Devotional 26062013

Mark 2 verses 14 - 17

 As He passed by, He saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting in the tax booth, and He said to him, “Follow Me!” And he got up and followed Him.

 And it happened that He was reclining at the table in his house, and many tax collectors and sinners were dining with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many of them, and they were following Him.

When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that He was eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they said to His disciples, “Why is He eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners?”

And hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

We sing with all the choirs in heaven:

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,

heaven and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna in the highest

How familiar are these words, how often have we said them before the communion table

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord

We here gathered are called to go in the name of the lord

The church is called to go forth in the name of the lord

But how often we fail to go anywhere

Christ calls us to go out for the sinners but sinners

Build a house where we like him can sit with sinners

But sometimes it seems we only go out for the saved

That we have built a house only for the saved

So lord we pray this simple prayer:

Lord help us go forth to the lost

Help us past the door and walls we have built

Lord help us see your mission for the lost

Help us see past social convention

Lord help us go in your name

Help us live out this going 

And let us make this simple pledged

I will go in the name of the Lord

I will leave behind the thing of man in the church

I will forsake mans wisdom

I will embrace only the wisdom of the lord

For out there are the people of God

For out there is my mission

For out there the lords has need of me

I pray Lord

Let this be said of me

That I did not live to go to the righteous, but to the sinner

That I went in the name of the lord

That I left what I knew and leapt towards what I did not

That I built a house for sinners, not just the saved 

Oos 9th of June

Order of service for 9^th of June 10:30

Hymn: Stf 51: Great is they faithfulness 

Call to worship: Galatians 1:3-5

Reading: 1 Samuel 1: 21-27

All age address:

Hymn: StF 424 God forgave my sin in Jesus’ name

Reading: Ephesians 1, 3-10

Reading Romans 12 1-2

Sermon:

Hymn: StF: 547 Beyond these walls of worship

Prayer of confession: Interactive

Prayer of thanksgiving for forgiveness

Hymn: StF: 565 Only by grace can we enter

Prayers of intercession

Lord's prayer

Offertory

Hymn: StF 553: I am a new creation

Dismal: Micah 6 8

prayer for passing glory

I stand surrounded by rubble.

Deserted, abandoned, left a remnant.

Alone, Lord I stand, naked against the wind

I am defenceless against the onslaught of barbed words

Day and night they mock you

Night and day they slander you

Without ceasing they mock your mercy

They call you gone; They say you are a lie

It feels that none can see you

It feels that none can heard you

It feels like the end

Do you still call lord?

Do you still call us?

Do you still love us?

Do you still love me?

Yet I still remain Lord

Disciple, sheep, faithful, remnant

I still stand here in your love and mercy

If I alone remain, your glory to fulfil

For you came and died for me

So I shall live for you.

I shall standalone if you call to me

I shall preach your glory is you ask it of me

I shall give my life lord if you but ask for it

I make this pledged to you lord:

Wherever I am lord you will have your church

 wherever I speak you will find your living word

 wherever I act in your name you will have your kingdom

200 words on Mrs T.

Ephesians 6: 14-17

In 1976 our country could not provide power for more than three days in a row, our rubbish entombed us and even our dead could find no rest. We had been forced to beg the IMF for funds and trade unions had brought down one out of two democratic government.

Who would pick take up the shield of faith and the sword of the Spirit and fight for the UK?  

Mrs T.

Mrs T first battle was with the unions, they had taken down government before but she was not for turning, she had the stomach for the fight.  Handbag in hand at the Battle of Orgreave she destroyed the N.U.M. and the dictatorial powers of the union barons.

She then had to defend British sovereignty; her first battle was over the Falklands, her second was against the USSR and her third was against a federal EU.  Two out of 3 is not bad.

Lastly she had to save British plc, she did this by empowering people to own homes, buy shares, start companies and trade internationally or even buy foreign currency.  She is responsible for the modern free Britain we all know 

Morning prayer - lost sheep

Lord I don’t speak as you would have me

I don’t speak out of fear of rejection

I don’t speak for fear of mockery

I don’t because I worry I may lose my faith in you.

I have seen other lose the light you gave them lord

I have seen them reject your holy grace

Am I so different?

I am so strong compared to those?

Am I lost sheep in waiting?

Yes I know you would never stop loving me

Yes I know you would never stop pursuing me

But what If I stopped loving you?

What if I ran from you lord?

My faith must be weak – I have these doubts

My faith must be small for I fear losing it

My faith must be useless for it has brought no one to you lord

See Lord I art weak and they art mighty

I am faithless and they art eternally faithful  

I am worthless they art beyond worth

So if you have some time keep an eye on me lord

Keep your hand on my shoulder

Keep your spirit in me

Don’t let me lose your herd

Don’t let your light go out in me

Do this for your love of me

Do this in your endless mercy

Do this because your strength never fails

Do this please lord

Do this 

Lay preaching

I volunteer as a lay preacher on trial for the Redding in Silchester Methodist circuit. I of course started out as a lay preacher note and only recently moved to the heady heights of on trial.

So the first and most obvious question is what is a lay preacher? A lay preacher is a non-ordained member of the congregation, who is allowed to take services. A lay preacher must be accepted by the local preachers meeting and they must preach at least three times a quarter.

What does on trial mean? The term note and on trial are stages a lay preacher must go through in order become a lay preacher proper. So unlike a full lay preacher, my services are reported on and also I have coursework to complete. This coursework is contained within the four folders that make up the Methodist faith and worship course which takes 2 to 3 years to complete.

So what does leading a service mean? Well essentially it means choosing the hymns and the readings for a particular service. The standard practice for the selection of readings is to select them from the appointed lectionary. The lectionary is a calendar of appointed readings.

The readings and the hymns make up the main body of what we call the “order of service”, in the OS there is normally: prayers of adoration prayers are confession and forgiveness prayers of intercession and of course the Lord’s prayer.

We must also prepare the two other preaching elements; there are the all age address and the sermon: the all age address is normally a more relaxed interaction with the congregation before the children dismissed. And the sermon is the 8 to 15 minute long talk given by the lay preacher.

So how does one write and all age address? All I only wish I knew, I have a very expensive book which gives me impossibly complicated suggestions. Those who know me know I’m not comfortable around children and yet they are the focus of all age address. So what can I do but rely on the Holy Spirit. I try against my nature to interact with the congregation and think of easy to organize things that they can volunteer to do. Above all I would have a single sentence which I try to get across. 

So how does one write a sermon? Are well dear reader, here the Lord has blessed me. As you may know I am dyslexic and to the use of written notes hold no attraction to me, so I make as I go along. This is by no means the easy option, it requires meditation on the readings, it requires faith in the Holy Spirit to guide me, and it requires belief in myself and God’s and his purpose in calling me to preach. As I write this I have no reason to doubt any of these, for the Lord has been good to me and is rewarded my faithfulness to his calling, with generally okay sermons.

Is all the work worth it? Yes a million times yes. I may feel like a right plum and the shake the hands of everyone as they leave but I would not stop preaching for the world. It is given me more time to spend with God, it allowed me to devote more of myself to God and it has allowed me to share the glory of God with others. Yes it is with its faults and its trials but Not Think in this life which is easy is worthwhile and when one labours with the Lord one does not labour in vain.

The sacramental church

Jesus said the end of days will come like is a thief in a night, we shall not know the appointed hour only the Lord God in heaven did. His advice was that we should prepare, that we should live and breathe for it, that the end of days was not something to be feared but celebrated. Celebrated because it was a day that the Lord and his creation will be joined together; the physical world and the spiritual world of the Lord thy God of Israel would at last be one.

The day of judgement did not come, the end of human history did not arrive on time, man’s reign upon this earth did not ebb but grew. As the kingdom of man grew so the kingdom of God shrank, firstly God’s spirit was replaced by man’s will via man’s Church. Then the authority of the holy Church itself was displaced by the authority of man’s kingdom aka the state and then God’s truth was replaced with man’s truth. Finally in these end days we see God’s wisdom replaced by the wisdom of man by humans and philosophy morality and science.

Who needs God any more in a world where miracle are replaced by medicine, when Gods singular truth is replaced with a plurality of ideas were all division is resolved into meaninglessness. What need do we have to adhere to the laws of Lord thy God of Israel when we have for the philosophy of the self of philosophy that asked nothing but self justifies and self glorifies the time of man.

So what of the church, this stinking falsehoods that dares to call itself the church, this rotted limb this insult to the glory of the gospel still exists but it does not exist in truth.  It exists only as an expression of the man. It exists only as an expression of community in which going to church is merely part of the process of life. Grace has been replaced by reason, miracles replaced by hermeneutics and the words of Jesus locked behind doors and buried, so can never rise again; and The church’s acts like a spiritual damn preventing and controlling any spiritual faith that could threaten the reign of man.

It is replaced the choir of angels, the celestial throne of God, the wisdom of the disciples, the suffering and the striving of the first Church with bureaucracy and paperwork and man’s law. As a Methodist I get a ticket of membership to show that I am a member of the church. A ticket! Seems the Methodist church has long since accepted it is empty but for the show, more historical re-enactment then faith, more society then church, more man than God. We have abandoned God, we are buried beneath ourselves.

We do worse than this we reject God we deny him we question his word, his wisdom, we have usurped his throne and put ourselves upon it. We find it odd that anyone would perish for God, that anyone would be moved by him. How could anyone see anything beyond our endless repetition of what was, how could anyone find meaning in our historical Society. We are not here for the faithful, we are here to contain them, we not here for the Lord thy God, we are simply here to ensure that the stone never roll from the tomb so he can never rise again.

This ever since the church entered into a covenant of man it has been meaningless but the kingdom man has grown so great so beyond the kingdom of God that the church serves no purpose anymore. The kingdom of man has no rival any more than is no one challenging for its crown; For even if the end of time came it would merely rate and mention on the third page of the newspapers whilst everyone gossiped on about some celebrity scandal.

So what of us who really do believe in the Lord thy God, those of us betrayed and imprisonment by man’s Church? While we must continue in our belief, we must continue to reject a world where man pretends to sit on the throne of the father; we must never mistake the son for the father. We must wait and wait and believe and believe we must not weep for the church and sold its soul centuries ago. When it was tempted by the devil, with the devil took it to the highest mount and showed all the kingdoms of the Earth and offered it Dominion over them the church took the knee and submitted to Earth authority.

We must give up this fake corrupted church, sacrifice to the world of man as a sacrament of confession and a sign of our contrition. I tell you brothers and sisters nail it to the cross, forsake it, abandon it, and weep not for it: for in this sacrifice it may finally achieve something meaningful, it may finally be worthy of its inheritance. It is time for the church to make way for the kingdom of God, it is time for the Church of man to die and the church of God to rise up from the tomb and be brought into the world.

Let us keep faith then. A faith in a church is not controlled by man, that a church which embraces and lives the gospel of Christ is coming, let us keep faith that the spirit will establish it and work towards this end of days. In the meantime let us be God’s church, let us reject the wisdom of man, and let us this reject man’s truth and his fads and obsession. We should join with the Angel in heaven they alone are our world, the Lord our God of Israel alone is our monarch. We will be rejected, will be mocked we will be derided but we will be a sacrament to God; Worthy of his divinity, worth of his mercy and worthy of the sacrifice of Christ but knowing that it is only in the mercy of Christ that we are redeemed.