st thomas' weekly bulletin letters
This is an archive of the St Thomas' "Weekly Bulletin" letters, written by Simon Manchester and other St Thomas' ministers.
|
||||||
|
Dear friends, If I get the chance I love to watch the Antiques Roadshow, not so much because of the exotic locations, or the quirky items people bring forward (although they are entertaining enough). I love to watch it because of the reactions, especially the surprised looks on the faces of those owners who discover they have been sitting on a small fortune without realising it. In a few cases I’ve seen people bring something forward (an old chest or a painting) as a last ditch effort for an official opinion before casting the piece aside. Lucky they brought it forward first. The apostle Paul says Christians are rich. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ” (Ephesians 1:3). But, like those roadshow antiquers, we can be unaware of the wealth in our possession, vaguely discontent with our lot and searching out other sources of satisfaction. Paul’s call, which echoes in other parts of the Bible too, is a call to go deep in the Christian life. Some have criticised the western church and the church growth movement as being a mile wide and an inch deep, and there may well be some truth to that. The New Testament’s call to the agitated or wanting Christian is to take another look in their own storehouse. A little later Paul expresses this in a prayer: “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ”. And when Paul mentions the “spiritual blessings in the heavenly realms”, this is not just pie in the sky. He is talking about the Lord satisfying our deepest longings so that we don’t have to search out broken cisterns, but to keep coming to Him, the living water. So we can truly say with the Psalmist “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” (Psalm 23). The thing I find difficult living in a western culture is that I am often in want – I want more of what others have got! But why? It’s because I have become an antiques roadie who has an unrecognised treasure. What do I do? Go deeper into Christ. Keep going over the gospel with all its facets. If the gospel were a cave, it would take us a lifetime to explore its caverns and cathedrals and we would never have to see another cave. The gospel should never become for the Christian a bore, a ‘been there, done that’, a ‘going over old ground’. But for some, I fear, it has become like that and that’s where they begin looking for some new, additional experience. It has been my delight to lead a small group through the major Christian doctrines these past weeks on Sunday mornings. We have gone deep, it has stretched us, but what a joy it has been to rummage through the storehouse. Shalom, |
|
|
|
