There is a flurry of activity happening at church all week as we prepare for the wedding of Stephen and Stacey on Friday 11th September at 1 p.m. For all those travelling to the venue, please note that there will be no parking in the church car park, but there is a car park available further down Market Street on the left.

A wedding is always a special occasion and church members and friends are working busily behind the scenes to decorate the building in many different ways and to prepare food for the reception which will be held in the community room after the service. Our thanks to all involved; please do pray for the happy couple as they prepare to take this huge step of marriage.

There will be no prayer meeting or Bible study tomorrow (Thursday), but preparation will be ongoing for the wedding, so if you are available to help, you can come along to that!

Because of the wedding, there will be no Parent & Toddler Group this Friday, but normal service will be resumed next Friday (18th September). All other services are unaffected, but remember that the Sunday morning service this coming Sunday (13th September) is at Cherry Tree Court at 10.30 a.m.

Prefixes and suffixes are sets of letters that are added to the beginning or end of another word; by adding these, the meaning of the word is altered. Thus, ‘possible’ is given the opposite meaning by adding the prefix im- to the beginning of the word, creating the word ‘impossible’; by adding the suffix -less to the word ‘hope’, the opposite meaning is created (‘hopeless‘).

For years I have only really considered the prefix ‘un-‘ in a negative light. I could think of plenty of negative words created by this little prefix: unimportant, unkind, unloving, uncouth, unappreciated, unfaithful, uncomfortable, uncommunicative, to name but a few. But today, I realised that this prefix can actually convey positive things as well: think of unworried, unspoiled, unconditional, unruffled and unabashed. In some circumstances, a word with a usually negative connotation (eg unrelenting or unsung) can be positive when applied to specific situations (God’s unrelenting love or an unsung hero, for example.)

When I was younger, my grandparents would often comment on how people were categorised as ‘good ‘uns’ or ‘wrong ‘uns’, depending on their actions. (‘You don’t want to be friends with X; he’s a wrong ‘un.‘) Here, the ‘un’ is a lazy abbreviation of ‘one’, but it did make me smile as I realised that the prefix un- can indeed be classed as good as well as bad, depending on the word it qualifies! Instead of automatically shunning this prefix, I have come to see that there are indeed some ‘good uns’ I should seek to incorporate into my life! Certainly, an unhurried life with Jesus is one thing I long to have:

… and this poster also captures my mood as I face a week of great busyness!

When we first pick up a Bible, it can seem utterly confusing, rather like opening a jigsaw box and seeing pieces strewn everywhere!

We have to understand that the Bible is actually 66 books within one book, all dealing with different aspects of life as God reveals it. These books actually form different genres or categories:

These often form interlocking pieces, helping to understand different aspects of God’s revelation (through the Law, through history, through poetry, through letters and so on.)

Some parts of the Bible may be easier to understand than others, just as some jigsaws are easier than others (3D jigsaws are particularly difficult, for example.)

However, 2 Tim 3:16 reminds us that all Scripture is God-breathed and has a purpose in shaping our lives, teaching, rebuking, correcting and training us in righteousness. Hebrews 4:12 tells us that God’s word  is ‘alive and active and sharper than any double-edged sword’, a word that is better than bread itself, a word that feeds us and sustains us (Matt 4:4) and dwells in us richly (Col 3:16) and creates faith in us (Rom 10:17) so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide, we might have hope. (Rom 15:4) The jigsaw pieces we took home (which had these Bible verses on) remind us of the importance of God’s word in our daily lives and how God wants to shape our piece of the jigsaw into His overall plan to make us like His Son. (Rom 8:28-29)

Mark’s game at the family service looked at using biscuits to make pictures; teams had to re-create pictures using only broken pieces of biscuits! Can you guess what these pictures represent?

These were meant to be a dolphin, a dog, an aeroplane and a Maltese cross!

Tonight’s family service looked at ‘The Bigger Picture’, using the analogy of the jigsaw. Life is rather like a jigsaw and we need to be aware of our part in God’s bigger picture, looking at questions like:

• What’s the bigger picture of life?
• How do all the pieces of life fit together?
• How is God’s story, the ultimate ‘bigger picture,’ told through the Bible?
• How can I understand God’s plan for my life?
• How does my life, my ‘piece of the jigsaw’, fit into God’s story, that massive jigsaw?

Our lives themselves can seem like a jigsaw, with different roles to be fulfilled (daughter, wife, mother, work colleague, friend and so on) and different aspects to life (work, home, leisure, church and so on forming different pieces) to be integrated into the whole. In addition, the Bible itself – God’s guide book to life – can seem like a jigsaw, with different parts which reveal more of God’s plans for our lives.

When doing jigsaws, it’s usually easiest to start with the edges and corners:

When we first read the Bible, we often start with the gospels, since these teach us about Jesus and Jesus really is the heart of the ‘bigger picture’ of life. Paul tells the Colossian church ‘He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.’ (Col 1:17)

When the corners and edges of a jigsaw are finished, the distinctive pieces of a jigsaw are usually tackled next: on the picture of the fish below, the fish colours are distinctive in comparison to the blue sea:

In the same way, some parts of the Bible seem easier to understand than others (stories about people, for example) and we can easily become bogged down in genealogies or Levitical laws. However, just as in a jigsaw, every single piece is needed, so we need the whole of the Bible to help us to understand the bigger picture of life: ‘All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.’ (2 Tim 3:16) Rom 15:4 tells us ‘For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.’  We need to absorb the whole of the Bible so that we can know how to live as God wants us to, being convinced (like the Thessalonians) that God’s word is not simply ‘a human word, but… the word of God, which is indeed at work in you who believe.’ (1 Thess 2:13) 

We had four birthdays to celebrate tonight (one was, admittedly, delayed from August!)