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!)

Knowing the fulness of God and living in the new covenant means that we are invited to partake in Holy Communion, the sacrament Jesus commanded all His disciples to take. So often, however, it is easy for us to do this without stopping to reflect on what it really means or pondering the significance of these ordinary looking emblems:

Stephen spoke from Matt 26:26-29 this morning, looking at how Jesus invested the Passover feast with new meaning as He took and distributed the bread: ‘This is my body, broken for you.’ All are invited to receive from Him by taking from what He offers us, accepting that there is so much more of God to experience than we have currently tasted. In the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, twelve baskets of bread were left over; there is an abundance in God we can barely comprehend! God always has more for us; His input into us never runs out.

There is nothing physically special about the bread or the wine, but the symbolic meaning behind these ordinary things shows us that God has made a new way for us all to be reconciled to Him. The blood of Christ, shed on the cross for all mankind, is sufficient to atone for all people’s sin, throughout all history. We can come before God now in a clean and holy way, since we are made holy through the sacrifice of Christ. He wants us to know Him all His fulness, and by taking the bread and wine, we can continue on our journey of getting to know God more and more in this fulness. Holy Communion is not simply a man-made ‘tradition’; it is not something we do to fill the space in a service. It is our act of obedience, the way we remember all Christ has done for us and should become, therefore, our means of partaking in the very life of God.

There’s always something to be done and today’s job was to clear out junk from under the stage so that we can sort out piping to fill the new baptistery when it is required.

We hired a skip which was soon full of unwanted, broken items including a massive traffic cone, a former wooden partition and storage trays. All the Christmas costumes and decorations were tidied up and everything put away neatly.

We also put up some leaflet holders:

Ps 87:3 says ‘Glorious things are said of you, city of God.’ Often, we feel that the world has a very negative view of the church, and there is no doubt that the church is not perfect and has made many mistakes. Nonetheless, God has chosen to work through the church, His body, and many churches are involved in social action and community outreach as an outworking of their faith in God.

Churches are involved in helping the poor and needy, ministering to the addicted, caring for the disabled and elderly, looking after children and young people in so many different ways. The Cinnamon Trust has recently carried out an audit (which can be read here)  of the work done by churches all over the UK; they found that over 9,000 paid staff and 139,600 volunteers worked in UK churches, helping almost 3 ½ million people and contributing over £220 million in paid and volunteer staff hours per year. Churches are involved in 4 main areas of social action:

1. Enabling children and young people to flourish
2. Supporting safer, stronger families
3. Building safer, stronger communities
4. Fighting poverty

The church is involved in helping so many people, through a variety of means: youth clubs, children’s work, Parent & Toddler groups, debt counselling services, food banks, pregnancy crisis centres, marriage and family counselling, coffee mornings and a whole range of other activities. Nonetheless, to be a church built on the foundation of Christ crucified and being built up by the Master Builder, we have to be involved in more than just social action. Paul says that Christ gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to the church ^‘to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.’ (Eph 4:12-13) To be a church that is growing in spiritual maturity and growing numerically, we have to see new birth and new life; there must be no division between the preaching of the gospel and the way we live this out in practical ways, ‘with God in the community, with God for the community.’  The Bible shows us the great joy there is in heaven (as well as on earth) when people are born again (see Luke 15:7, 10); our desire is to be a church founded on Christ and Christ crucified alone, and to see Him adding to our church daily those who are being saved.

Tonight’s sermon looked at Ps 87, a psalm written in praise of Jerusalem. Jerusalem (city of David, often known as Zion because of the mountain on which it was built) became Israel’s capital during the reign of David (see 2 Sam 5:1-16), but ultimately was chosen and built by God. God is the best builder in the world. The Bible is full of building stories, from the ill-fated Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-12) to the construction of the ark of the covenant and the Tabernacle, from the building of the temple to the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. Whole books of the Bible (Nehemiah & Haggai) are concerned with building, and this theme is carried on in the New Testament, where Jesus tells stories involving building (teaching us that foundations are crucially important in building, reminding us that we need to build on solid rock, not sand (Matt 7:24-29) and that we need to count the cost of following Him in the same way that someone building a tower has to do proper calculations to make sure they can complete the job and not just lay the foundations of the tower (Luke 14:28-30)). The New Testament writers take this imagery even further, using the metaphor of a building or temple to describe the church (Paul says the church is ‘God’s building’ (1 Cor 3:9) and Heb 3:6 says we are God’s house, explaining ‘every house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything.’ (Heb 3:4)). Jesus Himself talked about building the church, saying ‘on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.’ (Matt 16:18) The rock on which the church is built is not Peter himself (whose name, of course, meant ‘rock’) but on his confession of faith that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. (Matt 16:16) When looking at this psalm, therefore, we see that there are two aspects to it: the straightforward, historical aspect, praising Jerusalem as the city of God, the place where God’s presence dwelt, and the prophetic aspect which looks ahead to the church as God’s city or God’s dwelling, the place where God’s presence continues to dwell by His Spirit.

Foundations are crucial to building work and 1 Cor 3:1-6 reminds us that we need to build on proper foundations. The only foundation is Christ crucified (1 Cor 2:2); the work of the church can never be classed simply as social action, for it must involve working with God to see spiritual birth (see Ps 87:5-6). Spiritual birth is, of course, the work of God’s Spirit (see John 3:5), but the church is like a midwife, involved in proclamation, preaching and everyday witness so that people can hear the message and be saved (see Rom 10:13-15). Giving birth is a painful and difficult process, but what is more distressing is a labour that does not end in live birth. Isaiah spoke to the people of Israel, saying ‘As a pregnant woman about to give birth writhes and cries out in her pain, so were we in your presence, Lord. We were with child, we writhed in labour, but we gave birth to wind. We have not brought salvation to the earth, and the people of the world have not come to life.’ (Is 26:17-18) The church is meant to grow; it’s meant to be a vibrant, living organism, because God is at work in the world, reconciling people to Himself, wanting all people to be saved (see 2 Pet 3:9). We can be sure that as we do our part – as we testify to God’s goodness, as we ‘gossip the gospel’, as we serve our communities in all the many diverse ways God has given to us, as we maybe find new ways to reach out to our local community – God will give the increase.