Here’s the Take It Home sheet from today’s message “Gone Fishing!“

Just wanted to draw your attention to some great family resources for helping you and your kids memorise Scripture together.

The “Seeds Family Worship” CDs (4 CDs titled: “Praise”, “Faith”, “Purpose” and “Courage”) will definitely be a fab addition to your CD collection.

Each CD contains 12 songs, which are basically Scripture passages set to music…cool music you can actually enjoy and sing along too!

They are on constantly in our house/car/ipod and we ALL love them and benefit from them.  In fact, so good are they that we might introduce a couple of the songs into our corporate worship time!

You can order them direct from the Seeds Website.  They are reasonable priced, shipping is fairly cheap and with the £-$ exchange rate as it is right now should be considered a bargin!

At the Seeds Website, you can also download little memory cards and chord sheets for each song, and also listen to song samples before you buy!

Tonight (Wednesday 16th May 2007) is our monthly church prayer meeting.

 It’s an important aspect of life together as a church.

To encourage your faith and to whet your appetite to join us to pray for our church and the proclamation of the gospel in our city, here are a few quotes for you to meditate on…

Charles Hodge: “Prayer is the converse of the soul with God.”

Wayne Grudem: “Prayer is personal communication from us to God.”

John Bunyan: “Prayer is a sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God, through Christ, in the strength and assistance of the Holy Spirit, for such things as God has promised, or according to the Word of God, for the good of the church, with submission in faith to the will of God.”

D.A Carson: “The Bible insists that we pray, urges us to pray, gives us examples of prayer. Something has gone wrong in our reasoning if our reasoning leads us away from prayer; something is amiss in our theology if our theology becomes a disincentive to pray.”

Graeme Goldsworthy: “Prayer is not trying to persuade God to do something he otherwise would not do. It is our being caught up in the purposes of God and the expression of this privilege as his dear children who know him as Father…Prayer is not the bending of God’s will to ours, but his conforming our will to his…Prayer is a truly human response to divine revelation and action.”

R.C Sproul: “The Scriptures teach both the sovereign foreordination of God and the efficacy of prayer. The two are not inconsistent with one another, for God ordains the means as well as the ends for his divine purposes.  Prayer is a means God uses to bring about His sovereign will to pass.”

Martin Luther: “As it is the business of tailors to make clothes and of cobblers to mend shoes, so it is the business of Christians to pray.”

Donald Whitney: “When our awareness of the greatness of God and the gospel is dim, our prayer lives will be small. The less we think of the nature and character of God, and the less we think of what Jesus Christ did for us on the cross, the less we want to pray. But, when I think of what Christ has saved me from, when I recall the shame he endured so willingly for my sake, when I remember all that salvation means, prayer is not hard!”

See you at Emersons Green Village Hall at 8pm!

Just wanted to give you a heads up on some of the resources I’m using as we study Luke together on Sundays.

I’ve got a selection of commentaries for the Gospel of Luke but found these to be the most helpful:

Luke by Robert H. Stein in the New American Commentary series.

It’s a great one-volume treatment of this gospel by Robert Stein, a New Testament professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.

In my opinion, this is probably the best commentary on the gospel of Luke.  It’s a two-volume set in the Baker Exegetical Commentary series, by New Testament professor Darrell Bock. 

It’s a much more technical read, and goes into incredible detail.  Not for the faint-hearted!

This is another favourite!  It’s a two-volume work in the Preach the Word series, by pastor R. Kent Hughes (from which I get a lot of my quotes!). 

 Kent Hughes is senior pastor of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, USA.

Here’s fantastic quote from Mr Hughes about studying Luke:

“Luke’s carefully researched and orderly account of the life of Jesus Christ is one of the finest pieces of historical writing in all of ancient literature.  Yet it also accomplishes its divinely appointed – and more personal – purpose: that people of every century “may know the truth.”  Luke will make you certain about the truth – not only of his gospel, but of the gospel; those who study Luke cannot stay the same.  He took great pains to present the gospel with maximum power under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  The result is a compelling story.”

And finally…

R.C Sproul’s wonderful expoistion of the Gospel of Luke, entitled: A Walk With God”.

It’s a wonderful book for studying this great gospel in your devotions, as he breaks the book down into about 100 short passage and makes insightful comments to help us understand God’s Word.

If you’re going to buy one book on Luke, I’d whole-heartedly recommend this one!

All the books recommended here are available at Amazon.  Click on the above pictures for the links!  Enjoy!

Today’s bulletin is available to download from here.

Here’s the Take It Home sheet for today’s message Jesus’ Authority.