"In only two days the eight-day Festival of Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread would begin. The high priests and religion scholars were looking for a way they could seize Jesus by stealth and kill him. They agreed that it should not be done during Passover Week. "We don't want the crowds up in arms," they said.

 
Jesus was at Bethany, a guest of Simon the Leper. While he was eating dinner, a woman came up carrying a bottle of very expensive perfume. Opening the bottle, she poured it on his head. Some of the guests became furious among themselves. "That's criminal! A sheer waste! This perfume could have been sold for well over a year's wages and handed out to the poor." They swelled up in anger, nearly bursting with indignation over her.

But Jesus said, "Let her alone. Why are you giving her a hard time? She has just done something wonderfully significant for me. You will have the poor with you every day for the rest of your lives. Whenever you feel like it, you can do something for them. Not so with me. She did what she could when she could—she pre-anointed my body for burial. And you can be sure that wherever in the whole world the Message is preached, what she just did is going to be talked about admiringly."

Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the cabal of high priests, determined to betray him. They couldn't believe their ears, and promised to pay him well. He started looking for just the right moment to hand him over."

Thought:
Sometimes it's best to just let the Scriptures speak for themselves. So read these verses and ask God to take you where He will through them.

This is where He took me: I ask myself what was going on in the woman's heart to enable her to lavish this on Jesus. Whatever it was, I want it. I ask God to help me worship Jesus this Easter like that woman did.

"I've loved you the way my Father has loved me. Make yourselves at home in my love." (John 15:9)

A couple of Sundays ago we celebrated Mothering Sunday...we spent some time reflecting on a verse in John 15. This is the chapter where Jesus uses the picture of a vine and braches to describe the relationship between Jesus and his followers...a picture of connectedness...of intimacy...of dependency...of life.

Two of the most common translations of the bible have Jesus telling / inviting his followers to "Remain in me" or "abide in me". But the Message paraphrase of the bible has the phrase, "Make yourself at home in my love".

And it's this phrase I want to encourage you to spend a bit of time relfecting on now. What does it mean to "make yourself at home" somewhere? What does that look like? What does that entail? As I was reflecting, I was coming up with things like: putting down roots, settling, establishing, permanence, security, intimacy, belonging etc. And when you apply these sort of descriptions to understanding what Jesus is getting at, it kind of blows your mind away.

For a lot of people knowing Jesus is about rules and regulations. But here, according to Jesus himself, knowing him is about a relationship...and not just any relationship, but one of intimacy and connectedness...of permanence. His words are an invitation to come and find a perfect home in his love. 

Why not allow the truth of these words to soak over you. And if you're tired, rootless, searching for a home, then hear Jesus' invitation to make your home in his love.

I wanted to continue sharing stuff that I didn't get a chance to yesterday....it really flows out of the verses immediately following the ones we looked at yesterday. One of the downfalls of trying to go through Mark's gospel in about 10 weeks is that it is near impossible to cover everything...some stuff inevitable gets missed out on a Sunday....and some of that stuff is pretty important stuff....so I wanted to to get you all thinking about some of the verses we're not doing on a Sunday.

Sometimes I find scripture so powerfully clear that it doesn't really need much commentary or explanation....so I just want to set the scene, share some verses, share a couple of quotes, and then leave it with you all to do with what you want! Maybe it could be something to pick up on in small groups this week.

So here goes...

Yesterday we looked at Mark 8:31-33...Peter, having just declared that Jesus is 'the Christ', then listens to Jesus teach him and the other disciples more about what being ' the Christ' means...how he must suffer, be rejected, be killed, and rise again. We looked at why Jesus said this MUST happen...how the cross was God's way of dealing once-for-all with the problem of human sin.

Jesus then continues, 

"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?" 

Not exactly a rallying cry which you think is going to attract followers is it?! If you're starting a movement, do you teach the costs or sell the benefits? I'm pretty sure most times you sell the benefits don't you? You don't want to put people off, you want to draw people to you. But that's not how Jesus does it is it?

Now grab a bible and read Luke 9:57-62. Three men want to follow Jesus. Have a go at summarising how Jesus responds to each one. A guy called David Platt sums it up with, "Following Jesus requires total, superior and exclusive devotion."

On another occasion, Jesus said, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters - yes, even his own life - he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:26.....hint: "hate" means 'to love less')

And on yet another occasion, Mark 10:17-31, Jesus sent another man away disappointed.

And think what Jesus was asking the disciples to abandon when he first called them to follow him. Again, David Platt, "He was calling them to abandon their comforts and careers. they were reorienting their entire's life work around discipleship to Jesus. their plans and dreams were being swallowed up in his....In a world that prizes promoting oneself, they were following a teacher who told them to crucify themselves."

Okay....let me throw out some questions....

What is Jesus saying in these verses?
Does he really mean it? 
Do you believe this is a call for the disciples at that time, or is it the same call for us today?
What do you do with verses like these?....do you park them somewhere convenient or do you allow them to permeate your heart and choose to obey them?
Be honest, have you ever tried to rationalise verses like these...."come on, Jesus didn't really mean this did he?!" Give examples.
Can you think of ways we might take the God-centred gospel and make it human-centred?

Again, let me quote David Platt..."And this is where we need to pause. Because we are starting to redefine Christianity. We are giivng into the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with...a nice, middle-class Jesus."

Let me quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer (you may well have heard of this guy...he was a German theologian and follower of Christ in the midst of Hitler's Nazi rule...he ended up being executed for where his faith led him). Bonhoeffer wrote a famous book called "The Cost of Discipleship". In it he write, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

What's the cost of non-discipleship? For you? For others? Struggling to answer?....go back to Mark 8:35-36.

One last thought from David Platt...he writes that from the outset, we need to commit to believe whatever Jesus says. "It would be a grave mistake to come to Jesus and say, 'Let me hear what you have to say, and then I'll decide whether or not I like it.' If you approach Jesus this way, you will never truly hear what he has to say. You have to say Yes to the words of Jesus before you ever hear them. Then you need to commit to obey what you have heard. The gospel does not pompt you to mere reflection; the gospel requires a response."

"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it."

Have you ever seen one of these apple puzzles?

The idea is simple.....

break up the apple into its pieces, and then...

just put it back together again.

Nothing to it really!

And then when you've got the pieces correctly assembled you put in the 'core' piece...it slides down the centre. When that's in place, it holds all the other pieces together. It's the key piece.

I find that things in the real world can sometimes help me understand spiritual truths...not perfectly, but at least shed enough light on it to help me understand.

Let me explain...

There's a verse in the bible...Colossians 1:17...which says about Jesus, "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together".

What does that mean? It sounds like one of those deep, mysterious truths that we're never going to quite get our heads around. And to be fair, we'll probably never quite understand it fully.

But let me have a go...

The Bible says that Jesus is eternal....and that he was involved in every part of creation. And not just that he was involved in creating, but that in fact, Jesus sustains all things today....he keeps things going...his power is what keeps things together. In a way that we can't quite understand, if Jesus was to withdraw his sustaining grace and power, things would cease to be. Kind of like if you took out that central part of the apple puzzle....the whole thing would fall apart.

According to the Bible, Jesus is pretty important not just to you and me, but to the entire universe. 

Just a thought...

The monitor was on.

2 hours went by and then I heard her voice...."Dadda, dadda. By the sound of her voice I could tell she had awoken with a smile on her face. It's one of the sweetest sounds in the world...to hear a young child...your young child...calling for you. At that moment there was only one person she wanted...me! I ran up the stairs...I couldn't wait to see her and give her a cuddle.

"Dadda"...one short word but full of meaning, emotion,...love. "Dadda"... a word of informality...of intimacy...or belonging.

The Bible tells us we can know God in the same way. As a child calls their father "daddy", we can know and call the God who made the universe and everything in it, "Daddy". The God of the Bible isn't a stand-offish figure, who wants to stay at a distance. But a loving Father who wants to know us and us to know him. Imagine God's delight when we call him "Daddy"  longing to know him, to spend time with him, to receive his love.

Next time your child calls "Dadda", may it cause you to reflect on the love of our Heavenly Father.

Just after the shepherds had left the happy family, Luke tells us "Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart" (2:19).

And shortly later in the same gospel, when Jesus is a young boy and Mary and Jospeh have just found him after losing him for a short time in Jeruslaem, Luke writes, "But his mother treasured all these things in her heart." (2:51).

Imagine for a moment.....Mary...a young teenage mum...and all the incredible, slightly incredulous even, things that she had been witness to. Visits from angels; she was pregnant despite never having had sex; apparently she had just given birth to God's promised Messiah; the visit from the shepherds and their story of angels; and a bit later the visit of the Magi. Certainly not your average birth story! Luke goes out of his way to record Mary's faithful response (1:46-56), but he also reminds us that even in faith there is room for "pondering"...for taking what we know, what we've been told, what we've seen....and allowing it to sit in our hearts...allowing us time to reflect on it...allowing time for it to work on us and in us.

There's a difference between being told something and really understanding it for yourself. And I think for Mary, it was possibly much later in Jesus' life that she really began to understand just who her 'son' was.

This coming term we're going to be journeying through the gospel of Mark together, to try and encounter just who this Jesus was and is. We've just celebrated his birth....in a few months we will remember his death and resurrection...so let's take some time together to immerse ourselves in the bits inbetween. Let's learn together...let's ponder afresh some of the familiar accounts from Mark's gospel and see what God might be wanting to teach us from them.

We'll be launching into our new series on Sunday 8th January.

Great to have such a good turn out for carols this year... Happy Christmas neighbourhood. Ben

We just had a surprise visit from one of our new neighbours. They'd made us a wonderful gingerbread house. Made me think about how good unexpected gifts are. And got me thinking that whilst the birth of Jesus had been promised hundreds of years beforehand, it all happened in a very unexpected way. "for God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." The best gifts are the unexpected ones!

Job done!

Thanks to all who helped today. Looks great. And lots of great.comments from people in the neighbourhood.