mallisle's blog

The author C S Lewis made a radio broadcast in the 1940s about people who said that they accepted Jesus as a great moral teacher but didn't accept his claim to be God. How could someone who mistakenly claimed to be God be a great moral teacher? The two don't go together. If Jesus believes he is God and he isn't, he is insane, like a man who thinks he is a poached egg. If Jesus knew he wasn't God and was lying, he would be the devil of Hell...

Why have people stopped going to church? The number of people attending church weekly in the UK is half what it was in 1976. It has fallen from 10 per cent to 5 per cent. Many churches are full of old people and wondering if they will still be there in 20 years time. The same situation is effecting most western countries. On an Irish radio station, a reporter said to a Catholic priest, 'You must despair.' He said, 'I don't despair. People have...

Some very strange things had been going out outside my neighbour's. All sorts of unfamliar vehicles were pulling up in his designated parking space where the big number 6 was painted on the ground. Last week there had been a really old looking Ford Zodiac. Now something even stranger. This little white vintage car with an open top, bright red leather seats and a tiny little engine at the front that might have been a hundred years old. A really...

I remember seeing the car sticker in the 1970s, 'Jesus Saves.' I hadn't the faintest idea what it meant or what Jesus saved people from. All the time Christians talk about being saved. What does it mean? Saved from what? We are saved from sin. In order to fully understand the meaning of this we need to appreciate how sinful we are and why it really matters. Nobody's perfect. We have all broken God's laws. Our sin has taken away the close...

I was driving home from work on a Friday afternoon. I had collected some bread and cakes from the bakers shop and delivered them to the local Salvation Army. As I drove the car through Sheffield City Centre, I recalled a conversation I had had in the school classroom 40 years before. My friend had been talking about going to church. I went to church more often than he did. Did I not think that I lived an extremely dull and boring life? I...

Blessings for obedience to God were promised to Israel thousands of years ago, before the time of Jesus. It is dangerous to take promises from the Old Testament and apply them to ourselves. Israel was very much God's chosen nation. We are not God's chosen nation. The church might be the people of God but even then, it is unlikely that all the promises made to Israel would equally apply to us. Before the time of Christ also means that they are...

A game of Chinese whispers is played by sitting in a circle and each person speaking into the next person's ear. By the end of the game the simple phrase you began with has been distorted into something completely different. Is this how the Bible was written? Wasn't it passed down by word of mouth? There would have been an oral form of the story, especially at a time when the majority of people couldn't read, but there would have been a written...

Why is there so much suffering in the world? If God is a God of love, why is there so much evil? The devil brought evil into the world, not God. Why did God create the devil? I used to think that the devil was like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage. Someone you don't like but it gives people a choice. The universe has to be a democracy. But no. God created the devil to be good. He was a beautiful angel. Ezekiel 28:11-19. He was perfect in wisdom and...

Why do Christians believe that Jesus is the only way to God? In our multicultural society this sounds arrogant. Surely Muslims, Hindus and Jews have a faith. Surely they're good people and God respects them just as much. The question isn't whether somebody is the right or wrong religion. It's a question of whether religion has any value and whether it can actually save anyone at all. What do we need to be saved from? We are sinners. We don't...

Science has neither proved or disproved God. Whatever we believe about science, it is always possible to say that that is simply way that God does things. When Edmund Gosse was a botanist in the 1850s his wife would look down the microscope and say, 'How marvellous are thy doings!' How wonderful are the things that you do, oh God. Many Christians would simply see the big bang theory and evolution as an explanation of how God created the universe...