In the natural what is happening is that Ken Gott, who is God’s apostolic leader for the North-East of England, arrived back yesterday from the revival meetings in Lakeland, Florida, where the Spirit of the Lord is being poured out in a wonderful way and there is a visitation of the Lord in signs and wonders and miracles and raising of the dead. Fervent prayer is needed for Todd Bentley who is a mighty man of God if rather immature in his sometimes embarrassing vanity with respect to his ministry and possibly vulnerable to deception by dark angels masquerading as angels of light. With depressing predictability the self-appointed watchdogs of the internet have launched into the attack like dogs on a wounded prey and will slow the move by hemming him in with accusations and vilification that only the holiest saint would be able to endure without flinching in the battle.

Meanwhile the leader of the Argentinian revival in the 1990s, Claudio Freidzon, assumes his mantle as fire carrier, arriving in Newcastle upon Tyne today to minister in the church which Ken Gott leads, and we may be sure that the Lord will use him in power to release the apostolic anointing that is needed to break through the religious spirit that dominates and controls the pentecostal and other Spirit-filled churches in the area. Oh that the Lord would raise up men of grace and power and much Christian love, men like John Wesley who preached on the Newcastle quayside and Smith Wigglesworth and others who breathed the Spirit of freedom and holiness in the birth of the English pentecostal movement in Sunderland. Pray for us that we will lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus laid hold of us.

Reason has its place in the process of conversion and I thank God for apologists old and new who have defended the gospel with precious arguments and evidence. But ultimately it is the work of the Holy Spirit to bring conviction and faith. God help us to pray for the outpouring of the Spirit on this dry and thirsty and barren land. Amen.

Oh how glorious and wonderful the love of God, that He should look down upon us wretched sinners and rescue us from our destruction in hell, and forgive us our sins and reconcile us to Himself through the blood of the cross. Oh what a wonderful salvation and what a shame that the Pope did not proclaim it last Tuesday to the assembled teachers of the University of Regensburg, for they too must repent of their sins and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ if they are to be saved on the day of judgement.

The gift of God is righteousness through faith in Jesus Christ. He calls us into His kingdom, we do not call Him into ours. Justin and the apologists tried to accommodate the holy gospel of Jesus Christ to Greek philosophical terms and ideas and thus polluted it and set in train an amalgamation of pagan and biblical thought which corrupted the truth of the word of God. Hurray for the Pope standing up to Islam and its reign of violence through the Middle East and North Africa and across the Euphrates into Persia and beyond. But let us not forget that it was the paganisation of the church in these regions in the form of unholy and false doctrines that brought calamity upon it  through the armies of Islam.

 In the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God and the logos was God.

and he translates ‘logos’ as ‘word and reason’. He even says that this identity of God and the logos is ‘the final word’ on the biblical concept of God.

He goes on to say that, being made in the image of God, there is an analogy between our reason and God’s reason, so that God is not wholly incomprehensible to us.

He has a positive view of the encounter between the biblical faith and Greek philosophical and scientific enquiry, that resulted (though he does not say this) in the great dogmas of the catholic church. He speaks of the ‘intrinsic necessity’ of a ‘rapprochement’ between biblical faith and Greek enquiry and sees Paul’s Macedonian call as a ‘distillation’ (or sign or starting point) of this.

 Is he right? Is the emphasis on the reasonableness of our faith a good one? And was the marriage of the faith of the gospel with Greek philosophy holy and pure? I believe these two questions need to be examined separately and hope to do this tomorrow. Meanwhile I invite your comments.