Conversations

Thirty-One is a new initiative aiming to strengthen female relationships across the congregations of St. Michael-le-Belfrey church (St.Mike’s

, G2 and Conversations). We want to help women embrace their value and beauty, and to see themselves and others just as God sees them.

This will mark the launch of Thirty-One Ministries, and it’s going to be an exciting night!

Tickets cost £10 each and will include:

*Three-course meal with wine
*After-dinner speaker (Helen Askew from Everywoman Ministries)

Dress Code: Cocktail Dress

Tickets and more information are available from:
Caz Challis (cc573@york.ac.uk / 07717 006531)
Hannah Collins (hmrc500@york.ac.uk)
Sarah Lewis-Bennion (sarah.lewis-bennion@stmichaelsyork.org / 07512 858489)

“A capable, intelligent, and virtuous woman – who is he who can find her? She is far more precious than jewels and her value is far above rubies or pearls.”
- Proverbs 31:10, The Amplified Bible

There are a lot of questions that can be asked about prayer such as;

• What is prayer?
• Why should I pray?
• How should I pray?
• What does prayer mean for someone who calls themselves a Christian? Read the rest of this entry »

Hey guys, so quick back story here, I used to live in Huddersfield then came to uni at York St John and became a Christian whilst at Uni. I was talking to a someone at morning prayers the other day about how I can sometimes find myself slipping into my old lifestyle as none of my friends or family back home are Christians and he started questioning me about how and when I pray.

Now I kinda find praying difficult at times and can often go for a few days without praying, which to be honest isn’t good. But this guy just seemed to tell me everything I needed to hear. He really challenged me about my prayer life and his main point just seemed so wise I decided I would share it with you all.

He said that the first thing I should do every morning is pray starting with the Lords Prayer and that this would help me to focus on God more throughout the day.

Anyway I just figured I would share this with you as I think it will really help me improve my life and maybe give you something to think about.

Scott

What do you most need to make you more effective in living for God?
1 Corinthians 13.1-3 tells us that the answer is LOVE. If we don’t have love for people, it doesn’t matter how good we are at speaking to them; it doesn’t matter how much we know and understand of God with our minds; it doesn’t matter how much faith we have; it doesn’t even matter how sacrificial we are in the way we live – it will all be worthless, ‘as nothing’, without love as the motivation.

We sometimes talk about being able to ‘see people through Jesus’ eyes’ – this seems like a good prayer to pray, as he saw people with eyes of compassion and forgiveness and LOVE. That’s how we need to see people too, before we start thinking about strategies for reaching them with the gospel.

What does it look like to love other people?
Essentially, it means that we are prepared to do anything, to pay any price, so that they might know God, because He is their deepest need.

Think about what Jesus tells us are the ‘greatest’ commandments: ‘Love God with everything you are; and love your neighbour as yourself’. Everything else in the Bible ‘hangs’ from this, comes out of this. And the commandments are intrinsically linked together.

• First, we need to learn to love God; He must become the object of our love, and our whole lives must be about loving Him, because it’s when we love Him wholeheartedly that we come to find out that God is the One who can bring satisfaction to our souls – we were made, above all, to love Him, so it’s when we love Him that we feel fulfilled.

• Then, we see that what it means, above all, to love our neighbours is to help our neighbours to see how wonderful God is and to love Him for themselves. That’s how they’ll be satisfied, too.

• Often, the world suggests that loving people is just making them feel ‘better about themselves’, focusing on them and telling them how great they are. But that’s a big distortion of real love, which is to help people know God, to share Him with them. It’s like, Piper says, taking someone to the Alps and then locking them in a room of mirrors. We don’t need to point people to themselves, but to God.

How do we do this?
Well, in all sorts of different ways. As 1 Corinthians 12 says, we Christians are a body. We work together in fulfilling God’s purposes. So, we need to ask ourselves and each other: ‘what gifts has God given me?’; ‘how can I be using these gifts to love other people and point them to God?’
It might be that your gifts are to do with talking to other people about Jesus and his good news. But it might be that you are often doing things that are ‘behind the scenes’. Maybe you’re an especially gifted pray-er. Maybe you could be using your time and money more effectively to point other people to God.

Think about these things – what part will you play in ‘taking back the city’ for Him? How can you work with the other members of the body to give other people a picture of who God is?

1 Corinthians 13

¹If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ²If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

“So God think people sin and it makes him sad and angry. Why doesn’t Jesus get angry at people, just at tables?”

It is true that God is angry about sin but so also did Jesus. For hundreds years people have thought of Jesus and God the Father as different in nature and character but in reality they are one and the same. Therefore, they are angry and sad about the same things.

We read about Jesus anger in a few places.  For example the story alluded to in the question, John 2:13-17, Jesus gets angry at those in the temple profiting of the faith of others.

However it is important to understand the relationship between God’s anger and his mercy. The Bible describes God as “slow to anger and rich in love” (Psalm 103:8) The same verse describes him as gracious. The overarching story of the Bible is about the relationship between God’s love and mercy towards humanity conquering God’s anger at humanities sin. The Old Testament looks forward to the coming of Jesus to rescue humanity from the punishment it deserved for sin and the New Testament is the record of that rescue.

In short. God and Jesus are angry at sin, but Christians believe that the punishment for that sin fell on Jesus. The sinless Jesus, he that knew no sin became sin for us so that we could be made tight with God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)