Sunday 22 February 2026
First of Lent
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
Romans 5: 12 – 19
Matthew 4: 1 – 11
Praise – Spirit of God unseen as the wind
Prayers
Gracious and merciful God, today we begin our journey with you toward Easter. On this First Sunday of Lent, we bring our offerings of praise and prayer, and thank you that we can seek your forgiveness and look for renewal from everything that holds us back from you.
We come remembering the Christ’s lonely days in the wilderness, wrestling with his inner demons, his doubts and fears until he emerged sure in his calling to preach the Good News, to live and embody the Good News, transforming lives. Create that same heart in us Lord God, a clean heart, a pure heart.
Help us to learn from his example; to search our hearts as he did, to consider our calling, to reflect on our faith, to resist the distractions and commit ourselves more wholly to you.
Help us to take hold of all that Jesus has done for us through his life and death and resurrection; so why should we fear coming to you to talk freely about the failings of our humanity, to acknowledge our faults, accept our weaknesses, and find strength, forgiveness, hope.
Gracious and merciful God, today we begin our journey with you, toward Easter. Speak to us today and in the days and weeks to come so that we may rise with Christ to new life. Create in us a clean heart, a pure heart.
Gracious God, we never can repay all that we owe, or even a fraction of what we have received from your loving hand. Yet, we dare to bring these gifts now placed upon the table, not as a settling of a debt, but as a gesture of gratitude and an expression of our love offered to you in joyful worship.
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
“After spending forty days and forty nights without food, Jesus was hungry.”
Sometimes the gospels describe things in wonderfully simple ways – Jesus was hungry! I’ll say he was! I bet he was more than just hungry after not eating for forty days and nights! In fact, I got to be so curious about this I looked it up. Can the human body really go forty days and nights without food. Well maybe. After 48 hours, you’ll definitely be fatigued the body having used it its reserves of energy stored in muscles. Then it starts converting fat into sugars in order to stay alive and finally it starts converting muscle and organ tissue into sugars and this is the point where irreparable damage is done to the body. 40 days and nights without food and you are pretty much at death’s door. And don’t think that a good meal sorts it all out, it doesn’t. Re-introducing food to the body creates a whole new set of medical problems that can lead to sudden death.
Of course, I’m not in a position to say that Jesus didn’t fast for forty days and nights but from a human physiological stance it’s challenging. Might there be something we are missing? Well maybe. Forty days and nights. Like Noah was in the ark for forty days and nights. Like the Hebrews were in the wilderness for forty years after escaping slavery in Egypt. Maybe that number forty holds echoes of God’s intervention in the story of his chosen people. Maybe Matthew, writing for a Jewish audience is suggesting that God is once again intervening in the story of His people, bringing them to a time of promise.
Forty days or not, we can accept that Jesus fasted for an extended period of time, that he was weak, that his body was crying out for food to sustain it yet he chooses to value the Word of God more than his own life. Bread could easily and abundantly be made available yet he declines to make that choice. He trusts his Heavenly Father with his very life, just as he did three years later in the events of Easter; his crucifixion and resurrection. Here is a depth of devotion, that today, is hard for us to imagine. It is taken almost to an extreme of devotion for God and God’s word. Jesus is prepared to risk everything for the sake of his calling to bring Good News to the poor. He makes the choice which few, if any of us, would be able to make. We cannot live on bread alone but need every word that God speaks.”
“Jesus was hungry”, words that almost trivialise the physical ordeal that Jesus was going through and yet Matthew is not seeking to highlight physical ordeal rather, he is seeking to highlight the spiritual, the making of a choice that will determine the course of the rest of Jesus life, of Jesus fully, totally, absolutely placing himself into God’s hands and committing himself totally to everything that his Heavenly Father will ask of him. Jesus knows that God will sustain him.
Do you trust him? Do you really trust your God to watch over you, protect you from harm, as you respond to the call to preach the Good News? And Jesus refuses to put the Lord God to the test, refuses to wilfully engineer a situation where God is forced to respond. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” And yet, should we consider that Jesus is already testing the Lord God as his body enters into starvation and survival is questionable? If the Lord were not to send the angels to minister to him who would help him? How would he survive in order to fulfil that calling to preach the Good News? Is there not a lovely roundedness to the story of the Temptations as the Spirit leads Jesus into the desert to be tempted; and the angels minister to him at the end. A sense that from beginning to end God has been watching over this experience in the desert. It is not God the Father who is being tested; it is the Son who is tested, as we are tested by our experiences and questions and doubts. Will our God sustain us? Will our God stand idly by while we endure? Is it not better or easier to turn our back on matters of faith and live the life of one who does not believe or trust or look beyond the material and ephemeral to see the spiritual and eternal? Will we worship the Lord our God and serve only Him?
I suppose our temptation, when we come to the temptations of Jesus, is to trivialise them. It is surprisingly easy to do that when the language and concepts of the temptations are not instantly accessible to us. Or that we imagine giving up chocolate biscuits for the six weeks of Lent is a way of engaging with this because that’s how we see temptation; we just have to give up some of our guilty pleasures.
When really, the question they pose is this, “Are you prepared to risk everything, trust in God absolutely and look only to Him for sustenance, protection and guidance?”
Praise – Come Down O Love Divine
Prayers for Others
USA & Iran
Rising tensions between Iran and the USA. American battleships stationed in the Arabian Sea. Talk of further attacks on Iran in order to force them into negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme and the presumed development of Iranian Nuclear weapons. Does this sound like a repeat of the Iraq War? The non-existent weapons of mass destruction?
And who are we Lord, to know just what is going on? Too many secrets; too much greed, too much ego, too much distrust. Those who are in power who have such different world views, who strive for such opposing things, who cannot listen, who cannot talk, who fail to understand each other or see each other’s humanity. Iran and the USA may be far apart in the goals they seek to achieve; they are even further apart in their humanity. Lord hear us as we pray for that which seems impossible; the healing of the human spirit, an openness of heart to each other, the gift of humility and the desire to find common ground. Hear our prayers…
Choices
Lord God, we thank you for the season of Lent, for journey, for time to reflect and draw closer to you. May this journey be a time to consider our choices, of who we are and who we want to be, of where faith touches our living, our relationships, our choices.
When we think on temptations as something trivial, of being just a little naughty perhaps, help us to see the deeper meaning that touches on our relationship with you; all that distracts us from you, all that diminishes your presence in our lives, all that causes us to fail to love you as you love us, and so causes us to fail to love our neighbour.
Lord hear our prayers as we hand ourselves to you seeking guidance from your Word and by your Spirit to make the right choices seeking You in all the circumstances of life…
Praise – Will you come and follow me
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.