St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

Good Morning! Yesterday, we continued with our series on the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus started the sermon by declaring who is living life right – that it's the people who are spiritually bankrupt and who hunger and thirst for righteousness. But that raises the huge question of how it fits in with the Old Testament Law. After all, plenty of people at Jesus' time would think that the people who are living life well are the ones who keep all the rules. It's still a popular idea in the Church today – lots of people think that living well is about keeping rules. But what Jesus says next blows that idea out of the water. He doesn't do it by ditching the Law. After all, it had been given by God himself. He does it by showing that the Law itself was never about keeping the rules. When God says "Do not murder", he's not just inventing a rule about murder; the way the OT uses it shows that it's actually about valuing other pe...

​ Yesterday morning, we started a new series in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus begins the sermon with a dramatic statement of what the "good life" looks like. Who is living well? Who has got life sorted? Here's what Jesus said from some less-familiar translations: Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor; the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them! Congratulations to those who are mourning; they shall be consoled. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness are to be envied, because they will be filled. Congratulations to the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Happy are the pure in heart – because they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. You're blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God's kingdom. Congratulations to you when they reproach you and...

Shining with God's Love in Our Community Yesterday morning, we looked at Matthew 5:14-16. You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. We saw that we should shine because of who we are . A town on a hill does not get a choice about whether it is visible or not. Because it is on a hill, and because it is a town, people can see it for a great distance (even hundreds of miles away if there are no streetlights and it's a cloudy night). We shine because God has put his Spirit in us. Jesus the light of the world lives in our hearts by his Spirit and makes us, his people, into the light of the world. We don't get a choice about it. If we try not to shine,...

Yesterday morning, we continued our series looking at who we are, and what we're here for. In particular, we were looking at 1 Peter 2:4-12 . What really struck me in the passage was that all of the wonderful descriptions of things we are as Christians – a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, God's house – are things that we can only be together . They are all singular, just like in Romans 12:1, we offer our bodies as one living sacrifice, or in Ephesians 4 we grow up from being many infants to being one mature body. How does this happen? It happens as God builds us together by his Spirit, as we get the rough edges and knobbly bits knocked off and sanded down. It happens as we speak the truth to one another in love, as we move from seeing other people as there to make us feel better to seeing ourselves as there to serve others and help them know, love and serve God better. This coming weekend is the church weekend away, and for...

Yesterday, we started a new series at St Jude's. Recently, the leadership team have been thinking through the question "Who are we?" and we came to the conclusion that the answer can be summed up as follows: We are a church on a hill: Worshipping God and listening to his Word Growing together as the family of God Shining with God's love in our community. With that in mind, we're doing a short series of three sermons in the mornings looking at different aspects of this. We started yesterday looking at Micah 4:1-7 . In the passage, God gives his people a picture of the way things will be in the end. Sometimes if a story is going badly, people flick ahead to the end to see how it all turns out – that's what God does here for his people. As we look at it, we can find confidence for the future, but also see something of God's purposes for us as a church. The picture is that the mountain of God's temple – the hill where God...

Good Morning All! For the Monday Mail this week, I'd like to send a link to Glen Scrivener's new Easter Poem (animation on Youtube). Here's the poem in full: The Israelites in thirsty lands, trod burning sands with desperate craving, no longer slaving for Egyptian masters, now by grace they're free to face this fresh disaster -- starving in a barren place. Until the Bread of Heaven fell like morning dew each day anew, and to these folks complaining, every day the Bread sustaining, to lead them all their journey through. Fast forward 1500 years: a Man appears, stands tall among His peers, And feeds the desert crowds without ado, A supernatural déjà vu. And having won the mob's attention then He makes His bold contention: He IS the Bread of old, the One foretold to feed us and through our wilderness to lead us. Could His claim be true? It's Thursday Night, an upper room, a supper strewn with broken bread, Then Jesus stands, a loaf in hand and says: THIS...

Good Morning! Yesterday morning, we looked at John 12:1-11, which is the story of Mary anointing Jesus' feet with perfume that cost a year's wages. We saw that Mary's grateful, responsive, loving, extravagant, disgraceful love was exactly the right response to Jesus, even though it left her with no money, no provision for the future and her reputation in tatters. In contrast, Judas was shown to be hiding his real sin behind trying to look pious. One of the ways we applied it was by thinking about whether we hold back from worshipping God for fear of what other people think, whether that's when singing at church or when speaking to our friends at work or at the pub, or even whether we're sometimes, like Judas, people who sit on the sidelines and snipe at those who are putting their hearts into worshipping God. We also saw how Mary's action predicts what Jesus is about to do – that she becomes the servant who wash...