This book tells the story of a young American student becoming a Christian through his friendship with C.S.Lewis. Here’s a quote from it to help us think more about last Sunday’s Bible teaching …

“There is a gap between the probable and the proved. How was I to cross it? If I were to stake my whole life on the risen Christ, I wanted proof - I wanted certainty. I wanted to see him eat a bit of fish. I wanted letters of fire across the sky. I got none of these. And I continued to hang about on the edge of the gap … it was a question of whether I was going to accept him or reject him.

My God, there was a gap behind me as well. Perhaps the leap to acceptance was a horrifying gamble, but what of the leap to rejection! There might be no absolute certainty that Christ was God, but there was no certainty that he was not. This was not to be borne. I could not reject Jesus. There was only one thing to do once I had seen the gap behind me. I turned away from it, and flung myself over the gap towards Jesus.”

We are recommending this excellent book as an extremely helpful companion to our training course ‘Understanding and Communicating the Bible’ on Monday evenings.

‘Dig Deeper’ will equip you with a whole range of sixteen very practical tools to unearth the Bible’s treasure. As one reviewer says: ‘it will help you to see the Bible as an ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet rather than a ‘McQuick-and-not-very-satisfying’ nibble. Dig deeper and get to know God better.

Click here to read an extract from the introduction. Buy a copy of the book any Sunday at Emmanuel or click here to go to the IVP website.

We have bought copies of the English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible to use as our church Bibles. Some people have been wondering why, particularly because most people probably use the New International Version.

There are many different versions of the Bible now available. At one end of the spectrum are those that aim to translate the original languages of the Bibles (Hebrew for most of the Old Testament, and Greek in the New Testament) with a literal translation. There’s no attempt to unpack what the original Bible author might have meant, but simply to translate the words that are there. For example, if the original talks about ‘bowels of mercy’ then that is what is written down (rather than something like ‘heart filled with mercy’ which is what the author probably meant).

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The news from our January Members Meeting is that our Sunday meetings will continue to be at 3:30pm for now. From Sunday March 25 (the day when the clocks change) and for the whole of the summer, we will change our meeting time to 10:30am.