From time to time I put sermons I give up here. Not because I think they are particularly good, even less that they are model sermons. I can't even guarantee that I agree with everything I said then - I am (of course) learning all the time. But someone may be interested.
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A former work colleague of mine used to say, “I’m fine with you being a Christian as long as you’re not a born again Christian.” Don’t worry, this work context was not me working on a church staff team.
A number of folk in this church love the sport of running. I gather that there's an increasing Trinity Church contingent at the Wykeham Lakes Park Run on a Saturday morning. If they change the time so it's not 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday, I might be tempted to give it a go myself. But running is a popular activity for many today.
Let me ask you a question: what kind of priest do you think you need? Most religions have priests. Now, what does a priest do? A priest will represent you before God, and having represented you in the presence of God, the priest will bring to you things that you need from God. They might dispense you with forgiveness; they might give you blessings for success in various areas of life; they might give you wisdom—either general teaching or specific guidance that you might need.
We live in a very distracted age. Whether it's notifications on your phone shouting at you, "Stop what you're doing and look at me now!", whether it's you're trying to browse the internet to maybe buy your weekly shopping and pop-up ads invite you to visit pages that are nothing to do with the task at hand...
You choose to watch a single episode of something on Netflix, and as it comes to the end, you're told that maybe you'd like to watch this next – and unless you press stop, it just starts.
Being insecure is a terrible thing, and there is a lot of insecurity around today. People are insecure in their relationships: this relationship that I'm in, how long will it last? Does the person I love and I'm invested in love me, and will they continue to do so, or are things somehow a little fragile?
It helps to get some feedback that your actions in life are having the desired effect. When you order something online, you get a message on the screen that says, "Thank you for your order," and within two minutes an email arrives in your inbox to tell you that your order has been received.
We haven't had one for a while, but I do love watching a royal wedding. When you have a royal wedding, usually you have one member of the royal family marrying somebody else who is also rich and famous—possibly a member of a royal family of another country, or just somebody with substantially good upbringing.
Part of the reason why it's fun to watch a royal wedding is that it is not about you. You are watching how the other half live, and you are watching a ceremony that you know would never be yours. But there's something magical about it.
It is easy to be a Christian when the sun is shining. What do you do when it isn't? If your life begins to fall apart, perhaps fall apart in connection with your family, maybe it's your work, maybe it's your health, what do you do then? Now, as we've worked our way through this letter of James, we've seen that he's been helping us think this through. And today, in the final verses of his letter, he brings the various threads of his letter together to try to give us an answer of how do you keep going with Jesus when life feels like it's falling apart.
We're blessed in this church to have a great many people who work in the medical world. We have doctors, we have nurses, we have various other people who actually work in roles in the medical world, and that's a good thing, because when you become sick you need a doctor, assisted by a great many other medical staff who can help find out what is wrong and tell you what can be done to deal with your sickness.
Let me ask you a question: Do you need to be good in order to go to heaven? Do you have to do good works, good deeds, to get to heaven? That is a really important question, is it not? Because where you spend eternity really matters. This life we live in now is short; the most any of us will get is probably 100 years, relative to which eternity is a very, very long time. So where you get to spend eternity, well, there is no more important question for you than that.