Explore, Ottery St Mary Parish Church
Heal my heart and make it clean
Open up my eyes to the things unseen
Show me how to love like you have loved me
Break my heart for what breaks yours
Everything I am for your kingdom’s cause
As I walk from earth into eternity
Hosanna in the Highest, Hillsong
Image from UCB.co.uk.
A few weeks ago Lauren Daigle re-worked this song, originally from her first album.
This is a favourite new song from songwriter Matt Redman, Mercies (New Every Morning), recorded Live last year at Trafalgar Square.
Written last year by Matt Redman, Colby Taylor, DK Kim, May Angeles and Edith McNeill. You might recognise Edith McNeill’s The Steadfast Love of the Lord, which was used by permission.
In every season this I know:
Your goodness like the dawn will break again
All Your mercies rising
In this heart again
And my soul begins to sing…
A song we enjoy singing at Explore.
You will make all things new,
Until You do we choose to trust in You
Esther-Jane White, Jamie Thomson © 2019 Bespoke Records Ltd., info@bespokerecords.com
Put God in charge of your work,
Proverbs 16:3, The Message
then what you’ve planned will take place.
Image from Corbrandco, http://www.pinterest.com/corbrandco/pins.
Supply and demand have been inverted. In the past, there was a high demand for preaching, but finding a decent sermon was a hard task (you may have to travel for miles). Nowadays, a huge number of brilliant sermons can be downloaded and streamed online, and yet in our increasingly secular culture, the cultural demand for preaching is at an all time low. In this article from Premier Christianity magazine, Church leader Skye Jethani outlines the dilemma and proposes a possible solution.
I am a preacher. For hundreds of years my craft was in high demand. People travelled inconvenient distances to hear my sermons, they paid for my training so I could improve my skill, and they sacrificed to supply me time and space to study and write my weekly monologues.
But now the forces of modernity and technology have conspired against me. Seemingly overnight the conditions that made my vocation valuable have disappeared. I feel like a lamplighter at the dawn of the 20th Century, watching the cold glow of Edison’s lights replace the warm flicker of flames across my city. People still need light, just not mine.
Continue reading “Skye Jethani: The case against sermon-centric Sundays”
Now may God, the inspiration and fountain of hope, fill you to overflowing with uncontainable joy and perfect peace as you trust in him. And may the power of the Holy Spirit continually surround your life with his super-abundance until you radiate with hope!
Romans 15:13, The Passion Translation
Here is Lauren Daigle singing her song Your Wings, recorded during Lockdown.
Faith, according to Laura Story, is surrendering to God. This is how we begin “to know the fullness of my Father’s heart.” The song is full of theology and bears repeated listening.
Go ahead and give God thanks
Psalm 105:1, The Passion Translation
for all the glorious things he has done!
Image from UCB.co.uk.
