It was great to be together this morning to lift up our voices in praise of our great God, who’s grace has saved us! It was fantastic to see so many new faces, and have the opportunity to serve lunch to our growing student community!
Jadie Stiven led us in singing praises to God, and rejoicing in the incredible grace of God towards sinners like us; ours through the finished work of Jesus Christ.
We sang the following songs together:
Sunday’s sermon was preached by Nathan Smith and was entitled: “A Helpful Goodbye“ from Acts 20:17-38. You can listen to or download the audio file from here, or via our iTunes podcast feed.
It was great to be together on Sunday morning, to lift up our voices in praise of our great God, who’s grace has saved us!
Colin Elliott led us in singing praises to God, and rejoicing in the incredible grace of God towards sinners like us; ours through the finished work of Jesus Christ.
We sang the following songs together:
Sunday’s sermon was preached by Nathan Smith and was entitled: “Lessons from Two Cities“ from Acts 18:1-19:20. You can listen to or download the audio file from here, or via our iTunes podcast feed.
Here’s the quotes from the sermon:
Charles Spurgeon:
“If sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies, and if they will perish let them perish with our arms about their knees imploring them to stay. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for.”
D. Martyn-Lloyd Jones:
“This is what God has done. This is what God can do. Let us together decide to beseech him, to plead with him to do this again. Not that we may have the experience or excitement, but that His mighty hand may be known and his great name may be glorified and magnified among the people.”
It was great to be together on Sunday morning, to lift up our voices in praise of our great God, who’s grace has saved us!
Jadie Stiven led us in singing praises to God, and rejoicing in the immensity of the love God has lavished upon us, displayed most incredibly through the cross of Christ.
We sang the following songs together:
Sunday’s sermon was preached by Nathan Smith and was entitled: “Gospel: Contend & Contextualize“ from Acts 17:16-34. You can listen to or download the audio file from here, or via our iTunes podcast feed.
Here’s the quotes from the sermon:
D. Martyn-Lloyd Jones:
“Our Lord attracted sinners because he was different. They drew near to him because they felt that there was something different about him… And the world always expects us to be different. This idea that you are going to win people to the Christian faith by showing them that after all you are remarkably like them, is theologically and psychologically a profound blunder.”
Tim Keller:
“Contextualization is adapting gospel ministry from one culture into another by 1) changing those aspects of ministry that are culturally conditioned, and 2) maintaining those aspects of ministry that are unchanging and Biblically required. Contextualization ‘incarnates’ the Christian faith in a particular culture. It is the process by which we present the gospel to people of a particular worldview, in forms that the ‘receptor-hearers’ can understand.”
Darrin Patrick:
“Faithful gospel ministry consists of both firmness and flexibility. On one hand, we ‘contend for the faith that once was for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3). We are to stand fast and hold true to even the most unpopular and difficult Christian doctrines. On the other hand, we contextualize the gospel, as Paul did: ‘I have become all things to all people, that by some means I might save some (1 Cor. 9:22). To contextualize is to discern the culture’s core beliefs and then bring the truth of God to bear on them, confronting and exposing them and challenging people to embrace Christ. Both components are crucial.”
John Stott:
“Many people are rejecting our gospel today not because they perceive it to be false, but because they perceive it to be trivial. People are looking for an integrated worldview which makes sense of all their experience. We learn from Paul that we cannot preach the gospel of Jesus without the doctrine of God, or the cross without creation, or salvation without judgement. Today’s world needs a bigger gospel, the full gospel of Scripture, what Paul later in Ephesus was to call ‘ the whole purpose of God’ (cf. Acts 20:27).
It was great to be together on Sunday morning, to lift up our voices in praise of our great God, who’s grace has saved us!
Nathan Smith led us in singing praises to God, and rejoicing in, and celebrating the work of Jesus Christ on the cross, and it’s meaning and application for us today. We shared Communion together.
During Communion Nathan shared the following quote from Charles Spurgeon:
“There is nothing little in God; his mercy is like himself — it is infinite. You cannot measure it. His mercy is so great that it forgives great sins to great sinners, after great lengths of time, and then gives great favours and great privileges, and raises us up to great enjoyments in the great heaven of the great God.”
We sang the following songs:
Peter Bowley preached the next part of our “Momentum: The Unstoppable Gospel in the Book of Acts” series. His message was entitled: “The Mission Gathers Momentum“ from Acts 16-17. You can listen to or download the audio file from here, or via our iTunes podcast feed.
Matt and Lizzie, Noah and Beth Chapman have now been in the USA for about a month, and we’ve asked him to keep us all up to speed with what’s happening in their world and lives as Matt undertakes study at the Sovereign Grace Pastors College this year. Here’s the first update:
“The Chapmans in America – Update 1 – August 2011″
We arrived here in the US just three short weeks ago and we already have so much that we want to share with you, our church family and good friends back home.
We touched down late on a Tuesday evening in an airport just outside Washington DC where the temperature was still 30 degrees at 10pm! We made our way through to US customs and happily found that our paperwork was all in order and (apart from a quick detour through agricultural control because of a half banana we were trying to smuggle into the country) we soon planted our feet on real American soil.
We were warmly welcomed at the airport by Gary Ricucci. Gary and his wife Betsy are responsible for providing pastoral care to the Pastor’s College students and their families each year and they have already been a source of great encouragement and welcome to Lizzie and me on numerous occasions since we arrived.
Having loaded up a very large car with all our luggage, Gary took us on a 45 minute journey into Gaithersburg to the home of our host family. We have the great pleasure and privilege of living in the basement of the Linn family from Covenant Life Church for the 10 months that we’ll be here. Jim and Marianne Linn and their three teenage children have hosted 9 different PC families before us and their hospitality and wise counsel is literally legendary amongst the staff of Sovereign Grace Ministries. We feel very blessed to be with them and are eager to spend as much time as possible with them in the coming months.
Since moving in we have had 3 weeks together as a family before the start of term and we’ve packed a lot in: exploring the local area; finding the nearest playgrounds; driving down to Virginia to celebrate Tim and Kate’s wedding; visiting an agricultural show where we watched a pig rodeo (no joke!); setting up a bank account; riding out an earthquake in Washington DC, and lots more.
One way that God has been particularly kind is in quickly forging strong relationships between the families attending the Pastor’s College. Even before term began there were almost daily opportunities to be together with other students – helping people to unload their U-Hauls (see Wikipedia), sharing meals, playing Frisbee golf and getting lost together in the truly huge church building each Sunday (we still prefer the Grace Church trailer!)
What has most impressed us about these families is they have each made great sacrifices to be here this year, many do not know what God has in store for them after college and many have left behind long and successful careers in other fields for the sake of serving Christ and his Church wherever he might call them. And yet they have all come humbly and joyfully, keenly aware both that they are nothing special and that the one they serve is supremely special.
I think at times I had an unspoken concern that other people attending the PC this year might be quite private and serious, professional and proper, but to our delight we’ve found a group of families who are marked by joy and laughter, humility and gentleness – people who take God very seriously but who don’t take themselves too seriously. We already feel a great love and affection for each of them and even more so because they remind us of all of you dear friends back home.
Term has just started for the students this week and so things are likely to get a lot busier from here on in, but in all that has taken place since we arrived, the thing that we have been most freshly reminded of is this: God is faithful and kind, he dearly loves his children and he will meet their every need whatever the situation that he calls them into; be it attending a Pastor’s college, caring for children at home, working to support your family and live out the gospel before colleagues, or studying hard at school to get your GCSE’s. He feeds the birds and clothes the flowers and he cares so much more for you and I than he does for the birds and the flowers.
It would be wrong for us to finish this without sharing with you some of the differences and oddities we’ve come across in this big strange country that bears some similarities to our own but which is also so different. Here are a few to start with and we’ll keep our eyes and ears open for more to include in our next blog post:
One final thing to pass on is something Jeff Purswell, Dean of the Pastor’s College, encouraged us all with the other day. He shared his conviction (with tongue firmly in cheek) that God clearly has great things in store for this year’s students because our arrival has been accompanied by signs and wonders – already an earthquake and a hurricane! But there was in fact a third miraculous event that only our friends back home would recognise and appreciate as the greatest sign and wonder of them all – today Matt played sport!
With love to you all from Matt, Lizzie, Noah and Beth x
(**apologies that this is a bit late, but I thought it had been posted yesterday, but unfortunately, I set up “auto-post function” of our blog wrongly! If this reminder/encouragement is too late for you to fast today, perhaps join us for just one meal, or try and carve out 10mins extra to prayer for our church?)
Tomorrow (2nd Septemeber 2011) is the next instalment of our “First Friday Fast” at Grace Church.
It’s one day a month we encourage all the people of Grace Church to set aside, to devote time to fasting and praying for our church and the advance of the gospel in our community and city.
To encourage us all in the importance of prayer, take another nose at these notes from a recent prayer meeting. Hopefully they will remind us all of the need for devoted, earnest prayer for church and city.
Here’s a few prayer points to help us guide our praying. The focus this month is on students and the new opportunities we have as a church to reach out to them and care for them, as the academic year roles around. May the fruit of our prayer and fasting be that the gospel goes forward on university campuses, that many students will be saved, and students be added to our local church.
STUDENT PRAYER POINTS:
(I’ve asked Brian Whittaker (with his wife Becca, recent visitors to Grace Church, and working amongst the Christian Unions of the universities in Bristol and Bath, working for UCCF) to give us some prayer points.)
“In terms of prayer points.
1 – Christian freshers at UWE and Bristol settle quickly at a church and decide to live for Christ at university.
2 – Bristol CU and UWE CU have a good clear evangelistic presence during Fresher’s week
3 – there would be people at both Unis who hear the good news and are saved this Freshers Week.”
Registered Charity: Grace Trust (Bristol)
Charity Number: 1094803
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