In this session we look at Moses, one of the most important figures in the Old Testament. He led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt to freedom. However, this was not simply a historical event: this is perhaps the most significant event in the Old Testament for understanding what it means to be a Christian.
Check out the “What is Christianity?” category for all sessions of this course.
The Passover is one of the most significant moments of the Old Testament – and it teaches us about Christ. Today we are thinking about what it teaches us about faith, how we are to have faith in Christ as our saviour.
Sermons are also available on the podcast.
Church with UTB: This is part of Church with UTB. Please do have a look at that page for more information.
How bad is sin, really? In this session we start out by looking at just how bad sin is, and then how God started his rescue plan through a man called Abraham. God’s promises to Abraham show what God was intended, and Abraham serves as an example for us.
Check out the “What is Christianity?” category for all sessions of this course.
The Biblical scholar Alec Motyer observed that evil is like a boomerang: the evil that we do comes back to us. God often seems to work like that – we reap a fitting consequence for the evil we have done. In this passage we see what that meant for Pharoah, and how we need to humble ourselves before God or choose to BE humbled.
Sermons are also available on the podcast.
Church with UTB: This is part of Church with UTB. Please do have a look at that page for more information.
If God made a good world, why is there evil in the world? In Genesis 3, we read of how evil entered into the world. This introduces the concept of ‘sin’, as well as explaining why even the natural world doesn’t seem to work properly and why we all die at the end.
Check out the “What is Christianity?” category for all sessions of this course.
One of the biggest and most common questions in the Christian life is “Why?” Why did this happen to me or us; or why does someone not listen to God? The Bible often doesn’t answer the ‘why’ question specifically, but in this passage we have a rare glimpse into the reason why God acted as he did with Pharaoh.
Sermons are also available on the podcast.
Church with UTB: This is part of Church with UTB. Please do have a look at that page for more information.
Why is the world so full of contradictions – full of beauty and wonder, and yet with so much darkness and ugliness? Why does nothing seem to satisfy? Why do relationships cause so much pain? Why do we die? Was this how it was meant to be? In this session we go back to the beginning of the Bible to answer the question of how God intended creation to be.
If you missed it, check out Part One: “The Message of Christianity and the Bible”.
Are there any consequences of ignoring God? If you look round at the world, you might think there aren’t – people seem to ignore God with impunity. However, we need to heed the warning of Exodus and guard against the attitude of disbelief and hard-heartedness.
Sermons are also available on the podcast.
Church with UTB: This is part of Church with UTB. Please do have a look at that page for more information.
Back in 2020, I recorded the first proper Understand the Bible course. I called it, “What is Christianity?”, and designed it to be a six-part overview of the whole Bible. The course is still available on YouTube, and for nostalgia’s sake you can see all the videos here. In 2021 I decided to re-record the course, wanting to improve the production values of the videos a little bit, and at the time I was reasonably happy with the result (which you can see here).
However, things have changed a bit. Back in 2020, when I started Understand the Bible, I started out with some basic video editing software. I didn’t do much with it because, to be honest, the answer to the question: “Can I do x, y, or z with this software” was usually “no”. So I contented myself with some fairly basic video editing.
Since the autumn last year, I have been working with some new video editing software. It’s much more powerful, and I’ve gradually been learning how to do different things in it. Over the last few sessions of the holiness course I started experimenting a bit more with some video editing techniques, and realised how much more ‘professional’ things looked with a bit of editing. By my current standards, the old What is Christianity? course looks quite primitive!
Now that I’ve finished the holiness course, I have decided that the best thing to do is revisit the What is Christianity? course and bring it up to scratch. I released the first part of the course yesterday, and I’m reasonably happy with the result. I still feel like I have a lot to learn, but it’s definitely a step up in quality.
I hope that you like the new course, and please do let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!
In this course, we are looking at what Christianity is. In the first part of this course, we see that the message of Christianity is the message of the Bible. We learn what Christianity is as we explore the story of the Bible, from creation to new creation, with Jesus at the centre. In this session we look at why you should care about the Bible, and a brief overview of what the Bible contains.
This is the first part of a new “What is Christianity?” course. This is an updated and expanded version of the course originally released in 2021, but with significant differences – not least the production values!
