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This Book: Revelation - Look! (Revelation 1 v1-8)

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  To see the full message, scroll to the bottom and click through. There are four big 'scenes' in the book of Revelation. We're going to pause in each one, standing in John’s sandals, and look around. To see what John saw in those landscapes. To hear what he heard.  Got your travelling shoes on? Let’s go visit the Island, the Temple, the Wilderness, and the Mountaintop.    ______  John, a man in his 80s, stood trial under Emperor Domitian, and was found guilty. He was torn away from everyone he knew. He was chained and (literally) shipped to an isolated island in the Mediterranean called Patmos, with no expectation of ever going home. Leaving behind the people he loved to possibly face the same kind of trial.   He had been a child, growing up playing and working on a lake—a circle of water—surrounded by the green and the gold of the hills of Galilee.  He was now an old man, praying and working on a circle of stone and trees entirely surrounded by ...
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This Book: Epistles – You've Got Mail! (Galatians 1 v1-10)

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To see the full message, scroll to the bottom and click through. For the last few months, we've been walking slowly through the aisles of this library of books.   We’ve looked at the Old Testament books of history, law, poetry, prophecy, philosophy. There are fiction stories and love stories. There are questions that never get answered.   In the New Testament, we’ve looked at the Gospels and the book of Acts: historical events of the life of Jesus and the people who shared his world and joined him on his mission of sharing God's love.  Next week we're going to look a little bit at the book of Revelation. This week, between the history of Jesus' life and of the early church, and our attempts to understand Revelation are these letters that we sometimes call ‘epistles:’ people writing back and forth, sharing their lives with each other, sharing information, sharing their perspectives and experiences when they can't be together.   So as we study the Bible—...
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CBOQ Assembly 2026 Review (Prayer) - Acts 3-4

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    To see the full message, scroll to the bottom and click through.   For the last few years, the  S unday after our  a nnual  C anadian  B aptists of  Ontario  and  Quebec   (CBOQ)   Assembly ,  I 've  been taking a week to think about it ,  and then to summarize and  t o share the things that really landed for me .   ______   There's   an  interesting thing that pastors sometimes  say  when  we're  talking about prayer in our congregations :  prayer can be a tough sell.     It can be tough for a pastor to get a congregation excited about prayer, especially getting people to pray together. People just  don't  seem to get excited about prayer.    I really wonder why that is true.  It was not true for  the first generation of believers  who we  encounter  in the book of  Acts .  They were excite...
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