St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Greetings! Yesterday, Dennis led us skilfully through Psalm 46 which is a wonderful psalm of confidence in God. I love the way that it shows God as our stronghold – the absolutely safe place we can run to, the place we can hide in, the place that gives us confidence to take risks because we are safe there and ultimately nothing can hurt us. Even if the whole world falls apart, we're still safe in God. But the great weakness of strongholds is that sieges there can get pretty horrible. It's great to have a safe place, but safe places are often uncomfortable; they are often unpleasant places to be. That isn't the case with God. The Psalm talks about a river whose streams make glad the city of God. Ezekiel and John (in Revelation) also have visions of God's holy city with a river in, and in both cases (Eze 47:1-12 and Rev 22:1-2), the river comes out from the presence of God. The city ...

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Last Thursday, we celebrated one of the more frequently forgotten Christian festivals (largely because it's a Thursday, and doesn't get a Bank Holiday to go with it) – Ascension Day, when we remember that after he rose from the dead, Jesus ascended bodily into heaven. Actually, the ascension itself was for the benefit of the disciples, so they could see that he'd physically left; to get to heaven required some kind of cunning teleportation that I'm sure God could arrange. I'd just like to think briefly – what's the point of the Ascension? Two of the passages for the day were Acts 1:1-11 and Ephesians 1:15-23 , and they give us the same three answers. The Ascension means that God gives us the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4-5, Eph 1:17) In John 16, Jesus disciples were sad that he was going away, but Jesus told them it was for their good, because when he had retu...

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday was one of those really encouraging days, or it was for me anyway! We had a great time at church in the morning, and then had a really good 20s/30s picnic in our back garden – it was great to see loads of people there including quite a few we hadn't met before! If you're not on the 20s/30s e-mail list and you'd like to be, please let me know... Yesterday evening, I was preaching on the Old Testament Law. I should probably have switched sermons at the last minute, but didn't – sorry. This is roughly what I think I should have said(!)... When you see the word "law" in the Old Testament, it usually translates the Hebrew "Torah", which is talking about the whole of Genesis – Deuteronomy, a lot of which is story and so on rather than just lists of rules. The stories set the scene for the rules; they give us a background to read them against a...