Andrew mentioned the book ‘The Shack’ in passing during the sermon on Sunday night. For a thoughtful and helpful analysis of some of the failings of ‘The Shack’, have a look at Tim Challies’ extended review, available here:

 http://www.challies.com/media/The_Shack.pdf

 

[He also writes a thoughtful blog at www.challies.com, and reviews Christian books at www.discerningreader.com]

Fear not! Intheshadow hasn’t gone quiet, we’re just planning the next reflection to be on the whole sermon series that we’ve just had on John 5 from William Taylor over the last four Sundays. If you need reminding what he said, the download links are on this page:

http://sthelens.audiop.org.uk/search/series/4247

The Work of the Son – 4/01/09
The World of the Son – 11/01/09
The Word of the Son – 18/01/09
Witness to the Son – 25/01/09

Here’s a good one: why not resolve at the start of this year to get your personal Bible reading sorted into something more regular and patterned? If, like me, you haven’t always got this nailed, take a look at:

http://www.esv.org/biblereadingplans

They have a great range of options including the McCheyne calendar – a plan of Bible readings that can take you through the Old Testament once and the NT and Psalms twice in a year (or two years, depending on how much you want to read per day).

You can set it to email you the passages each day, or look at them on the web, or even download an iCal version or get it via RSS (for the geekies amongst us).

There’s nothing more helpful in reading and studying the Bible than to have read it all through before, and be getting more and more familiar with the ‘whole counsel of God’ – just imagine in five years time how much better off we’ll be as a church if we’ve all read the whole Bible two or three times through between now and then!

Tom

Well, now it’s well and truly Carol Service season, we’re taking a break from sermon reflections over December. Your feedback on how the blog has gone in it’s first term would be really appreciated. Is it being used? Is it helping with your own reflections on what has been preached here at St Helens? Let us know in your comments.

However, there’ll still be occasional posts over Christmas on related topics. Like this…

A team of St Helens people have put together this short film on the real meaning of Christmas with particular focus on the historical events behind that first Christmas. There’s an interview with Paul Barnett, an expert in the historical reliability of the New Testament, and the whole thing is very well put together.

Do go to the web page and share it on Facebook, post it on delicious and get it out there on the web in whatever social network you use. It’s at www.st-helens.org.uk/xmas. Or watch it below.

Sunday 3rd December
Ephesians 3

Have you ever begged God to make you strong enough to understand how much he loves you? That was the challenge Ephesians 3 raised for me. Good question.

I do pray that God would help me to understand his word, I pray that a friend of mine might come to know him, I pray when I’m anxious he might help me not to worry…but how much do I actually pray he would help me understand that he loves me?

I know God loves me, but do I know that in the depths of my heart? When I think about this question it strikes me that I know a lot about God’s love in my head, but it doesn’t always hit home in my heart. If I received a love letter from someone really amazing and valuable (…like the creator of the world?!) surely it would affect my every desire, thought, will or decision.

If I’m honest, sometimes the idea of God loving me seems quite abstract. When I come to Ephesians, it all seems a lot to take in. All this talk about plans for the fullness of time, uniting all things under one head. What does that all mean? Why is that so great? Plus I can’t sit around and think about ideas of love when I have things to get on with – job applications, RML to prep, dinners to organise, Facebook messages to reply to (okay now I’m stretching it…)

No wonder I need prayer. And that’s the amazing thing. God’s love is so great it’s beyond our ability to comprehend it on our own. We need all the super spiritual strength we can get to help us understand it. Paul prays for the Ephesians that they would have just this i.e. all help of the Holy Spirit and Jesus working in their hearts to help them understand the breadth and length and height and depth of Jesus’ love for them.

As I pray and think about the letter of the Ephesians some of it starts to fall into place. We are part of God’s masterpiece – his church united in Jesus. We were chosen by him even before the universe was created. We were predestined adopted, redeemed. We are part of one of the greatest love stories ever – centred on his Son & his church. Mind blowing stuff.

I need super spiritual strength to understand this. I’m keen to pray for this strength as I’m short-sighted without his help. I also need discipline too as I need to sit down and think and pray properly though what we have been learning. Amazing to think God can help us understand “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge”.

Jacqui Mantle

In the Heavenly Places (6)
Charlie Skrine

Download: http://sthelens.audiop.org.uk/search/talk/51357

Sunday 23rd November
Ephesians 2:11-22

 

Once again the alarm rings to signal the start of another day. Groggily you turn to switch it off, and go back to sleep finding out that when you finally do wake up you’ve massively overslept and you don’t quite have time to study the bible, or pray; thanking God for what he’s done. Burn out seems to be a large problem among many followers of Jesus Christ – with many people giving up the Christian life, or just going lukewarm; compromising with the world in the way we work and, relax.

It wasn’t always that way, do you remember the first time you properly understood the gospel? The joy that at one point never seemed to cease, every moment of life appeared full of opportunities to see the amazing works of the Father through the Son. Every time you opened up the Bible, it spoke to you about the amazing gifts and hope you have through Christ. Nothing about why we were so excited has changed? God still speaks to us in his word. The promises are still the same. So what has changed? Is it that, like the Ephesians we’ve lost our first love (Rev 2v4)?

Paul’s encouragement to the Ephesians is to remember just how horrible and hopeless that former life was, and the reconciliation that Christ had achieved through the cross. Looking back certainly does change your perspective on life again. The amazing reconciliation that Christ has bought by his blood is something that completely takes my breath away. It’s amazing that we have the ability to approach the awesome, powerful, and holy God in prayer and call him father. That instead of anger and wrath for our sins, we will have an inheritance the will never perish spoil or fade. That we as the Church are being united together to praise God both here and in the new creation.

These amazing gifts are true because God tells me so in his word, and meets me when I pray to him. Yet the temptation for me as someone who is embedded in the English culture is to then set up a series of rules to try and help me remember. As good, and helpful as those things are I’m not convinced that the person who does all those things will still have their first love. Instead they are a response to the great work already done by God (Father, Son and Spirit). We need to beware of a legalistic attempt to justify ourselves, in order to re-kindle that exact same feeling. Our approach should be that we go to the bible and pray because of what God has said and done; meeting Him as someone fully humbled by the awareness of where he has come from and feeling totally inadequate without God.

Praise God for his immeasurable goodness and mercy to those who are lost without Him!

Marcus Leiwe

 

In the Heavenly Places (5)
Charlie Skrine

Download: http://sthelens.audiop.org.uk/search/talk/51354

Sunday 16th November
Ephesians 2:1-10

 

Picture salvation as a house that you live in. It provides you with protection.
It is stocked with food and drink that will last forever. It never decays
or crumbles. Its windows open onto vistas of glory. God built it at great cost
to himself and to his Son, and he gave it to you. The “purchase” agreement
is called a “new covenant.” The terms read: “This house shall become and
remain yours if you will receive it as a gift and take delight in the Father and
the Son as they inhabit the house with you”…
 

…Would it not be foolish to say yes to this agreement, and then hire a
lawyer to draw up some kind of schedule with monthly payments in the
hopes of somehow balancing accounts? You would be treating the house no
longer as a gift, but a purchase. God would no longer be the free benefactor.
And you would be enslaved to a new set of demands that he never dreamed
of putting on you. If grace is to be free—which is the very meaning of
grace—we cannot view it as something to be repaid.
 

John Piper

 

From ‘A Foe to Faith in Future Grace’, available online at http://www.desiringgod.org/media/pdf/books_bfg/bfg_all.pdf

 

[Any one else been thinking of Tom Skrine and his guitar prayers this week? ]

 

 
In the Heavenly Places (4)
Charlie Skrine

 
Outline:

I’d like to thank my agent…

1. Before

2. After

3. Whodunnit?

Download:http://sthelens.audiop.org.uk/search/talk/51348

Sunday 9th November
Ephesians 1:15-23
 

“How’s your prayer life?” is either the best or the worst sentence to start a sermon with. It can either strike such fear into my heart that I sit up and listen or I panic and starting mentally counting, “I was at the prayer supper, my quiet times on Thursday and Friday were good, and I’ve been following the advice William gave us.”

Fortunately, if the question is chased by a couple of well placed follow-up questions, then I’m back on track. Such as, asking what I pray about, and querying what (if anything) I pray when everything is going well. Because the truth is, I’m most likely to fire off an “arrow” prayer, “Lord, please help X with the exam.” But when things are going well, and X has passed? A little thanksgiving, maybe, if I remember.

So we are brought neatly to Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians. I know about heaven but do I know it in my heart, do I yearn for it? In my dark hours and sleepless nights, I really do, but is that just a longing to be “anywhere, anywhere but here”?

And what about Christ’s Lordship, that all are subject to Him, “under his feet”? Do I live as if it is real? Do I pray that I, and those I know, would truly see, with more than our physical eyes? That we would see more than words on a page and see instead, with our spiritual eyes?

This week, will my life be any different because of the certain hope of heaven and the truth that God has put ALL Christ’s enemies under his feet, or will I be as scared as ever of man’s approval? I don’t know yet, but I am praying that it will be.

Beckie Akroyd

 

 

 

In the Heavenly Places (3)
Andrew Sach

 
Outline: [to come soon]

 
Download: http://sthelens.audiop.org.uk/search/talk/51345

 

Here’s the Jonathan Edwards quote from Andrew’s sermon yesterday:
 

There is a distinction to be made between a mere notional understanding, wherein the mind only beholds things in the exercise of a speculative faculty; and the sense of the heart, wherein the mind not only speculates and beholds, but relishes and feels. That sort of knowledge, by which a man has a sensible perception of amiableness and loathsomeness, or of sweetness and nauseousness, is not the same sort of knowledge with that, by which he knows what a triangle or a square is. The one is mere speculative knowledge; the other sensible, knowledge, in which more than the mere
intellect is concerned. The heart is the proper subject of it, or the soul, as a being that not only beholds, but has inclination, and is pleased or displeased. And yet there is the nature of instruction in it; as he that has perceived the sweet taste of honey, knows much more about it, than he who has only looked upon and felt it.

 
Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections

 

You can read the whole section, which is all about spiritual sight, on the web at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/affections.vi.iii.html

How’s that spiritual sight helping this week? Four eyes better than two?

Sunday 26th October
Ephesians 1:1-10

 

A few weeks ago my housemate built me a bed from scratch. It’s amazing – a bed 5 ft off the ground, with sliding shirt hangers underneath, and all from a few blocks of wood and some hardboard from a skip. I was seriously chuffed and the week after he made it I couldn’t stop banging on about it.

So there you go – it’s not that I’m not a praising kind of person. It might not be Tottenham that does it for me, but give me a new bed or three points to the Hammers and I’ll be waxing lyrical. But ‘bless God’? Hmm. Do I? I’d even estimate 90% of the time I sing praise songs in church I’m not actually mindfully thankful.

I was chatting the other night with a friend and we quickly reached the conclusion we’re both really unthankful to God when it comes to day-to-day life. So today I’ve been trying to think about my day with the reality-specs on, knowing that God has given me every good thing in it and therefore being thankful to God for the great time with a friend, the pleasure of the Mars Bar milkshake, a productive morning at work. The ‘what are you thankful to God for?’ question is one we’ll definitely start asking each other. But Sachy showed us Ephesians 1 is about more than just that; Paul grounds his praises to God with the reasoning that he ‘has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing’. And then it’s bam-bam-bam.

On Monday morning I thought about some of the particular blessings Paul says God has lavished upon us… all of them are blessings – they’re things that God has given to us because we are included in Jesus, because we’re Christians. We talk about ‘not deserving them’, but I realized how easily I pass over the reality of that in my emotions. The whole shebang of Paul’s super-sentence (1v3-14) is the heart and soul of being a Christian. And it’s all stuff that I don’t and can’t have any natural claim on – being chosen, being made God’s child, forgiveness of sin… it’s all complete unmerited gift. And so I found the refrain in v6 and v14 a really great way to anchor my prayers and prompt me to being glad – ‘to the praise of his glorious grace’. To complement that I’ve found a few songs all about praising God to ‘sing’ along to on the old mp3 player as I walk to work, keeping in mind God’s gracious inclusion of me in his plan.

This has started to help me bridge the gap between knowing logically it’s a good thing to be ‘in Christ’, or articulating the goodness of the gospel when I’m chatting to someone who’s not a believer, and then actually knowing these blessings and realizing the goodness of being included in this plan so that I’m actively praising God. Its gonna take lots of adjusting my eyes to the Ephesians 1 planetarium and its gonna take questions from my Christian mates, but I’m praying that my thankfulness for all that I have in Jesus will remain long after the novelty of a new bed has faded.

Robin Ham

 
 
 

In the Heavenly Places (1)
Andrew Sach

Outline

Bless God?

Bless God who has blessed us in Christ (v3)

           – He chose us to be holy and blameless (v4)

           – He predestined us to be adopted as his children (v5)

           – We have redemption through his blood
                     the forgiveness of our trespasses (v7-8)

           – He made known to us the mystery of his will,
                     to unite all things under Christ (vv9-10)

So Bless God! (v3, 6, 14)

Download: http://sthelens.audiop.org.uk/search/talk/51257