The best sort of rest

There are times when we're dog-tired, and the thing to do is rest - to get horizontal and catch a few zeds! But that's not the best sort of rest. We find what the best sort of rest is in the Bible. It starts with God himself:

'By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.' Genesis 2:2:

This doesn't mean God took a nap. The word 'rest' here doesn't mean 'doing nothing'. It means 'he stopped doing one thing in order to do another'. In this case, God stopped the work of creation in order to enjoy what he had made.

This idea of 'rest' on the seventh day gets written into the pattern for all human life. We see it in the law that God gave to his people Israel after he had freed them from their Egyptian slave-drivers:

'Remember the sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day it is a sabbath to the LORD your God...' Exodus 20:8

In other words, for one day a week, the best thing they could do was to stop doing the work that normally filled their days in order to spend a whole day with the LORD, enjoying Him.

Beyond all reasonable doubt

Some people avoid the claims of Christ by calling ‘faith’ a leap in the dark. They mean that Christians don’t really know what they believe in. Other people avoid the claims of Christ by putting faith down to temperament or personality type. They say things like, ‘I wish I had your faith’, as if it was something you were born with. But Christian faith is nothing like that.

Faith in a person
True Christian faith is faith in a person. It is a personal trust in, and commitment to, Jesus Christ. And this is achieved on our part through careful investigation of who he is. The Christian is someone who has scrutinised the evidence, asked the big questions, tested what the Bible says and realised that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.

Harvesting personal information

The lid has been blown off the way personal information can be harvested from Facebook and other social media.


Photograph: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images

The Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower has exposed how political parties and advertisers can target us, based on our online profiles. These are the uncomfortable realities of our digital age. Strangely, it's all come to light just as the new General Data Protection Regulation is coming into effect on 25th May 2018. The law is tightening up the way companies collect and hold our personal information.

World gone mad

Dan Smith, lead singer/songwriter of Indie band Bastille, wrote a song in 2017 'World Gone Mad'. He felt, like so many today, that civil society is unravelling before our eyes, and becoming one scary place. The reality is that chaos and confusion are very frightening. Take something as simple as traffic lights. If a group of people insisted on their rights that red, orange and green can mean whatever they want them to mean, then approaching a busy crossroads would be really hairy, really unpredictable and unsafe.

Bleak outlook

The economic forecast going into 2018 is not good. The future is looking bleak. Economic growth has slowed down. Despite the prolonged pain, austerity has failed to dig us out of crippling debt. Jobs are uncertain. The cost of housing (rent or purchase) is way beyond the average Joe and Jane. And who knows what the effect of Brexit will be?