Welcome to our service - 7 February
This service sheet can be used individually or with households.
We would encourage you to say (or even sing) hymns and songs out loud.
Prayers, other liturgy or readings can be said out loud or silently, corporately or individually.
If you are able, we would also like invite you to join us for our main Sunday service, 10am, live on Zoom. Even if you have never been to St Gabriel’s before we would love you to join you. Please get in touch with the vicar Alistair (vicar@saintgs.co.uk) and he will send you the Zoom details.
Notices
Due the current lockdown the PCC have decided to suspended public worship for the foreseeable future. We are also unable to offer private prayer in the church building.
Please don’t hesitate to ring Alistair (07769 213 581) if you have any questions or would like support.
SERVICE
Opening
The Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.
Let us rejoice and shout for joy,
giving God the glory.
Glory to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning is now
and shall be for ever. Amen.
SING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuMh_ept-Js
Crown Him with many crowns,
the Lamb upon His throne;
Hark! how the heavenly anthem
drowns
all music but its own:
awake my soul, and sing
of Him who died for thee,
and hail Him as thy chosen King
through all eternity.
2 Crown Him the Son of God
before the worlds began;
and ye who tread where He hath trod,
crown Him the Son of Man,
who every grief hath known
that wrings the human breast,
and takes and bears them for His own
that all in Him may rest.
3 Crown Him the Lord of life,
who triumphed o'er the grave,
and rose victorious in the strife,
for those He came to save:
His glories now we sing,
who died and rose on high,
who died eternal life to bring,
and lives that death may die.
4 Crown Him the Lord of heaven,
enthroned in worlds above;
crown Him the King to whom is given
the wondrous name of love:
all hail, Redeemer, hail!
for Thou hast died for me;
Thy praise shall never, never fail
throughout eternity.
Matthew Bridges (1800-94) Godfrey Thring (1823-1903)
CONFESSION
Our Lord Jesus Christ said: The first commandment is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’
The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
All Amen. Lord, have mercy.
‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.’ We long for the fire of God’s cleansing to touch our unclean lips, for our guilt to be removed and our sin wiped out. So we meet Father, Son and Holy Spirit with repentance in our hearts.
We have not always worshipped God, our creator.
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
We have not always followed Christ, our Saviour.
Christ, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
We have not always trusted in the Spirit, our guide.
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy
ABSOLUTION
May the Father of all mercies cleanse us from our sins,
and restore us in his image
to the praise and glory of his name,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
COLLECT
Almighty God,
give us reverence for all creation
and respect for every person,
that we may mirror your likeness
in Jesus Christ our Lord.
SING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTZnuPTGWS8
O LORD OUR GOD, how majestic is Your name,
The earth is filled with Your glory.
O Lord our God, You are robed in majesty,
You’ve set Your glory above the heavens.
We will magnify, we will magnify
The Lord enthroned in Zion.
We will magnify, we will magnify
The Lord enthroned in Zion.
O Lord our God, You have established a throne,
You reign in righteousness and splendour.
O Lord our God, the skies are ringing with Your praise,
Soon those on earth will come to worship.
We will magnify, we will magnify …
O Lord our God,
the world was made at Your command,
In You all things now hold together.
Now to Him who sits
on the throne and to the Lamb,
Be praise and glory and power forever.
We will magnify, we will magnify …
Phil Lawson Johnston.
Copyright © 1982 Thankyou Music.
READINGS
Psalm 8 New International Version – UK
Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
in the heavens.
Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honour.
You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Acts 4:24-31 New International Version - UK
When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. ‘Sovereign Lord,’ they said, ‘you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:
‘“Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth rise up
and the rulers band together
against the Lord
and against his anointed one.”
Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.’
After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.
This the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
TALK by Alistair Stevenson
Prayer always starts with praise.
In the opening words of the Lord’s prayer Jesus establishes not only who God is but who we are in relation to God. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name” These words are worship - they are adoration to God and Jesus puts them in at the start of the prayer to make sure they are at the start of our prayer life and ultimately our lives.
Worship puts God in his rightful place.
In our passage from Acts, Peter and John have just returned from being unjustly brought before the Sanhedrin and thrown in prison for healing a man. They are threatened and commanded not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. It is the first time that these early Christians have experienced persecution. Peter and John come back to the believers and tell them all that has happened. And what is their response? Their response is praise and adoration. They could have immediately turned to intercession - praying for the safety of the believers. But Instead, they start by pointing to God and giving Him the glory.
Adoration puts God in his rightful place in our hearts and lives - despite what may be going on in our world or our lives for good or bad. When we put God first and praise His name, everything else is put in its right place and perspective.
In these opening words of the Lord’s prayer Jesus is establishing two critical things about who God is: he is our father and he is heavenly and holy.
Pete Greig says: ‘The deeper we receive our identity as ‘dearly loved children’, the greater our desire to spend time with our Father in prayer. We will start to tell him everything and dare to ask him anything because we now know that, as Jesus puts it elsewhere, ‘Your Father in heaven [loves to] give good gifts to those who ask him.’
But at the same time, Jesus immediately balances this with “hallowed be your name”. Jesus, on the one hand, describes God as a father who longs to welcome us with arms flung wide whenever we approach him, whatever we’ve done, however long it has been since we were last there. But Jesus immediately proceeds that by declaring the holiness of God. As the biblical scholar William Barclay says, this ‘saves the idea of the Fatherhood of God from all sentimentality and … sets down in unmistakable terms the inescapable obligation of reverence’.
This balance is so important. In understanding God as a father, we need to do so also understanding His holiness and the privilege of being able to come before Him as a child.
I have been reading the Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe with our eldest children. It is one of those parenting milestones or rites of passage. Reading it again I was reminded of how the writer C.S. Lewis uses so many biblical themes and imagery.
It is with Mr and Mrs Beaver that the children start to hear about Aslan. Even the mention of his name evokes deep and profound feelings in each of the children. One of the children then asks Mr Beaver: ‘is Aslan safe?’. I love Mr Beaver’s response:
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.
How safe is God for you? Have you lost the awe and wonder and the privilege of coming before the holy of holies?
It seems like as I grow older in my faith in some ways I understand God less. But I am also becoming more OK with that and learning to understand that I may never fully understand, in this life at least. In fact, I would suggest that it is that place of unknowingness that God may in fact want us to meet us because when we acknowledge our lack of understanding we are more able to put our trust in him.
Our God is both a father and the holy of holies. Again, Pete Greig says this:
“After being told again and again over the years how deeply God loves me.. and how powerfully he wants to use me...it comes as a considerable relief to finally discover that I’m actually not that big a deal. A bit-part actor – certainly not the lead – in the play of someone else’s life. I am, as the Psalmist says, just dust. I am, as Isaiah says, like grass that grows, withers and dies in a day. I am a child who finally knows enough to know that I don’t know much, and that it’s perfectly possible to trust in things I don’t fully understand. Perhaps it’s better after all to have a mustard seed than a mountain. I’d rather have a little faith in a great, big unshakable God than a great, big unshakable faith in a little god unworthy of the title.”
When we come to God in worship and adoration we do so recognising that he is a father who loves us and loves to spend time with us. But He is also holy, sovereign, awesome and ultimately, beyond our understanding.
So how do we worship? We could do a whole course on worship and adoration, but for now let me suggest some things that might be helpful to you.
1) Don’t wait until you feel like it.
More often than not, what starts as an act of will turns into an overflow of grateful heart - but we shouldn’t worry if the overflow doesn't start immediately. The writer of Hebrews urges us to ‘offer to God a sacrifice of praise’. It might be easy to worship God on a beautiful mountain, or when we’re singing with thousands of others, or in response to an amazing answer to prayer. But not so easy on a murky, damp, Monday morning, especially in January, and especially during a global pandemic. The last year has been tough for us all. Yes we need to acknowledge before God and be honest with him about how we are feeling. But when times are tough I think it is even more important to have an attitude of gratitude. So don’t wait until you feel like worshipping God before doing so. Make it a habit. Make it regular.
2) Love liturgy
Having grown up as a child in a charismatic Anglican church and then as a teenager at a non-denominational even more charismatic church, the only liturgy I regularly said was the Lord’s prayer and even that was my school once or twice a week. In Scotland Catherine and I spent 5 years at a Baptist church but here I am as a vicar of an Anglican church. And as an Anglican, one of the things I appreciate the most is liturgy. Regular words and prayers drawn from scripture and said repeatedly allow us to pray when we don’t have the words to pray or even if we don’t know what to pray or can’t find the words to express what our heart is saying. It gives us language and enables us to express things we might find difficult and to address things we might otherwise ignore.
The theologian Stanley Hauerwas says: ‘There’s much to be said for Christianity as repetition… Evangelicalism doesn’t have enough repetition in a way that will form Christians to survive in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new.’
3) Worship and creativity go hand in hand.
I love music. I listen to music a lot and to a whole range of different styles and genres. As you can probably guess, the primary way I worship is through music. But I know of others who very rarely listen to worship or who aren't musical and can’t sing but they worship creatively through other creative ways - painting, drawing, poem, dance, even cooking. Creatively moves worship from the left hemisphere of the brain’s central cortex, enabling our spirits to soar unencumbered by the constraints of language. I think everyone is creative, in some way. God made us that way and he wants us to use our creativity to worship him. So what is that for you and how do you worship God through it.
And therefore on the back of this…
4) Worship out of and from whom God has made you.
Try to identify and pursue the particular people and places, the music and activities that speak the mother-tongue of your heart. I love to worship God through music. But I also love to worship on the top of a hill or mountain or walking by the sea. My soul comes alive when I gather and spend time with people who help to point me to Jesus. Don’t get me wrong, these things are nice, but I have come to realise they are also necessary. God has made you unique so it’s likely you will have a unique way to worship him.
5) Worship with others
By now you may have noticed the whole of the Lord’s prayer is written in the plural. Our father in heaven. Give us our daily bread. We are not designed to hallow the Father’s name entirely on our own. In our passage from Acts, the groups of believers are facing the first wave of threats and imprisonment of Peter and John, and so they pray together. In what is probably a shortened version of the actual prayer, we have 6 verses – four of which are declaring who God is, how He speaks and what He has done - His power and His majesty. Through this declaration, they are reminding themselves. They are re-focusing and putting things in perspective – a godly, kingdom perspective that is beyond what they might be able to perceive. And then only two verses which you may say are more intercessory.
The corporate worship of believers is so so important because it gives us the opportunity to fix our eyes away from ourselves and to hear the heart of God and the heart of others. We remind ourselves of how He speaks and that He is at work in our lives. From my experience, the more we worship together, the more we become of one heart and mind. Worshipping together is an amazing act of unity.
I think it is worth saying something here about how the global pandemic and the resulting lockdown has unequivocally transformed the way that we corporately worship together. Many of us haven’t physically worshipped with someone outside our household, or even with anyone else, for nearly a year. But what we have discovered is that you don’t have to physically be with others to worship together.
Whether we access worship online or through a physical service sheet, we are speaking the same words, singing the same hymns, reading the same Bible passages and reading the same sermon. Wherever you are today - know that you are joining in worship, particularly with this church family here in Greystones, but also with billions of others around the world.
And so I would encourage you today to consider how you can shape or reshape your worship to be:
· At all times, and not just when you feel like it.
· More liturgical
· More creative
· Shaped by who you are
· With others
Amen.
THE APOSTLES’ CREED
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth
I believe in Jesus Christ,
his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand
of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen
O LORD, HEAR MY PRAYER,
O Lord, hear my prayer:
When I call answer me.
O Lord, hear my prayer,
O Lord, hear my prayer:
Come and listen to me.
Jacques Berthier/Taizé.
Copyright © 1982 Ateliers et Presses de Taize (France).
PRAYERS - written by Christine Carney
Heavenly Father, we confess that we don’t find it easy to praise you. Our prayers are full of our own worries and concerns. Help us to really look at the beauty of this world and praise you, who created it. How amazing it is that you who planned the moon and the stars in the heavens, and the earth with its vast variety of animals, birds and plants should care about each one of us and invite us to call you ‘Our Father’. Help us, Father, to praise you wholeheartedly. Help us to honour your glorious name and the name of your son, Jesus.
Thank you, Father, for the two Alpha courses that are running. We pray for wisdom and sensitivity for the leaders and we pray for each of the guests that they will be open to your Word, that they will feel comfortable asking questions and that your Holy Spirit will be at work in each of their lives drawing them into a relationship with you.
We thank you for the ‘Bless Greystones’ initiative and we pray that the ‘Wellbeing Packs’ which went out to families will be really appreciated and enjoyed. We pray for children and families in the Greystones area that you will help them to cope with the home schooling during this lockdown. We lift to you the increased stress on parents, particularly those who are working from home and we pray for your peace in each home. Thank you for Alistair and Catherine and all they do. Please help them to get enough sleep and bless them as a family. Thank you for our PCC and lay readers; please give them wisdom in all their discussions.
We continue to pray for protection from the coronavirus. We cry out to you for healing for those who are ill, for encouragement and energy for those who are caring for the sick and for your loving arms to surround those who are living alone, who are lonely, feeling trapped in their homes. We pray for your provision for those who have lost their jobs and your peace for those who are fearful for the future.
We thank you, Father, for the scientists who have worked so hard to develop vaccines and we pray that these vaccines will be effective and will be distributed fairly and that there will be enough for poor countries and for refugees. Please give Boris Johnson and our government wisdom in deciding when it will be safe for children to go back to school. We pray too for wisdom for those involved in continuing trade talks with the EU.
We cry out to you, Father, for justice in our world: for a restoration of civil government in Myanmar, for the release of Alexei Navalny in Russia, for democracy in Uganda, for the plight of the Uighur people in China.
Heavenly Father, we commit to you the need for new measures to combat climate change and we pray for Boris Johnson and Joe Biden that they will each be motivated to take a lead in making these changes.
We pray in the name of Jesus.
Amen
LORD’S PRAYER
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your Kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those
who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power,
and the glory are yours
now and for ever.
Amen
SING: (Sorry there is no YouTube video available for this song)
ALMIGHTY SOVEREIGN LORD,
Creator God,
You made the heavens and the earth.
You’ve spoken to the world,
Yourself the living Word,
You give us eyes to see Your kingdom.
So stretch out Your hand, O God,
In signs and wonders,
We rest our faith on Your almighty power.
Stretch out Your hand, O God,
To heal and deliver. We declare,
We declare Your kingdom is here.
Stir up Your people like a mighty wind,
Come shake us, wake us from our sleep.
Give us compassion, Lord,
Love for Your holy word,
Give us the courage of Your kingdom.
Why do so many stand against You now,
Bringing dishonour to Your name?
Consider how they mock,
But we will never stop
Speaking with boldness of Your kingdom.
So stretch out Your hand, O God…
Phil Lawson Johnston.
Copyright © 1987 Thankyou Music.
OFFERTORY - Take a moment to consider how you are going to continue to give to the life of the church and support other aid agencies and mission organisations.
Yours, Lord, is the greatness, the power,
the glory, the splendour, and the majesty;
for everything in heaven and on earth is yours.
All things come from you, and of your own do we give you.
SING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ph-t8P2r_I
BREATHE ON ME, BREATH OF GOD,
Fill me with life anew;
That I may love what Thou dost love
And do what Thou wouldst do.
Breathe on me, Breath of God,
Until my heart is pure;
Until my will is one with Thine
To do and to endure.
Breathe on me, Breath of God,
Till I am wholly Thine;
Until this earthly part of me
Glows with Thy fire divine.
Breathe on me, Breath of God,
So shall I never die,
But live with Thee the perfect life
Of Thine eternity.
Edwin Hatch (1835–89)
FINAL BLESSING:
May the Father
from whom every family in earth and heaven receives its name
strengthen you with his Spirit in your inner being,
so that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, and that, knowing his love,
broad and long, deep and high beyond our knowledge,
you may be filled with all the fullness of God;
and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,
be upon you and remain with you always.
Amen