Sunday 31 May 2026

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…

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The Psalms

Psalm 8

Live recording

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Your Weekly Church Notices

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Scripture

2 Corinthians 13: 5 – 13

Live recording

Matthew 28: 8 – 20

Live recording

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Praise – How deep the Father’s love

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Prayers

Live recording

God of creation, who commanded and all things came into being;

You are Lord over chaos and over order.

Meet us in our chaos – when things are not going well or when we feel out of step with life and our own natural order.

In our worship and in our doubt, just like those first disciples – we ask that You show Yourself to us.

God of light and dark, You are never far from us.  May we know You with us

as we gather in worship, as we listen for You in prayer, as we raise our voices in adoration.  Your presence, Your voice, Your breath creates life and love – may we sense it as we pray!

We give You thanks for Your faithfulness – everlasting, unchanging yet new and fresh each new day.  We give thanks for Your love and compassion, provision and protection, and for Your grace and mercy given to us all.

We confess that we have brought our chaos to bear upon your order.  We have distanced ourselves from you; lived life at variance with your grace and mercy.  All the good things you desire to bring to us we overlook, reject and treat with disdain.  We praise you that in Christ you have shown us again the pathway to peace and order; that place where the spirit is at work within us and at work in the world around us.

May we know the life-giving power of You our Maker, the saving and healing mercy of You our Saviour, the peaceful presence and sustaining grace of You, our Comforter. We are forgiven and loved by the God of all the universe, Three yet One, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with us and loving us until the very end of the age.

How Lord God might we respond to your gifts eternal and beyond price?  What should we bring?  What should we say?  What should we do?  And all you ask is that we live out our lives in the image of Christ who revealed to us The Father and breathed upon us the gift of the Spirit.

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.

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Address

Live recording

Every year, as we journey through the cycle of the Christian year we celebrate milestone events; in particular Christmas and Easter and of course the lead up to those events through Advent and Lent.  But we also celebrate happenings that might be harder to think on as historical events; maybe they are more like spiritual events, revelations of God’s nature; the Transfiguration, Ascension, Pentecost.  But today is Trinity Sunday and Trinity is none of those things!  Trinity is a celebration of doctrine and theology.  You have switched off already! Bear with me though…

It took 300 years for the early church to arrive at a doctrine of the Trinity.  For three hundred years all kinds of ideas and thinking circulated in the early church and of course all those strongly held ideas created division.  It took a Council of the early church considerable time to work through all the ideas and finally arrive at a position to be adopted by the church as a whole.  The very concept of God being Three yet One, One yet Three is probably the defining doctrine of the Christian Church.  This is the how the Christian Church understands the nature of God to be – Trinitarian, Three and One.

Sometimes, there is no accounting for the images that stick in your memory.  Perhaps a scene from a particularly gripping film.  Perhaps something traumatic from a news report on war or famine or disease in our beleaguered world.  Perhaps a chalk drawing on a blackboard.  No I’m not joking with you.  I can clearly picture a chalk drawing on a blackboard purely and simply because I watched it being drawn countless times.  The drawing started with a circle inside which the word “Father” was written.  The blackboard was rolled up and a second circle was drawn inside which was written the word “Son”.  In between “Father” and “Son” were drawn a series of arrows pointing up and down.  Across the arrows were written the words “Holy Spirit”.

I’m sure you’ll agree it does not sound like the most memorable of pictures, but it served its purpose very well.  Now I’d like to think that the artist in question was creating an original artwork but he was not.  In fact that picture has been around since the time of the Early Church Fathers.  Saint Augustine spent a lot of his time pondering what the relationship was between God the Father and Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Augustine started from a very simple place… God is Love, and that is something we can all agree with.  Well, if God is love, how is that love expressed through Father, Son and Spirit? Again, his answer was simple… God is the Lover, the Son is the beloved and the Holy Spirit is the love between them, which spills out to draw all people and all of creation toward the heart of God.

Sometimes when we talk about the Trinity we try to describe it through the relationships that are familiar to us.  One man can be a father to his children, a son to his mother and a grandfather to a grandchild, just as a woman can be a mother to her children, a daughter to her mother and a grandmother to her grandchildren.  There are lots of other human relationships that we could bring into that picture to show how one person can be known in different ways through different relationships.  We see different aspects of the same person through these different relationships.  The wonderful grandfather so relaxed with his grandchildren, who laughed and played with them, never got angry with them, had all the time in the world for them.  But as a Father to his own children, he was strict and overbearing and grumpy.  In different circumstances of life, in different settings, we see different aspects of a person’s character.

When we look at the Trinitarian God, Father, Son and Spirit, we are not thinking about different kinds of relationship, we are thinking about the very essence of relationship.  What is it that draws us to one another? What is it that holds us together as friends, or holds us together in marriage, or as a church community even though we are diverse people varying in our outlook and experiences of life and faith?  I think the only answer you will find to that is Love. Love holds us together.  Love is the essence of relationship.  Love creates relationship, love sustains relationship, love redeems relationship.  Yes, when things go wrong in our relationships as sometimes they do, and we hurt each other, it is the realisation that we still love each other that calls us to set our relationships right again.

If God is Love, then God is right at the heart of every relationship we enjoy.  And more than that, as Christians we hold to the truth that God’s perfect love, the love we see between Jesus the Son and God the Father, is changing the way we love each other.  Is that why Jesus could say that the world will know we are his disciples because of the way we love each other?  And just as Saint Augustine could picture the bond of love between Jesus and the Father spilling out to the whole world so through us God’s love spills out to the whole world.

Jesus had a pretty diverse group of disciples, fishermen and the uneducated, those who were astute and educated, a common thief like Judas, the rash and impetuous like Peter.  They were not people who naturally belonged together other than they had all experienced God’s love through Christ and that love called them to be in relationship, to be together and to draw others into that same bond of love.  If we are a diverse group of people then that is only to the good because our coming together bears witness to the love of God that calls us to be together.  And we might argue that the more diverse a group we are, in age and gender, race and class, ability and disability, the greater the witness to the power of God’s love that calls us together.  If God loves all people, then there is a place for all people within His Church.

If today you are sitting saying to yourself, “Well, I would struggle to love that person over there, and my neighbours are pretty anti-social at times how can I love them? ”  I am not going to ask you to try harder to fix the relationships or dig deep to find some last drop of compassion.  But I will ask you to dare to open yourself to the perfect love of God, for his love is transformative, his love changes us, his love is generous and spills out to the world around you. 

I understand that talk of the Trinity, that distinctively Christian doctrine, can sound so far removed and irrelevant to the reality of our lives when in truth it is at the very heart of our living.  The Trinity is shorthand for the loving relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son and is the pattern for all relationships and every relationship we will ever treasure.

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Praise – Come find the quiet centre

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Prayers for Others

Live recording

Father God,  your purpose is for all, for you are Lord of heaven and earth, the Creator of humanity, Ruler over history.  You are always at work, always involved in our lives, calling, guiding, speaking and responding, everyone is important to you no matter who they are, each having a place in your purpose.

So, then, we pray for all in our world who feel they are drifting, all who search for meaning in their lives, a sense of direction, a goal to strive for.  May they find through faith a God who is able to guide and direct them toward fulfilment.  In faith we lift them before you in prayer.  Hear our prayers…

Son of God, your love is for all, for you lived and died for others, reaching out to both the rich and the poor, Jew and Gentile, righteous and unrighteous, nobody is outside your care, no one beyond your grace.  You gave your all, enduring death on a cross, so that everyone willing to receive you may share in the joy of your kingdom.  So, we pray for all in our world today who long of love – those who yearn for a meaningful relationship, and those whose once-precious relationships have ended in tears; those who have been abandoned or orphaned as children, those who cannot have children of their own; those cut off from family and friends, those who continue to work through the trauma of bereavement.  May they discover in you a love that will never let them go.  In faith we lift them before you.  Hear our prayers…

Spirit of God, your peace is for all, for you are at work in every heart, seen or unseen, recognised or unrecognised, striving to break down the barriers which keep us from one another, from ourselves and from you.  We pray then, for all in our world who hunger for peace – all who are tormented by fear, torn by doubt, troubled by anxieties, or tortured by guilt; families separated by feuds, communities racked by division and nations ravaged by war.  May they find through you peace in body, mind and spirit.  In faith we lift them before you.  Hear our prayers…

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Praise – Love Divine

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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.

Tags: Worship