EDINBURGH NORTHWEST KIRK
MARCH PRAYER DIARY
I lift up my eyes to the mountains
- where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD,
maker of heaven and earth.
(Psalm 121 : 1 - 2)
* * * * *
Prayers for each day
1 April the Visiting Team Easter Service at 2 pm
2 April Maundy Service at Pennywell at 6pm
3 April Good Friday service at Cramond at 7.30 pm
4 April The Moderator who is in Israel at this time
5 April Easter Service at Pennywell
6 April peace in the Middle East
7 April the church in Iran
8 April politicians making significant decisions affecting the world
9 April Louise Heron (mother of Tanya Ramsay). Louise is recovering from surgery.
10 April Julia and her family
11 April Jessie Fubara-Manuel
12 April our services at Cramond and Pennywell
13 April the people of Gaza and aid agencies providing help
14 April the church in Ukraine
15 April the British Couple sentenced to 10 years in prison in Iran, Lindsay and Craig Foreman. They are connected to an ENK family.
16 April the ministry of Fresh Start
17 April those recently bereaved
18 April the Turi Children’s Project in Kenya
19 April our services at Cramond and Pennywell
20 April Emma McMillan in her studies
21 April the ministry to young people on Sundays and during the week.
22 April the ministry of local churches
23 April the ministry of Julia, Jessie and others to local care homes.
24 April the ministry to local schools
25 April Edinburgh Street Pastors
26 April our services at Cramond and Pennywell
27 April Kirk Session meeting this evening
28 April Edinburgh Presbytery meeting today
29 April CrossReach: Morlich House, a care home for older ladies in Morningside
30 April persecuted Christians in Myanmar
Reflection
by NT Wright, Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Enlightenment thought rejected Jesus’s resurrection, but not because of a new scientific awareness that dead people do not rise. Everybody has known from earliest times that dead people stay dead. The Enlightenment’s real reason for the rejection was that, if Jesus had risen from the dead, his resurrection would be the turning point of world history—a status the Enlightenment claimed for itself...
...The resurrection of Jesus unveils to the world the new creation that is the reaffirmation of the creator’s love in the first creation. This fact is obvious in one way, but so unseen in another that it needs spelling out.
I have argued that creation in all its rich variety speaks to us of the creator’s love, so that to know God’s world ought to be the action of an answering love. But the horrors of the world, and particularly of death, call the creator’s love into question. Affirmation of creation’s goodness without acknowledgment of
its horrors risks collapsing into sentimentalism. But the New Testament sees Jesus’s bodily resurrection as the reaffirmation of creational love, and hence the retrospective validation of the love that was already expressed in creation.
Jesus’s resurrection answers the ultimate question, by overcoming death and launching a new world in which, as John Donne put it, “death shall be no more.” ...Belief in Jesus’s resurrection is not a private option for those blessed with peculiar credulity, nor the simple affirmation that after his death Jesus’s kingdom-project somehow continued, nor any of the other things the modern and postmodern world, and as often as not the Church, have imagined. The resurrection of Jesus was nothing less than the launch of the new creation in
which all wrongs would be put right. In this new world, the creator’s love, which had always been displayed in the original creation, is displayed in all its glory. A biblical view of Easter has to struggle not just against scepticism—which was as strong in the ancient world as in the modern—but against Christian misunderstandings going back to the Middle Ages, when “heaven and hell” became the big categories and the very idea of “new heaven and new earth” was forgotten, despite its biblical prominence.
(https://firstthings.com/loving-to-know/)
If you have a prayer request or a favourite prayer which you would care to share in a future Prayer Diary, please e-mail office@cramondkirk.org.uk