There’s a lot about life that is beyond our control and so it’s easy to feel like life is just happening to us and we are being dragged along for the ride. Despite that we do still have choices to make–big ones and little, day-to-day ones. How do we make good choices? What things do we need to have in place in our lives to give us the best chance of making good decisions in the midst of our busy, stressful, or just overwhelming lives?
Towards the end of Samuel’s life the Children of Israel began demanding a king. They wanted someone in charge who could defend them from their enemies, and besides, all the neighbouring tribes got to have their own king. God had two responses to their demand:
1 – Don’t do it
2 – If you do, here’s how you need to do it
Even though God knew that having a king was less than ideal, He was also willing to work with their demands and show them a way of doing it that would be successful. Likewise, when we balk at the Lord and demand to be able to do spirituality our own way, God is willing to compromise, provided we remain within a certain framework of truth. This Sunday we’ll talk about that less then ideal but still workable way of following the Lord.
People are often intimidated to try reading Emanuel Swedenborg’s books. This program is your chance to give reading them a try (or another try if you’ve tried before). Learn more…
What makes someone spiritual? Is it how they talk and what they say? Is it the rituals they take part in or the practices they have developed? Is it how they treat other people? All of these things do go into a person’s spirituality, but what really makes a person spiritual does deeper, to what is going on in the heart. The Children of Israel’s superficial treatment of the Ark of God, and their subsequent defeat, has a lot to teach us about the need to go deeper than just going through the motions and to take what God says to heart.
This Sunday we’re starting a series on the story of Samuel. As an adult, Samuel becomes a pivotal figure in the history of the Children of Israel but his story begins in his childhood. The Lord calls out to him and at first he doesn’t know that it’s the Lord. We too can struggle to distinguish the Lord’s call in our lives from a lot of other inputs. With Samuel we can learn what it takes to recognise the Lord’s call and what sort of messages the Lord has for us.
“Everything in moderation” seems like a sound rule for life. After all, anything, even something good, can become harmful when taken to an extreme. Yet this common-sense truth finds surprisingly little support in the Lord’s Word. As just one example, Jesus says, “no one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). There is no moderation or balancer here: rather pick a side and wholeheartedly follow it! This Sunday we will look at how a blind devotion to moderation can be harmful and why thinking in terms of prioritisation is a more heavenly outlook.
This Sunday we will be looking at the spiritual significance of the year of Jubilee. This was a law that the Children of Israel had that, every fifty years, they had to let the ground lie fallow and not plant seeds or harvest. Also, any land that had been sold during those fifty years had to then revert to the original owner. What is the spiritual significance of all of this for our lives and our need for fallow times?
This Sunday we will finish our series on the spiritual history of the human race by talking about the beginning of Christianity all the way until today. What happened that made it necessary for there to be a new church after the church started by Jesus Christ? And where do we go from here—what do we believe will happen in the next 500 years of the spiritual history of the human race.
In wedding ceremonies and love songs people talk about two people becoming one when they get married. That sounds beautiful and poetic but is it actually possible? To people who are in love it can feel very possible; to people in the midst of a difficult conflict or who have just drifted apart it can feel entirely impossible and naive. And what does “becoming one” even mean? Does it mean always agreeing with your partner? Does it mean you have to lose yourself in your relationship for it to work? These are the questions we’re going to be digging into this Sunday.
The final sermon of our series “The Spiritual History of the Human Race” will be on Sunday, 30 June.
In the lead up to New Church Day we are looking at the spiritual history of the human race, in other words, all the churches that went before and how they contribute to where we find ourselves today in the New Church. Last week Malcolm talked about how mankind began in a kind of purity and innocence, but then fell away from that when they decided to make their own sense of self more important than God. This week we’ll look at the next era in spiritual history: the Ancient Church. This is the time period in which people became disconnected from spiritual reality and the Lord had to find other ways of reaching them. By studying this process we can start to understand why God can seem so distant from us today.
