Easter Sunrise Service 2024
March 31, 2024These days, the onset of arthritis in my left hand makes playing guitar extremely painful. I had intended that this Easter service would use recorded music instead, opening with “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!”, a contemporary rendition from Hillsong; a hymn written by the Anglican bishop Reginald Heber (1783–1826), followed by Michael W. Smith’s live renditions of “Above…
Slavery, Servitude, and the misguided
March 23, 2024This image or meme was posted by a friend on Facebook and, to be honest, I was horribly offended that someone I was invested in could be so ignorant. I had to reply and wrote “The concept of slavery in biblical times was different from the modern understanding of slavery and was often associated with…
What Does it Mean to be Non-Denominational
March 13, 2024I started life as a Christian attending Trinity Baptist Church in Bexleyheath, Kent, in southeast England. I left that church as soon as I could and walked away from God completely at the age of 17. Much later in life, I was born again and came back in the Pentecostal faith with the International Church…
Should I be Baptized?
January 5, 2024“As for me, I baptize you with water for repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove His sandals; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into…
New Year’s Morning, 2024
January 1, 2024Good morning, and welcome to the second New Years Day Service. The first was held at The Palms in 2019 at the request of dear friends who were not going to be on island for Easter, and now, at the request of dear friends who are not going to be on island for Easter 2024,…
Biblical Creation is Science
December 30, 2023It’s difficult at times to have thoughts that one wants to discuss but have no one to discuss them with. I don’t mean to appear arrogant, but I also don’t want to be apologetic. I have no difficulty believing in God and His creation at the same time as believing in solid science. By that,…
Needle-Gate: Why it Doesn’t Matter
November 2, 2023I sarcastically wrote yesterday that I was going to write a brilliant message, juxtaposing exegesis, and hermeneutics. Sounds kinda hoity-toity, doesn’t it? Hmmm: how do I deal with that? These two concepts in theology pretty much deal with interpreting and explaining biblical texts, but hermeneutics does so more from the perspectives of historical context, cultural…
The Problem of Evil
November 1, 2023I was going to write a brilliant message for today on exegesis and hermeneutics, juxtaposing one with the other. Really – it was going to be brilliant – until God stepped in and sent me a question from a reader of this site that was so much more important; and I decided that God being…
So You Want First Place?
October 26, 2023Today, my message is about selfishness and selflessness – two contrasting concepts that describe different ways of thinking and behaving and are in juxtaposition to each other. An important point is that neither selfishness nor selflessness is inherently good or bad. The context and intentions behind one’s actions play a crucial role in determining their…
Are you a Sheep or a Goat?
October 22, 2023“But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. And all the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, just as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right, but the…