Our Easter Service is at 10.30am on Sunday 4th April 2021. You are very welcome to join us in person or watch online at our YouTube channel.
These words come from a leaflet we distributed at Easter 2021. To see the whole leaflet, please click here: Easter 2021 (PDF)
SOCIAL MEDIA invites us to document our lives with an endless stream of photos. But here’s a challenge for you. If you could only choose 10 photos to sum up your life thus far, which ones would you pick? They can be of any time from babyhood to today. Obviously, depending on how old you are, you’d have to miss a lot out. But what 10 photos would capture what you’d want others to know about you?
We don’t have any photos of Jesus – he died over 1800 years before the first selfie in 1839. However, we do have four booklets known as the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Each tells the story of Jesus in a selective way. A bit like the challenge of choosing a set of photos to sum up your life, each gospel uses a series of key events and conversations in Jesus’ life that express what’s most important about him.
We’d like to invite you to discover one of those gospels. Why bother? Because as the non-religious writer H. G. Wells once wrote: “Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history”. As amusing as the 10 photo challenge might be, learning about Jesus is time better spent. You will meet a life not just interesting in itself but which can benefit yours.
How? By bringing you back to the one person who is missing from every photo you have: God. He can’t be seen. He doesn’t post on the Internet. He never gets in touch. Don’t you wonder why? Some suggest it’s that he doesn’t exist, but the evidence says otherwise. No, the reason God doesn’t appear is because of us. Long, long ago we turned our backs on him, treated him badly, cut him out of our lives. As a result, all we’ve got left of the God who made us are some poor memories, which often disagree with one another.
But Jesus can show us the truth. In his life, and his words, we truly meet God again. More than that, we can receive God’s forgiveness for our appalling behaviour towards him and, also, one another. You’ll find all this in the gospels. So why not do both challenges? Pick out your 10 photos. But then pick up a gospel to discover Jesus Christ. We suggest you begin with Mark and to start you off here’s a sample of it:
Leaving the crowd behind, they took Jesus along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”
THE BIBLE (NIV, BIBLIA INC.): MARK 4:36-40
To read and hear more from Mark’s gospel, visit our web page “He Changed The World”. It has lots of resources designed to help anyone learn the true story of Jesus: forestbaptist.org.uk/hctw