New Church Westville Weekly Sermon Podcast

In our series on the stages of life, this Sunday we come to the stage of adulthood. We will follow the story of Moses as he is called by the Lord to do something great. And we will also see how he tries to get out of it any way that he can. Moses eventually grows into one of the greatest leaders of the Children of Israel but he also experiences a lot of ups and downs, victories and defeats along the way. Such is adulthood and the Lord’s Word can help us to find our way through it.

This week we continue our exploration of the stages of life as seen in the story of Moses. As a young man Moses faced the challenges of putting his ideals into practice. On the one hand he could see with clarity the injustice his people faced. On the other hand, he struggled to reconcile how his own people treated each other, and in the end was forced to flee to a foreign land. These experiences illustrate well the dichotomy of the teenage years: a growing sense of right and wrong, tempered by growing awareness of the complexity of life.

Are you an adult still trying to figure out what it means to be an adult? Are you a teenager or young adult trying to figure out where you fit in the world? Or, are you feeling like you might actually be getting old now? Over the next few weeks we’re going to be using the story of Moses as a way of exploring the challenges and opportunities of the different stages of life that we go through in our lives. This Sunday we’re going to start with the story of baby Moses being put in a tar covered ark in the Nile river and what this can teach us about the first few years of our lives.

We live in a world of technology, all the more so since the advent of COVID-19. This pandemic has highlighted the blessing of technology, as it allows us to carry on work safely, to connect with loved ones around the world, even to attend church while not being able to attend in person. But it has also highlighted the downsides of technology, as we yearn to get back to in-person connection and struggle with the frustrating limits of technology. As with any tool, technology will be useful or useless depending on how much it is used in the service of what is spiritual.

What do you do if you’re pretty sure that the person you’re married to is not your soulmate? That’s a big question and we’ll be doing our best to answer it on Sunday.

The ultimate expression of love is to feel the joy of another person as if it were your own joy. This is expressed in the great commandment that we are to love others as we love ourselves, such that we rejoice in their happiness and feel pain at their hurt. At the same time there are limits and boundaries to how much we feel another as ourselves. Even as we empathize, we also need to maintain our independence, lest we get sucked in and lose ourselves. The Word gives us guidance on how to both reach out and remain separate in a healthy way.

Do you believe that you have a soulmate? Can you know when you’ve found your soulmate? These are philosophical questions, in one sense, but the conclusions that you come to about whether or not you think someone is your soulmate can have huge consequences in your life. This Sunday we’re going to talk about how your beliefs about soulmates can impact the decisions you make before you get married and in 2 weeks we’ll talk about after you get married.

Relationships, including marriage, fulfil many human needs, from basic economics to deep companionship and beyond. But the deepest component of marriage is spiritual. It is not just about the relationship of a husband and wife with each other, but also the relationship of each with the Lord. Working on this part of the relationship, and working towards it even as a single person, deepens and enriches all the other pieces that go with marriage.

We’re starting a series on relationships. With the pandemic and lockdown regulations, relationships have been under additional strain for almost half a year. This Sunday we’re going to focus on how to work on our relationships in these weird and hard times and we’ll be using the story of the Wedding at Cana. The story begins with the wine running out at a wedding and this seems to relate to times when all the fun and joy seems to have run out in our relationships. Can the Lord help?

Over the last three weeks we have looked at the Lord’s Prayer. In our services, we often follow the Lord’s Prayer with the familiar phrase, “Lord, forgive us our trespasses; as we forgive those who trespass against us.” This is based on the teaching that Jesus gave immediately after giving His disciples His Prayer. Having prayed, it is a useful reminder that we must also live the words that we have spoken; that we must actively work on repentance from sin so we can forgive and be forgiven. So this week we leave the Prayer behind as a spoken conversation with the Lord and turn to how we live it in our daily lives.