Monday Mail, 12th Jan 2014

By -
Greetings!

I hear yesterday morning went very well in my absence. As a "thought for the week", here's a lovely poem about prayer by George Herbert. Well worth reading slowly and meditating on as Herbert uses lots of word pictures (and no verbs) to show what a glory and a privilege is ours in prayer!

God bless,

John

Prayer (I)

Prayer: the church's banquet, angel's age,

         God's breath in man returning to his birth,
  
      The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth.


Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
  
      Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
  
      The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;


Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
  
      Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
  
      Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
  

      Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
  
      The land of spices; something understood.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Any Questions?

By -
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!
Read more

Book of the Year?

By -
Image
I read quite a lot of books. The best book I've read this year is probably The Good God by Michael Reeves. It's a book about the Trinity. The big point is that the Trinity is central to understanding who God is, to understanding the difference between Christianity and other religions, and to understanding how we can be saved. Reeves doesn't say anything new, but he explains the theology very accessibly and clearly, quoting and explaining "big name" theologians like Athanasius, Augustine, Luther and Richard of St Victor in a way that is accessible to all, and he does it very well. It would be my top recommendation for anyone wanting to understand the Trinity and why it matters, whether they were a new Christian or training for ordination. My one criticism of the book is it could be very good for ecumenism as well - building links between evangelical theology and the Roman Catholics and Orthodox, but the end lets it down in that sense. Trinitarianism is tru
Read more

Monday Morning Mail, 7th April 2014

By -
Image
Good Morning! Yesterday morning, we looked at John 12:1-11, which is the story of Mary anointing Jesus' feet with perfume that cost a year's wages. We saw that Mary's grateful, responsive, loving, extravagant, disgraceful love was exactly the right response to Jesus, even though it left her with no money, no provision for the future and her reputation in tatters. In contrast, Judas was shown to be hiding his real sin behind trying to look pious. One of the ways we applied it was by thinking about whether we hold back from worshipping God for fear of what other people think, whether that's when singing at church or when speaking to our friends at work or at the pub, or even whether we're sometimes, like Judas, people who sit on the sidelines and snipe at those who are putting their hearts into worshipping God. We also saw how Mary's action predicts what Jesus is about to do – that she becomes the servant who washes Je
Read more