St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! It seems amazing that this is the last Monday Morning Mail of 2013! Doesn't time fly when you're having fun! Yesterday morning, Philip and Andrew both took us through Matthew 2:13-23 – the notorious picture of Herod and the Slaughter of the Innocents. In some ways, the central figure in the passage is King Herod – the last political King of the Jews who would do anything to hold onto power. He was only half-Jewish but supported by the Romans and tried to get more Jewish support by rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. He had married one of the last survivors of the Hasmonean dynasty of kings, who were Jewish but not descended from David, and he set about killing all the other survivors, including his uncle and mother-in-law and eventually even his own (favourite) wife and three of his sons when he saw them as threats. So it is hardly surprising that in the passage he take

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Greetings! All the Christmas Services seem to be going really well so far – we had a great Nativity Service and Carols in the Pub yesterday! (what is it with me and candles though?) As a Christmas Week Monday Mail, here are 10 reasons Jesus is better than Santa: 1. Santa is a mythological personification of the season; Jesus is the very real reason we celebrate (and parents – if your kids can understand "mythological personification", they've probably figured it out by now...) 2. Santa gives us stuff we want but don't really need; Jesus gives us what we really need, which is forgiveness, and a restored relationship with him. 3. What Santa gives wears out; what Jesus gives lasts forever and gets better and better. 4. Santa only visits children who have been good. Jesus knows that we aren't good and loves us anyway. 5. Santa just ignores children who

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community I'm still buzzing after the excitement of last night. It was great to see so many folk there, and the whole evening seemed to go really well! I've just been looking in the books, and that was the largest attendance at a Carol Service for 5 years, which is a real encouragement. Well done to everyone involved, to those who put so much hard work into preparing and doing the service, and to those who invited family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, hairdressers, etc – even if they didn't come! Here are a few thoughts on that based loosely on a sermon I preached a few weeks ago at the 11am service, on Mark 4:1-20 – the often-misunderstood Parable of the Sower. Jesus has started his ministry preaching and teaching people about the Kingdom of God, and quite a lot of folk are following him, but lots aren't. Some people have started plotting to kill him, others are ignoring him, and at the

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday morning was the second in our three-part Advent Series, and were thinking about the difficult topic of judgement, from Revelation 20:11-21:4 . As far as I remember, my main points were: Judgement is good news " It's not fair!" is the cry of every child at some point, as as we grow up we learn that life often isn't fair, and it can never be fair in this life. Some people have awful things happen to them and there seems no compensation. Other people literally get away with murder, and in the case of a few dictators, with millions of murders. But God will bring justice. He will redress the wrongs, protect the vulnerable and punish the guilty. We see in Rev 20 that everyone will stand before God's throne in judgement. It doesn't matter if they are dead, or what happened to their body – it could be in a mausoleum, burnt to ashes or at th

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday morning, we came to the end of our series in 1 John, though due to issues with recording (we're still using technology from last century and I forgot to use my pocket voice recorder) the sermon may not have been recorded, so here's roughly what I remember saying from 1 John 5 ... When we are faced with all the uncertainty of life, how can we know that we will keep going as Christians – how can we know that when Christ comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead he will welcome us into his kingdom? John says that it is all down to whether we have been "born of God" - whether we have been born again and given a new life that can never die. How can we tell is that is us? John's three tests come out again... Do we trust that Jesus is the Christ? – Christ isn't a name it's a title meaning something like "God's chosen and rightf

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! In all of our services yesterday, the idea of genuine faith came out. So yesterday morning, Dom & Guy led us through 1 John 4, where John tells us that if we claim to follow Jesus but don't love other Christians, we are lying (v20-21). Genuine faith loves other Christians. The same theme came out in the evening, when I was preaching on the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18:9-14. The Pharisee has almost everything going for him spiritually – he knows lots about God, lives a life that is pretty good by human standards, gives generously to those in need and remembers to say thank you to God. And yet it's the wicked tax collector who walks away right with God because the Pharisee has got so into living rightly for God that he has forgotten that he needs to come to God on his knees – that he can't earn God's love but still needs to ask for God'

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday morning we had our All Age Remembrance Service. It was great to see so many folk there (over 150), including lots of children and young people and our Brownies as well as representatives from the Army, Navy and Air Force. The Remembering Service in the afternoon was 10% up on last year as well and had a great atmosphere of loving and supporting one another. Thanks so much to all of those who helped out at either or both services! But for today's thought I'd like to think back to the evening service, where Andrew preached on the first few verses of Luke 18. Jesus told his disciples a parable to show that they should always pray and not give up. What sometimes makes us give up praying? There are some good reasons for giving up praying for something – like if God gives us what we ask for, or if we see that it isn't what's best for us. But a lot of

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community I'm not working tomorrow, so I'll send this out today! As this Thursday is Hallowe'en, here's a Hallowe'en poem from the excellent Glen Scrivener, or hear and watch him read it here : Vast armies undead do tread through the night and In hordes march towards hapless victims to frighten. They stumble in step with glass-eyes on the prizes; Bunched hither, hunched over in monstrous disguises; In sizes not lofty but numb'ring a throng; To unleash on their prey the dreaded DING DONG. Small faces with traces of mother's eye-liner, Peer up to the resident candy provider. And there to intone ancient threats learnt verbatim; They lisp "TRICK OR TREAT!" Tis their stark ultimatum. Thus: region by region such legions take plunder. Does this spector-full spectacle cause you to wonder? Just how did our fair festive forebears conceive, Of this p

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday all our services seemed to have a theme of sin and forgiveness. In the morning, we were back in 1 John thinking about how we as Christians cope with the fact that we all mess up. We saw that a common response is to try to deny or to hide it, but that when we do so we insult God all the more. The best response when we mess up is to be honest about it and to say sorry – sorry to God and to one another. When we do that – when we confess our sins, John tells us that God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. When God "purifies us from all unrighteousness", that means that: in the past, he has freed us from the penalty of sin when Jesus took our punishment on the cross. in the present, he frees us from the power of sin as he transforms our minds by his Spirit in the future, he will free us from th

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Greetings! Yesterday we began our new series in 1 John with looking at two of the big questions the apostle John tackles in his letter. The first one was the question of how we can know God. I've put roughly what I said yesterday here because hopefully most of the regular readers of my Monday mail are happy with the fact that we know God in Jesus. Incidentally, if you're worried about how we get from knowing God through Jesus to knowing him in the Bible, there are some great resources on Mark Meynell's blog . The main topic I spoke about yesterday though was John's big theme – how can we be sure that we are following the real Jesus? John gives us three tests, which we're going to spend more time looking at over the next few weeks. They're really helpful for giving us a quick spiritual check-up. Testing our mind – do we know and trust that Jesus is God himself, com

Good Morning! It was great to see so many folk at church yesterday for our Harvest Festival Celebrations. It strikes me every year just how important it is to thank God for all the good things he gives us day by day and week by week. Sometimes when I feel ungrateful, I just start thinking through all the ways God has been good to me, and to us as a church, over the years. The General Thanksgiving from the BCP seems to sum it up well. Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we your unworthy servants give you most humble and hearty thanks for all your goodness and loving kindness. We bless you for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for your immeasurable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And give us, we pray, such a sense of all your mercies that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we show forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! It was great to see quite a few people I didn't know at church yesterday – many thanks to all those who invited friends or neighbours for Back to Church Sunday! And particular thanks to those who invited people who didn't come along – our job is sowing the seed, not making it grow... I'm not going to do a full recap of yesterday's sermon – writing is a different medium from preaching. But I preached on the so-called parable of the Prodigal / Lost Son , so that's what's still on my mind, and here are three big surprises in the story. 1. The Father lets his younger son go The younger brother was really insulting to his dad. He basically told him that he wished he would just hurry up and die so that he could inherit his share of the estate. And yet instead of punishing him, his dad let him go. In the same way, when we want to run away from God, he lets us go.

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday morning, Geoff and Dom led us through the first half of Luke 15 – the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, or perhaps it would be better to call them the parables of the searching shepherd and searching woman. God is a God who goes searching for what is lost; who longs so much for it to be found that he is like a shepherd who leaves most of his flock in the wilderness or like a woman who tears the house apart looking for her coin. Jesus himself said that he came to seek and to save the lost. Dom used the picture of a child getting separated from their father in a supermarket. The child is lost, even if they don't know it, because they are separated from their father. In the same way, those who don't have a relationship with God as their father are lost. We owe our salvation to the fact that when we were lost, God came looking for us; that he love

Good morning! Yesterday, in our morning services we were looking at Jeremiah 29:1-14 , and thinking about how Christians should relate to the world we're living in. We saw that our situation is like that of immigrants (or ex-pats) in a foreign country, and there are three big dangers that we face. Assimilation is the danger of just blending in so that we're the same as our culture. But God tells his people that he is in charge, and he does have wonderful plans to bless us. Hostility is a natural response to being in a foreign culture that is often hostile to us. But God tells his people that he has put us here for a reason. Ghettoisation - cutting ourselves off and forming a Christian enclave - is again understandable but again stems from fear rather than trust in God. Instead, God wants us to be a blessing to those around us. He tells his people in Jer 29 that they should seek the peace and prosperity of the (evil, pagan) city of Babylon because he has put them there,

Good Morning! Today, the Monday Morning Mail is guest-written by Dom Turner, our trainee-vicar from St John's College. We live segmented lives. All of us have many different commitments, and all of us play many different roles in our lives: perhaps you work full- or part-time; perhaps you care for children or other relatives; perhaps you're retired or unemployed. All of us have different circles of friends, and different activities and tasks that fill our time. The temptation is to put God into a 'Sunday box', to fit our worship into one slot during our week and then to forget about it for the rest of the time. Yesterday morning, John preached from Romans 12, and made it clear that this is a tendency we must resist. Romans 12:1 says that we should, "in view of God's mercy, offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God--this is our spiritual act of worship." So we need to resist the tendency to think of worship as something that is sep

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! It's great when we're putting on a service, and God seems to be saying the same thing to lots of different people in different ways and it all comes together really well. That was pretty much what happened at last night's Songs of Praise evening service at St Jude's. For those unfamiliar with the format, lots of people are invited to come up and talk a bit about a song which they particularly like, or which God is really putting on their heart, and we spend some time singing together. Last night the theme which kept coming across again and again is that God is there with us no matter what we're going through; that he is enough for us and will provide, and will win, and will satisfy us and protect us. It all fit in wonderfully with the lectionary reading for yesterday evening from Isaiah 33:17-22, written to God's people when they were under siege by the

Dear all, Just a quick mail to say that I'm back at work as of today. Lydia and I had a lovely holiday variously around the UK and in Norway. Probably Norway's most famous export over the years was the Vikings. For hundreds of years they raided the rest of Europe, raping and pillaging as they went. Yet in the 150 or so years from 1000 AD, these violent warriors did something extraordinary. They settled down and stopped raiding. Why? Because after hundreds of years of opposing Christianity, plundering monasteries and so on, they became Christians and instead of building warships, they started building stave churches, some of which still survive. Even today, modern Norwegian culture shows its Viking roots. Houses are still often made of wood rather than brick, and people's holiday homes are often accessible by boat rather than by road. Norwegian is clearly descended from the Old Norse that the Vikings spoke. Becoming Christians didn't make them less themselves or break

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Last week we very much enjoyed having Marcus and Tamara Throup visiting us – Marcus encouraged us strongly to take Jesus with us wherever we go, whether to work or visiting family or on holiday! Yesterday, at the 9:15 and 6:30pm services, I preached on 1 Peter 5 . The big idea in the passage is that God's kingdom is coming, but isn't fully here yet – in posh theological language it's inaugurated but not consummated – it's started, but we don't always see it. And that means that sometimes in the present we find ourselves with the opportunity to live in ways that show we are looking forwards to God's kingdom being fulfilled. In the passage, Peter highlights three main ways this works out. All of them point back to Jesus' first coming to establish his kingdom, and all of them look forwards to when he will return to complete it. They are: Eager Service – esp

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday morning was the last in our series on the first few chapters of Joshua – we'll be coming back to carry on the story next year. One thing that really struck me is that we think of Joshua as all about the invasion and conquest of Canaan, but actually it's much more about the people's relationship with God. So as we looked at chapter 6 yesterday, we only just got to the first battle, and even that is completely overshadowed by God's conversation with Joshua. As Christians, we find it really easy to just assume that God is on our side. We've been watching the BBC drama The White Queen for the last few weeks, and last week they made a point of showing several different sides in the Wars of the Roses all praying to the same God before the same battle and asking for his help. But that's not how God works. He isn't a slot machine God who we can mani

There is one sermon slot free in the Autumn service rota, and I'd like to use it to answer a question that we have about Christianity - a point of doctrine, how to respond in a certain situation, anything along those lines. If you've got any ideas, just post them as comments on this post - completely anonymous!

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday was another really encouraging Sunday at St Jude's. I had an e-mail this morning from a member of St Jude's who said that Andy Murray winning Wimbledon was an anti-climax after the morning, and I think that just about nailed it! For those who didn't make it, we had 2 baptisms and 5 people wanting to publicly reaffirm their baptism vows, which grew to 10 during the service! There's a line in the baptism liturgy which we said yesterday that goes something like this: Fight valiantly as disciples of Christ against sin, the world and the devil, and remain Christ's faithful soldiers and servants to the end of your lives. That whole idea of fighting isn't something we tend to talk about much these days. But it ties in well with what I've been reading in my personal devotional times lately. These days, I often seem to find myself in the "fig

Greetings! It's been a really encouraging weekend! The Day of Prayer on Saturday seemed to go very well, and yesterday morning we enjoyed looking at Joshua 5. Joyce and Dennis both preached on the passage, and I had a Sunday off preaching for once! Both sermons focused on the importance of making sure that you're in the right place with God. Israel had just crossed the Jordan river, and we'd have expected a quick attack on Jericho. Instead, the nation stops, and celebrates their "sacraments" - they circumcise the men and then share the Passover meal. They see that getting right with God is more important than sorting out their food supply, or their safety with enemy armies around. There's a thing in psychology called Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It says that we try to get the basics of life – food, drink and so on sorted first, then security, and only move on to other stuff once we've got the basics sorted. Joshua and the Israelites don't see it

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday was another really encouraging morning. We had almost record attendance at both morning services (certainly for my time here and away from Christmas / Easter) – helped by Isaac Lennon-McCalla's baptism at the 11am service. We continued in our series on the first few chapters of Joshua, looking this time at crossing the Jordan river at just about its widest point when it was in flood. We looked at the three different responses that we can make when God calls us to do something. We can fear, we can forget or we can follow in faith. Fear is an understandable response, especially when God calls us to do something outside our comfort zones or (as in Joshua 3-4), something seemingly impossible. I guess things we're often afraid of today are when we are worried that people will think worse of us because of how we are following Jesus, or when it means we lose some of