Sunday 22 March 2026
Fifth Sunday 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 8: 1 – 11
John 11: 17 – 27
Praise – The Lord is King
Prayers
(recorded live in Westhills Church)
There will come a time when all around us will be gone – blown away like dust…
But there will never come a time when the breath of God ceases to blow, when the Spirit sleeps, when love lies lifeless in the grave.
This is the God we come to worship, eternal and glorious; the God whose love is stronger than death, whose Son triumphed over death. And though we will never fully grasp the beauty and complexity of all the Son has done for us we will continue to trust, believe and have faith in his saving grace.
When our minds are on ‘what’s mine,’
When our hearts are hardened to the needs of our sisters and brothers,
When we are disconnected and indifferent to the lives around us, forgive us; forgive us our failure to love.
But do not forgive and allow us forget –
breathe Your zest, Your cause, Your desire to love into our beings and bring us back to life.
For we who claim to be the Body of Christ are called to continue your ministry, called to have open hearts, called to heal and forgive, to lift the fallen and to love even those this world finds unlovable. We do this not in our own strength but in strength of Him who called us out of the darkness and into the light.
Let us worship God, who holds everything within his hand and breathes life into life.
What then, can we bring to a God who holds all things in his hand, who has no need of gold or silver, no need of food or water, a God who is Spirit, eternal and everlasting? We bring our gift of love expressed through prayer and praise, love expressed in gifts and fellowship. We are imperfect yet within us you see the beauty of your Son, Jesus Christ the Lord.
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
There is a lovely little story (forgive me if you’ve heard it before) about the mum and dad who were always looking for ways to avoid spending time with their daughter. Maybe like many over-stretched parents they wanted time for themselves and got it at the expense of the time with their daughter.
One evening angling for a bit more time over their coffee and newspapers they offered their young daughter a puzzle to put together; something that would keep her occupied for a good while. On one side of an insert of the newspaper was a current map of the world, so they cut it up and told her they would do something nice as a family as soon as she’d put the puzzle together. Fairly happy with themselves, they put their feet up ready to enjoy their second cup of coffee. Two minutes later their daughter came back grinning from ear to ear. “Finished!” she proudly exclaimed and said the puzzle was complete. ‘How did you manage that?’ her parents asked, feeling a little deflated by the failure of their plan.
‘It was easy. There was a person on the other side of the page, so I put the person together and the world followed.”
Life begins with relationships – listening, waiting with each other, realising that we are part of something so much bigger. If we are to bring life, justice, healing – hope, then we need to begin with ourselves and the possibilities our changed lives may bring to the world. If we can put the person together the world will follow.
Across the years, I’ve spent time with families, arranging the funeral for a young member of the family who has lost their life to drug addiction. Point is this; there is a life that is broken, maybe through drugs but there are so many other causes of lives that are fractured, hurt, incomplete; if that life can be put back together then the hurt that so many around them bear can find healing too. What kind of pain do parents nurse wondering how their child got to be that way, so lost, so hopeless; life enslaved by an addiction. What about brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and grandparents who find the addiction in tolerable, who cannot, find it in their hearts to trust anymore. One life enslaved to chemicals and not just their physical life but hopes and dreams, joys and sorrows, the fulfilment we all find in meaningful relationships. All of that is lost. Enslaved.
Paul the Apostle had a deep sense of what it means for us to be enslaved. “the mind of sinful man is death.” He says. That descent into death can be seen where lives are marred by addictions. I may be using an extreme example, but it illustrates the truth that sin leads inevitably to death. I don’t necessarily mean physical death but that people die on the inside. They lose their perceptions of right and wrong, they become untrustworthy, lost, empty, and use even those who love them most, if it serves to fulfil their addiction.
But what about us? We’re ordinary and decent people doing our best to lead a decent life, and although we may slip occasionally, on the whole we’re pretty good. How can Paul’s letter to the Romans with its words about sin and death, really have anything to say to us?
Earlier in his letter to the Romans, Paul points out “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). This is our human condition; we are sinful. About the only place we hear the word sin being mentioned these days is in church (I’m not sure if Weightwatchers still use that expression). So what do we mean by sin? To be sinful is to fail to love God in the way that He loves us. And all those things we do which we like to describe as sins like lying and cheating and stealing, and that list could go on for a long time, these things are only symptoms of our failure to love God.
Because we don’t experience the fully beauty of a loving relationship with God our relationships with one another are tainted as well. We fail to love others as God loves us. Jesus put it this way in the words of the great commandments. “Love the Lord your God with all you heart, all your strength and all your mind AND love your neighbour as yourself.” We cannot have one without the other. We cannot love God and hate our neighbour. We cannot hate our neighbour and claim to love God.
Our inability to love God as He loves us created a huge gulf in our relationship with God until Jesus put us right with God. Jesus loved God in the same way that God loved him. Jesus enjoyed the kind of relationship with God that Adam enjoyed before Adam went and took a bite out of the apple. Jesus lived his life loving God with all his heart, all his mind and all his strength and loved his neighbour as himself. He didn’t care what other people thought of him. His love for other human beings was so deep and so genuine that he didn’t care about his own reputation or social standing. Maintaining his relationship with his Heavenly Father was more important to him than his physical body, He remained true to the end despite the agony of the cross.
Jesus puts us right with God so that all those who believe in Him can share in the loving relationship he had with his Heavenly Father. In Christ we’re no longer on the path that leads to death; we are on the path that leads to life. We aren’t completely there yet; we know that we don’t love God as He loves us; we’re still sinful, but through Grace things are changing within us. Already we are beginning to experience the brilliance of resurrection, we are beginning to taste eternal life.
Praise – How deep the Father’s love
Prayers for Others
God, who hears the cries of Your people,
God, who sits with those who wait for the dawning,
God, who holds broken hearts in Yours,
Hear our prayer…
Meningitis Outbreak
Father in Heaven, we offer our prayers for students and families going through the anxious times of the meningitis outbreak in Kent. We think on the families of the two students who have succumbed to the disease and those who have been confirmed as contracting meningitis. We pray for their healing and pray that recovery and the aftermath of the disease is not life changing. We place a whole community into your hands so uncertain of what to do, how to respond in the midst of an alarming time. Lord hear our prayers…
Bruised spirits and battered confidence
Here now, in these moments of prayer, we offer to you Lord, those whose spirits are bruised and who confidence is battered. When life has been unkind and they have been treated harshly, when love has been absent and the need for control has been the priority, when the word of God has been used to tear down and not build up, will you bring healing, quietness of heart and mind and restoration of faith.
In many ways, in many walks of life, in places of faith and places of no faith, there are those whose integrity is challenged, whose voice goes unheard, who stand up for justice to be met with the wall of oppression and injustice. Bring courage to their hearts and strength to their voices.
Lord hear us in our prayers for those whose spirits are bruised and whose confidence is battered…
Our own prayers
We thank you Lord God, for the gift of time, time in which to be busy, time in which to be still, time for prayer and being close to You. You have given us these moments now, time in which to offer our own prayers, to seek you, to speak to you even in the quietness of our thoughts. Lord, we offer our own prayers…
Praise – We cannot measure
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.