Sunday 1st February 2026
4th Sunday after Epiphany
Welcome!
Welcome to excerpts from the worship held within the newly formed Westhills Church of Scotland Congregation. We know that not all members of the congregation are able to be in church on Sunday morning; offering these excerpts from the Sunday morning service might help you feel included. Where we can, we offer parts of the service in text and audio, whichever works best for you.
If this post helps you explore what happens within an act of worship then please read on…
Your Weekly Church Notices
Scripture
1 Corinthians 1: 18 – 31
Matthew 5: 1 – 12
Praise – All my hope on God
Prayers
God of light and love, we come into this place of Light, a sense of worship rising within us, a desire to be with the people of God. We are here because of the witness of our ancestors who lived by faith and worship the Lord our God in Spirit and in Truth. We are here because the Christ has touched our hearts and called us to be His own.
We come to this place of light, open to the lovingkindness of those who worship here this day as we each live out our faith through family and friends and society.
We come into this place of light, our minds and souls stirred to ponder greater things and mysteries, to ponder the nature of our God;
this place of light –
the home for Christ the Light of the World, the Light that the darkness has never overcome. Help us to open the shutters of our minds that the light of Christ may shine into every corner of our souls.
Merciful God, before we can know your renewing grace, we seek Your forgiveness. We are sorry for the times someone stretched out a hand and we pretended not to notice;
for the times someone wasn’t beautiful to us and we looked away;
for the times truth was on our tongues and we not to speak it;
for the times love was in our hearts and we were too embarrassed to express it;
for the times we were prey to fears and we didn’t trust You with them;
for the times a stranger asked us for something and we pretended not to understand their need;
for the times we have not loved, as you have loved, with our whole selves, body, mind and spirit, have mercy upon us, O Lord.
In humility and with gratitude we come with our offering in praise and fellowship, in worship and service. We offer what we have knowing it will never be enough yet, like the widow’s mite our gift touches the very heart of God Himself.
Hear us as we join in the words of the Lord’s Prayer saying…
Our Father who art in Heaven Hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, for thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory forever. Amen.
Address
Here we are one month into being the Westhills congregation and I think we’d say things are going well. The atmosphere is good, the singing is great, so I’m challenging you with a big hymn at the end of today’s service.
Thursday night was a real occasion for us. I know the 7pm evening start for that Presbytery led service was less than ideal for many of you but we still put on a good show for Presbytery and we were joined by committee members and others from the groups and clubs that use our halls. Yet, that service seemed to highlight the sense of creating something new here at Westhills, of creating a church that embraces discipleship and the foolishness of the Gospel.
I consider I had very good teenage years in the rural North East. My parents afforded me great freedom to roam around the town with my friends. I was never a bad or wayward child; I never brought the police to the door; but I cannot stand here and say I was a perfect little angel; cause I wasn’t.
So, I grew up at a time when it was OK at the age of 13 to go to the Ironmongers and purchase Sodium Chlorate weedkiller. It was purchased by weight because it’s a dry white crystalline substance. Mixed in equal quantity with sugar it burns very rapidly to the point of being mildly explosive. My friends and I never damaged any property or people but we did have fun creating some very spectacular mushroom clouds. My parents never gave me into trouble because they never found out! Until now. Hi Mum. Sorry Mum!!!
I’m sure I’m not alone. I suspect each and every one of us has done something, which at the time was fun and later, reflecting on our actions, then considered it to have been foolish. We have this in common that none of us like to be considered a fool or to feel the embarrassment of having been foolish.
Yet, Paul, as he writes to the Corinthians has no hesitation in talking about the foolishness of God’s message. The Jews want miracles for proof, the Greeks look for wisdom. As for us we proclaim the crucified Christ, a message that is offensive to the Jews and nonsense to the Greeks.
The Christian Gospel tells of a man, Jesus of Nazareth, proclaimed as the Messiah, God’s son, who died on a cross and rose again from the dead. It is not rational. It is not everyday. It is not part of common experience. To trust in this dying and rising again is to trust in a foolish message. Is it any wonder that Paul encountered so many struggles conveying to Jews and Greeks that this Gospel is true. Christ rose from the dead; He is still alive to us, and within us, through the gift of the Holy Spirit.
I’ve seen passages that argue that one of the oldest names for God “Elohim” is in fact plural and embraces both male and female. I’m not sure what that might mean for our understanding of God. We produce word clouds and Mission Statements which mean not a lot. I read prayers that talk of the God of the dew drop, the splashing of the waves and the whistle of the wind. And what I sometimes think is, does this all arise from a need to become acceptable? Are we determined not to be offensive or proclaim nonsense? Is it an attempt to avoid the fact that the Christian Gospel is foolishness? Yet Paul was assured of this; that no matter how foolish the Christian Gospel may appear to be, it is still the message God has given to us, it is God’s foolishness; and God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.
When it comes to weakness and foolishness and being what the world considers nonsense the Christian Church is learning that lesson very rapidly these days. Dare I say it again, at the risk of boring you, that the Christian Church is in decline. Everyone within the church feels vulnerable, people are pressured, carrying out multiple roles and tasks, we share a sense of failure, isolation and struggle, clinging to things that no one else seems to understand or value. We ask questions that have no answers and run initiatives that gain no response. We see no betterment for our efforts.
In some ways I am not perturbed by that. It is in our weakness that God’s strength overcomes. In our weakness we cannot boast of anything but what God is doing. In our failure we have hope. In death we have resurrection.
Let’s remember then that the Gospel, which is foolishness, calls us to be fools for Christ. The foolishness of the Gospel can and will light up our hearts. Let that be the aim of Westhills Congregation, to embrace the foolishness of Gospel and happily be fools for Christ.
Praise – Be thou my vision
Prayers for Others
Praise – O for a thousand tongues
The Grace
And now… May the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you and all whom you love, now and for evermore. AMEN.