St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday we were looking at John 15:1-17 , and we saw how God calls his people to like fruitful lives and to bear fruit for him. Jesus compares his disciples to the branches of a vine – a plant that is grown entirely for the value of its fruit. He tells us that God has chosen and called us so that we would bear much fruit, and tells us three important factors in us living fruitful lives. 1. Being Pruned by the Father One of the most important factors in growing vines for fruit is that they need to be heavily pruned. Left to themselves, they produce shoots in all kinds of directions, and waste all their energy on shoots rather than on fruit. If you want a fruitful vine, it needs pruning. "To Prune" in Greek is the same as " to clean" - it's the idea of cleaning off all the unnecessary branches. In the same way, pruning is sometimes getting rid of bad things ...

Happy New Year! I love it when the same theme comes out again and again on a Sunday, and I know I had nothing to do with planning it! So it was yesterday, and the theme was the importance of searching and waiting for God. It came out in the 9:15am service, where Dom preached on the story of the Magi from Matthew 2. They travelled for maybe a thousand miles looking for Jesus, not knowing exactly where they were going, and when they found him they worshipped him and gave him gifts. It came out at the 11am service, where we were thinking about how trustworthy God's promises are, even when it's tough to keep on going as a Christian, living as a Christian and telling others about Jesus. It came out too at the Songs of Praise service in the evening. We thought about how God will never ever forget us or let us go – it's like he's engraved our names on the palms of his hands (Is 49:16). Of course, that isn't just a picture. God sho...