those words in the setting they occur in.

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Matthew

The Sea

Sun, 02/02/2014 - 15:33 -- James Oakley

This morning, at our 8 am service, we had two readings. They weren't picked because they belonged together. We had Exodus 14 because we've resting the whole Bible as a church and this is where we've got to in the Old Testament. We had Matthew 8 because this is the BCP gospel reading for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany.

Yet they shed some very interesting light on each other.

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Exodus
Matthew

The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

Fri, 06/09/2013 - 12:21 -- James Oakley

This week, I've been pondering how the individual paragraphs of Matthew 7 fit into the whole chapter. It's always a mistake to take a paragraph of Scripture away from its context, and to read it with no regard to where it comes. In this case, these paragraphs were spoken by Jesus, but he said them as part of what we call the Sermon on the Mount.

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Matthew

Matthew 7:1-12

Thu, 05/09/2013 - 12:15 -- James Oakley

On Monday, I posted about the difficulties in reading Matthew 7 as a whole. Far easier to read a paragraph in isolation; hard to
articulate what the chapter as a whole is about and how each paragraph contributes to that.

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Matthew

Matthew 7:13-27

Wed, 04/09/2013 - 11:36 -- James Oakley

On Monday, I posted about the difficulties in reading Matthew 7 as a whole. Far easier to read a paragraph in isolation; hard to articulate what the chapter as a whole is about and how each paragraph contributes to that.

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Matthew

Praying to the Triune God

Wed, 14/11/2012 - 12:26 -- James Oakley

I'm enjoying thinking about the Lord's prayer and the slightly wider context of Matthew 6:7-15 ready for this coming Sunday's services.

In the Lord's prayer we are told who we address (our Father in heaven), then three petitions for matters related to God (his name, his kingdom and his will) and then three petitions related to our own needs.

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Matthew
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