St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

Yesterday morning, we continued our series looking at who we are, and what we're here for. In particular, we were looking at 1 Peter 2:4-12 . What really struck me in the passage was that all of the wonderful descriptions of things we are as Christians – a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, God's house – are things that we can only be together . They are all singular, just like in Romans 12:1, we offer our bodies as one living sacrifice, or in Ephesians 4 we grow up from being many infants to being one mature body. How does this happen? It happens as God builds us together by his Spirit, as we get the rough edges and knobbly bits knocked off and sanded down. It happens as we speak the truth to one another in love, as we move from seeing other people as there to make us feel better to seeing ourselves as there to serve others and help them know, love and serve God better. This coming weekend is the church weekend away, and for

Yesterday, we started a new series at St Jude's. Recently, the leadership team have been thinking through the question "Who are we?" and we came to the conclusion that the answer can be summed up as follows: We are a church on a hill: Worshipping God and listening to his Word Growing together as the family of God Shining with God's love in our community. With that in mind, we're doing a short series of three sermons in the mornings looking at different aspects of this. We started yesterday looking at Micah 4:1-7 . In the passage, God gives his people a picture of the way things will be in the end. Sometimes if a story is going badly, people flick ahead to the end to see how it all turns out – that's what God does here for his people. As we look at it, we can find confidence for the future, but also see something of God's purposes for us as a church. The picture is that the mountain of God's temple – the hill where God&