St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

Good morning! Yesterday, we began a new series in Paul's letter to the Galatians, with Gal 1:1-10 . It's a letter I haven't heard preached very often, but it has a lot to teach us about how God sets us free in Christ and about the centrality of the gospel. I've written a bit about the background to Galatians, and how we can tell that it was written during the events at the start of Acts 15 here . For now, the important features are that Paul had only recently planted the churches in Galatia (cities like Iconium and Lystra), but that he heard they were already abandoning the gospel and following a different message. Paul couldn't visit them because he had an urgent visit to make to Jerusalem to find out where the different message was coming from, so he wrote Galatians to them instead. The passage has a lot to say to our culture, where we often like to think that the detail of what we believe doesn't really matter and where we often let our ...

Good morning! When we're desperate for something, when we see that we really need help, we pray about it far more than we do at other times. I've seen that in my own life, and we've seen it in the life of St Jude's as well over the years. In fact, God sometimes allows difficult things to happen so that we can learn to depend on him more. One of the big dangers is that when things improve, when they get more comfortable, we stop seeing our need for God as much and so we get complacent and stop praying as much. One of the big dangers for us as a church is that we are far too easily satisfied with our own spiritual lives, with the state of our church, with seeing God at work in our community. We saw that yesterday at 11am when we looked at Philippians 3:7-14 . Philippians is the letter where we see real Christian contentment the most clearly. Paul is hungry and in prison and he writes that he has learnt the secret of being content in any and ever...

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-b...