Walking on Water!!

At our Saturday prayer meeting one of our group brought along a pictue he had painted of Peter walking on(or sinking in)the water. A theme emerged for me of keeping our eyes on Jesus which inspired me to talk about Peter and the work of the Holy Spirit in his life on Sunday at Ashley. I was struck again by the way a man of such mixed temperament could be used so significantly by God - weaknesses and all.

There is encouragment here for us all. It is matter of stepping out and being used in the way that God sees fit. Peter was still struggling with his own Jewishness and what others thought of him after years of ministry (read Galations 2 - in the Message is powerful). I believe it was the tension between Peter and Paul that was a major factor, used by the Holy Spirit, to create the basis of the early church in all its wonder and freedom (possible in all its failures and sqabbles too !!).

The PowerPoint of the talk including the picture are included below.

Being a better friend

This morning we continued our look at men and women of the bible with a study of Barnabas and a look at how we can follow his example to be better friends this year. With all that is going on in the world and therefore in people's lives I guess people will want good friends this year. We can be there for each other and new people we meet. The presentation belwo follows Barnabas's appearances in Acts and suggests some things to think about if you want to read my notes follow this link

Christmas Reflections

Slightly after Christmas but the reflections, all specially written for our Christams Service, are really worth another read. Click here

For unto you a child is born

We wish you a Merry Christmas

Christmas reflections - community

Not having visited the blog for a while for various reasons I was very excited to see that we had passed 1000 hits and when you look at the map we are being visited by people from all around the globe. Though there may be many disadvantages to the interent there are also a great many advantages too. One of these being that we can share our experience of God with a world wide community.
So I would like to wish all our readers and visitors to this blog a very happy Christmas and my prayer is that what we share on our blog will help people to deepen their relationship with God, and as always I would invite anyone visiting our blog to say hello and tell us a bit of your experiences of God so we can all share in the wonderful things God is doing around our world.

Our greatest need.

If our greatest need was for information,
God would have sent an educator.
If our greatest need was for technology,
God would have sent a scientist.
If our greatest need was for pleasure,
God would have sent an entertainer.
If our greatest need was for money,
God would have sent an economist.
But since our greatest need was for forgiveness,
God sent a saviour.

I came across this today. I liked the image of God, looking at us and noticing that what we needed was not someone to come and teach us how to do things properly, but someone to come and forgive us for ever for the things we get wrong.

Advent reflection

I came across this again as I started to do some advent reading and was reminded of what this time of year should be about - discovering Christ in those we meet and reflecting Christ to those we meet.

Advent should admonish us to discover
In each brother or sister that we greet,
In each friend whose hand we shake,
In each beggar who asks for bread,
In each worker who wants to use the right to join a union,
In each peasant who looks for work in the coffee groves,
The face of Christ.

Then it would not be possible to rob them,
To cheat them,
To deny them their rights.

They are Christ,
And whatever is done to them
Christ will take as done to himself.

This is what Advent is:
Christ living among us.

Oscar Romer (1917-80)