Book now available on Amazon.com

My book ("Would You Like To Sin More And Still Get To Heaven") is now available on amazon.com - still waiting for it to become available on other Amazon sites...

Getting to Know Jesus Better

In Phil 3:10, Paul says "My aim is to know him...".

One of the targets that I have set for myself for this year (now that I have finished the work on that book!) is to "get to know Jesus better". My plan is:

1. Get a parallel gospel resource (thanks, Google :) )
2. From that, compile a list of events in Jesus life.
3. Go through them all with the objective of trying to understand what they reveal about Him (His character, motivations, aims, methods, etc.)

... Nothing terribly complicated, but hopefully useful in helping me grow in my knowledge, understanding and relationship with Him.

I'll try to keep on top of posting updates on my progress and interesting points or thoughts that occur to me as I go so you can follow along if you are interested.

Sin More and Still Get to Heaven?

Well, it's taken a long time, but I have finally got around to getting my book to the point where it is ready for release.

The title is "Would you like to SIN MORE and still GET TO HEAVEN? - How to deal with sinful desires and become a more fruitful Christian". See below for more info on what it's about.

At the moment, there are a few ways of getting it...

• You can buy a paperback copy from LULU. The RRP is £9.68, but there is currently a 20% discount on it there, so the actual cost comes to £7.74.


• You can buy a paperback or Kindle copy from Amazon US or Amazon UK.

Here's a brief description of what the book is about:

Many of us have certain sins in our lives that we just can't seem to "shake off". However hard we try, we don't seem to be able to make any progress in overcoming them. This book is about that problem and the Bible's answer to dealing with it (largely based on Paul's letter to the Ephesians).

In the book I look at how a fundamental change to our approach may be the key we are looking for. Instead of "trying to sin less", we should focus on "rooting ourselves" in God's love and "walking in a manner worthy of the calling". I also talk about a number of practical things that we can do in our daily lives to help in the struggle against sin.

If that sounds like something you may be interested in, go ahead and buy a copy :) - I pray that what I have to say will help you in some small way in your Christian walk.

Getting there with the book...

Many moons ago I said that one of the things that I needed to get round to doing was to finish off my book and make it available online.

Well, the good news is that things are moving forward on that front - I've now all but finished publishing it on Lulu - I've just got to wait to receive a proof copy to make sure all is well at which point I'm planning to make it available to download or to buy as a "proper" book.

Two things

Two brief comments -

1) Again, I seem to have been silent for quite some time - this is partly because we have changed the meeting structure at the congregation where I meet, so we are not doing formal "sermons" any more (rather shorter contributions from more people - more in line with what's set out in 1 Cor 14) - as a result, we're not currently videoing anything. It's possible that we may move back to videoing the shorter bits and pieces at some point in which case I may be able to start uploading that kind of thing again. However, in the mean time, I should really be uploading other bits and pieces. Slap wrist!

2) There seems to be intermittent problems with Tangle, so the videos posted here don't always actually work. Hopefully this is something that they are dealing with!!

All Go with Tangle

Well, it looks like Tangle will do the job for us at Crawley Church. We've started uploading videos there - there was a bit of a problem for a while in that I couldn't get the videos to embed on our Church's website (which is on Wordpress.com), but discovered that it can be done via VOD:POD, so all is well.

Here's my latest appearance doing one of the talks in the Journey through the Bible series. Have a look at Tangle or our Church Blog for the rest of the talks in the series.

Tangle

As I mentioned previously, it seems that Google are going to be dropping Google Video so I won't be able to use that in future (after sometime in March, I think is was) - so, I've been looking for somewhere else to host my videos. I've been looking at Tangle.com (previously called GodTube.com) - it has the advantage of being a Christian site which I would like to support - however, unfortunately there are limits to the videos that you can upload (max 100MB or 30 minutes). This is better than YouTube (which has a max of 10 minutes), but it does mean that a lot of the sermon videos (like the ones in the "Open Sunday - Take a Look" series) would have to be uploaded in two parts. It's still a possibility, but would be more of a hassle (each time) than I would like, so I may keep looking for a while. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

A Little Song

Well, we had our Open Sunday on the 18th, and it seemed to be quite successful - had a reasonable number of visitors, which was nice. However, I'm going to be delivering a series of talks over the next few weeks, so am still rather busy. We're hoping to put recordings of the talks on our church website all being well - if we manage to get that to work I'll try to post them here as well.

In the mean time, here's another little poem for you to enjoy:

A little song, one summer's day,
Came floating past my ear.
It tiptoed in to look around
And chose to settle there.

It filled my head with dancing notes
That skipped into my heart,
And now we are so close and dear
It seems we'll never part!

- Mark H (DelightInLight.com)

Note: This is one of a number of poems for Christian children that I have posted on this blog. If you want to see more of them, please have a look at this post: "Fun Poems for Kids"

You can also email a link to this post by clicking the mail icon below...

Open Sunday

Just an update bacause I have been rather silent on this blog for a while... We're planning a Church "Open Sunday" in January and I've been snowed under with the planning and organising for that! There have been various things that I have wanted to get on with for this blog (poems, book, songs, etc.), but these have had to go on to a bit of a back burner at the moment.

Talking of which - if you are a Christian, then please pray for God to guide us and for us to be open to that guidance so that we can work for Him in the way He wants.

If you are not a Christian (or even if you are, for that matter), then why not come along if you happen to live somewhere near Crawley, West Sussex, UK? The Open Sunday will be at Gossops Green Community Centre, Crawley on Sunday 18 January 2009. Details have not been posted on our church website yet, but I'll try to remember to post a link here when it is.

Welcome to Visitors From Google :)

I recently received a Google AdWords voucher in a magazine, so I decided to try setting up an account and using it to advertise this site a little.

Up to now, this blog has mainly been read by my family and friends, so if you are a new visitor who has come via Google: WELCOME!

I know that it's easy to convince people like my mother, wife and kids that this blog is really really interesting, but I suspect that you are somewhat less biased, so I hope you find something of interest too. If you do, I hope that you will come back in the future and that there will be something new that will continue to interest you.

May I also request, if you are willing, that you go ahead and use the "email this post" option (the little mail envelope icon at the end of each post) to send a link to someone else who you may know who you think would be interested in a particular poem or post. Since this site doesn't actually earn me any income, my advertising budget is pretty much limited to the value of the voucher I got, so if you could help me along I would greatly appreciate it! Don't go too overboard though - I don't want to end by being the source of piles of the dreaded spam - please only send the link to people you know well enough to be sure that they won't mind.

Thanks for stopping by and I pray that I have, in some small way, helped to brighten your day today :)

ps. If you came here via Google (or even if you didn't, for that matter), why not add a comment to this post to say "Hi" and let me know what you thought? I'd love to hear from you.

Say Something!

I think that I must be more of a perfectionist than I would like to admit. I keep thinking that I'll get cracking with this blog more effectively just as soon as .... . Trouble is that there's too many ...s!

So I thought that I should jump in a break the cycle and just say something! This, in fact.

I think that the problem is that there are a number of things that I would really like to do. On this blog, I mean - let's not even get into all the other stuff that's not even connected to this blog that I want to / have to do!

Here's some of them:

• Publish some of my other poems for you to have a look at
• Create some photos to go with some of those poems
• Post a song that I wrote
  
• Get round to finishing off a book that I have basically finished writing and popping it up as a PDF in a sort of "Beta" form to get feedback (can you have a book in Beta?)
• Give a bit of an explanation to those of you who don't believe in such a thing as "God" as to why I believe that there is (I feel that I at least owe you that much)
• Talk about some of the issues that I have been studying with various other Church members and friends lately

And I'll try to get to some of those soon. Honestly.

See you soon.

No, really, I mean it. Hold me to it, will you?

What's In A Name?

A quick comment - in order not to embarrass them too much or cause other alarm and despondency, I will, in a lot of cases, used alternative names for other people that I talk about from time to time.

First Post (Well, sort of)

This is the first real post that I have made on this blog. Actually, it's not the very first post - I did some "dummy" posts earlier so that I could play around with the design of the template. However, I've now deleted them, so this is the first "real" post.

I've also come back and edited it a few times, so it's really sort of an adaptation of not quite the first post!

This blog contains (or, at least, will contain) various of my thoughts about life in general and Christianity in particular as well as poems, songs and other bits and pieces.

Now, enough of all that - I'll let you get on and read some of the actual content. I hope that you find something interesting, thought provoking, amusing, encouraging or otherwise enjoyable in at least something that I have to say.

For now, though, let me leave you with this blessing from the book of Numbers 6:24-26 (English Standard Version):

[May] the LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.