Prayers 260114

Pray for Syria  26/01/2014

In July, a Catholic priest was executed by Islamist forces and in August, rebel gunmen killed 11 Christians in a driveby shooting as they celebrated a feast day. More recently, reports are emerging of 30 dead bodies being found in mass graves in the Christian city of Sadaad after forces from jihadist group al-Nusra invaded the town in October. The victims included the elderly, disabled, women and children who could not escape as these forces arrived. Many were tortured. In addition, the remains of six members of the same family, including a 90-year-old grandmother, were reportedly found in a well. The incident has been described as the "most serious and biggest massacre of Christians" since the conflict began in March 2011.

This week, please pray for Syria:

Pray for the families and friends of those killed in the city of Sadaad, that they would be comforted;

Ask God to comfort and strengthen Christians and other religious or ethnic minorities who remain in Syria;

Pray for the safety of those who have been abducted and kidnapped, and for their families;

Pray that sufficient humanitarian aid would quickly reach both internally displaced persons and refugees;

Pray that the various warring factions would embrace reconciliation;

Pray for wisdom for the international community as it responds to the humanitarian and security crisis the war has caused;

Pray for the peace talks, an end to the civil war, a restoration of peace, and the healing of the nation.

AND A WORD OF ENCOURAGEMENT FROM C.S. LEWIS

‘Training the Habit of Faith’

Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has onceaccepted, inspite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. We know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable : but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why faith is such a necessary virtue : unless you teach your moods ‘where to get off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of faith. The first step is to recognise the facts that your moods change. The next step is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and bible study, religious readings, and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument ? Do not most people simply drift away ?

STUDY QUESTIONS FOR ACTS 17 : 1 – 9

1. Read Paul’s two short letters to the Thessalonians which he wrote - the first not very long after he had left them – to encourage them. They give us a good insight into the life of the church in Thessalonica.

2. Why was it (v3) ’necessary for the Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead’ ? And why both – (clue)Good Friday and Easter Day?

3. Why was a crucified Messiah a stumbling-block to the Jews ?

4. Why is a crucified Jesus for some a stumbling-block to belief today ?

5. Why is the fact of the historical resurrection of Jesus so important for the truth of Christianity ?

6. Why do you think some of the Jews ‘became jealous’ (v5) ? Of what ?

7. What does their ‘jealously’ and their readiness to employ the ‘ruffians’ suggest to you about their religion ?

9. In what way were Christians (v6) ‘turning the world upside down’ and why were the city officials ‘disturbed’  (v8)?

10. What impression do Acts and 1&2 Thessalonians give you of the church and Christians at Thessalonica ? Is all there perfect ? Why do you think the letters became part of the New Testament ?

A Christian Society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it : and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat, ‘Do as you would be done by’….but I cannot really carry it out untill I love my neighbour as myself : and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself until I learn to love God : and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey him.

C.S.Lewis