Sermons

We're becoming more and more aware these days of the dangers of fakes. Whether that is fake news, fake banknotes, fake holiday advertisements, fake job listings, fake concert tickets, deep fake videos claiming to be somebody that you trust speaking, or fake designer goods. Just this past week, police forces across the country raided hundreds of tiny shops on high streets up and down Britain, confiscating large quantities of counterfeit vapes. They might have been stolen as well, I don't know, but they were fake.

What kind of TV do I like? You've probably never wondered what kind of TV Pastor James likes, but I'm going to tell you: many different genres. I love a good detective story. I love a thriller, space opera, but you cannot beat time travel. Now, I'm going to be a little bit controversial here. Not Doctor Who. I think it's completely lost the plot, but there we go. Now, I realise that may have deeply offended people.

We’re in a little sermon series that we’ve called Divine Encounters, looking at different individuals in the Gospel of John that met with the Lord Jesus.

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.

If you’re going through a hard time of one kind or another, it helps to have company – people around you who can give you companionship, support, love and care. It helps not to be alone. But it helps even more if the people who are with you have had some kind of experience similar to yours. It means they can relate to what you’re going through. They can begin to see life in your shoes and to empathise. Then you’re truly not alone.

Life can be cruel. Cruel to you personally, cruel to your family, cruel to your business. You see much cruelty on the news, and it can make you wonder if God is, in fact, cruel. Many people who don’t believe in God don’t believe in God because they think, from looking around them, that if there is a God, he must be a cruel God. And, as awful as it is to live in a world with nobody at the controls, it would be even worse to live in a world where there is a tyrant at the controls. And so they choose to conclude it would be better if there was no one.

As we come to look at Psalm 23 together, I’m very conscious that we are on hallowed ground. This is probably one of the most loved passages in the Bible, one of the most well-known passages in the Bible, possibly second only to John 3:16, with which Tony opened our service. Many Christians have derived great comfort, support, and help from these familiar words over the years.

It's become fashionable these days to say that there is no God. It's a bit of a modern fad. For example, Richard Dawkins: "We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." Or the actress Emma Thompson says: "It's not enough to say that I don't believe in God. I actually regard the system as distressing. I am offended by some of the things in the Bible and in the Quran, and I refute them."

If you're ever gone for a long bike ride, or a walk, or a run, you need to know where you are and where you're going. You have to get your bearings. Perhaps you've done that thing where you get on a train or you get on a bus and you get it to drop you off some distance from where you live, or from where you're staying, and then you walk, run, or cycle back to where you started. As you get off the bus or the train, you're looking around, aren't you? Going, "Well, where am I? Which direction was the bus going in when it dropped me? What landmarks are there to tell me where I am?

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.