St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

Yesterday, we continued our series In the Wilderness. Last time we looked at the Israelites complaining in Numbers 11:1-9 ; this time we looked at the effect on Moses in v10-17 . These verses are a crisis for Moses, and in some ways he never really recovers. In the previous year, he has saved the nation three times by praying for them (Exodus 17, Exodus 33, Numbers 11:2). He never does that again. Instead we keep on getting challenges to Moses' leadership. Moses' biggest problem in this passage is the weight of unrealistic expectations. The people are acting like little children, and expecting him to carry them. They are asking him to provide the whole nation with meat. Both of those are things that God had done earlier in their wanderings. God provided them with quail in Exodus 16 and said in Exodus 19 that he had carried the nation "on eagle's wings". But Moses forgets that. He listens to the people's unreasonable expectations of him and...

Good Morning! Yesterday, we continued with our series "In the Wilderness", following Israel's journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. We skipped the giving of the Law, the priesthood and the Tabernacle at Mount Sinai, and resumed in Numbers 11, roughly a year after Exodus 17 but only slightly further on the journey. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that so little has changed. The people have been fed by God every day for a year (except Saturdays!), they have heard God speaking the 10 Commandments, they have been given the Law, sacrifices so that they can be forgiven, and a way to access God by the priesthood and the Tabernacle. But they are still complaining. Complaining is a big problem, but is far too ignored in modern Christian culture. I know it's been a problem for me, and I talked a lot more about that in my sermon yesterday. I've only got space here for a few thoughts on what the start of Numbers 11 shows us about complaining. Complain...

Good Morning! Yesterday morning, we continued our series In the Wilderness , looking at Israel's wanderings from Egypt to the Promised Land. Specifically, we looked at Exodus 17:1-7, and how the Psalmist applied it in Psalm 95. [Incidentally, Hebrews applies Psalm 95 in chapters 3 and 4, which means that preaching on Hebrews 3 and 4 would be a sermon about a sermon about a sermon about Exodus 17.] We saw that the people of Israel were faced with a choice. Part of the problem was that it didn't look much like a choice to them. To them it looked like they were running out of water (again!), and so they started complaining and accusing Moses of leading them to die in the desert. Their real problem, though, was that they were hard-hearted. They just carried on as normal and hadn't let anything that God had done for them over the last 3 months or so affect their hearts. If they had been soft-hearted towards God, then they would have looked at th...

Good Morning! Yesterday we started a new series at St Jude's - "In the Wilderness". We'll be looking at Israel's journey from Egypt to Sinai, and then from Sinai to the edge of the Promised Land. Homegroups also have material on the same passages! Being in the wilderness is a time of difficulty, a time of now-and-not-yet, a time of testing, and can be a real time of growth. That's my prayer for us this term! We started by looking at Exodus 16. God's people have just come out of Egypt. They have seen the plagues; they have taken part in the Passover, they have crossed the Red Sea. God has provided them with water in the desert, but now it's a month after they left Egypt, and they are running out of food fast. Folk are getting hungry; maybe babies aren't putting on weight properly and the older members of their families are getting frailer. But in their trouble, they don't remember God. He has led them out into the desert, and yet their response ...

Good Morning! Yesterday, all three services in different ways pointed to the way that we can trust God to provide for us. In both morning services, we were looking at the feeding of the 5000. Jesus is exhausted and wanting to grieve after the murder of his friend and cousin; his disciples are tired out after having just been on a mission trip, and the crowd are hungry and tired having been following Jesus all day and found themselves in the wilderness late in the day. In all three cases, they give what they have to God and seek to serve him even when tired, and he provides more than abundantly for them. That's also similar to what we saw in Psalm 11 last night. David was facing an uncertain situation, with secret plots against him, and his friends were "encouraging" him to run for the hills. When we are in difficult situations, we always face a choice between faith and fear. Faith for David meant looking to God, remembering that God is on...

Hi folks, Slightly delayed today.... Yesterday we continued our series on the Sermon on the Mount with Matthew 6:19-34 and Jesus instruction not to worry. But he does a lot more than just tell us not to worry – as ever, his words examine the thoughts and motives of our hearts to expose why we worry and to provide some solutions. Here then are Jesus' three reasons why we worry: We're storing treasure in the wrong place (v19-21). Jesus tells us that our hearts follow where we store our treasure. If what we really value is in the stock market, that's what we'll worry about. If it's other people's opinions of us, that's what we'll worry about. Storing up treasure on earth is dangerous – it wears out, breaks and is stolen. But it's also silly – we can store up treasure in heaven instead by following Jesus and setting our hearts on the things of God. We're looking at the wrong things (v22-23). What we look at affects wh...

Yesterday, in our morning services, we continued in the Sermon on the Mount by looking at Matthew 6:1-18 . If I was picking a summary sentence for the whole sermon, I'd pick the opening one "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." It's thinking through what it looks like for us to be "poor in spirit". What does it mean for us to recognise that we can't earn God's favour, that we can never be good enough for him, and yet to live as those he has adopted into his family? In Matthew 6, Jesus turns to what we might call "religious acts" - things like giving, prayer and fasting. We see straight off that there is a wrong way to do them, and a right way to do them. The wrong way is to do them like those who have something to prove to ourselves or to others. That's the path of those who try to show off by flaunting their generosity or asking for their name to be associated with their gift. It...