Tag: gospel

Gospel of John (WBS #3 MP3 streaming)

Hello there and welcome again to the Weekend Bible Study.

I hope you’ve had a good week. This morning I noticed that the old almond tree in our back yard has just sprouted its spring time blossoms – and it is absolutely beautiful. I can understand why the almond blossom was included in the floral designs carved into the ornaments of ancient Israel’s tabernacle.

Last week we worked through a few verses from the Gospel of John, and by this stage, I hope that we’re beginning to get a feel for what John is telling us. John is telling us about God, God in the flesh. “We have seen him and we have touched him,” says John in one of his epistles. That’s personal. That’s close. And very, very revealing.

John wants to tell his readers something very important. It is something that he knows and it’s something he understands. It’s something he has told verbally, since the death and resurrection of Jesus, possibly hundreds of times over the years. Anyone who reads the book of John, carefully, deliberately, word for word, with a heart to understand, will by the end of the book stand beside Jesus with shoes as big as John’s.

So, as we’re about to begin, if you like, grab a cuppa and a cookie, and we’ll continue our journey together through the Gospel of John.

Click here to listen or download MP3.

 

Rivers of Living Water

We visited Eadine Springs and Spencers Brook running through Clackline, not far from where we live in rural Western Australia. It was the ideal venue for a Sabbath picnic followed by a leisurely walk through the bush.

Leah held up her mobile phone and motioned that she was about to film, saying, “Go on!”

You can’t beat those spontaneous moments – they surely can’t be repeated!

(Apologies for the noise of the stream).

Keeping you up to date

Next month Rebecca and I will be away for a couple of weeks, travelling to London to attend the International Ministerial Congress. From there we’ll travel to Paris and then onto Rome where at both locations will shoot two on-location gospel films.

We’ll endeavour to keep you up to date via this blog – as often as we have WIFI access.

Surprise! (Exactly when you thought you really understood).

One of the remarkable things about the Bible, especially prophecy, is its SURPRISING nature. Things come to eventuate exactly as scripture foretells, and we find ourselves (or those at the time it occurs) as absolutely surprised and not really expecting it!

For example, even though there was a great deal of Messianic expectation when Jesus was born, and the ancients understood the prophecies given, in Isaiah for example, where “a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and his name shall be called Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14) – that is “God with us”, when Jesus did come to this earth and was born as a baby boy in Bethlehem, it really came as a surprise.

When you read the gospel accounts, you soon pick up on that sense of surprise from Mary’s visitation by the angel Gabriel, from Joseph’s experience, from the shepherd’s in the field to the arrival of the wise men.

When Jesus came it was a surprise.

It also happened in the discourse when Jesus repeatedly told his disciples that he would be handed over to the Gentiles, he would suffer, be killed and that he would be raised three days and three nights later. I don’t think that the disciples, as the scriptures attest to, really understood or fully comprehended what Jesus was foretelling.

Thus when you read the gospel accounts when early on that Sunday morning, long after Jesus had been resurrected, the people immediately involved were nothing less than surprised! The angel at the tomb spoke to the women were surprised. The disciples were surprised. They only understood what actually happened some time after those events occurred.

I think Jesus understands that “sense of surprise” we experience. When Jesus was telling his disciples about the upcoming resurrections, as cited in John 5:28-29, he said, “Don’t be amazed; for the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear His voice – and come out, those who have lived righteously to a resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to a resurrection of judgment.”

And here Jesus prefaced his words by saying, “Don’t marvel” or “Don’t be amazed!” So, one day in the future, when we find ourselves participating in either of those resurrections, we’ll probably find it “surprising” – more surprising and amazing than we can ever imagine today.

The last book of the Bible is part letter, part prophecy and part apocalypse. The Book of Revelation is prefaced by telling us of “things that must soon take place”, and so over the years theologians and scholars alike have disagreed and debated whether these mysterious things and events in Revelation happened completely in the past or whether they exist yet in the future. But, the bottom line is, that even though we know that Jesus Christ is coming as “King of kings, and Lord of lords”, in might and in power and in glory, his coming is probably going to happen in a way that we really don’t fully comprehend or imagine today. We’ll probably be more surprised than anything else.

So when the day comes and the words of God become fulfilled, may we all be more than pleasantly surprised!

For the MessageWeek team, I’m John Klassek.