Posted by Rob Borley | Posted on 06-06-2006
Category : Bible, Literature, Religion
One of the really interesting things that I have found with our recent series of Bible Studies in Daniel is how God has repeatedly used dreams to communicate with people. Stories of such communication are throughout the Bible; both Old and New testaments but does God still communicate this way today?
I have also been reading a book by Russ Parker; Dream Stories: A Journey into the Bible’s Dream and Visions, which gives a fascinating insight into the stories around the dreams as well as the dreams themselves. Russ Parker suggests that the continuing demystification of Christianity in favor of a more reasoned, ââ?¬Ë?let’s try and explain as much as we canââ?¬â?¢ approach has led to us writing dreams off as little more than “…too much cheese the night before…” and thus losing out on a valuable outlet for our relationship with God.
Please don’t misunderstand me. He doesn’t suggest that all of our dreams are a communication from the almighty but does offer some interesting advice on how you might be able to tell the difference. This led me to consider my own ‘dream life’.
Anyway, the book is certainly well worth a read. And it’s an easy page turner too, which made a nice change for me *smile*.
But what do you think? Does God communicate through dreams today? Has he ever used this form of communication with you?
Posted by Rob Borley | Posted on 21-05-2006
Category : Religion
The basic jist seems to be that they are not happy, for whatever reason, with the way institutionalised church works so they thought it a good idea to go and start their own. Churches of course have their problems, they are made up of people like me for a start which is always going to give you grief, but can you just go off and form your own variety of church? Would it actually be church? Is there still / was there ever any value in institutionalised religion?
I must confess these are somewhat loaded questions to which I already have at least some form of opinion on but I wondered what you thought.
Over to you.
Posted by Gareth Matthews | Posted on 03-05-2006
Category : Religion
As many of you may know I lead worship at my local church and to keep the worship vibrant and fresh I try and add new songs to our repotoire as often as I can. Consequently I find myself singing a lot of different songs. It was last Sunday morning when I was rehearsing before the service when someone pointed something out to me…
It was a genuine mistake – a typo on my words. We were singing that great hymn, ‘In Christ Alone’ and in the last verse my copy of the words said ‘From life’s first cry, to final death‘. If you have ever sung this song before you will know that it should read ‘final breath‘. Oops. I have probably sung that song a good ten times previous and never noticed that I had been insinuating that we as Christians have more than one death…
“Thats no big deal” I hear you cry – and you are probably right. But it did cause me to think a little further about what I sing. It took someone to point out to me that what I was singing was completely incorrect and if they had not I’d probably still be singing the wrong words. My mind was just on auto-pilot and it says to me that I probably wasn’t giving my full attention to what I was singing and what the words actually meant.
I think there is a danger for all of us who engage in corporate sung worship to fall into this trap. In the age of good quality modern worship bands it is easy to switch off and enjoy the songs – when, just as we should weigh any prophecies spoke over our lives, we should also be weighing, and meaning every word we say in sung worship to God. It doesn’t matter how catchy the tune is, if it is incorrect or dodgy in any way, we should not be singing it.
I heard a great talk by Louis Giglio who said that we “should stop singing the songs [in our corporate meetings] until we start living the life”. Sung worship has power, it blesses God and draws us close to Him. Lets be vigilent about what we sing and more importantly, mean everything we sing too.
As an aside – this is not the worst typo I have ever seen… My favourite was at an event where they had printed song sheets and the chorus to ‘Your love is amazing’ by Brenton Brown went ‘Hallelujah, Your love makes me sin…’ Whoops… 
