Ever heard a talk on how to meditate in church before? Us neither. But the crossover between what the science says about mindful meditation being brilliant for our brains, stress-levels, focus, memory sleep patterns and approximately a zillion other things, and the way we - in the spirit-filled church - prepare our minds, bodies and souls to experience the holy spirit, seems like a weirdly undiscussed marriage. And Jesus did make it quite clear that the spirit was the one who was going to show us how to do this whole christian thing. So let’s talk about it.
Discipline of Prayer
It’s hard to overestimate quite how foundational prayer is to our spiritual health and connection to god, yet in reality many find prayer very difficult. But when we see prayer as Jesus did - a means of partnering with, hearing from and experiencing the intimacy of our Father - prayer is transformed into a life-giving, exciting, joyful, essential pursuit. Prayer’s goal becomes not what Jesus can do for us, but Jesus himself.
Introducing the Spiritual Disciplines
Many have grown up with the Christian faith being represented as one long slog of discipline - Do this, Don’t do that, Try harder, Be better. This is not what the Spiritual Disciplines are about at all. Rather they are tools in the spiritual tool kit God gives us. Their job is to place us in a position to receive more of God’s grace directly from him. It is only ever grace that changes us. The two most common method for trying to overcome our old sinful nature are both equally flawed: either we rely solely on their will power, or we remain passive and hope for the best. By contrast the Spiritual Disciplines involve our wills - we have to choose to engage with them, but they rely entirely on God’s grace to change us. They are the keys to how we mature in our faith, becoming better people, and come closer to Jesus.
Revelation: City of the Lamb
The final chapters of Revelation depict a glorious vision of heaven. In our final talk on the series we look specifically at what the people of heaven are like. There’s a lot of them; they are you and me and everyone else who responds to Jesus; they are not just future, they are present; and most importantly they take a like God’s emissaries, his vice-regents, his high-priests. This means we, as heavenly people, have purpose and calling - to witness to and extend God’s heaven here on earth. It is what makes sense of life and brings us fulfillment. The vision we have at bread is that all of us play our unique part, with our unique gifts, and so get to enjoy all the glory of heaven, and bring it to a world in need.
Revelation: Restoration of All Things
What is likely to come to mind when we think of Revelation is the question, “what will the end of the world look like”. It is what most of cultural interest tends to be around the book. But it’s not quite what the book aims to answer. Instead, Revelation is about Jesus and what He is doing. The book unveils Jesus’ restoration of the earth by bringing heaven and thus transforming everything about our world. It also shows how God will be permanently present with his people - no temples, no sacred locations - God face-to-face with us all the time. It isn’t just for the future, it also is for today, in-part that is. So we can experience intimacy with Jesus and glimpses of his kingdom restoring relationships, bodies, and more. Looking ahead at what God is doing means we can have joy today.
Revelation: Empire State of Everything
Alright so we know it’s not a roadmap of end times by now, but what on earth WAS John of Patmos saying when he wrote this epic and crazy story? We’ve got to the scene with the dragon and beasts now (yep - coming at you with 666 chat this morning) and as a side-note it still blows our MIND how many people were raised with terrifying, entirely wrong teaching on this stuff. This story is about same thing the rest of the bible is about: God is good, evil is real and coming for you, but Jesus is on the throne. The beast was the Roman Empire - no serious scholars disagree on that. Empire, and all it’s lying, deceiving, masquerading about who we should worship and how we should live. Conquer, dominate, and tell ourselves God is on OUR side. Those of us whose politics demand we’re already 100% anti-empire should make no mistake: the imperial cult is still whispering to us all.
Revelation: Overcoming Evil
Part of what Jesus says to the church throughout the book of Revelation is this: "Evil is real. It is both inside and outside of God’s church. But let us overcome it together.” In fact Jesus has already defeated all the forces of evil once and for all. And he calls his people to join in his victory. This talk is both about us taking seriously the ways in which we collude with evil in our own lives, and how we are able to overcome it - specifically through joining in the worship of heaven and putting out faith in the victory of the lamb.
Revelation: The End of Fear
One of the most misunderstood and misapplied books in the Bible, Revelation has tended to either scared people off or unhealthily preoccupied them. In this introduction to the series we explore what this curious book actually is, and importantly what it isn’t. Ultimately this is a book a much about our present as it is our future - and it’s one which expands our vision to the extremes of how big and awe-inspiring Jesus is. His first words spoken in the book are ‘do not be afraid’ - he is good, he loves us, and he has been and will continue to be victorious over all evil.
2022 – Leave Behind Your Box - talk + Q&A
We are happy to have had Mark Chase with us (virtually that is, as you’ll notice by the not so great audio quality). We observed how each of us clings to a box, that thing we take comfort in, where we feel safe, where it’s predictable and it’s often what we can put God in. But God isn’t meant to be put in a box, he comes to shatter our boxes and offer us something much more valuable: life with him. When we let him get a hold of us, we can partner with God to create a better world that looks after the marginalized, seeks justice, and is meaningful. God comes to release life and flourishing for all and you can join him. This is what his kingdom is about and he does this by his Spirit. All of this is followed by a Q&A where Ed and Mark chat about what this looks like in our church. Take a listen.
Christmas Service – We’re in Uncertain Times
And as a species we don’t tend to do very well with uncertainty - it makes us anxious. When world-views are shaken and things we thought were solid no longer appear to be, our brains will do everything they can to stop us from experiencing uncertainty. We can be tempted either to double down on certainty (despite all evidence to the contrary) or demolish the whole edifice of our beliefs entirely. Many people feel caught between these two extremes when it comes to their Christian faith. But the story of Christmas invites us on a different path. Jesus did not take flesh in order simply to be believed in - but to be met. He became one of us to be with us. Putting our faith in Jesus (as opposed to a belief system) is a lifelong journey of him forming and challenging all our beliefs and actions. And it means that we neither need to hold onto certainty dogmatically, nor throw everything away as soon as doubt creeps in. Rather we allow God’s spirit to change us from glory to glory. And we can meet an uncertain world in confidence, not our own, but his. Because Christmas means that once and for all: God is with us - so we never need to be afraid again.
Advent – Hope in the Messy
The timing of Jesus' arrival is worth noting, he comes at a height of imperial power, social unrest, and religious clashes all under a false peace. In the messiness of it all, Jesus is born in manger and of him it is declared 'Prince of Peace' and 'King'. This is something the writers of Matthew and Luke want to highlight because it shows that in our own lives, Jesus doesn't mind clashing with the things we've made kings, he isn't intimated by the mess in our personal lives, in our relationships, or in the world around us. He arrives in the midst of it all and we can know him to be the bringer of peace, and the King. This is the hope of Christmas.
End of Year Giving Campaign (2) - Give To Something Of Lasting Value
The currency of the kingdom of God will always be people. Jesus began his ministry by finding 12 disciples in whom he could invest - not projects, or buildings, or courses, or initiatives, but people. Bread church exists to carry on this mission and to invest in people - both those who are near and far off. When we give our financial resources to the church we are investing in this currency. We're looking to see people from all backgrounds, experiences, and understanding of faith grow to become more and more Jesus-like. In so doing we’re acting in faith and helping build God’s kingdom of peace and justice and mercy and freedom here and now.
End of Year Giving Campaign – How is your relationship with money?
It’s easy to judge others about their use of money (most often the very rich or the very poor), but less easy to consider our own relationship with money. Jesus talked a lot about money because he knew how a healthy treatment of money was so important to our spiritual health. Allowing Jesus into our finances is one of the most challenging but transformational things we can do. We’re called to put out faith in him, not money. And in so doing we can be free with money - to earn it, to save it and to give it away in such a way as to have a huge impact for God’s kingdom.
Where Help Comes From – Peace in the Wait
Waiting doesn't come naturally to humans. It's inconvenient, it's annoying, but most of all it's painful. We're are all familiar with waiting and so was the community behind Psalm 85. Like us, they're waiting to bounce back from a less than ideal situation. In it all, they hear from the One who promises peace or 'shalom'. God is the one who offers shalom. Its completeness and wholeness to our fractured situations, relationships, and souls. And in him is where we find our enoughness. So in the wait, we can know and experience the living God who brings shalom.
Where Help Comes From – Honestly Confronting & Waiting on the Lord
In Psalm 130 we’re shown one way to approach our Righteous God: crying out honestly, demanding God’s attention, but also remembering his compassion and mercy. Even more, as a “Psalm of Ascent,” the poet of Psalm 130 insists that waiting is a legitimate and embodied prayer. Waiting is an under-rated theme in the whole of the scriptures, and the second half of this Psalm gives us some encouragement in how to embrace waiting as a spiritual practice in our own lives. Ultimately, we wait for Jesus’ return to set all things right, and as he is even now “making all things new,” we wait in the now-and-not-yet of his Kingdom, in hope.
Where Help Comes From – Find Your Soul Again
What does it mean to lose our souls? How do we get it back when it’s gone? The soul is the core of a person. It’s the soul which yearns for more of God. When we’ve been disconnected from God it’s our soul that misses him. It can ache if it goes too long without him.
This tends to happen when our desires have been left unchecked. Desires, as opposed to needs - like food, shelter, warmth etc - will always have the potential to consume us because they can never be satisfied. And the more we desire, the more our desires are unmet. The more unmet desires we have the more we grow agitated, competitive and aggressive.
The Psalmist encourages us back from the chaos of unmet desires, to putting our hope in God once more. He is not something to be desired, but he is who we need. He alone satisfies all our longing. This is a call to come back to him once more.
Where Help Comes From – Freedom from Shame
We kicked off this new series by remembering first what the psalms were for. They were the ‘hymnbook’ of the Jewish people, sung and recited at every gathering and worship service, which shows us that to them, worship was more then praise and gratitude, it was the full gamut of all human emotion. Many of them were written by King David, who embodied what Israel knew itself to be: called and broken.
Psalm 32 is the perfect confession prayer for this condition - a condition that we share too: called and broken. And it builds to a declaration of what God called David, because of Jesus, we get to be called too: righteous. But as a starting place, we have to truly believe that being disconnected from self, other, and God himself (or the condition of ’shame’ as it’s more widely known) was never ever ever what God wants for us to feel. This can be the hardest part for many of us (especially if the church has historically been the place where we’ve experienced shame the most) but it’s true: God never ever wants you to feel shame.
People In Search Of A Kingdom – Mercy & Justice
As people of God's Kingdom, how should we interact with the world around us? the Bible says two almost paradoxical things; 1. This world will pass away, 2. This world is being redeemed. Living with this tension allows us to be both hopeful about and engaged in the world (God’s kingdom is here to redeem it), as well as not controlled by or conformed to it (God’s kingdom will eventually supersede this world). The presence of the kingdom now means not only can we experience God's justice and mercy for ourselves, but we can bring them to a world in need. The kingdom is for everyone, but it is always particularly powerfully present for those most in need - where Jesus is king there is justice for the downtrodden, mercy for those who have not experience mercy, healing for the hurting, abundance for those in poverty, deliverance for the oppressed, and loved for the unloved and unloveable. Lastly, hear from Raul (bread’s community engagement pastor) about the ways you can get involved in bringing mercy and justice in the community.
People In Search Of A Kingdom – Everyone Gets To Play
The kingdom Jesus establishes is one of transformative power - power from God that is given to each and everyone of us. Embracing who we are as inhertors of the kingdom means embracing that we have dynamic culture-transforming roles to play. The kingdom is also one of diversity. No two kingdom people are the same - we are individually gifted - and part of maturing as Christians is identifying and expressing our individual gifts for the good of God’s kingdom.
People In Search Of A Kingdom – Lifestyle Of The Future
What does it mean to live the kingdom lifestyle? The Sermon on the mount is the closest thing we have to the manifesto, but if we were to make that the moral standard, no one could ever hope to enter the kingdom of God. The good news is that’s not how it works. Jesus is not describing a new set of rules, he’s describing what happens to us when we pass out of the present age, enter his kingdom, and start to live as people of the age to come. This is what heaven looks like. And heavenly people, sons and daughters of the kingdom, which is already here in part, have undergone a revolution of their whole way of being.