St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

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 ...