Seeking to make the Lord God Jesus Christ visible in our midst… "Where two or three are gathered together in My name there am I in the midst of them." (Matt. 18:20)
Various Topics
It is clear from what the doctrines for a new church teach that our spiritual or mental health is a reflection of the quality of the thoughts and feelings that dominate the inner landscape of the mind. The phrase, …we are because God is… is a helpful reminder in this regard as it draws our focus back to the source of our mental health and wellbeing by emphasing that if the life of our mind is to be something truly spiritual then its activity needs to reflect something of what God is. When we talk about being or existing, or that …we are because God is… we need to be aware that we only truly exist as human beings when our mind is in the human form.
READINGS Mark 7:1-23 1 And there are gathered unto Him the Pharisees, and some of the scribes, who came from Jerusalem. 2 And having seen° some of His disciples eating bread with defiled, that is to say with unwashed, hands, they found fault. 3 For the Pharisees and all the Jews, unless they wash their…
The spiritual work we are given while in the material body is to cooperate with the Lord as the Word so that we can be created anew. This new creation is not of the material world but is a spiritual creation being a new form of mind that lives consciously from the Lord. To live from the Lord is to live from the Word and so we are given a Word in the form of the Texts of Divine revelation from which we can, if we choose to, begin to draw our mode of life.
We need to take care that we don’t diminish the status of the Sacred Scripture in our thinking. For it to be viewed as anything less than the LORD goes against the central tenant of angelic wisdom and so can do nothing but weaken the Word’s power to effect change in people’s lives.
Temptation is unavoidable in the spiritual life and this sermon explores this idea through seeing the picking up of one’s cross as a conscious choice to embrace the spiritual disciplines of self-examination and repentance.