Authentic Jesus 5/10 | Mark 2:18-3:6 | Nat Charles

Mark 2:18-3:6 & Leviticus 23:26-32

Part of a series about the authentic Jesus.

This week: have we missed the point of our religion? These passages show how that leads to an absence of joy, missing the purposes of God and ultimately wanting Jesus dead.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting in person and on Zoom.

Authentic Jesus 4/10 | Mark 2:1-17 | Nigel Beynon

Mark 2 v1-17

Part of a series about the authentic Jesus.

This week: how sin is our deepest problem, but Jesus has come to solve it. Recognising we are sinners and need His forgiveness is how we become Christians, and also how we stay Christians.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting in person and on Zoom. Apologies, no video this week due to a technical glitch.

Authentic Jesus 3/10 | Mark 1:29-45 | Nat Charles

Mark 1 v29-45

Part of a series about the authentic Jesus.

This week: What king Jesus has come to do - he comes with power and authority to heal, but he primarily comes to preach good news of the kingdom of God. Will we listen?

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom.

Authentic Jesus 2/10 | Mark 1:14-28 | Nat Charles

Mark 1 v14-28

Part of a series about the authentic Jesus.

This week: Christianity is a message of good news - repent and believe! We also see Jesus' supreme authority, both then and now.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom.

Authentic Jesus 1/10 | Mark 1:1-13 | Nat Charles

Mark 1 v1-13

Part of a series about the authentic Jesus.

In this first sermon in our Mark series, Nat Charles preaches about the essence of the Gospel. It is about a person, who is the fulfillment of Old Testament promises, who comes to offer forgiveness and to bless the world.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom. With apologies, the recording picked up two microphones so the audio is echoey.

Let Justice Roll 5/5 - Amos 9:1-4, 11-15 - Nigel Beynon

Amos 9:1-4, 11-15

Part of a series on the book of Amos.

This week: In this final sermon in our series in Amos, Nigel Beynon helps us to see how inescapable God's judgement is without Jesus, and how the New Creation God promises through Jesus is everything we've ever dreamed of.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Let Justice Roll 4/5 - Amos 6:1-8, 7:1-8:2 - Nat Charles

Amos 4/5

Part of a series on the book of Amos.

This week: Nat Charles shows us how the men of Israel in Amos' day had become complacent and proud - their foundations were ruined. Amos speaks to God about the people, praying for God to forgive and relent. Amos also speaks to the people about God, but he recieves an unexpected response. Nat calls us to question: will we listen to and obey the word of the Lord? Will we repent when our sin is exposed? And will we pray for those who are lost?

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Let Justice Roll 3/5 - Amos 5 - Nat Charles

Amos 3/5

Part of a series on the book of Amos.

This week: Nat Charles shows us the urgent invitation from God to seek Him, the warning not to mistake seeking God for seeking religion, and that true worship should result in transformed lives.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Let Justice Roll 2/5 - Amos 3:1-8 & 4:1-13 - Nat Charles

Amos 3:1-8 & 4:1-13

Part of a series on the book of Amos.

This week: Nat Charles talks to us about the demands of love and the call to return.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Poverty and Wealth - Proverbs 30:7-9 & Luke 12:13-21 - Nat Charles

Proverbs 30:7-9 & Luke 12:13-21

A talk about Poverty and Wealth for SBD’s Giving Sunday, 17 Jan 2021

TRANSCRIPT

17.1.2021

 Welcome to SBD.

Today is an unusual Sunday for us. We’ve decided to set today aside to talk about giving. About giving our money and giving our time.

What I’d like to do is this. I want us to spend most of our time thinking about the prayer of Proverbs Chapter 30, before briefly setting out our context here at St Barnabas.

But as we start, if you are here today as a visitor, if St Barnabas isn’t your church community, please do feel free to ignore the specific requests that I make about money later on. If you are a visitor, and particularly if you wouldn’t call yourself a Christian, let me say really clearly as we start, that we don’t want your money. We’d love you to think about exploring who Jesus is – and if you have questions about how to do that, please be in touch with me on the Zoom chat, or get in touch after the service.

But, whoever you are, please don’t ignore what God has to say about money in Proverbs 30. I want us to look at the two parts of the prayer, but spending more time on the second.

THE PERIL OF POVERTY

First, the wise person prays that they won’t experience poverty.

In the Bible, poverty means not having food, clothing, or shelter. It’s what we would call destitution. And the wise person prays that they would be protected from that.

The reason is given in Vs 9 –that poverty would understandably drive people to extreme actions, like theft, and in so doing bring dishonour to the name of God.

Poverty is much in the news at the moment. It’s been clear throughout the Pandemic that the risks and burden of Covid have been much greater for those in our country who are poor. If you are poor, you are more likely to have underlying health complications that would make contracting Covid much more threatening. You are more likely to live in poor quality, overcrowded housing without access to a garden. You are less likely to be able to work from home, or access any online provision made available by local schools. Writing in the FT a few months ago, Anjana Ahuja put it like this, ‘This crisis has broadly separated us into the exposed poor and the shielded rich.’

The Bible is unsentimental and realistic about poverty. So the wise person prays that they won’t become destitute. It’s not a prayer that God always answers. There are many Christians around the world today who don’t have enough.

But in our context, nobody here is poor as the Bible understands it.

THE RISK OF WEALTH

So why not pray for riches? Why not pray to win the lottery, or that our share option will skyrocket?

According to Proverbs, the wise person prays for no more than what they need. They pray, in effect ‘no more pay rises, I have enough’, because they recognise the hidden danger of wealth. It’s there, again, in Vs 9. If I have too much, I may disown you and say ‘Who is the Lord?’

Let me put it really explicitly like this – if you or I have more than we need for food or for clothes, we will be tempted to walk away from God.

Stated like that of course, it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that any of us would see ourselves doing. But praying this prayer puts us in an uncomfortable position. If we have more than we need, what will we do with it?

Let me try to outline practically some of the ways in which our wealth might adversely affect our walk with the Lord.

-       First, prayer might become an optional extra. Of course, we all know about the importance and privilege of prayer. But if we’re wealthy, how much will we really see our utter dependence upon God in prayer?

Let me put it like this, how many of prayed this morning ‘Give us, today, our daily bread’? Our relative wealth means that we can simply assume we will have what we need. And in that position, it’s much harder to retain our spiritual life and commitment. If prayer is an optional extra, rather than the beating heart of our lives, it might just be that our wealth has acted like a fire blanket that dampens our dependence on God.

-       Second, we might find that our conscience becomes a tiring irritant. We are all very good at rationalising our behaviour, especially to other people. Whether we want other people to think that we are wealthier than we are, or poorer than we really are, we all think that we know how to do it. How to present ourselves in a certain that we fits with a perception we’re trying to create.

We can pretend to others that we are being wise with our wealth, but the person we find it hardest to convince that we have used our wealth wisely, is our self. That inner voice of conscience might become a tiring irritant if our wealth is displacing God in our lives.

-       Third, we may come to resent other people in our lives. Especially needy people, or our church community. If we value or wealth more than anything else, and we feel that it’s threatened by the presence of other people in our lives, we’ll simply end up trying to avoid those people. And we won’t serve the people that God brings in to our lives, as we might have done.

-       So lastly, and most seriously, to disown God makes us fools in God’s sight. The story of the rich farmer in Luke 12 makes that really clear.

The story is not designed to belittle wealth. Every society needs people who create wealth, like the man in this story. A successful business is a good thing – it should bring prosperity and wealth not just to one individual, but to all those involved in it, and to the wider society.

But this man is a fool in God’s sight, because his life is his business. He knows, doesn’t he, that there is more to life than his wealth. But, next year. And then, it never comes. So he has devoted his life to something that he will never enjoy. And God’s verdict is ‘you fool’.

Friends, there’s much more that the Bible says about money than I have covered here. We could talk about the need to provide for your family. The need to save wisely for later life so we don’t burden others unnecessarily, the requirement to settle our debts.

But before a brief word on our situation at St Barnabas, let me just say this. Today is not primarily about fixing our financial pressures. Today is actually about our spiritual health. And the prayer of Proverbs 30 is an invitation to spiritual sanity – to be honest with ourselves and honest with God about the material resources with which we’ve been entrusted.

And my prayer for you, my hope for you, is that you won’t pass up the opportunity. On one level, I don’t really care whether you give to St Barnabas. Don’t get me wrong – I’m going to ask you to. But even if you never give St Barnabas a penny, if you are persuaded that there is more important Kingdom work taking place elsewhere that you want to support, I hope that you will make the prayer of Proverbs 30 your own, and be honest with yourself about your wealth.

SBD CONTEXT

Let me say something briefly then, about St Barnabas.

The first thing to say is that I don’t know who gives what. If I had to guess, I would guess that some of us give more than we can manage. Some probably don’t give at all, and most of us have been giving something for a few years, without giving it too much thought.

Wherever you are in that mix, can I ask you to make some time this week to review your giving. Set aside an evening to pray and review.

As you may know, our context is that since last April, our hall hire income has been greatly reduced. There are no hires happening at the moment, and we don’t know if and when they will resume. So we are expecting that this year, we will have a deficit of about £35,000 in our budget. Some of that deficit we can cover with our reserves and some of it we can cover by reducing our costs. All staff, apart from me, are now on furlough.

But we would also like to cover some of it through our giving. A 10% increase in giving across the congregation between now and August, would cover around £5,000 of that deficit. As you review this week, could I ask you to increase your giving by 10%?

For some of us, that might be an impossibility. Some of us will have been hit hard financially by Covid. And if that’s you, what I actually want to say is, if you need financial help from the church, we’d like to make it available to you – the 6:10 fund that we have in place to assist those facing hard circumstances is available.

But, for others, it might be that Covid means you are spending much less than you otherwise would and it might be that you could commit to an increase of more than 10%.

But, wherever you are on that scale, can I ask you to make some time this week to pray, and to review?

Let Justice Roll 1/5 - Amos 1:1-8, 2:6-16 - Nat Charles

Amos 1:1-8, 2:6-16

Part of a series on the book of Amos.

This week: In our first sermon in our new series, Nat Charles shows us aspects of God's character revealed in the opening chapters of Amos. The LORD is the God who speaks, the God of the nations, and the God of Israel, who cares more about justice than we do.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Complete in Christ 9/9 - Colossians 4:2-18 - Nat Charles

Colossians 4:2-18

Part of a series on the letter to the Colossians.

This week: What does it look like to live as those who are seated with Christ in the heavenly realms? We are to be devoted to prayer, ready to speak, and aware of the people with us. NB Due to a quirk of Zoom, there is only a small video of Nat this week. This will be fixed by next week.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom and in person. See our Sundays page for details.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Complete in Christ 8/9 - Colossians 3:15-4:1 - Nat Charles

Colossians 3:15-4:1

Part of a series on the letter to the Colossians.

This week: how our identity in Christ shapes our lives. We think about how being seated with Christ in the heavenly realms affects our church life and our home life. Unfortunately the camera stopped working half way through so this is predominantly an audio file this week.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom and in person. See our Sundays page for details.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Complete in Christ 7/9 - Colossians 3:5-14 - Nat Charles

Colossians 3:5-14

Part of a series on the letter to the Colossians.

This week: See how identity drives behaviour; as those who are in Christ, we put to death our old attitudes and behaviours and put on Christ-like attitudes and behaviours. No video of Nat this week due to Zoom camera issues.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom and in person. See our Sundays page for details.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Complete in Christ 6/9 - Colossians 3:1-4 - Nat Charles

Colossians 3:1-4

Part of a series on the letter to the Colossians.

This week: Paul tells us that to grow as Christians, we must remember that we have died and been raised with Christ, and thus set our minds on things above.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom and in person. See our home page for details.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Complete in Christ 5/9 - Colossians 2:16-23 - Nat Charles

Colossians 2:16-23

Part of a series on the letter to the Colossians.

This week: We only need Jesus. Growth does not depend on empty ritual, empty experience or empty rules.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom and in person. See our home page for details.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Complete in Christ 4/9 - Colossians 2:6-15 - Nat Charles

Colossians 2:6-15

Part of a series on the letter to the Colossians.

This week: Christians grow in the same way that trees do: by remaining rooted in the same place, in Jesus.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom and in person. See our home page for details.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Complete in Christ 3/9 - Colossians 1:24-2:5 - Nat Charles

Colossians 1:24-2:5

Part of a series on the letter to the Colossians.

This week: We can trust the message preached by the apostle Paul, because he was prepared to suffer for it.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom and in person. See our home page for details.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Complete in Christ 2/9 - Colossians 1:15-23 - Nat Charles

Colossians 1:15-23

Part of a series on the letter to the Colossians.

This week: We are complete in Christ, add something and you lose it all.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow

Complete in Christ 1/9 - Colossians 1:1-14 - Nat Charles

Colossians 1:1-14

Part of a series on the letter to the Colossians.

This week: Jesus is all, he is sufficient for spiritual growth.

Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom.

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TRANSCRIPT to follow