Posts tagged ‘Peter Adam’

May 31

Dying to sin: John Owen

John Owen was a 17th century Puritan. He wrote a whole treatise on The Mortification of Sin in Believers. He identified deceitfulness as the chief characteristic of sin such that you can think you have so understood grace that you tolerate and even love sin. Thus in order to mortify it, “diligent attention” must be given to the evil of sin if it is to be rooted out. He gives eleven steps; nine of which are preparatory and the last two being where the work is contained: Read more

May 21

Esther prayer

This is the prayer Peter Adam has prayed before each of his chapel Esther talks. It’s based on an idea from 17th century London Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs.

Lord Jesus, as Mary sat at your feet and listened to your teaching, and you blessed her as she received your words: please bless us now as we hear your Holy Spirit’s words in the book of Esther. Help us to listen and learn in humility, thankfulness and faith. Amen

May 19

Reading Esther 8 with Peter Adam

Today was the final in the Esther series at chapel. Peter concluded by speaking about the double pain of the story of Esther. Read more

May 17

Reading Esther 6-7 with Peter Adam

How do you expect God to work? In miraculous healing or in the suffering of the ill? In timely prophecies or in taking words written long ago in Scripture and applying them to our lives? In wealth or in poverty? By miracles or by sustaining creation order?

Peter Adam reminded us in chapel today that our God works in all things. We so often miss the ways God works because our view is too narrow. We expect one of these things and discount the other. That’s why we need the whole Bible: Judges offers a different picture from Malachi; Job contrasts with Amos; 1 Corinthians deals with different stuff from 2 Corinthians! We learn a great deal about God from Esther as one part of the whole Bible’s picture. Read more

May 14

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Reading Esther 4 with Peter Adam

‘For such a time as this’ may be the most famous phrase from Esther. It comes from the passage we looked at in Thursday’s chapel sermon. Taking a ‘slightly experimental’ approach to preaching, Peter told us at the beginning what the application would be, asking us to choose which was the challenge for us and to move to particular places in the room according to that. Those who needed to learn to love people more sat on the right side of the room and those who needed to learn to trust God on the left. I’ll quickly cover how Peter spoke to the ‘love’ people and spend most of my time here on the ‘trust’ people – no prizes for guessing which side of the room I was on! Read more

May 12

Reading Esther 3 with Peter Adam

Esther 3 is about enemies. We meet Hamaan of course but Peter pointed out that there are two enemies of God’s people in this text: Mr Evil (Hamaan) and Mr Weak (Xerxes).