Urban Vineyard

The third Sunday of advent is a time for reflecting on the joy of the gospel. In this sermon, James makes the point that joy cannot be established by any earthly power or agency; no human circumstances can secure our joy; it can only be brought by Jesus who draws people in to be freed from evil, transformed, renewed and shaped to be like him. In Jesus' earthly ministry we the seeds of God's Kingdom were laid in the ground. Through the faithfulness of God and the believers who dared to trust him, everywhere for 2000 years those seeds have been popping up in the form of little communities of faith where deserts have been transformed into places of rejoicing and where wastelands of the soul have blossomed into gardens. Our hope is not in our own ability to make life go well, it is in the God who raises what is dead back to life. That is why we are people of joy.

In this second talk in our advent series, Lloyd returns to that question of what it looks like to hope in the dark. Reading from Isaiah 11:1-10 he shows that people of faith have always hoped when things looked at their worst. How can fruit grow from a stump? How can he bring renewal into this world, and into our own hearts when all seem as hard and cold as stone? The same way he always does – by raising the dead. And so we learn to hope in the God who has come to us once already, and will come again.

"You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers. The night is nearly over; the day has drawn near" (Romans 13:11-12).What does it mean to discern the dawn of God's new creation? It means to recognise the time; "the night is nearly over; the day has drawn near." As we enter into the season of advent as a church, we are taking time to explore the traditional readings from the common lectionary to help prepare our hearts for the arrival of Jesus our lord and God, who is coming to make his home among us.

In this final sermon in our series, Jonathan returns to some themes from earlier messages, looking at how fear leads to malfunctions in our giving but that God's commitment to forming Christ in us, both individually and collectively, will ultimately bring us through these malfunctions and into the freedom for which we so keenly yearn.

In this third sermon in our new teaching series, Lloyd opens up various parts of the Bible to show how we can discover our identity as steward's (rather than owners) of God's abundant resources. He makes the case that as we live into our identity as stewards, we discover freedom from being "possessed by our possessions." Lloyd encourages us to consider our role as stewards of time, money and energy, and to see these three resources as being there for us to put to use to bless the poor, the support the church, and to advance the gospel.