St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community I'm not working tomorrow, so I'll send this out today! As this Thursday is Hallowe'en, here's a Hallowe'en poem from the excellent Glen Scrivener, or hear and watch him read it here : Vast armies undead do tread through the night and In hordes march towards hapless victims to frighten. They stumble in step with glass-eyes on the prizes; Bunched hither, hunched over in monstrous disguises; In sizes not lofty but numb'ring a throng; To unleash on their prey the dreaded DING DONG. Small faces with traces of mother's eye-liner, Peer up to the resident candy provider. And there to intone ancient threats learnt verbatim; They lisp "TRICK OR TREAT!" Tis their stark ultimatum. Thus: region by region such legions take plunder. Does this spector-full spectacle cause you to wonder? Just how did our fair festive forebears conceive, Of this p...

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday all our services seemed to have a theme of sin and forgiveness. In the morning, we were back in 1 John thinking about how we as Christians cope with the fact that we all mess up. We saw that a common response is to try to deny or to hide it, but that when we do so we insult God all the more. The best response when we mess up is to be honest about it and to say sorry – sorry to God and to one another. When we do that – when we confess our sins, John tells us that God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. When God "purifies us from all unrighteousness", that means that: in the past, he has freed us from the penalty of sin when Jesus took our punishment on the cross. in the present, he frees us from the power of sin as he transforms our minds by his Spirit in the future, he will free us from th...

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Greetings! Yesterday we began our new series in 1 John with looking at two of the big questions the apostle John tackles in his letter. The first one was the question of how we can know God. I've put roughly what I said yesterday here because hopefully most of the regular readers of my Monday mail are happy with the fact that we know God in Jesus. Incidentally, if you're worried about how we get from knowing God through Jesus to knowing him in the Bible, there are some great resources on Mark Meynell's blog . The main topic I spoke about yesterday though was John's big theme – how can we be sure that we are following the real Jesus? John gives us three tests, which we're going to spend more time looking at over the next few weeks. They're really helpful for giving us a quick spiritual check-up. Testing our mind – do we know and trust that Jesus is God himself, com...

Good Morning! It was great to see so many folk at church yesterday for our Harvest Festival Celebrations. It strikes me every year just how important it is to thank God for all the good things he gives us day by day and week by week. Sometimes when I feel ungrateful, I just start thinking through all the ways God has been good to me, and to us as a church, over the years. The General Thanksgiving from the BCP seems to sum it up well. Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we your unworthy servants give you most humble and hearty thanks for all your goodness and loving kindness. We bless you for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for your immeasurable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And give us, we pray, such a sense of all your mercies that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we show forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by ...

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,...