St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

Greetings! Yesterday was Pentecost Sunday when we remember God sending his Spirit on the disciples in Acts 2. Here are three quick thoughts on what difference Pentecost makes. It means that we can know God directly . The prophet Jeremiah wrote this about God's gift of his Spirit. (Jer 31:33-34) ' I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbour, or say to one another, "Know the Lord," because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,' declares the Lord. 'For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.' We can know God directly because he lives in us; we can hear from God directly and share his word with others. Having the Holy Spirit in us means we can have transformed hearts . Here's God speaking to the prophet Ezekiel about the gift of his Spir...

Good morning all! Yesterday morning we continued our "back to basics" series looking at some of the basics of the Christian faith from different angles. We were thinking in particular of different ways that people relate to God at different times in their lives. Of course God is the same God, Jesus is the same Lord. We all need to keep doing the basics of meeting together as Christians, meditating on God's Word and praying. But we are also all different, each with our unique personality and gifts, and that shapes the way we pray and so on. Theologian Gary Thomas (in his book Sacred Pathways ) identified 9 different ways of connecting with God. All are valuable, but some people are better at some than at others: Naturalists love being outdoors and feel much more connected to God when they are surrounded by the natural world. Sensates find that awe, beauty and splendour, in art, architecture, music and so on are often paths which lead them to God. Traditional...

Good morning! Yesterday at St Jude's we began a new short series looking at some of the basic "how to"s of the Christian life and we started by looking at probably the number one habit recommended in the Bible – meditating on Scripture . Christian meditation is different from Buddhist meditation; the point of Buddhist meditation is to empty yourself because they see desires as fundamentally wrong and the aim of life as nirvana. Christian meditation might start with emptying yourself (and it sometimes does) but it is with the aim of being filled by God and his word. The word used in Psalm 1 for meditation is literally "muttering": Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who mutters his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water...

Greetings all! I thought it would be good to share a few thoughts on the General Election this week. Some people seem to think that the church should stay out of politics. Certainly the way it's involved in the US isn't always helpful – culture wars between the church and society are a bad idea and tend to twist the Christian message into being about Law rather than about Grace. But even so, the Christian message is profoundly political. The first Christian profession of faith was "Jesus is Lord", but that was in a world where the normal affirmation of citizenship was "Caesar is Lord"; worshipping Jesus as God meant that many Christians could not take part in the standard political-religious ceremonies where they worshipped Caesar. One of the big reasons Christians were persecuted in the first few centuries was their stance against Caesar's political claims to absolute authority. And one of the big reasons they won in the end was the...