A daily reflection drawing from Advent Bible passages – to help us grow as we live out our faith in the everyday moments of life. It’s lovely to have you tune in to the last day of the advent collective – day 24. I’m going to start by telling you a story… When I was 17, in my last year of school, I applied to and got accepted onto an amazing adventurous, leadership programme called Soul Edge. We were to live in a small Christian community in the middle of rural Canada for 5 months and learn from and serve the local church there. As part of the application, I needed a few references so naturally I asked one of my teachers at school. He did his research and came back to me and said “Sarah, are you sure you’re not joining a cult?” I had to explain to him that, no, doing a Christian discipleship training scheme is not the same as joining a cult! It felt horrible to be misunderstood and doubted… In Mathew chapter 1 Mary falls pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit and no one believes her. I’m sure she will have tried to explain to Joseph that she hadn’t slept with anyone and that it was God’s child she was carrying – but like my teacher I’m not sure if the people around her would have understood. I don’t think anyone would write her a reference or vouch for her! Doesn’t it feel awful when people don’t believe you? But also, it is so understandable that Joseph wanted to break off things with Mary. She claimed she was still a virgin and yet was going to have a baby. I really relate to Joseph – I would not believe Mary. She hasn’t slept with him and so the rational conclusion is that she had got pregnant from another man. If you were Mary’s friend, would you believe her story that God had miraculously impregnated her? It would be a big ask … In the same way though it was crazy for Noah to believe a flood was coming in a desert; or for Moses to stand at the edge of the Red Sea and believe there was a way across; or for Sarah to believe that she would have a child in her nineties. Sometimes God asks us to believe him when he promises us crazy, impossible things and to trust him when it doesn’t make sense. When God promised Sarah a child in her old age, she laughed at God, but he replied in love, “Sarah, is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return and you will have a son.” Jesus reminds us in Matthew 19 with God all things are possible. And God keeps his promises. When it doesn’t make sense to trust God’s promises we are still called to have hope, in spite of what people may think of us. What things in your life are we not daring to pray for because they might be too impossible for God? What things have we lost hope for? I dare you to bring them before God again today and to pray really bold prayers, trusting God with his promises. Going back to the passage in Matthew 1, verse 20 tells us that Joseph has a dream where the Lord appears to him and says “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” God calls him by name and knows he is afraid, but God reassures him: do not be afraid, this is a divine conception, a miracle, trust me… And he does. Joseph’s trust in God is beautiful. The situation hasn’t changed – Mary is still pregnant. But Joseph is obedient to the call of God, he trusts in the promise-keeping God, and when he wakes up, he did what the angel of the Lord had told him and took Mary home as his wife. Our highest calling, as Christians, is to love God with everything we have, and I’ve heard before that God’s love language is obedience. So let’s love God today by recommitting ourselves to God today, to trusting him, to serving and obeying him. I am choosing to trust God with some impossible things today: with the uncertainty of this season, God I trust you.

A daily reflection drawing from Advent Bible passages – to help us grow as we live out our faith in the everyday moments of life. Welcome to day 24 of the Advent Collective. Who’s your mum? Since we moved into our house in Walkley we have had well over 30 people live with us. Currently Sam Watson from the staff team is part of our family and part of our bubble. Each house guest that comes to stay is subjected to a tough interview by the children. And although they have got bigger, smarter and more savvy, the questions asked have become something of legend… of tradition. The first question, that dates from the time Duncan Vaughan came to stay, is always the same: Who is your mum? The second… and a tough follow up question: does she wear glasses? Today we find ourselves with Mary, Jesus’ mum, pregnant and visiting her relative Elizabeth – who is also pregnant with John the Baptist. And… As we heard yesterday from Joel… when they met, Elizabeth’s baby jumped for joy in the womb. In response Mary sings – the Song of Mary, or the Magnificat! ‘My soul magnifies the Lord… It’s an anthem of praise, an expression of joy and it probably became an early hymn, much as you would find in the psalms. But on a deeper level it echoes through time and scripture to the songs of the women of Israel. Songs that were sung at huge turning points in the history of the Israelite nation. At the very beginning, the start of the family, the beginning of the 12 tribes of Jacob. Leah, one of Jacob’s wives and a mother of the seedling nation… sang that all the women would call her happy or blessed! And here Mary sings “From now on all generations will call me blessed” And hundreds of years later… at the moment that Israel became a nation… when they fled from Egypt and escaped through the parting of the red sea – the Egyptian army wiped out… at that moment, when slaves were set free, when they set out into the desert to be fashioned into a people, Miriam – Moses sister – sang a song of victory, a song of praise… And then at the moment that Israel became a Kingdom.. a nation lost and without direction… another mum, Hannah sang an anthem of praise. She took her son Samuel… dedicated him to God… left him in the house of the Lord… to be raised by Eli the priest… and this boy Samuel, would grow to become a great prophet… a great priest… Samuel would anoint the first king over Israel – Saul – and anoint the second – the great King David. So this isn’t just a song of praise… this isn’t just a private moment between two mums to be. No, this is a song of victory. This is a song signifying the beginning of a new era… a momentous turning point in the history of Israel… and more than that… a turning point in the history of the world! All that had been promised to the nation of Israel… all the promise of blessing, of peace, of justice, of redemption, of freedom… all the fullness life lived with God, empowered, enabled, beautiful and blessed… all that had been promised to Israel now focussed on one man… one child… one baby… growing in his mother’s womb. But the beginning of a new era also signals the end of the old… We cannot embrace the new… and expect the old to remain. Jesus would ignite a revolution: revolution of the heart… a reordering of power and a redistribution of wealth – Luke 1:51-53: he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. 52 He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. 53 He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. As we approach Christmas day… the coming of Jesus… as we’ve reflected on the song of Mary… we have opportunity to take a moment, to pause, to consider the impact of this little baby on the life we lead. We want to fully embrace the new era,

A daily reflection drawing from Advent Bible passages – to help us grow as we live out our faith in the everyday moments of life. Hi! I’m Joel and I’m part of the student Church here at STC. I hope you’ve been enjoying the Advent Collective as much as I have so far. My Dad and my Uncle are huge Manchester United fans. Thankfully I saw the light early enough and adopted Wednesday as my team, but I do still have a soft spot for Man Utd because of that. Anyway, we went to Rio Ferdinand’s testimonial a number of years back, he’s a former Manchester United player if football isn’t your forte! It turned out that our seats for that game were right in front of the VIP section. As we turned around and realised this, I saw my hero Edwin Van Der Sar – the 6 foot 5, no nonsense, legendary Dutch goalkeeper – a matter of inches away from me. I was so excited to see him and my Dad encouraged me to go up to him and get an autograph (that would be a selfie in 2020 – I don’t know who let the selfie replace the autograph but I’m fuming about it – but that’s not the point of this story!) I felt like I couldn’t because he was literally Edwin Van Der Sar! It was a bizarre mixture of emotions of pure joy but also a sense of awe that the man I watched every single week on TV playing for my football club was now stood right in front of me. So what does Van Der Sar have to do with the Christmas story? He wasn’t there when Jesus was born, I’m sure of that. But if we look at Luke chapter 1, verses 38 to 45, we read about Elizabeth’s response to Mary’s arrival. For context here, the Angel Gabriel has already appeared to Mary to tell her that she will have a baby who will be called Jesus, the son of God, and that her relative Elizabeth is also pregnant despite her old age. When Mary arrives at Elizabeth’s house, Elizabeth seems to have a similar feeling to what I had when I saw Van Der Sar: a mixture of awe and joy. Look at verse 43: ‘But why am I so favoured, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?’, Elizabeth says. She is clearly in awe of what God is doing, in awe of the fact that God has chosen to use her in this way. She feels unworthy. Yet in the very next verse – 44 – she says, ‘As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy’. A sense of joy so overpowering that the baby in her womb physically responded to it! Reverence, and joy. Two things which often seem incompatible – but two things that should be natural emotions in us when we are responding to what God is doing. It’s not just the Christmas story in which we see this either. In Psalm 150, the final Psalm of the book, the Psalmist tells us to praise God with ‘the sounding of the trumpet’ in verse 3 – associated with the grandest and most solemn events. And then in verse 4 – ‘praise Him with tambourines and dancing’. Clearly a joyful celebration! Yet again praising God with reverence and with joy. I know that I’ve not always felt like I can come to God with joy and reverence in my life. This can be because of things going on in life that just make us feel like joy is impossible! I’ve felt that a lot through 2020 especially. And sometimes life makes us feel like there is no need to be in awe of God, and we are distracted from his power, glory and beauty. If that is the same for you then I would really encourage you to spend time with God in prayer, in worship and through reading the Bible, and let’s hope that as we do that we will discover that sense of joy and reverence that we’ve seen in today’s passage this Christmastime! Let’s pray. Lord Jesus, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you are so good to us that it is only appropriate to come to you with joy and reverence. Sorry for when we’ve forgotten that and have come to you with the wrong attitude. Please help us to worship you with joy and reverence this Christmas and please meet us wherever we are at so that does not feel out of our g...

A daily reflection drawing from Advent Bible passages – to help us grow as we live out our faith in the everyday moments of life. Hello, Welcome to the Advent Collective podcast, day 21. Today is the 21st December, it is the winter solstice, the shortest day or longest night of the year. In about a week’s time we will begin to sense the change in the light as we slowly move towards spring and into a new year. I don’t know how you feel about 2021, my sense is that there is some hope out there but also a lot of trepidation and a fair amount of anticipation – and who can blame us, 2020 has not been what we were expecting or planning for. If you speak to anyone who knows me, they will tell you I love a plan, even the process of planning brings me a fair amount of joy! And I had a great 2020 planned out – 12 months ago I was about to start my second maternity leave, we were in the process of buying a new house – bit of a renovation project so a fair amount of 2020 was to be spent over seeing the renovation project, realising my interior design dreams and generally filling my calendar with coffee and cake dates, catch up with friends and some family holidays. Now not all of this has come to pass. In today’s passage, Luke 1 v 26 -28 we meet Mary at a point where her plans are about to spectacularly veer off track. I think it is fair to say that the appearance of an angel and all that his message brought about were not what Mary had planned for her future. In every nativity I have seen, or cartoon or film depicting these verses Mary is to be found at home; kneading bread, sweeping up, generally going about her day to day routine. However, God, through his angelic messenger breaks into the every day rhythms and routines of Mary’s life. I think it is fair to say that the very routines of our lives have been rather disrupted this year, all plans out the window and whatever rhythms you might have had in place thrown off course. That being so I think there is something we can learn from these few verses. God breaks into Mary’s life with a divine greeting of love and encouragement. In the passion translation it reads “Grace to you… You are anointed with great favour”. I don’t know if this year someone has offered you a word of encouragement – I wonder how it made you feel? For me, it is a powerful moment when a friend takes the time to see me and my situation and to speak a word of affirmation into it. How much more so must Mary have felt to have received this encouragement from God? During advent I have reading from a book called “the art of advent” – the book takes a piece of art each day to further explore the advent story. One piece which has stayed with me depicts these verses – the painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner shows Mary in a simple room surrounded by the trappings of her everyday life, yet the scene is a beautiful one. Mary looks nervous and uncertain yet she is looking with shy confidence directly into the face of the angelic light. Unlike her relative Zachariah a few verses before, Mary’s conversation with the angel is much more practical and accepting. The painting shows a young woman, who having heard the opening encouraging words of God, is daunted but unafraid of the challenge before her. As we will see in the coming verses whilst Mary expresses bewilderment and worry at the angel’s message their interaction concludes with Mary’s servant hearted acceptance of the plan, and further on her ‘magnificat’ is a hymn of praise to God for all he had done and will do. In short she gently and gracefully accepts the monumental change to her plans. I think it is fair to say I have not accepted the changes 2020 has brought with such grace, I have been angry, stubborn, resentful and often daily irritated when all I had planned fails to work out as I wanted it.  So what about us at the turn of the year as we, however tentatively,

A daily reflection drawing from Advent Bible passages – to help us grow as we live out our faith in the everyday moments of life. Welcome to the Advent Collective Day 21.  Our Bible passage today is the whole of Revelation Chapter 22, and I’m going to be reading verse 17 shortly, but before I do here’s a little festive introduction…….. In August 1994 Mariah Carey sat in a flat with a cheap Casio keyboard and a tape recorder, bashing out some chords and a simple melody that she thought might work for a Christmas song.  At first her co-producer wasn’t convinced – he thought it was too basic.  But they released the song anyway. It went on to become the 11th best-selling single of all time and last week, 26 years after it was released, it finally reached the number 1 slot in the UK charts for the first time ever.  11 million people streamed it in the space of just 7 days. The song, of course, is ‘All I want for Christmas is You.’ I share this not because I am getting any sort of promotional rewards from Mariah, but because it leads us to ask the question – What do you want for Christmas this year?   As we approach the end of a most bizarre, challenging, demanding, and, at times, surreal year, what is your soul craving and thirsting for? I spoke to two women last week who are both working from home, in demanding jobs, which involve back to back Zoom calls all day. They see no end in sight, and are craving face to face human interaction, longing for a time when they can escape the four walls and the screen that have dominated their last 10 months. Maybe you are a teacher desperate for the Christmas holiday so that you can get a break from the endless task of contact tracing, teaching online lessons, and covering for colleagues that are self-isolating. For some, the deep longing of our heart is to see family, to hug grandchildren, and to not be alone.  For others, our soul is gripped by fear and we long to feel safe and secure again; or perhaps we crave joy and happiness in our lives, having faced bereavement and sadness this year. At the end of 2020, what is the deep longing of your heart? Our answers will all be different, but together, let’s read and reflect on the words of Revelation 22 verse 17.  I’m reading it from the Passion translation. “Come,” says the Holy Spirit and the Bride in divine duet. Let everyone who hears this duet join them in saying, “Come.” Let everyone gripped with spiritual thirst say, “Come.” And let everyone who craves the gift of living water come and drink it freely. “It is my gift to you! Come.” It is a beautiful verse and, like much of Revelation, it has parallels and links with other parts of the Bible.  In John Chapter 7 verse 37 Jesus declares, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.”  And there is also Psalm 42 verses 1 and 2 which says: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” Whatever you want for Christmas, whatever grips your heart, whatever your soul longs for, whatever you crave and thirst for; we read in Revelation 22 verse 17 that Jesus will satisfy, meet and provide for all our deepest needs and desires. However, we often seek to satisfy our spiritual thirsts elsewhere.  We try to meet and fulfil the longings of our hearts with things other than Christ. After the awfulness of 2020, many of us are seeking to make this Christmas the best ever.  Supermarkets have seen an unprecedented demand for festive food – with more luxury and higher priced options being purchased than ever before.  It’s the same with toys – parents are trying to make up for lockdown, missed birthday parties and playing with friends, by buying more gifts than in previous years. We are trying to meet the needs and desires of our heart through buying more stuff – it’s called consumerism.

A daily reflection drawing from Advent Bible passages – to help us grow as we live out our faith in the everyday moments of life. Hello and welcome to day 20 of the Advent Collective. This Advent and building up to Christmas we’re thinking a lot about hope – what does it mean to have hope? What does hope look like for the city of Sheffield? I think the passage for today sums up well the hope that we have, it’s 1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11 but I’m going to focus on verses 9-11 of chapter 5, which I’ve found the message translation really helpful for. They say, “God didn’t set us up for an angry rejection but for salvation by our Master, Jesus Christ. He died for us, a death that triggered life. Whether we’re awake with the living or asleep with the dead, we’re alive with him! So speak encouraging words to one another. Build up hope so you’ll all be together in this, no one left out, no one left behind. I know you’re already doing this; just keep on doing it.” He died for us, a death that triggered life…we’re alive with him. Out of Jesus’s death on the cross, one of the most horrific ways to die, came life, for you and for me. These words around life remind me of one of my favourite verses in the Bible, John 10:10, where Jesus says, ‘the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full’ I don’t know if you can recall a moment when you’ve felt truly and fully alive, maybe a moment when you’ve thought, ‘this is what it’s all about’. Maybe it’s when you’re out in the Peaks, or you’re watching a beautiful sunset on Bole Hills and you just feel in awe of God’s creation. I also think there’s something about being right in the place where you know God wants you to be at that moment, that can bring about a feeling of being fully alive. What’s the passion that God’s given you that, when you pursue it, you feel fully alive? Or what are the skills God has grown in you, that when you use them, it gives you life and glorifies God? On the flipside, what drains you of life, what are the things that steal that fulness of life away, that maybe aren’t from God? For me, when I think about this, I’m drawn back to my language year abroad in Ecuador, working with a mission organisation, Latin Link. I was working with a project called Vida en Abundancia, which means life in abundance. Part of their work is with children and young people with learning difficulties. There was this one day where we were invited to an event that the council were putting on in a local park, which involved participation and performances from a few different schools from around the city. With this being Ecuador, we only seemed to know about it the day before and hadn’t got anything prepared when the life in abundance project was called up to the stage to perform. I thought we might just have to ask the organisers to move swiftly onto the next group, but two of the girls from the project suddenly made their way up onto the stage and asked if they could dance! So some music was put on and it was a beautiful moment when lots of the other young people at the event got up to join them and dance along together. It was so special to watch the girls’ faces light up as they got to spend those moments with a whole bunch of new friends, expressing themselves in a way they knew how to, without any inhibition. And I just remember thinking that, right there, that was them enjoying life to the full, life in abundance, and working with them taught me a lot about what it means to live my life in abundance too. That feeling of the fulness of life is just a glimpse of the life we’re promised for eternity with God, for those who know Jesus as their saviour. But we also don’t have to wait for it to start when Jesus returns, we can know life in all its fulness here and now, as we let hope settle in our hearts. I think part of having hope,

A daily reflection drawing from Advent Bible passages – to help us grow as we live out our faith in the everyday moments of life. Hello and welcome to the Advent Collective day 19. We’ve explored in some of the previous reflections how Advent is a season of waiting, of joining with the prophets’ longing for the birth of Jesus, but we’re also reminded that that was only the first half of the story, as we eagerly wait, with all of creation, for Jesus’ final return, when he will make all things new. And this second half of waiting is what we see in the passage for today, which is 2 Peter 3:3-13. Peter is writing to remind us that God is in control of the timing of Jesus’ return, that we can’t predict it, but that we should live ‘holy and godly lives’ as verse 11 says, while we wait. I’d encourage you to read the whole passage, but for now, verses 8 and 9 particularly stood out to me, which say: “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promises… Just this week I have finished my job with Spectrum First, after just over years 3 of working in autism specialist student support – mentoring university students one to one, and helping to run the company administration and operations. It’s been an amazing job to have and I’m so thankful for the opportunity to have learnt a lot more about autism, to have seen lots of students flourish not just in their degrees, but also in their understanding and acceptance of who they are and also to have gained a whole variety of different experiences as I’ve worked in the admin role. It has been, as all jobs are I’m sure, stressful at times, but overall I have really loved it! I was thinking back to how I first got the job – after I graduated from university, I decided to do the STC college year, as it was known then, which was 2 days a week. I had prayed and weighed up a lot of options during my final year and, for a number of reasons, that felt like the right step to take. Around April of my final year of uni I started looking for a part-time job that ideally I could have over the summer and then would work around the college year. I applied for so many jobs in the following months, I lost count of how many altogether, and was just getting nowhere. I think I only had one interview out of the probably at least 100 jobs I applied for! (Which probably suggests I’m not very good at writing applications!!) It was a hard and frustrating few months as I felt like God had pointed me in the direction of the college year and so I had trusted him to provide a job that would work around that, but, in my opinion, he didn’t seem to be holding up his end of the bargain very well! It wasn’t until October of that year, 7 months later, that the opportunity to work as a mentor for Spectrum First came about and I was finally offered a job! Looking back, I can see God’s hand over the timing of that year and I’m really thankful that it was Spectrum First who I ended up working for. I would actually say that I’m glad I didn’t get the many jobs I had applied for before that. Although it was hard to always recognise at the time, there were so many other ways that God provided during those long months and many things that I was forced to learn. What felt like an age to me at that point, was merely like a day in God’s grand scheme of things and I’m learning to trust that what I think in my head is the best way, isn’t always the case, and that God’s timing is indeed perfect. Where might God be asking you to trust in his timing today? Where do you need to be patient in waiting for the breakthrough,

A daily reflection drawing from Advent Bible passages – to help us grow as we live out our faith in the everyday moments of life. Welcome to the Advent Collective Day 18.  Our Bible passage today is 1 Corinthians 15 vs19-28. I’d like us to look specifically at verses 19-22, and I’m going to read these now from The Message translation: “If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we’re a pretty sorry lot.  But the truth is that Christ has been raised up, the first in a long legacy of those who are going to leave the cemeteries.  There is a nice symmetry in this: Death initially came by a man, and resurrection from death came by a man.  Everybody dies in Adam; everybody comes alive in Christ.” My daughter loves a good story.  One of the series she enjoys is the Disney ‘Twisted Tales’ books.  They are all based on the same premise……..what if the story was different? What if Aladdin never found the magic lamp? What if Sleeping Beauty didn’t wake up when the prince kissed her? What if Cinderella hadn’t had the chance to try on the glass slipper? As the ‘what if’ becomes a reality, obviously the story changes, and so does the ending.  Not all the twisted tales see people living happily ever after. In Chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians we see Paul facing a similar ‘what if’ scenario.  What if there is no resurrection of the dead? This was a question that some people in Corinth had begun to ask, and indeed believed to be true. We don’t know the exact arguments that Paul is refuting in this chapter, but when it comes to concerns about the validity of Jesus’ resurrection, it is clear that Paul has no questions or what ifs.  He is absolutely certain that Christ died, was buried, and was then raised to life again; and he is convinced that this belief is fundamental to the Gospel.  Without it, there is no Christianity – there would be no story at all. Paul goes on to say that if we let the ‘what ifs’ become rooted in our hearts and minds, then this not only changes the story of the Gospel, it changes our story as well.  If Christ was not raised from the dead first, then we have no hope of being raised to eternal life after our deaths either.  The ending of our story would be completely altered – and not for the better. In verse 21 Paul writes, “Everybody dies in Adam; everybody comes alive in Christ.” Because of Adam’s sin, the story that God planned for humanity was fundamentally changed.  It became a story marked by death – not just physical death, but spiritual death.  The story changed from one where everything was very good; to one that was filled with violence, suffering, selfishness and greed. Jesus came to change that story. If we say yes to Jesus, and seek forgiveness for our sins through his death on the cross, we are able to know and experience the abundant, richer, fuller life that God always planned for us.  In Christ we are able to come alive in the present.  And then through Jesus’ resurrection we have the hope of a future where we will live forever in the presence of God, in a place with no more death or mourning, crying or pain.  This is the perfect ending that Paul refers to in verse 28. Advent is a season when we remember this story.  A story that tells us we are forgiven for the past, can experience life as God intended in the present; and have the hope of eternal life in the future. It is a great story………but is it the one that we tell? That’s the question that Paul is asking through his hard hitting comment in verse 19: “If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we’re a pretty sorry lot.” That’s a powerful challenge. It makes us ask ‘What does Christ actually mean to me?’ Does our story reflect the one that Paul has just explained and unpacked in these verses from 1 Corinthians 15&#...

A daily reflection drawing from Advent Bible passages – to help us grow as we live out our faith in the everyday moments of life. I don’t know if anyone else grew up in a house full of star charts? My mum absolutely loved them! I had them for everything. They were very specific – I had one for not spilling food down myself, one for not saying the word, ‘yuk!’ at mealtimes, and one for flushing the toilet. The opposite of a star chart, I think, is probably something like the ‘warning sheet’ the Eden team sometimes resort to at youth clubs, and our rule on that is 3 strikes and you’re out, which is very sad. Going back though, to the way I relate and behave with my mum – something has changed, thankfully over time. So I’m still her daughter, very much, but it’s a long time since she gave me a star for flushing the toilet at her house. I just do that out of the goodness of my own heart. I don’t remember what age I was when I made that transition, but somewhere along the road from childhood to adult I started to come round to my mum’s point of view about toilets, and to do the right thing without needing a system to control my behaviour. Today we’re looking at a bit of the letter Paul wrote to the Galatian Christians, and he’s been talking to them about the Jewish law. My mum’s star charts wouldn’t have stood a chance next to the Jewish law, it covered absolutely everything – very specific, and the Galatians, who weren’t Jews for the most part, but have started following Jesus, come into God’s family, and they’re starting to pick up the family history, and wondering if maybe they should take up the Jewish law? So what’s Paul going to say? Paul knows all about the law, and he was a pretty big fan – or he was before he met Jesu – because he was actually doing pretty well at it. If the Jewish law was a star chart, Paul would have had pages full of stars and his warning sheet would have been squeaky clean. So maybe Paul’s writing to give them tips on how to do as well as he did? Well, actually, no. What he actually did is he call them idiots and he writes 6 chapters persuading them to look at the bigger picture of what God is doing across human history.  Paul says, the law was good in its day – it came from God, it’s going to be good. It kept humans in check, while humanity was younger. It was sort of damage control. Because you can’t just wait for small children to be inspired to flush the toilet or do anything else they’re meant to do, you can’t wait for them to do that out of the goodness of their own hearts, you put some sort of discipline, a system in place in the meantime. We were like children who needed a system to control our behaviour, or, put another way, we were like employees who only did the work because we were paid for it, or slaves, who did the work because we were scared to do anything else. But that was never meant to be how it worked forever. Paul says, in chapter 4v4- when the fullness of time had come, (when humans had metaphorically grown up, turned 18) God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And that is Christmas in a nutshell – that God sent forth Jesus, born of a woman, to redeem us, so that we might receive adoption. He’s saying to the Galatian believers – don’t go back to the law! Jesus has been born under the law to redeem us from the law, so we can be adopted instead! The old rules are not for us, not now, not now the human race has reached adulthood and the Spirit of God has been poured out on all Gods family. Goodness doesn’t need to be imposed on us any more from the outside by systems, because the Spirit of God grows it in us, like fruit grows on a tree.   Do you ever, subconsciously maybe, treat your relationship with God a bit like a contract or a system? Maybe you have an imaginary star chart,

A daily reflection drawing from Advent Bible passages – to help us grow as we live out our faith in the everyday moments of life. Hello! This is the Advent Collective from STC Sheffield, it’s great to be with you today. Only 10 days to go. I didn’t grow up around a lot of small children, but I have had the joy of knowing some great little people in the past couple of years. One of my favourite things about children, especially younger kids, is how gullible they can be. I was really gullible as a child and would believe absolutely anything anyone told me. I’d take anything I heard as the truth. Something to know about me, is that I have been a serial nail biter for most of my life. My poor mother tried all the tricks in the book to stop me. The day I did stop was honestly one of the happiest of her life. You’ll be glad to know that I’ve been clean now for just over a year. But I remember my friend once telling me that his cousin bit her nails so much, she had to have her appendix removed because it was full of finger nails. Whether there is any actual medical correlation between the two or not, for a long time afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about each nail I’d bit off and how each one might be putting me in danger. You see with kids, sometimes you’ll make a sarcastic comment or have a witty response to a their questions and won’t think anything of it in that moment. Until a couple of hours or even days later when a similar topic of conversation comes up again, you hear them repeat what you’ve said. “Sam said so and so and that this happens because of this…” It takes a moment but you soon realise one off the cuff comment was taken as absolute truth to them. They not only remember exactly what you said, they also trust it. They let it in to their minds and let it form their understanding, their opinions and their reality about something. It’s a slightly tenuous link, but it’s comparable to the circumstances of the Colossians in our passage for today. Colossae was once a major city known for its trading significance. But at the time that Paul is writing to them, the city had dwindled in prominence. The city was also known to have a real fusion of religious influences. There were so many different versions of truth and for this new bunch of believers in a place like that, just like children, it would have been easy to take on board and let in everything they heard as gospel, when in fact it was not. They needed some solid, foundational truths of who this Jesus guy was. And that’s what Paul offers to them in our reading for today. He knows who he is writing to. He knows what they’re going through and what they’re experiencing. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, these words are written with a purpose. A world of conflicting ideals, diverging thoughts and increasingly divided perceptions of reality. So many different voices, so many different pushes and pulls, so many different stories and narratives. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? So let me pose this question to us today… Who am I letting in? Who and what am I letting speak into my life? This is Colossians 1, verses 15 to 20 and I’m going to read the whole thing to us now: so buckle in… “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” Amen.