St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

Greetings! Yesterday at St Jude's we were thinking particularly about how to share God's love and the good news of Jesus with our families and close friends. I said I'd found one book in particular really helpful, which was Bringing the Gospel Home by R. Newman (the link is to the IVP online bookshop, where it's only £5 at the moment...) Incidentally, Newman's earlier book Questioning Evangelism is also really good for thinking through how to share the good news in our conversations more generally. We looked at the theme yesterday through the lens of Jesus' conversation with the woman of Samaria in John 4 . As so often in John's gospel, the story serves to illustrate a lot of what has already been said about Jesus. So in John 3:17 we read that "God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him", and in John 1:17, John sums up Jesus' message as " Grace and truth ". An...

Yesterday, we were continuing in our series looking at some of the basics of the Christian faith from a slightly different angle, and we were looking in particular at Faith and Doubt from Psalm 77 , which was written by David's chief musician, Asaph. A lot of people today seem to think that faith is the opposite of doubt, but that isn't how Asaph saw it at all. Instead we'll see that faith is something we choose (or don't), and that the opposite of faith is pride. But I'm getting ahead of myself a little... Asaph was in a very difficult situation (v1-6). He doesn't explain exactly what was happening, but he tells us that he couldn't sleep, and that his spirit "refused to be comforted". It feels like God is a million miles away; all that he has left of faith is a memory of times gone by when he enjoyed singing to God, and that memory hurts. More than that, Asaph probably didn't see it himself at the time, but he had becom...

Hi folks, This one is slightly late in the day! (Quick notice - there's a meeting at 12:15 on Sunday for all helpers at Holiday Club - let Paula know if you can't make it). Yesterday was Trinity Sunday, when we particularly remember one of the key doctrines of the Christian faith. It's sometimes seen as being dull and irrelevant, but it's anything but. On Sunday I hopefully showed how it comes from the very first chapter of the Bible into the very last chapter. Here's some of what I said about why the Trinity matters. The Trinity is Key to Understanding God because it shows us that God is all about relationships. T he Bible shows God to be a Trinity, three persons in an eternal relationship of love – always working together, always seeking one another's glory. He does not need anyone outside himself, and yet he is a God who is loving and can make the universe for love not because he is insufficient in himself, but because true love wants that love to o...