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...

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! It seems amazing that this is the last Monday Morning Mail of 2013! Doesn't time fly when you're having fun! Yesterday morning, Philip and Andrew both took us through Matthew 2:13-23 – the notorious picture of Herod and the Slaughter of the Innocents. In some ways, the central figure in the passage is King Herod – the last political King of the Jews who would do anything to hold onto power. He was only half-Jewish but supported by the Romans and tried to get more Jewish support by rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. He had married one of the last survivors of the Hasmonean dynasty of kings, who were Jewish but not descended from David, and he set about killing all the other survivors, including his uncle and mother-in-law and eventually even his own (favourite) wife and three of his sons when he saw them as threats. So it is hardly surprising that in the passage he take...

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Greetings! All the Christmas Services seem to be going really well so far – we had a great Nativity Service and Carols in the Pub yesterday! (what is it with me and candles though?) As a Christmas Week Monday Mail, here are 10 reasons Jesus is better than Santa: 1. Santa is a mythological personification of the season; Jesus is the very real reason we celebrate (and parents – if your kids can understand "mythological personification", they've probably figured it out by now...) 2. Santa gives us stuff we want but don't really need; Jesus gives us what we really need, which is forgiveness, and a restored relationship with him. 3. What Santa gives wears out; what Jesus gives lasts forever and gets better and better. 4. Santa only visits children who have been good. Jesus knows that we aren't good and loves us anyway. 5. Santa just ignores children who...

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community I'm still buzzing after the excitement of last night. It was great to see so many folk there, and the whole evening seemed to go really well! I've just been looking in the books, and that was the largest attendance at a Carol Service for 5 years, which is a real encouragement. Well done to everyone involved, to those who put so much hard work into preparing and doing the service, and to those who invited family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, hairdressers, etc – even if they didn't come! Here are a few thoughts on that based loosely on a sermon I preached a few weeks ago at the 11am service, on Mark 4:1-20 – the often-misunderstood Parable of the Sower. Jesus has started his ministry preaching and teaching people about the Kingdom of God, and quite a lot of folk are following him, but lots aren't. Some people have started plotting to kill him, others are ignoring him, and at the...

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday morning was the second in our three-part Advent Series, and were thinking about the difficult topic of judgement, from Revelation 20:11-21:4 . As far as I remember, my main points were: Judgement is good news " It's not fair!" is the cry of every child at some point, as as we grow up we learn that life often isn't fair, and it can never be fair in this life. Some people have awful things happen to them and there seems no compensation. Other people literally get away with murder, and in the case of a few dictators, with millions of murders. But God will bring justice. He will redress the wrongs, protect the vulnerable and punish the guilty. We see in Rev 20 that everyone will stand before God's throne in judgement. It doesn't matter if they are dead, or what happened to their body – it could be in a mausoleum, burnt to ashes or at th...

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Good Morning! Yesterday morning, we came to the end of our series in 1 John, though due to issues with recording (we're still using technology from last century and I forgot to use my pocket voice recorder) the sermon may not have been recorded, so here's roughly what I remember saying from 1 John 5 ... When we are faced with all the uncertainty of life, how can we know that we will keep going as Christians – how can we know that when Christ comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead he will welcome us into his kingdom? John says that it is all down to whether we have been "born of God" - whether we have been born again and given a new life that can never die. How can we tell is that is us? John's three tests come out again... Do we trust that Jesus is the Christ? – Christ isn't a name it's a title meaning something like "God's chosen and rightf...