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New! Thought for the Week

Posted on by Phill Sacre

I’ve started a new Thought for the Week feature. I will publish a video every week with a short, 10-minute reflection on a part of the Bible followed by a prayer. The idea is to help you not just understand the Bible as an intellectual exercise, but be moved by it as well. In other words, to inspire our love as well as our minds!

I’ve decided to start by working through the Psalms – which will take a while! But that’s exactly what the Psalms are there for – to help us not just understand but love.

You can get these reflections on YouTube, Facebook, or the podcast.

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Attn Church Leaders! Using UTB in church groups

Posted on by Phill Sacre

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a way of enabling churches to use UTB. I’m convinced that the internet is not a replacement for the local church. Lockdown has proved that – online church is not a substitute for real church! But nonetheless, the internet can be a very useful tool.

What I have done is enabled churches who register to create groups and meetings so that small groups can study the UTB courses together. A subscription will cost a little, but each church starts with a free subscription so you can try it out.

If you’d like to have more information, check out this page all about subscriptions. If you haven’t yet registered your church, it’s easy to do – just create a free account and then register your church. As soon as it’s registered you can start exploring groups.

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How to live as a Christian: A Guide

Posted on by Phill Sacre

A few months ago, I created a new course called What is Christianity? That course was designed to introduce Christianity by looking at a very brief overview of the Bible. However, it didn’t offer very much practical help in terms of actually living as a Christian. I want to start remedying that now with another short and practical course about what it means to live a Christian life.

A few years ago I stumbled across a document called “A Short Guide to the Duties of Church Membership”. It was written back in 1954 by the then Archbishops of Canterbury and York. Although it’s over 60 years old, I think it remains a very helpful document as an overview of what it means to be a Christian. And it’s not just for Anglicans!

They included nine things in that list:

  1. To follow the example of Christ in home and daily life, and to bear personal witness to Him.
  2. To be regular in private prayer day by day.
  3. To read the Bible carefully.
  4. To come to Church every Sunday.
  5. To receive the Holy Communion faithfully and regularly.
  6. To give personal service to Church, neighbours, and community.
  7. To give money for the work of parish and diocese and for the work of the Church at home and overseas.
  8. To uphold the standard of marriage entrusted by Christ to His Church.
  9. To care that children are brought up to love and serve the Lord.

I think this is a very helpful list – if you studied these things you would be well on your way to understanding how to live a Christian life. Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to do!

In this series we’re going to work through each one on the list to show how these things can be lived out each day. My hope eventually is to turn this into its own course and add it to the teaching programme. In the meantime, you can see the whole thing on this page.

If you’d like to receive these by email, you may sign up to the mailing list. You’ll get a weekly email with all the new updates from UTB.

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Feeding of the 5,000 | Simple / Children’s Explanation

Posted on by Phill Sacre

For the children’s spot in our online service this week, I recorded a video on the Feeding of the 5000. (Similar to the Parable of the Weeds one I did a couple of weeks ago). It’s a simple explanation of the story with a little bit to get us thinking about food! The passage is Matthew 14:13-21.

The weather wasn’t as hot as last time, and the ‘on location’ bit was a bit closer to home – from our kitchen!

Did you know? This is the only miracle which is recorded in all four gospels!

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Parable of the Weeds: Simple / Children’s Explanation

Posted on by Phill Sacre

For our church service today, I decided to record the children’s spot “on location” in a farmer’s field. I thought it might help make the story more simply to visualise the parable of the weeds. The passage is Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.

It was a really hot day – 30+ degrees – but I think it was worth it and it came out relatively well. Here it is, recorded for posterity’s sake!

At the moment I don’t have any other simple or children’s videos, but as and when I do I will add them to this category.

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Psalm Reflections

Posted on by Phill Sacre

A few weeks ago I posted up a video about a habit which can REVOLUTIONISE your spiritual life. I wasn’t kidding! Well if you’d like a bit of help getting into the Psalms, the church I belong to is doing a series of reflections on the Psalms – one every weekday – during the summer. There are many different contributors including me – I’ve done one on Psalm 19 and one on Psalm 25.

This would be a great way of getting into the Psalms and helping you to reflect on them and think about them each day! Why not try to watch them daily during these summer weeks?

You can be notified of new videos if you subscribe to the YouTube Channel, or they will be available on this playlist.

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Grace vs Religion | Titus 3 | Sermon

Posted on by Phill Sacre

What’s the difference between Christianity and other religions? At the end of the day it comes down to grace. This is an absolutely fundamental thing to grasp about Christianity, and Titus 3 is all about grace.

In this sermon, instead of working our way through Titus chapter three a verse at a time, instead we look at how it contrasts religion and grace. The two things are not compatible and they lead to very different results. This is the same whether the religion in question is a secular religion, like the current cultural “woke” phenomenon, or whether it’s an actual religion. Sadly you find it in churches as well, where it is called Pharisaism.

Read the passage online via Bible Gateway.

If you like this, you might like other posts about Titus or other sermons.

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The Proverbs 31 Woman: The Life of Wisdom

Posted on by Phill Sacre

The very last chapter of Proverbs – Proverbs 31:10-31 – contains a description of the life of a woman which looks almost superhuman. I hear that some women, particularly in American churches, have come to dread the ‘Proverbs 31 woman’ sermon: “ladies, this is what your life should look like…” How could anyone’s life look so perfect? It’s beyond intimidating!

However, I do not believe that the ‘Proverbs 31 woman’ is actually describing any individual. The question in verse 10 is right: “A wife of noble character who can find?” – well the answer surely is, ‘no-one!’ No-one has a wife like this, because this is not describing a real woman.

No. The Proverbs 31 woman is a description of a perfect ‘wise’ life to encourage us to adopt a life of wisdom. Why do I say that? Let’s look into it.

Continue reading “The Proverbs 31 Woman: The Life of Wisdom”
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The content of our teaching | Titus 2 | Sermon

Posted on by Phill Sacre

Are sermons there for entertainment? Knowledge transfer? Moral instruction? Here we learn from Paul’s testimony about what Biblical teaching should be. A sermon on Titus chapter 2.

Apologies from the little interruption in the middle from my 3-year-old daughter.

I finished the sermon with the Valley of Vision prayer “Living for Jesus” but was interrupted so I didn’t include it in this video – but you can find it here and pray for yourself: https://banneroftruth.org/us/devotional/living-for-jesus/

This is the fourth part of a five-part series on Titus – see the rest of the series tagged under Titus.

Titus is one of the shorter books in the New Testament, written to a church pastor, and it concerns the pastoral role. However, it’s important for the whole church to listen to what it has to say. In particular, Titus has a lot to say about how the gospel drives our behaviour: it’s not the case that we change our behaviour to become acceptable to God. Rather, God’s grace leads to our behaviour changing. This is vital to understand!

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Wisdom of Proverbs: Wealth and Poverty

Posted on by Phill Sacre

One the best thing about Proverbs is its practical wisdom about everyday topics such as wealth and poverty. However, Proverbs is more than simply a self-help book – it is godly wisdom which seeks to put “the fear of the Lord” at the beginning. As we saw in the previous session on guidance, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 1:7). Today we are going to look at how that works out with money / wealth and poverty.

This is a huge issue in our society: according to the Global Inequality website, the richest 1% of people own 44% of the world’s wealth. According to Oxfam, the wealth divide between the richest and the poorest in the world is steadily growing. Closer to home, in the UK about 20% of households are below average income. And yet, a lot of people chase after wealth – according to the Telegraph, 70% of UK adults (more than 32 million people) play the lottery on a regular basis – and 99% of winners play again, convinced they will win again.

Money and wealth play a huge role in our society. What does the the wisdom of Proverbs have to say about it?

Let me first just give a quick caveat: one of the problems with proverbial wisdom is that you can’t simply read off one verse and then ignore the other verses about wealth and poverty. Proverbs isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme! All of these things need to be taken into consideration together. With that in mind, here are seven short lessons about wealth from the wisdom of Proverbs.

Continue reading “Wisdom of Proverbs: Wealth and Poverty”
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