Previous Service
Service available on Youtube, or as text (below), or for audio see the Podcasts page.
Welcome
No service at Bethel next Sunday June 19th – Churches meeting together in Macclesfield Town Centre for Open-Air Service at 10.30am, everyone welcome!
We had a very blessed time on the church weekend at Cloverley Hall last weekend.
Testimony
(The Film: “90 minutes in heaven”) – On Saturday night (at the church weekend away) some of us watched this film at Cloverley Hall. Without spoiling things for those who might want to watch it, it was based on a true story of a Pastor who was killed in a car crash and the message: “Heaven is for real.”
Worship
Word
Please read: Rom. 5:12-21
Sin and death entered the world…
Rom. 5:12
When I was about 7 years of age we moved from living in Deganwy to Conwy. Trying not to be too morbid, we used to joke that this was the best place to die. Along the long drive to the back of my parent’s Restaurant was a “Chapel of Rest” and we would regularly see Funeral Cars and Undertakers to-ing and fro-ing with coffins going in and coffins coming out. Then over the high wall along a large part of the drive was All Saints and St. Mary’s Church with its large graveyard into which we regularly ventured to retrieve our football which sometimes took time to find amongst the long grass and the many old graves there, including the famous “We are seven” grave. And then, finally, more and more people seemed to be coming to the Restaurant for funeral teas and the like. So on the one hand we are very used to graves, undertakers, funerals, etc. but on the other hand the shocking realisation comes afresh, “We all die”.
“The world is a place of cemeteries.”
Dr. D. M. Lloyd-Jones
No-one, even the most ardent atheist, can deny that, we are born to die. The most amazing aspect of this, though, is how little people seem to prepare themselves for it and the possibility that there is a continuation of life on the other side.
But first let us ask the question, “Why do we die?” Science’s answer might be that all organised systems tend to fall into disrepair with time including those in our bodies. The Nursing Home I used to work in were trying to get it accepted that people die simply of old age. However, we need to go back further and ask why these things happen and here in Romans 5:12-21 we have the answer, death came through sin.
We read in Romans:
The wages of sin is death.
Rom 6:23
This ties in with what we are told in Genesis:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die“.
Gen 2:15-17
This death is experienced by all,
Death came to all people, because all sinned.
Rom. 5:12
Adam our representative head, in whom we are in union with, sinned and therefore, all sinned, and in this way death came to all people.
Quote of the week
“How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset”
George MacDonald
Verse of the week
To live is Christ, and to die is gain.
Philippians 1:21
Let’s Pray
Heavenly Father, thank You that through Your Son we have the victory over sin, death and hell. Oh, that the world might taste and see the riches of Your grace and Spirit, in Jesus Name, Amen