Talks, Sermons and Reflections

2 Peter 1.1-4 How precious is your faith? What is precious to you? A person, home, freedom, career, possession, a ring! Peter writes here of his faith as being something that is precious. 1. It is precious because it is the gift of God Notice how he writes, ‘To those who through the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours’ (v1) Our faith is gift. If there were no Jesus, if he had not come from heaven to be born as a human being, if there had been no sacrificial death on the cross, no resurrection – then there could be no Christian faith. And God has done it all. We did nothing to deserve life; we did nothing to deserve God’s mercy; we did nothing to deserve God’s forgiveness or acceptance; we did nothing to deserve the fact that God calls us his friends, or that God pours out on us his Holy Spirit, or that God gives us the hope of eternal life. I don’t know whether you think the same way as me. But at about

1 Corinthians 12.1-13 listen to ‘on spiritual gifts and speaking in tongues’ on audioBoom We are looking for the next few weeks at 1 Corinthians 12 – 14 and at spiritual gifts. Paul does not want us to be ‘uninformed’ about the gifts 1. He begins this chapter by speaking of the heart of the spiritual person. 1 Cor 12.1 literally says ‘And now concerning the spiritual (people, gifts, things)’ People talk a great deal about being spiritual. It can mean that they are into yoga or dowsing or Gregorian chant or angels or they claim to be particularly sensitive or open to the world beyond our senses. But that is not what Paul understands here as spiritual. At the centre of the true spiritual person is a heart that worships Jesus Christ as Lord (v3). What we have here is a line. At one end are those people who declare that Jesus is cursed. They look at the Jesus Christ who we read about in the bible, [they see one who allowed himself to be crucified in love for s

Luke 7.1-10 [ If the service is in the context of an all age gathering, the following may be appropriate. In our story Jesus finds something in an unexpected place.  I've hidden 5 boxes in the church (each box has letter of the word 'faith' on it. One of boxes needs to be in an unexpected place. When they are all together get children to work out what the word is) Rhiannon found love in a hopeless place!  Jesus found faith in an unexpected place] 'I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith'  Jesus is looking for people with faith. He looks for faith in the place where he would expect to find it. Of course that would be in the people who God chose to be his own people - the people of Israel. They were the people chosen by God to be His people all those many years before. They were the people who had seen God act time and time again to rescue them. They were the people who had been given the great promises of God an