March 29, 2020

Lent 5 - Spiritual Life Depends On Relationships

Introduction to Video: Spiritual Life Depends On Our Relationships (click to view) 

youtu.be/af558fF7Ao0

·      Teaching is normally near the beginning of a Holy Communion Service – after a prayer for purity and the prayer for a particular Sunday and three Bible readings
·      Since churches are closed and many people are self-isolating this video will include the Three Readings assigned for the Fifth Sunday in Lent followed by a teaching.
·      There is a 10 minute video of  a short home Eucharistic prayer on my blog page spirituallifeteaching.info.
·      Next Sunday we hope to post a complete “Palm Sunday” Eucharist with an invitation to people to “participate in their hearts” by saying Amen to the prayers.
·      A copy of the service may also be copied and pasted into a  word processor for the blog
·      The theme of the readings is our need for RELATIONSHIP – with God and our neighbour

March 21, 2020

We Are All Born Spiritually Blind (Lent 4 2013)

Note: As a contribution to the current Covid-19 virus social distancing emergency my 2013 teaching was found through the blog search feature to the left, copied to Word, saved as a file and reposted to demonstrate the ease of finding relevant teaching material in this library. I will be experimenting with posting a video of our home Holy Communion service with a shorter version on Facebook and possibly here tomorrow around noon (if it works out). 

It did work out! Click on F at top right to go to Facebook  - 2 posts - Gospel Reading and Teaching - Eucharistic Prayer:


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Original 2013 Teaching: We Are All Born Spiritually Blind 
We can see physically, most of us, but we cannot see spiritually when we are born. ‘Seeing’ is a metaphor for understanding. In our case it means we do not understand how the unseen spiritual world operates. Our understanding of the unseen spiritual world is about the same as a blind persons’ understanding of the physical world. With experience the blind person will develop understanding of the physical world just as with experience we can develop understanding of the spiritual world:

·      At birth we know nothing. We are, as the Apostle Paul says “darkness” and “disobedient” (Ephesians 6.8, 12). 
·       The readings challenge us all to be open to being healed by Jesus, like the man born blind so we can see spiritually, come out of this darkness and be transformed into “children of light”. (Eph. 6.8).
 1. Spiritual blindness is worse than physical blindness