Weekly Church news from the pews and around our organisations and groups.
Tune in LIVE tonight at 8pm for another organist entertains video.
Since we’re live tonight the words cant easily be edited in, so we have a hymn sheet in their place
Download the hymn sheet here
If you are able say hi in the live chat, its great to see folks there interacting with each other. If you watch later on catch up then you’re equally as welcome and we hope you can leave a comment.
Throughout Scripture we are reminded of God’s direction over our lives. He is our good Shepherd who leads us if we we would look to Him for guidance. The Bible teaches us that God’s plan leads to joy and contentment. When we pray for God’s guidance and for discernment through the Holy Spirit, we can rest assured that God will provide wisdom! We do not have to worry about our next step or about tomorrow because we know who guides our way! Do not rush your day without going before God to seek guidance.
Dear Lord, times are really hard right now and life has really got me down. I don’t know what to do. I ask that You bestow Your wisdom upon me. I don’t want to lean on my own knowledge anymore, because it has let me down so many times. I need to hear Your voice. Give me the discernment to hear Your voice and Your voice alone. Speak to me in the way You know I will hear you best. I also pray for Your Will, Lord. I give You the praise and the glory in my circumstances because I know that I am exactly where You want me. I know this is to teach me something or to help me to grow. No matter what, I trust you and ask You to show what is best in this situation. In Jesus Name I pray. Amen.
– Carrie Lowrance
This Sunday (15 August), Christians across the country – and further afield – will join together in prayer and reflection at 7pm in response to the pandemic.
As with previous weeks during lockdown, 15 Christian churches and organisations across the country, including the Church of Scotland, have co-signed the letter calling for prayer.
Scottish Christians have been continuing to answer the call to pray at the same time each week, and the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Lord Wallace, is taking part alongside them.
“We should always be mindful for the wisdom handed down to us from past generations; much of it learned the hard way, from mistakes made and consequences suffered,” Lord Wallace said.
“So, too, we are grateful for the richness that comes to us from living alongside people of other traditions. In our day and generation we must surely allow our minds and hearts to be open so that we can risk getting to know them and learning from them.
“In this pandemic, our responsibility is to come together and offer our prayers for all the many diverse expressions of our Christian faith that enrich life, as we have done for many months now.
“As the statistics appear to move in a hopeful direction, let us not forget that behind each death there will be grieving family and friends; behind each hospitalisation there will be a suffering patient, an anxious family and a caring and skilled medical team.
“And behind each vaccination, let us recognise, with thanks, the skill of the scientists’ research and those who make distribution and vaccination possible. Let us remember, too, those in countries who still wait anxiously for vaccines to arrive. May our leaders respond imaginatively and generously to that challenge.
“A pattern has been set for us, lived out in Jesus Christ, made possible by the Spirit. May we follow in His way, and be guided by the one over-riding rule of love in all that we say and do.
This week’s letter accompanying the prayer, which is also available in Gaelic, states:
“As we journey from where we have been in past months to where we will be in times to come, we are beginning to recover some of the parts of our shared life that had been lost to us for a time.
“Within shared communal settings and within the community of God’s people, one of the things that we are recovering is the experience of song and the bonding that the shared experience of singing brings to us.
“Within the community of God’s people, we are gradually beginning to recover the shared expression of worship through the singing of ‘psalms, hymns and spiritual songs’. (Ephesians 5: 20)
“In recovering that which had been lost, we rediscover a dimension of our shared experience that is integral to our worship of God. As the Spirit inspires us, we renew our thanksgiving ‘to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ’. As we do so, we share more fully in the life that God gifts to us through Christ and by the Spirit.”
God our Father,
As we journey from where we have been
To where we will be,
Fill us with Your Spirit
That we might truly worship You
And praise Your holy name.
Lord, in Your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
God our Father,
As we journey from where we have been
To where we will be,
Inspire us within the community of God’s people
To lift up our hearts
And to renew our praise.
Lord, in Your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
God our Father,
As we journey from where we have been
To where we will be,
Renew us as we renew our praise
With Psalms and hymns
And all the songs of God’s people.
Lord, in Your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
God our Father,
As we journey from where we have been
To where we will be,
Help us to recover that which has been lost
And to rediscover all that unites us
As those who are made in Your image.
Lord, in Your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
God our Father,
As we journey from where we have been
To where we will be,
We give thanks to You
For all your gifts to us
Through Christ and by Your Spirit.
Lord, in Your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
“It is a tremendous grace, then, and a great privilege when a person living in the world we have to live in suddenly loses his interest in the things that absorb that world, and discovers in his own soul an appetite for poverty and solitude. And the most precious of all the gifts of nature or grace is the desire to be hidden and to vanish from the sight of men and be accounted as nothing by the world and to disappear from one’s own self-conscious consideration and vanish into nothingness in the immense poverty that is the adoration of God. This absolute emptiness, this poverty, this obscurity holds within it the secret of all joy because it is full of God.”
~ Thomas Merton
BELLSHILL: CENTRAL PARISH CHURCH OF SCOTLAND 