No.22 - A bible feast

9 Bible studies, 2 talks, 1 interview and God's eternal promises.

Verse of the Week

I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.

Genesis Ch7:6-7

What breathtaking verses. God made such mind-blowing promises to Abram. This week, I have found it so wonderful to see how God really does want a relationship with humans. And he doesn't want a distant relationship; he wants a relationship full of blessings where he is our God forever. And we can be confident that this is not a fleeting desire by God. God was so passionate about blessing us, being our God and staying faithful to his promises that he came to earth to die for us. What an incredible reality, the God of the universe desiring and enabling sinful, selfish humans to live forever with him as their God.

Encouragements

This week, as a church, we have been aiming to reduce the unnecessary secular media that we consume and spend more time directing our minds towards God and his word. This has been really wonderful. As we mentioned last week, we were excited about this but also a bit nervous about whether we would have the energy to meet up with all the people we had planned to. Thank you so much for your prayer, by God's grace I was able to go to 9 bible studies this week. It has been a real privilege to open God's word with lots of different members of our church family over the last week.

I also had the joy of giving a talk on Colossians Ch1:24-2:5 at my TEAM Bible course in Cambridge. I found it so encouraging to think about how important Christ is and how keeping our minds fixed on him can help us from worrying due to losing sight of the new creation.

Later in the week, I got to travel to London for an interview with St Helens to talk about the possibility of pursuing future ministry training. It was a joy to spend some time in London and I am always encouraged by the passion St Helen's has for the bible and for training people to understand and share it. It was also an encouragement to reflect on how over the last year God has increased my passion for spending as much of my life as possible sharing his word and serving his church.

There have been many encouragements this week, but one more that stands out was a Songs of Praise meeting that happened on Thursday, where I got to give my first Evangelistic talk. I was speaking on the joy we can have as Christians when we serve Christ the King, because he is the King of heaven, and he has ransomed, healed, restored and forgiven us! I think I managed to speak with joy and by God's grace, I have the opportunity to speak again next month.

A Little Update

Here are a few of the things we've been up to and some of what we've got coming up.

The Past Week

The Next Few Weeks

Prayer Requests

We would love prayer that:

God would help us to continue to be motivated to use our time to delight in God's word and loving our church family.

It would be wonderful to keep the desire to focus on God that we have had this week throughout the next week, even when we have slightly less in the calendar.

We really are so grateful for your love and prayers. You are such an encouragement! God bless :)

Joshua & Luci.

P.S. - This week has been so full of encouragement, If you want to hear more about how I've been delighted by Christ over the last week feel free to listen to the video below. I found it really encouraging to think back over the week and delight in all the different things I've learned about God. I hope you may find it encouraging to :)

TEAM Bible Course Notes

Bible Overview

After the return from Exile things were better than the exile, but not great

Prophets of the return

• Haggai

• Zechariah

• Malachi (Last prophet)

Books that show the history of the return

• Ezra

• Nehemiah

Key points

• The Babylon king was overthrown as God prophesied

• The new Persian ruler let God’s people return and rebuild the temple

• The foundations of the temple are laid

• It’s not going to be as beautiful as before

• But still great to have the temple

• God’s people face lots of challenges and opposition

• Haggai tells them to priorities building the temple

• Zechariah tells them return to God

• There is a perfect King and Priest coming

• God will provide a way for his people to be holy

Malachi

• The issue is half heartedness

• God promises the Lord will come to judge

• Either repent or be judged

• That's where the OT ends

Why a 400 year gap between old and new testaments?

• To gather scripture

• By then there was no debate about what is in the scriptures

• The Whole OT had been translated into greek - The Septuagint

Ecclesiastes

The Teacher

• Speaks most of the book

• The teacher - very wise person

• Seeking to figure out what is worth doing in life

Epilogue - Pay attention to the teacher

Big ideas

• Things in this world don’t last

• The wise and fool seem to both suffer

• The teacher goes from despairing to rejoicing

• We can have joy in toil, not from own efforts but from God

• It is a terrible to gain everything by not be able to enjoy it

• We don't need to cling to anything because what we have coming is even better

• Hope in God who provides everything richly for our enjoyment

Job

Topic of Job - Unjust Suffering

Job is a rich righteous man

Almost all he has gets taken away

The books shows how Job and his friends respond

Job worships God

But starts to think God is wrong to treat him so badly

Job’s friends think his suffering means he must have done something wrong

Both have flaws in their thinking

however when God responds to them at the end

Job comes off better as he was acting within a relationship with God

Job was crying out to God

His friends we’re acting apart from God - not asking him for wisdom

God wants us to understand

We don’t need to understand everything

We do need to trust God who is in control of everything

Because He is God and we are not

Workshop notes

My talk - Colossians Ch1:24-2:5

Main points

• Christ is really important

• Keep trusting him

• Even when faced with people trying to deceive you

• One sign we have been deceived could be worrying about what we do say or think, we don’t want to put too focus on our own actions that we forget about God’s promises

Things I did well

• Reflect the emotions of the passage in my presentation

  • E.g smiling, tone, volume and speed of voice

• Had a clear and helpful structure

  • E.g explaining what we were doing when and used repetition

• Linked the application to our lives

  • Showed what it looked like not believe the passage well

• Able to walk through the passage in an engaging way

Things to improve

• Getting clearer how the application flows out of the passage

  • How - People deceiving is linked to Christians worrying

• Get clearer on applying the application

  • Very specific examples of believing and not believing

• Look at what sets this passage apart - maybe linked to the ‘fully mature’ idea