The Bethel - Old Trafford Christadelphian Church

Phil explored the necessary attributes required to 'finish the race', reminding us that Jesus has already won it and our completion of it is enough to make us winners too. Our encouragement is to seek the Kingdom first, knowing that our reward is a relationship with God and Jesus.

In our quest for righteousness, we can sometimes follow the footsteps of the Pharisees and Saducees. These groups were so bent on their extreme version of matching up to God's law that their experience of forgiveness was very shallow. It took a woman 'steeped in sin' to demonstrate to them that they may have missed something. David brings out the lessons for us from that encounter.

Belonging to a family is not always straightforward. There are many ways it can come about, birth, adoption, chosing to join a group... Mark reminded us that belonging to Jesus is more important than belonging to church and gave us encouragement and guidance for how to help increase acceptance and belonging.

In a world where patience is a virtue being rapidly lost, David explores our agenda and timing and compates it to the timing of God. God is patient and waiting for us, can we be patient and wait for the Lord?

It is all too easy at times to beat ourselves up and languish in our sinful state. On the flip side, we can also sometimes find it easy to be so caught up in the joy of forgiveness that we forget the seriousness of our sin. Darren encourages us to walk this balance carefully and gives us a way to navigate the through remorse, repentance and forgiveness and truly embrace grace.

Sometimes belief is not easy, sometimes it is a choice. In the story of Abraham, we see a man tortured by the paradox of a promise that is as yet unfulfilled but a life of experiencing a faithful God. God is not late, unconcerned or ignoring Abraham, but while he waits Abraham chooses to believe God and was counted righteous as a result.

There is a lot happening when we think nothing is going on. All our body processes, all that happens to take our world spinning through space around the sun. And this serves to remind us that we are sojurners. Travellers on a journey, that our lives are not permanent. It will not always be comfortable. Progress is sometimes if not often slow. We can, however, always rely on God to provide assistan...

Today we ask Jesus to enter in to something that can often be very busy with other concerns.

Malcolm looks at the inkeepers of Bethlehem and how they couldn't find room for Jesus. He challenges us to look at our lives and decide whether we find room for him today.

Christmas is a time of year where we often reduce our 'gift' to a tiny sized Jesus that would fit in a little ring box. What we really should be doing is making Jesus bigger and turning down the rest of the interference that gets in the way. Trevor calls us to make much more of Jesus especially as we enter the Christmas season.

Whenever we look at Biblical characters we get a very compressed view of their lives. More than half of the list in Hebrew 11 were ongoing things that they did and we miss large amounts of time in their lives. Faith is an everyday thing not just a special occasions event. We should not expect our lives and our experiences to be different from theirs. God’s universe goes from the absolutely miniscu...

You cannot know the peace of God unless you know the God of peace

God does not protect the faithful from the pain and suffering which are all around us. In our damaged world we find God right at the centre , sharing with us.

Richard leads us on an imaginative journey through the grief of Jesus, Mary and Martha following the death of Lazarus - finding reassurance and empathy for all of us remembering lost loved ones - and a future in the hope of resurrection.

God doesn't think the way we think, He doesn't see things the way we see things. How often are we guilty of making God 'smaller' than He really is to conform to our perspective. Andrew shared lessons from the approach of the people of Israel, who remembered all the good but not the bad of Egypt. They moaned about what they didn't have as opposed to celebrating the goodness of God all around them....

97% reliability used to be a good measure of reliability for everyday products. Today, companies tend to achieve a 99.9997% reliability in manufacturing. Colin talks us through an approach to the only thing that is always 100% reliable - God our heavenly father.

Whilst summarising the Youth Weekend talks, Richard shocks us with a staged heckling, but this talk is really about listening to what you might not want to hear. Jesus told the crowd the story of Naaman, but those listening were so angry that they wanted to throw him off a cliff. Sometimes we hear what we don't want to hear, sometimes we get disillusioned, but we're not the first. It is all part o...

What does God ask from us? Does he ask us to follow a list of rules? Or does he offer us something much simpler?

An exploration of the life of David reveals that it was in some of his toughest moments that he wrote Psalm 34. The words in verse 8 'taste and see that the Lord is good' show that David trusted and relied on God even in the most troubling circumstances. The only way we too can experience that God is good, is by leaning our trust on Him; to let go and put our faith in God, even when life is most c...

Sometimes in life we get so focused on our own lives that we forget what it truly is to be Christ-like. Rob guides us through what it means to be a living sacrifice, whether it's at work, at home or at church. Christ's example shows us that others come first, that God's love for us calls us to love others and share God's love.

How often we are distracted from and too busy to notice we are in the presence of God. Are we losing our ability to live with our attention on the here and now as society and consumerism con us into thinking we might miss out on something. Chris grounds us again to refocus on the present and taking the time to tase and see that the Lord is good.

Last week, we thought about an invisible God. This week was about the same God who leaves his mark in creation, in history and in our lives. He is a God who wants a personal relationship including making a mark in your future.

If we do something that is big and impressive, we always like to put our signature on it. It can seem at times thath God is not like that and prefers not to reveal his hand so obviously. Mike suggests that God wants us to search for him, to seek him to discover his hand in this world. It's all about tasting to see that the Lord is good.

Taking us through three very different examples of the way that we might be trained or changed as followers of Christ, Pete demonstrates that we are all different and God is working to transform us in a way that He knows best - whether its Olympic level training, a leap of faith to walk on water, or the heating and cooling of metal to forge us into swords.

Sorry for not being able to provide the service audio this week.