Category Archives: Family

Creation, Family, General Principles, good news, His Story, Worship & Song

The Infinitesimal Drama of the Virgin Birth

January 1, 2017 faithfulwon Leave a comment

Incomprehensibly constrained to the size of a pinhead, the Lord of the Universe marches down through the ages and arrives Immanuel in a young girl’s womb.

From the first glorious image of Adam through patriarchs and kings, Matthew parades the central march of God’s history before us and brings us to a place of wonder – a few cells in a wonderful dwelling.

“Did You wrap yourself inside the unexpected
So we might know that Love would go that far?”

That whole long march, funnels down and focuses like a laser on this tiny point.

Matthew 1.

Music taken from the album “Music inspired by the Story” 2011. Song sung by Francesca Battistelli.

church, Family, General Principles

Anger May Be An Appropriate Response

June 27, 2014 faithfulwon Leave a comment

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. (John 11:33)

The word translated “deeply moved” contains the sense of a brimming over and the word translated “troubled” is a hard word more akin to anger. Jesus wept shortly afterwards. The context is the death of His good friend Lazarus.

As a church we recently experienced to loss of a seven year old who had fought cancer for years and finally died of complications arising from the struggle and treatment. All sorts of emotions arise when you attend a funeral like that. Anger at God might be one of them. But being angry with (i.e. in company with) God might be a better way of seeing it. Jesus is God and He was angry too in similar circumstances.

So what troubled him so much that he brimmed over, wept and was angry? He knew what He was about to do. And it wasn’t too long before that He had told Martha that amazing truth:

” I am the Resurrection and the Life, he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.”

John 11:25, 26a

So it wasn’t the death so much as the distress caused by the death that was the issue for Jesus. All that terrible consequence of the fall of Adam. Perhaps He was also thinking of what He had to go through to finally put an end to death.

So, anger is not a wrong emotion to feel at such times. Jesus felt it so there is no good reason why you shouldn’t also.

Family, General Principles

The Abortion Debate

April 23, 2012 faithfulwon Leave a comment

From what I have read, what seems to make Ireland a pro-life country is the legal view that a child’s life is equivalent to a mother’s from the point of conception. This leads to a whole different way of treating difficult pre-natal situations from a country where the legal position is that the child is not a child but something less than human (often called a foetus) until some arbitrary stage in the pregnancy.

Well I am not a lawyer but that is how it reads to me.

If that is the case then I am all in favour of it staying that way.

Again from what I have heard and read however that doesn’t mean there won’t be some difficult legal situations that will arise. When you have an adult or even a child threatening the life of another person it is difficult but the courts can deal with it and there are precedents. A child would normally be considered as having diminished responsibilities as compared with an adult. However a child in the womb can have no responsibility at all for threatening the life of the mother and that is very difficult to legislate for. So we seem to have buried our heads in the sand about this for some time now. Yes it is a difficult issue and perhaps the only way to deal with it is to have a judge nearby who can rule in each case as to what the best thing to do is. In our pro-life environment we can be sure that any judgement made by doctors or specially assigned judges will be those that try to preserve the lives of both. But unfortunately there are cases arising in this State in which that horrible decision has to be made. They may be very few but they do arise.

The current approach is to avoid the situation or pass it over to another jurisdiction to deal with it. I don’t believe that is the right approach.

Autobiographical, church, Family, General Principles

The difference between tolerance and support

April 1, 2011 faithfulwon Leave a comment

Our children go to a Church of Ireland based school. Most of the schools in Ireland are run on religious lines and the ethos of the school very much depends on the religion that is sponsoring it. Unfortunately there are very few if any evangelical run schools in Ireland and none near us. So schools run by Protestant denominations are probably the closest in ethos to what we would believe. Of course that doesn’t stop them being taught about other religions even to the point of making clay buddhas in school. In general I have no issue with this, its not as if they are asking my children to worship the buddha or anything.

Well, usually not.

The 14th Dalai Lama is coming to Ireland next week and visiting our home county of Kildare. Apparently he has a particular interest in Brigid a Roman Catholic saint of doubtful pedigree. In preparation our children have learnt a particularly suspect song directed to Brigid – who if she was a real human is now dead and so – according to the ethos of the school – should not be sung to. But you know we’ll put up with that. Our children have been educated enough to know these things (not by the school though unfortunately) and we don’t want to make a fuss about relatively minor matters. There are more serious issues in children’s lives than that kind of thing.

And sure, haven’t we been taught to be tolerant? Isn’t that the message of the Dalai Lama? What could be wrong with that?

Jesus said: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” John 14:6.

My 10 year old daughter quoted that to me recently when I asked her what she thought about the Dalai Lama. You see she has a living relationship with Jesus and she has it, she knows, because He suffered a very cruel death so she could.

If the Dalai Lama is right, the answer of God the Father to Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane to his question: “If this cup can be taken away from Me..” should have been: “It can”. Because if the Dalai Lama is right there is another way to the Father, in fact more than one. That makes the Father’s insistence on making His Son go to the cross for our sins the act of either a mad God or a bad one.

So when one of my children is asked to sing to Brigid and to the Dalai Lama I’m going to back him up in his own desire not to be made to go and write a letter to the principal of the school explaining why not.

Tolerance of other religions is fine but I will not support them.

The Christian gospel still has some absolutes.

A Christian in a relationship