Welcome to the weekly blog that will go with our new website.
In a world of countless blogs, we don’t want to waste your time with random musings. Instead, we hope that this resource will help you open up discoveries from the Bible. We’ll dig out truth which is sometimes surprising and always thought-provoking – because the Bible always is. Above all, our aim will be to show what real Christianity is. And where better to begin than at the beginning?
In the beginning God… (Genesis 1:1)
The Bible starts with God because everything started with God. He takes the initiative. As John Stott put it in the opening lines of his classic Basic Christianity: “The first four words of the Bible are more than a way of launching the story of creation or introducing the book of Genesis. They supply the key which opens our understanding of the Bible as a whole. They tell us that the religion of the Bible is a religion in which God takes the initiative.”
This is why the Bible is not, primarily, a set of laws or proverbs, like the sacred texts of some other faiths. Instead, it is mainly a narrative: the true story of the great rescue which God brought about in Jesus Christ.
God did not wait around doing nothing, for us to turn to Him. He did not wait for us to try to please Him. Instead, He took the initiative – and still takes it. Everyone who has become a Christian looks back at what Christ did for them and how God, by His Spirit, has grabbed hold of them. That may be obvious to any Bible reader, but it isn’t an obvious feature of the public perception of Christianity. Kids come home from school after RE lessons that stress only the rituals and ethical obligations that may go with Christian faith. Some church leaders give the impression that being a Christian is more about what we do for God than what He has done for us. The reverse is true: real Christianity is not good advice but good news. Great news, in fact: about what the God who takes the initiative has done.
