Many Christians have a desire to go to the Holy Land someday. I think this is a good desire to have. I have found it very moving to see the land and many of the sites (or regions) where Jesus walked and where much of what is recorded in the Old Testament took place.

If we want to learn how to pray, one way is to learn to pray the Psalms. If God wrote them for us, then we are learning to pray according to His mind, His will and His heart when we pray a Psalm.

Jesus is Immanuel, God with us. He is present in our joys and sorrows, pleasures and pain, rejoicing and weeping, exultation and disappointment.

There are two Bible passages that we do well to meditate upon in this election season. One is fashionable and one is forgotten.

Over the years I have lived with people who suffer from mental illness. One day I was sitting having coffee with a housemate and his friend.

The true and living God creates uniqueness; the world, the flesh and the devil seek to remove uniqueness and create sameness.

When a couple exchanges their marriage vows, what is said is short and to the point, but the consequence is life changing.

One of the wonderful things about Messiah is that some people come to the church, and then come to the faith, from very different cultures and backgrounds than my own.

I recently received an email written by a well-meaning Christian leader. The email was addressed to local “faith communities”.

The invisible church is one, for it is in Christ. It is one, yet spans the countries and continents and denominations. It is one, and being His body, the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. Visible churches are always a mixture of saints, not-yet saints, and those who, tragically, will never come to saving faith in Jesus Christ.

Some people hear the message and are part of the visible church, maybe even having leadership positions. They “understand” the word. However, the word has not entered into them to bear fruit for eternal life and the glory of God.

I am a redeemed sinner, called by the Lord to be a Pastor. Being a redeemed sinner means that I am never in short supply of things to repent of and call out to the Lord for help to amend my life. This blog will touch on this.

I have a philosopher friend who once told me rather directly that he never eats at a MacDonald’s, Tim Hortons, or any other restaurant that is inside a big box store like Walmart or Home Depot … he became very aware of the universal belief that dining in a location or with someone actually meant something and created a sort of link socially, psychologically and spiritually.

I find one of the most difficult aspects of being a Christian is how to share my faith with my neighbours.Looking back, I believe this is partly due to being raised in a church where it was believed that the more ‘culturally relevant’ you make the gospel, the more likely people will embrace Christianity.

Many of us believe we cannot evangelize. If we are in an evangelical church, we will occasionally feel guilty about this.

The well-being of our environment has become one of the issues most important to Canadians. This shows up in how we vote and engage economically. You’ve probably recognized that Canadians and even Christians are divided on how we should feel about this issue.

There is an old prayer that Anglicans have been praying since the mid-1500’s. It has been a much hated prayer by many in the Anglican Church for the last forty years, but it is a wise, deep, and biblical prayer that we can both pray and learn from. The prayer is called The Prayer of Humble Access.

The Anglican Church of Canada will probably be in the news over the next week or so. What is the news and how does that church connect to Church of the Messiah?

What does Luke mean in Luke 5:1-11, when he says that after the miraculous catch of fish the men left everything and followed Jesus? It is a very graphic picture.

In the 1930’s an American theologian by the name of Reinhold Niebuhr developed a prayer which summarizes much Biblical wisdom. The prayer is commonly seen as being very wise; so much so that secular people will often remove all references to God and share its content with people, as an example of wisdom