The more we love God, the better we come to know him. Jesus continues to assert his knowledge of the Father, and too his eternal coexistence with the Father from before all time [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses | The Gospel Of Saint John
Daily Bible Verses For Lent | Truth Will Set You Free | Jesus Teaches To The Jewish | Sin And God | Prayer, Faith
We are asked to consider the truth about ourselves and to consider the truth of freedom: what does it really mean for us to be free? [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses For Lent | The Woman Taken In Adultery | He That Is Without Sin, Let Him First Cast A Stone
Jesus goes to the Mount of Olives on a number of occasions to pray. It is good for us now to witness Jesus praying. When we pray, we pray with Jesus and according to his example [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses For Lent | Different Opinions About Jesus | Temple Authorities – Scribes, Pharisees | Jesus Christ
There are people now who choose to think of Jesus simply as an extraordinary man, a wise man and a performer of miracles, and not as our saviour the Son of God. There were and are those who think of Jesus as a great prophet, whose mission was to reject Jewish sectarianism, and insurrection, and unite the Jewish people, to enable them to survive the Roman occupation while being true to God, to maintain the Kingdom in their hearts despite the presence of the occupying pagan and Gentile power [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses For Lent | Jesus In Jerusalem | The Feast Of Tabernacles | Jesus And Temple Judaism | Jesus Is The Christ
John’s teaching of the journeys Jesus makes is more complete than the other Gospels. According to the other Gospels, Jesus travels only once to Jerusalem, when he goes to be crucified. According to John, Jesus travels at least two or three times to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. This gives us the approximation of the duration of Jesus’ public life as being three years [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses For Lent | Jesus Christ The Son Of God | Bearing Witness | Scripture, Signs And Miracles | Audio KJV | Faith
The Jews – often in the Gospel of John a generic term for those who reject Christ, or those who are so muddled, contentious and sectarian among themselves that they threaten the continuity of themselves in the Law – do not reject Jesus for any good reason. They do so rather because they cling to what precious little they have, within their prison walls, and so they deliberately blind themselves to the universal, and universalizing, truth which Christ brings. Jesus knows this. Nevertheless, through justice, he must give to the Jews this additional opportunity to listen to his teaching and recognize the truth of who he is. We may imagine that Jesus is truly desperate for the people of God to put aside their differences and truly be with God [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses For Lent | Authority Of The Son of God | God The Father / God The Son As One | Jesus Is God | Audio KJV | The Christ
Jesus explains certain aspects of the truth of his relationship with his Father. He explains that he is consubstantial with the Father. He is not created as we are; he is the Son; he has life in himself. On earth, Jesus is the mirror of the Father. It is through Christ that we may approach God. God the Father and God the Son share one being. The Father and the Son are equal [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses For Lent | Jesus Heals A Paralyzed Man | The Angel And Waters Of The Pool | Faith Healing | Sabbath
The Church Fathers teach that the pool by which the sick people wait is a symbol of baptism. It is striking to consider that, for the paralyzed man, there is healing to be found here, and too that the mode of healing at this pool is generally capricious and not available for all. We are made aware through this passage of the Bible that our healing through Jesus is for all [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses For Lent | Jesus Heals An Official’s Son | Faith Healing | Jesus’ Miracles | Audio KJV | God’s Mercy
The official who approaches Jesus would have been a man of high rank, living in Capernaum, which was a town with a customs post. He comes to Jesus with faith, and yet his faith is, to begin with, imperfect. The official thinks that Jesus must come to his house, a journey of twenty miles, to heal his son. Jesus tells him that, through the faith he has shown, his son is already healed [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses | Follow Me! | Philip And Nathaniel Are Called | Jesus’ First Disciples | The Apostles | Christmas Octave
Today, Jesus has decided to walk to Galilee. There is a wonderful sense of lively movement as Jesus moves from place to place during his ministry, as one rounding up the sheep of Israel. Jesus finds Philip and he gives Philip his vocation, saying to him: Follow me. Through Jesus’ lifetime, we read in the Bible of great crowds flocking to Jesus, and of great processional events, as well as the constant travelling with Jesus of his closest companions. There is movement, direction, purposiveness, through which the disciples grow closer and closer to Jesus, their living faith always developing as Jesus fits them to become shepherds of men [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses Advent & Christmas | In The Beginning Was The Word | Christmas Day | Christmas Octave | Saint John’s Gospel KJV
The opening passages of John’s Gospel affirm key, central truths concerning the nature of Christ. He is the Word, the perfect, ideal and original Word giving meaning and life to all utterance. We sense here the influence of classical Hellenic philosophy on the developing understanding of Christ through the first century. And, from the very first verses of his Gospel, John affirms the divinity of Christ. Christ is with God, the Father, and he is God. God the Father and God the Son are distinct and too of one being; they are consubstantial [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses | The Feast Of Saint John, Apostle & Evangelist | The Beloved Disciple | Christmas
Today’s Bible reading from the Gospel of St John speaks of the beloved disciple, and from earliest times we have identified this disciple with John. It is strange, however, that this identification is not made in the Gospel. It may be that in so readily equating the beloved disciple with John, we miss out on an important truth of the Gospel, which is that we are all beloved disciples – this title is not that of John only; it is open to us all [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses | The Passion | Jesus Christ Before Pilate | Christ The King | Kingdom Of God
It is the time of the Passion. Jesus has been arrested and the Jewish leaders have asked Pilate to judge Jesus and order him put to death. Pilate now speaks with Jesus. Jesus’ life is in Pilate’s hands. The lives of all the people in the world are in Jesus’ hands – the crucifixion must happen; the figure of Christ on the cross, which has towered over the Gospels, must be realised, the sign of our redemption and the sign of truth [ .. ]
Jesus Wept | Death And Resurrection Of Lazarus | Love Revealed By Jesus Christ | Humanity Of Jesus
The Gospel Of Saint John, Chapter 11 | Jesus Wept | Death And Resurrection Of Lazarus | KJV The account of Lazarus’s death and resurrection in John 11:1-45 is profound [ … ]
Sunday Bible | Jesus Is The Bread Of Life | Manna From Heaven | Eternal Life | Eucharist | God The Son
Jesus identifies himself explicitly as the ‘bread of life’, contrasting the manna given to the Israelites in the wilderness with the living bread Jesus offers. The manna, though miraculous, was temporary and ultimately failed to give eternal life, as those who ate it eventually died. In contrast, the bread that Jesus offers is his flesh, which is given for the life of the world [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses Easter Season To Pentecost | Thursday Week 6 | The Fullness Of Joy | A Little While And You Shall See Me
We are presented in these Bible verses with a peculiar sense of our understanding of time, our human time, in relation to God’s great plan for our salvation, and to the fact of God’s encompassing all time, from which perspective we are born and pass on within the blink of an eye. ‘A little while… and again, a little while…’ The Greek word, micron, is so translated [ … ]
Holy Week | Good Friday | The Passion And Death Of Jesus | King James Audio Bible | KJV
This is the Passion and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ. For us all, this is a tremendously saddening and painful part of our Easter journey, as, in a sense, we die again with Jesus to be reborn on Easter Sunday. The church is dark. There is an emptiness to the building as Jesus rests. Through this time, we acknowledge our need for Jesus and pray that he may come again to be with us [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses Lent | Jesus Sent By God The Father | Son Of Man | King James Audio Bible | Audio KJV
Jesus speaks of his crucifixion as he speaks of his being sent by his Father and of his being consubstantial with his Father. Jesus has made himself man, and this was necessary for our sakes. However, his being is most truly in heaven. He is divine. The entirety of Jesus’ being, as God the Son, is beyond our human comprehension. In order to be with Jesus, we must surrender our fears and our doubts and have faith in what has been promised to us. Jesus is from above – and he asks us to join him [ … ]
Easter Sunday | The Resurrection Of Our Lord Jesus Christ | God The Son Is Risen | Mary Magdalene And Peter | Audio KJV
Easter! Today we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. Jesus has conquered death and sin. This is the proof of our salvation in Jesus Christ. We know that Jesus lived. We have his teachings and the clear evidence of the miracles he worked. We know he died. Now we have the proof of our faith in Jesus. He lives again. He did not know corruption. He raised himself from the dead to be near us always and to sit, as he promised, at the right hand of his Father in heaven. We have passed through darkness and the light of our lives is with us now and always [ … ]
Mary Anoints Jesus At Bethany | Monday Of Holy Week
As we have heard in our Palm Sunday reading, Mary anoints Jesus. In John’s account, she anoints Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair. This is a sign of great love and humility, which Jesus will offer to his followers in John’s account of the Last Supper. The ointment she uses is very precious, costing a year’s wages for a labouring man, and the whole house is filled with the beautiful scent [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses For Lent | Cleansing Of The Temple | Christ The New Temple Of God | Jesus And The Jewish Authorities
The Passover was the most important religious feast for the Jewish people. It was celebrated on the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan, a spring month whose date, according to our solar calendar, varies following the lunar cycle, just as Easter does. It was followed by the festival week of Azymes, an English word (derived from the Greek ἄζυμος) for unleavened bread in Biblical times [ … ]
Advent | True Faith | Christianity | Baptism | Prepare Ye The Way Of The Lord | Clean And Pure In Jesus
The message of this Sunday’s Gospel is so clear and so perfect. John has come to prepare the way of the Lord. He is not the Lord; he is come to prepare his way, the way of Christ.
The opening of John’s Gospel may be heard this week as a beautiful restatement from a new point of view of the message of the coming of the Lord and the beginning of Christ’s ministry [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses Advent & Christmas | The Witness Of John The Baptist | A Burning And Shining Light
Jesus pays tribute to John as a great prophet, bringing the truth of God to the people, as a burning and a shining light. There is perhaps a veiled rebuke as Jesus reminds the people that they flocked to him for a period, as if theirs was a fickle and fleeting regard. Nonetheless, Jesus speaks of John now to help the people, because John witnessed Christ and that witness could help people to believe and so be saved [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses | True Faith | Baptism And Prayer | John The Baptist Bears Witness To Jesus
Jesus and his disciples have moved south into Judea, and Jesus and John are baptizing people very near to one other. John’s location is precisely stated in these Gospel verses: he is at Aenon, an Aramaic word meaning wells, near Salim, which was to the northeast of Samaria, about thirteen miles to the south of the Sea of Galilee. In these verses, John’s Gospel develops the information given to us in the Synoptics: we learn that Jesus’ public ministry began while John the Baptist’s was current, and that there was no rivalry between Jesus and John; indeed, that John the Baptist rejoiced in Jesus’ beginning his ministry [ … ]
Faith Healing | Spiritual Healing | Miracles Of Prayer
Faith healing, also known as spiritual healing, is the belief that illness can be cured through prayer, divine intervention, or the power of the Holy Spirit. It is a practice that has been present in Christianity since its inception and has been the subject of much debate and discussion within the Christian community [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses | Behold The Lamb Of God | Come and See! | Disciples Witness Jesus | Christian Vocation
‘Behold the Lamb of God.’ Throughout the Bible, we are called to know and to develop our relationship with the Lamb. It is in Genesis the Lamb is first mentioned, provided by God as a sacrifice to take the place of Isaac. Through the history of Jewish ritual, a lamb is offered in sacrifice, for expiation, reparation, sanctification. The prophets speak of a meek, tame lamb, sheared without opening its mouth. In the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, the full meaning of the Lamb will be revealed, as the king, the Spouse, the lamp, the temple, the place of our eternal dwelling. The Lamb spans all history. And John the Baptist has already, in John’s Gospel, recognised and declared Christ as the Lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses For Lent | God So Loved The World | Good And Evil | Jesus The Light Of Truth | Christian Faith | Audio KJV
Through the time of Lent, we recall the Exodus. We recall the release of the then chosen people of God from their slavery in Egypt and their time in the wilderness on their way to the promised land, during which time God provided for them [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses For Lent | Jesus Announces His Glorification | Jesus’ Crucifixion Is Near
Jesus’ Passion is near. It is almost time for Jesus to permit himself to be crucified. It is true to this that the Greeks, non-Jews, have come to seek Jesus and to hear his word. Jesus’ mission, to come to earth to save everyone, is becoming fulfilled [ … ]
Daily Bible Verses | The Calling Of The First Disciples
The first two disciples called by Jesus are disciples of John the Baptist. It is he who looks to Jesus and directs his disciples to look and so behold the Lamb of God. They are sent by John, through being told by him to recognize Jesus. John shows them the way to Jesus – as ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord.’ [ … ]
Parable of the Vine and the Branches | Parables Of Jesus
In the Old Testament, the chosen people of Israel have been compared to a vine. We may think, for example, of Isaiah’s Song of the Vineyard (Isaiah 5:1-7 – Audio Bible Verses Spoken Word), in which God complains that, despite the care he has lavished upon it, his vineyard has only produced wild grapes [ … ]
Parable Of The Good Shepherd 1 | Parables Of Jesus
Christ offers himself to the people as the good shepherd, recalling a favourite theme of Old Testament prophecy. Priests and kings are so described, and indeed God is spoken of as a shepherd, as we hear, for example, in Psalm 23: THE Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want [ … ]