I became a Christian when I was 16 and my friends told me to get a Bible, so I did. When I was at university I decided to read the Bible from start to finish. I did it in about 18 months. It was amazing. When I was 30 I was having my second child. Sh...

In 2001 my husband and I did up the bathroom and we had fun doing it. We didn’t often have fun. We worked hard and were ships in the night. It was his birthday and I bought him a card with two rabbits in a bath, and inside I wrote words from Psalm ...

Why did I get this tattoo of Jonah and the whale? In Jonah, you see that holiness is about blessing. If you receive blessing, you should in turn bless others. Jonah preaches to the Ninevites. They repent, and God forgives them. So, Jonah goes and sul...

Many of the Old Testament leaders had more than one wife. At what point in Jewish history did monogamy become the accepted norm?

How did the tradition arise that Christ appeared four times in the Old Testament prior to his incarnation?

Just over nine per cent of adults in England and Wales have been divorced; that’s according to the 2021 Census. So what does the Bible have to say about divorce, and how should we understand it? The words of Jesus in Matthew 5.31–32 seem quite cl...

The usual way that Christians understand the Bible to be a book from God is to say that he inspired it.

In Britain, Mother's Day falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent and started as a church tradition. While you won’t find many verses in the Bible directly hailing motherhood, it’s easy to see through the stories of Bible moms the love that God ha...

What was Jesus was writing in the sand when the woman was caught in adultery? Was it the 10 commandments, or was he writing down all the sins of the Pharisees? Maybe by writing in the sand and not in stone, he was indicating that the laws of the reli...

One of the most common themes in the Bible is God’s almighty heart and concern for the outcast and the poor. Even if you are abused, thrown aside and left with nothing, there’s still one who sees you. ‘He will never leave nor forsake you’ (De...

The Bible changes lives. One particular book with a great record for this is Paul’s letter to the Romans. Dr Andrew Ollerton, author of The Bible Course, is someone who’s been transformed by this standout book.

I love the story of Thomas in John 20.24–29. He knew that there was such a thing as fake news. People didn’t rise from the dead, did they?

I was one of those boys who didn’t sit still for a minute. I left school before taking the equivalent of GCSEs. I went to church. My reputation preceded me and they all thought I was there for the girls. But it was there that I made a commitment. P...

I grew up in Yugoslavia. Christianity wasn’t banned, but nobody ever spoke about faith. I never heard anything about it. I thought the Bible was make-believe and fairy tales. I thought that people who read the Bible were off their heads in la-la la...

Daniel is a book of two halves. The first six chapters contain stories about ‘Daniel’, an exile in a high position in the Babylonian court, and what he did to survive as a Jew in that potentially hostile environment. The final six chapters contai...

The book begins with God commanding Hosea to marry an unfaithful wife. The first few chapters describe what happened when he did so. Chapter 4 onwards contains messages from God via Hosea, first to the people of Israel (4–11) and then to the people...

The story of Judith features, unsurprisingly, Judith as its main hero. Judith, whom we are told was both very beautiful and a widow, was horrified that her fellow Jews did not trust in God to deliver them from their enemies, the Assyrians. So she wen...

The book of Isaiah is really important to me. I read it during the year that I was Student Union President at Exeter University. I’d just finished my degree in theology and suddenly found myself in charge of sixty staff. I was super, super busy and...

Our second child was called Zachary. Everything seemed normal, but when we went for the 12-week scan we discovered that he had Edwards’ Syndrome. There was 95 per cent chance that he wouldn’t survive the pregnancy. If he did, he’d only live for...

I worked in the City for many years. Life was brilliant on the trading floor. If you couldn’t stand pressure and didn’t have a sense of humour, it wasn’t the place to be! One lunchtime, two of my colleagues asked me to go to St Helen’s Bisho...