Welcome to our church website – its good of you to pay us a visit and we hope you will find something that will interest or inspire you. Our church is a friendly place to come to, where people do genuinely care for each other. We love to come together and worship God and have fellowship with one another. What are our aspirations? To share the wonderful news of Jesus’ love and grow into that same love ourselves. We want to be a church that makes a difference. Have a look around the site and get a flavour of what we are about. If you want someone here to contact you, meet with you or visit you, just leave your details and we will be in touch. Best Wishes Iain Greenshields |
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We can now see clearly that the word hope signifies two distinct, though related, realities. Objectively, it means the divinely guaranteed prospect before us; subjectively, it means the activity or habit of looking forward to the day when what is promised will become ours in actual enjoyment. It is thus quite distinct from optimism. Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfilment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse “in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Optimism is a wish without a warrant; Christian hope is certainty guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that each day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God’s own commitment, that the best is still to come – J. I. Packer |
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