Streams of Living Water

This week, for my day off, I did something rather unusual. I went tramping through Sighthill Cemetery looking for the grave of Andrew Bonar, the minister of Finnieston Free Church in the 19^th Century and a man whose writings and life I greatly admire. After a good while searching, I finally found what I was looking for – the final resting place of the man whose biography I have read and re-read. There’s nothing remarkable about the place he is buried – an unremarkable stone covered with spray-can graffiti – nothing special. This greatest of Glasgow men dead and buried now for 115 years. But today, and every Lord’s Day, this congregation en masse goes gravehunting – we are looking for the body of truly the greatest of men – but we never find it. We go looking for the body of the crucified Jesus Christ, but we always find His tomb empty – the Jesus who 2,000 years ago was executed on a Roman cross, but on the third day, He rose from the dead and is alive and alive forevermore – the tomb is empty – His body is not there – He is risen! Read the rest of this entry »

Read: Genesis 3:1-24

I read in a newspaper yesterday, that getting married in a church is still the most popular place to tie the knot. 60% of couples, and the number is rising, choose to marry in a church. They want to start their marriage off on a good footing; perhaps getting God’s blessing and doing things right from the very beginning. Everything goes perfect on the big day, but unless they aren’t human, the problems and arguments then begin. What starts off as a perfect marriage in a perfect place so often ends up as a sticky divorce in a law court. Why does this happen? Last week we saw that God created the family and His benediction over it is “it is very good”. So how come God’s perfect family life, as revealed in Genesis 1 and 2, now keeps countless divorce lawyers in Ferrari’s? The answer is in Genesis 3 and 4 and it is in a word “sin”. Sin breaks and ruins the family – just like the first sin broke the first family. So what I want to do today is to survey just how great the impact of sin is upon the family – I want to trace first of all how sin came into the family, and then I want to look at how sin has broken the family: Read the rest of this entry »

In 1850, the first Europeans settled on a remote hillside in Queensland, Australia, and formed a community called ‘Mount Morgan’. These settlers scraped a meagre living from the land through farming. But in 1874 a certain William McKinlay discovered gold, and since then 247 tonnes of gold, 40 tonnes of silver and 247 tonnes of copper have been mined out of Mount Morgan. For 24 years, the settlers were scraping away a living when, if they had dug a bit, they would have found gold and never had to plant another potato. The 1850 settlers on Mount Morgan literally didn’t know the riches they were sitting on. We are a bit like that, for we, with our exclusive Psalm singing heritage think that our praise is barren rock and desert – but all the time we haven’t realised and appreciated that when we sing a psalm, we are singing gold itself. And what I want to do over the next few weeks is to open up seams of gold in the Psalms so that you will begin not just to cherish your heritage and stop being apologetic about singing the Psalms, but also so that you may be able to find new wonders of worshipping God in this marvellous book called the Psalms. After all, in the original language of the Old Testament – Hebrew – these psalms are called “The Tellihim” – which literally means, “the Praises”; this is God’s praise book! Read the rest of this entry »

Christmas time beckons and children are busy dreaming up what they want from Santa Claus. Santa is a remarkably accommodating chap, but even he struggles sometimes to answer the letters he gets at this time of year. Parents are either unwilling or unable to get what their children want. We, earthly parents, know what is best for our children and sometimes we just know that what they want isn’t good for them, and so we don’t give it to them. We only give them things which we want them to have. The same law applies in prayer - we may ask for a thousand different things, but God will only give us those things which He wants to give us - in the language of Answer 98 of the Shorter Catechism, the answer we have been studying this term, He will only give us those things which are agreeable to His will. Read the rest of this entry »