Category: Your questions answered

Why should we use liturgy? – Your questions answered

Posted on by Phill Sacre

A lot of people think the only way to pray properly is for everything to be spontaneous. But I think there are good reasons to use services and prayers which are written, as well as spontaneous prayers. Here are four reasons why it’s important to use liturgy.

The key points

  1. We all use liturgy, whether it’s written down or not. If the liturgy we use is written down, we can judge it against the Bible.
  2. God often repeats things – it’s how we learn. Things often go in deeper when we repeat them – especially when we’re young. (I didn’t mention it in the video, but you might like the book You are what you love by James K.A. Smith)
  3. Good liturgy teaches us to worship God. Good liturgy doesn’t just help us to worship God in that moment, but it teaches us to worship God day-by-day. It shapes our whole attitude to God.
  4. The most important thing is our hearts. It’s possible to read the words from a page like you’re reading the newspaper – but that doesn’t have to be the case. Whether words are written or whether they are spontaneous, they can and should come from the heart.

Explore further

Part two of the How to live a Christian course is about prayer.

Part three of the Heidelberg Catechism course goes through the Lord’s Prayer – starting with session 45 on prayer.

Your questions answered

This is the fourth video for the Your questions answered feature. See the rest of the series on that page.

If you have a question about Christianity or the Bible, please send them in or comment below.

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How does God guide us? – Your questions answered

Posted on by Phill Sacre

Guidance is something we’re all looking for. What career should I choose? Who should I marry? Whenever we’re facing big decisions (or even small decisions!) we want to know what the right choice is. As Christians, we believe that God guides us. But how?

Here’s a brief video which introduces the big picture of how God guides us today.

How God guides us: key points

  • We need to look at the big picture of what God wants us to do with our lives.
  • The big picture is found in the two greatest commandments (love God and love our neighbour) – Mark 12:29-31.
  • How do we know what that actually looks like?
  • We love God by asking him to help us – Psalm 25:4-5. God loves us when we ask him for his help and guidance.
  • The 10 Commandments are a guide to how we love others – they’re God’s framework for helping us know how to love.
  • The rest of the Bible helps us to understand what God’s will is for us.
  • You could sum it up in Proverbs 3:5-6.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
   and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
   and he will make your paths straight.

Explore further

Proverbs is great for guidance. You might be interested in the Wisdom of Proverbs: Guidance.

You might also appreciate this sermon on guidance from Proverbs 16.

Also check out session #9 of the Heidelberg Catechism, God our Father.

Your questions answered

This is the fourth video for the Your questions answered feature. See the rest of the series on that page.

If you have a question about Christianity or the Bible, please send them in or comment below.

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Do Christians need to keep the 10 Commandments?

Posted on by Phill Sacre

One of the biggest questions people have about the Christian life is about our obedience. Do Christians need to keep the 10 Commandments? Is that what the Christian life is all about?

This is another huge topic, so this video is just a short introduction with a couple of pointers to some more detailed information.

Summary of the video

Here’s a brief summary of the points I make in the video:

  • Do Christians need to keep the 10 commandments? The answer is “It’s complicated” – it’s a bit like yes / no / yes…
  • In Matthew 5:17, Jesus said: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.”
  • Jesus didn’t come to remove any laws but fulfil them. What does that mean?
  • Romans 3:20 says, “through the law we become conscious of our sin”.
  • The Law shines a light on our lives and helps us to see our sin.
  • The reason we need the law in the first place is because there is something wrong with us – we want to do the wrong thing.
  • Romans 8:1-4 says that the law cannot help us with our innate problem with sin – only Jesus can do that.
  • Jesus came to do what the law couldn’t do. He makes us righteous from the inside out.
  • Jesus can help us want to love God and love others – something which we could never do by simply trying to obey the commandments.
  • Jeremiah 31:33 says, “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.” This is a prophecy of what God would do in Jesus.
  • Through Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, God writes his laws on our hearts.
  • Finally, in Matthew 5:21-22 Jesus uses the example of murder. It’s a command most people think they’ve kept. But Jesus shows that none of us have kept even this law perfectly.
  • We need a transformation to love others!

Explore further

You might like to look at the Sermon on the Mount course.

You might also appreciate session 15 of the New City Catechism: What’s the point of the Law (if we can’t keep it)?

Your questions answered

This is the third video for the Your questions answered feature.

If you have a question about Christianity or the Bible, please send them in or comment below.

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How can we know the Bible is true?

Posted on by Phill Sacre

One of the questions people often have is, how can we know the Bible is true? The Bible contains so much which seems strange to us. For one, it’s full of miracles. And the very centre of the story is based on Jesus – a man who performed many miracles and rose up from the grave. Can we trust that this is true, or is it more like one of Aesop’s fables?

This is a huge question and obviously in a short video we don’t have time to look at all the answers. In this video I focus on the gospels, drawing on Peter Williams’ brilliant book Can we Trust the Gospels?

Summary of the video

  • The Bible centres on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus – so if we can trust the gospels, we can almost certainly trust the rest of the Bible.
  • Peter Williams’ book is the best book on the reliability of the gospels that I’ve ever read.
  • He talks about a number of reasons why we can trust in the gospel as historically reliable. Here are just a couple:
    1. Geography. The gospels talk about a lot of places. All four gospels have unique place names which no other gospel mentions. Those place names range from large, common cities to local, relatively uncommon names. For someone to make this up, it would require research beyond anything we’ve ever seen from this time period!
    2. Undesigned coincidences. This is when a fact in one gospel is confirmed almost “accidentally” by another gospel. So, for example, Mark describes James and John as the ‘sons of thunder’. Luke doesn’t call them that, but he does record them wanting to call down fire on a village.
  • He says that if it wasn’t for the miracles of Jesus, no serious historian would consider the gospels unreliable. So can we trust that the miracles are true?
    1. The miracles are not random – they occur within a whole picture which fits together. It would take a huge leap of faith to believe everything was fiction or happened by coincidence.
    2. The resurrection turns the disciples around. Through the gospels, the disciples are portrayed as misunderstanding lots of things, rarely getting anything right. What turned them into the group of men who evangelised the world? They would not have suffered and died as they did unless they knew it was true.
    3. The first witness of the resurrection was a woman. In those days, the testimony of a woman was inadmissible in court. No-one wanting to make up the story of the resurrection would make a woman be the first witness of the resurrection. It wouldn’t help the case at all.
  • As Sherlock Holmes famously said: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. It would take more faith to believe that the gospels were not true.

Your questions answered

This is the second video of a new feature called Your questions answered. (This particular video was originally recorded for my own church).

If you have a question about Christianity or the Bible, please send them in or comment below.

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Can we see the original version of the Bible? – Your questions answered

Posted on by Phill Sacre

Is it possible to see the original version of the Bible anywhere? If not, how do we know that what it says is accurate?

In this video we look at these questions:

  • why there aren’t any original copies of the Bible left?
  • how did the Bible come down to us through the years?
  • how can we be confident that we have the Greek New Testament accurately?

Key facts

  • We have about 5,800 copies of the New Testament in Greek
  • The earliest fragment of the New Testament is from about 150AD, a small part of John’s Gospel, called Papyrus 52
  • The earliest complete New Testament is from about 300AD called the Codex Vaticanus
  • The New Testament has far more manuscripts available than any other ancient writing
  • There are very few places in the New Testament where we’re really not sure what the original version said – e.g. ‘we have peace’ or ‘let us have peace’ (in Romans 5:1)
  • There are only two well-known fragments of the New Testament which look like they have been added since the Bible was written, which most modern Bibles bracket out

Your questions answered

This is the first of a new feature called Your questions answered. (This particular video was originally recorded for my own church).

If you have a question about Christianity or the Bible, please send them in or comment below.

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