St Barnabas Swanland, Sunday Sermon Summaries

  The Battle We Fight If we are following Paul’s writing in Romans, we have just read about the incredible reality of what Jesus has done for us. Earlier in chapter 6 Paul speaks of how we have been buried with Christ in baptism and then raised to walk in newness of life. It’s a glorious, mountain-top truth. We can take certain verses from Romans on a Sunday morning and feel very triumphant. But then Monday morning comes. We wake up, and we face the harsh reality of the world we live in. We face the reality of ourselves. Despite being inspired on Sunday by what we read or heard…We struggle with doing, even thinking, the right things the very next day. You’re not alone. It’s a universal human experience, isn't it? We live in an age of unbelievable advancement. We have the internet—the vast expanse of human knowledge right at our fingertips. We can access the greatest art, the deepest theology, and the answers to almost any question in a fraction of a second. And yet, what ...

  Romans 4: 13-end   Imagine you are a church leader planning a visit to St Barnabas in Swanland.    What would you write to them?    What ground work do you want to do? Is everything OK, or are there some things that need sorting out?    What are they getting wrong?    You wouldn’t want to make them feel miserable or failures so they give up; you want to encourage them. What do you think they need to know?   This was the position the Apostle Paul was in.    It’s about AD57, so around 25 years after Jesus.    After the events of Pentecost, the early church was growing in different regions and had spread to Rome. The book of Romans in our Bibles is actually a letter from Paul, written to the church in Rome - probably meeting together in 5 house church.    Although it actually reads more like the sort of essay written at theological college.   It’s quite dense, and the commentaries ...