Services

Ian and Abbey led today and the songs included God be in my Head, Light of the World, Open The Eyes of My Heart, and Love Love, Love One Another.

Yvette brought us the word from Ephesians 4 1-16.

Paul wrote this, like a lot of his letters, from prison in Rome. Yvette shared that each of us have been called and chosen by God. We should be able to see Him in the way that we treat each other, being humble , able to admit we are sometimes wrong, and giving God the glory rather than focussing on our achievements. We need to appreciate and understand where people are coming from and that they may be different to us. Relationships at work in business in marriages are not easy and take effort to make them work. . After all people are not easy to get along with. We need to pray for them, pray for their families, pray they get to know God.

But a warning , be prepared for you to be the answer to your prayers. We are all part of the Body of Christ and prayer changes us. You need to study your Bible alongside praying to make sure you are not misled. Reading a Bible without praying is also not much use. Doing both means that your prayers have power and authority

Spiritual gifts are there to help the Body of Christ. We don’t always know what our gifts are . God doesn’t always show us what our gifts are. In fact God often doesn’t tell us the full journey and the destination, He simply tells us our next step. He won’t take us further until we do what he wants now.

Yvette then showed us Psalm 68:18. And explained that a conquering king would distribute looted wealth amongst his troops. When Jesus conquered death, he shared his gift, his new wealth with us.
In Acts 2 16-19 Yvette showed that we are living in the last days between Jesus resurrection and return. Each of us has the Holy Spirit living in us. We have gifts because of this, all different and all equal to help us grow. Paul says we need to use our gifts to step out in faith.

We need to be conscious of the fact that we don’t get to be good at something until we first are given the freedom to be bad at it.

If you want God to speak to you, you need to open your Bible. When we use our gifts to encourage each other, we will be ready to take God to West View. Unity and loving and working with all the other churches will change the spiritual landscape around us. This is what the spiritual gifts are for. It’s an ongoing process to aim for unity in faith. Thankfully it’s not about what we deserve, it’s about God’s love for us and using the gifts he gave us.

Amanda thanked Yvette for her words and reminded the church that in the induction service for Fiona and our new community ministers, Linda Donaldson had also been given a message if changing landscapes.

Promoted by James 5-13, we have introduced a prayer and praise box at church . This will allow people to share items for prayer and to request their favourite songs. They can also use it to provide feedback on their experiences at church….Of course you can also do this via our website by filling in the contact us form.

Happy New Year and welcome to our first service of the year

God’s covenant and promises and the criticism trap

Amanda, Ian and Abbey led worship today. Songs this week were “I speak Jesus”, “Holy Water”, “God’s Great Dancefloor”, “Spirit of God, Unseen as the wind”, “God of Wonders”, “Thankful”, “Graves to Gardens” and “Holy of Holies”

Matty brought us some thoughts and reflections from his week. He had found it particularly difficult to highlight what message he wanted to share. He eventually decided to speak around Numbers 12:11 “Please my Lord I ask you not to hold against us the sin we have so foolishly committed”. In this passage we see the result of falling into criticising others, and Matty reflected on the times when he has been critical of others and outlined a situation in his life where he had heard the result of someone being criticised by others when simply attempting to do the best job that they were capable of.

Despite his own reflections on this topic, he still found himself in discussions with a fellow dog walker about recent actions of the council. It is all too easy to be drawn to the criticism trap.

Amanda brought us the word today and gave us a tour of the seven covenants made by God,

A covenant is an agreement between two parties to work towards a common goal and normally sets out roles, responsibilities and consequences when the agreement is broken.

She started with the Adamic covenant which was a general covenant instructing Adam and eve not to eat from the tree of good and evil. Not following the covenenant led to consequences, death and the pain of childbirth etc. If we are disobedient the vine will be pruned.

Another covenant promise was given to Noah, that God would not use floods to drown man again. The rainbow was left as a sign of that promise.

Covenants were also made to the twelve tribes of Israel and within our communion service Amanda used 12 pieces of unleavened bread to signify the tribes.

Finally Amanda also drew people’s attention to the covenant promises given to the people of West View Baptist Church. They pre date her time at West View yet we can all see how folks from West View have spread out across the world to share the good news of God’s work and promises.