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Have you ever felt like there was more to life than this? Known some sense of longing for the future?
by T.M. Suffield | The great writer on joy and longing, C.S. Lewis, tells us in a famous passage from The Weight of Glory that we are far too easily pleased. We do not know what the Lord is offering us, what joy is available to us in God. Lewis argued, especially in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, that we find our...
Psalm 8 is about Jesus. Which is not a ‘big’ claim, the Psalms are the book of Christ and they all tell his story in one way or another.
by T. M. Suffield | Son of Man is the bigger and grander title, and we should read it in two ways: one as here in Psalm 8, the Son of Adam, the Serpent-slayer. The other as in Daniel 7, where Daniel extends the promise of the new Adam to show us that he is God come himself. Son of Man, after...
I suspect most of us give little thought to time. It’s simply something we move through, or exist in, or bemoan the passing of as the years slowly strip away the vigour of our youth.
by T. M. Suffield | The fact that what time is amounts to a philosophical question that is notoriously tricky and nevertheless vital to any sense of trying to live a good or harmonious or flourishing or blessed (delete as appropriate) life, is a fact that passes most of us happily by...
“Silence is violence,” we are told—to not speak on a particular issue is to perpetrate violence against those affected by it. If that is true, how then do we cope with the silence of God?
by T. M. Suffield | How do we face up to the silence of God? Alain Emerson says we do so in prayer, as we learn to sit with God in the midst of pain. We learn this in Gethsemane, where Jesus asked for the cup to go from him and was answered...
Everybody loves community, or they say they do at least. We live in a land that is parched of the life-giving water of friendship and stripped bare of many of the settings that used to make this ea…
by T. M. Suffield | I’ve yet to talk to a Christian who doesn’t think community is inherently good for us. We’re meant to be a people. The local church is supposed to be the household of faith—something different to our modern concept of family but in the same broad arena—where everyone fits and is loved and is able to...
Walter Bruggeman, in his book Interpretation and Obedience, said that: The key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination, so that we are too numbed…
by T. M. Suffield | So much of the faith is weirder than we’re used to thinking, not just the sensational stuff like angels and Nephilim, but ‘simple’ concepts like Union with Christ. It’s the heart of the Christian view of salvation, yet I rarely hear it talked about in our churches. It’s weird, it’s enchanted, it makes us much...
A much more experienced writer than me recently gave me some writing advice about editors: He suggested that you don’t always need to make the changes editors suggest...
by T. M. Suffield | For all there is pain in having lovingly crafted prose torn up, there is purpose to it. We can rarely see our own faults, and since churches tend to work well for their leaders, we can rarely see our church’s faults either. Work with “editors,” be they trusted outsiders or those within the church. Trust...
In the past I’ve described evangelical churches as living in an anticulture, have suggested that we are in an ebb of history, which can make us think Christendom was a terrible thing, which it wasn't…
by T. M. Suffield | Assuming you’re with me, and convicted that we don’t build anything, but that we also live at what feels like a civilization ebb, what can we do about it? I think it’s helpful to start by looking at others in the Bible who sat at a similar point in history. Take, for example, the Sons of the Prophets in 2 Kings. Elijah functioned as a solo prophet who despaired of there...
