Amazing Grace in the Life of William Wilberforce

A couple of days ago our family watched (some of us had seen it once before) the story of William Wilberforce, as told in the film Amazing Grace.
John Piper has written a short biography of Wilberforce which is available as a pdf file here, or which you can get on Amazon (follow the link).
Amazon.co.uk: Amazing [...]

A book from Tim Keller on its way

Tim Keller is to have a book published in about 6 months from now. From the TOC it looks as though it will be a good tool in the area of apologetics.
Name Pending: Keller New Book Info…Again….

The gospel in a supermarket carpark?

Have you ever seen how the gospel is illustrated in supermarket trolleys left scattered around the carpark? Possibly not. But read this and you will see the connection. GospelDrivenLife: meditation on shopping carts

Honouring God with bold prayer

I’ve been revisiting Tim Keller’s talk on the gospel at last year’s Desiring God pastors’ conference (free video is available here). At the end of his talk he gives an illustration from a story about Alexander the Great.
One of Alexander’s generals asked him for an enormous sum of money in order to marry off [...]

Sunday at Portstewart Baptist

This past Sunday was the last of our main holiday season at PBC. Next week we go back to two services as we will no longer be running an early family service. In the morning I started a new sermon series on the book of Nehemiah. The focus was chapter 1. [...]

Sovereign Grace resources

The folk at Sovereign Grace Minstries are truly grace-filled folk. They love the gospel. They have now made available all their MP3 talks for free from their website. Click the link to see what they have available.
Sovereign Grace Store

GospelDrivenLife: Why the Gospel must be everything

GospelDrivenLife: Why the Gospel must be everything
Mark Lauterbach on the gospel. I used part of this in my message last Sunday.

Praying with Nehemiah

I’m going to be starting a series on Nehemiah this weekend. Ahead of the first message, last night at our midweek service in PBC, we used Nehemiah’s prayer as a framework for our prayer time, building our time around the themes of Who God is, What we have done, What God promises, and What [...]

Sunday at PBC

Yesterday was my first official Sunday as pastor of Portstewart Baptist Church. In the morning I preached on Reminding ourselves of the Gospel, where I basically looked at two implications of the core gospel fact that “Christ died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15). I talked about how this means that our sin [...]

Early days but top of the league

It’s very early days, and they have played a game more than almost everyone else, but you can’t do any better than win your first two games of the season. A 3-1 away win at Spurs (second win there in a row) sees Everton nicely on top of the Premier League.

Hezekiah and the sin of a good man

2 Chronicles speaks well of King Hezekiah. Not only did he restore the temple and reinstitute the celebration of the Passover, but it was also in his day that the provisions for the priests were restored to such a place that there was more than they needed. Facing the sinister threats of King [...]

Sunday at PBC

Today was my last not-being-on-duty Sunday before getting started at Portstewart Baptist Church.  In the summer we have 3 services on a Sunday.  The day starts with a high energy family service which is the responsibility of our youth pastor.  Then there is an 11 o’clock service  – which draws quite a big crowd through [...]

Hawaii

Jet lag has kicked in! Despite the little blue tablets that are supposed to make it go away, we’ve been awake early this morning. So a chance to write about our trip to Hawaii. Actually, our trip to O’Ahu, the island where Honolulu sits. Geographically, it is not the same as [...]

From one island to another…

Just back from our ten days in Hawaii. I’ll hopefully get the time in the next few days to post a log of our travels along with some photos.