New Church Audio - Search results

What do you do if you’re pretty sure that the person you’re married to is not your soulmate? That’s a big question and we’ll be doing our best to answer it on Sunday. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (00m 00s)

Soulmates? Therefore....what? Part 1: Before You Get Married

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - August 30, 2020

Do you believe that you have a soulmate? Can you know when you’ve found your soulmate? These are philosophical questions, in one sense, but the conclusions that you come to about whether or not you think someone is your soulmate can have huge consequences in your life. This Sunday we’re going to talk about how your beliefs about soulmates can impact the decisions you make before you get married and in 2 weeks we’ll talk about after you get married. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (00m 00s)

Relationships - Part 1 - When the Wine Runs Out

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - August 16, 2020

We’re starting a series on relationships. With the pandemic and lockdown regulations, relationships have been under additional strain for almost half a year. This Sunday we’re going to focus on how to work on our relationships in these weird and hard times and we’ll be using the story of the Wedding at Cana. The story begins with the wine running out at a wedding and this seems to relate to times when all the fun and joy seems to have run out in our relationships. Can the Lord help? | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (00m 00s)

Revisiting the Lord's Prayer - Part 3 - Lead Us Not Into Temptation

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - August 02, 2020

This Sunday we will finish revisiting of the Lord’s Prayer by reflecting on the last two sentences of it. We will be focusing particularly on how the Lord teaches us to pray in times of temptation, crisis, and evil. Sometimes it takes things getting pretty bad to make us resort to giving prayer a try. But, especially if we’re out of practice with praying, and our desperate prayer seems to go unanswered, that can be pretty hard to take. Let’s revisit how to pray about hard things and when things get hard. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (48m 06s)

Revisiting the Lord's Prayer - Part 1 - Our Father

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - July 19, 2020

We say the Lord’s Prayer regularly but because of that familiarity we can sometimes forget the meaning and significance of the words that we’re saying. Over the next three weeks we will be revisiting the prayer that the Lord taught us so that it can become all the more meaningful for us when we say those familiar words. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (42m 00s)

You Have Enemies and You Need to Love Them

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - July 05, 2020

If I asked you, "Do you have any enemies?" you would probably answer, "No." I think most people don't think that they have any enemies. So does the Lord's revolutionary command to love our enemies not really apply to most of us? Well, we all have people that we treat as enemies and we need to recognise that fact. And then we need to learn what it means to love them and then do it. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (39m 14s)

Living in a Post-Apocalyptic World, Part 3: The Future of the New Church

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - June 21, 2020

What's going to happen in the future of the New Church? What are things going to look like in the next 50 years or the next 1000 years? Will there be a need for another new church? This Sunday, as we celebrate the founding of the New Church 250 years ago, we will try to get a picture of the future of the New Church and an understand of what our role is right now. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (37m 45s)

Living in a Post-Apocalyptic World - Part 1 - The Larger Narrative

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - June 07, 2020

Things in the world these days can seem rather apocalyptic. Intriguingly the teachings of the New Church say that the apocalypse has already happened, over 250 years ago in fact. What does that mean for us today? How can that larger narrative help us to understand what's going on in the world at the moment? | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (39m 27s)

Misconceptions of Providence - 3 - It's all God or it's all me

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - May 24, 2020

In this sermon series we’ve talked about how the Lord is working in every little detail of what happens in our lives. That can be a profoundly comforting thought but, in other moods, it can make us feel like it doesn’t matter what we do. If it’s all in God’s control, then our decisions mean nothing, really. In other moods, it can feel like God is just some distant force (if He’s there at all) and it’s entirely up to us to figure out what we need to do with our lives and what God is doing or not doing is largely irrelevant to our daily lives. The teachings of the New Church provide another option for how to understand this. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (38m 51s)

Misconceptions of Providence - If it happened, it was meant to be

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - May 10, 2020

We’re starting a sermon series on misconceptions about Divine Providence. Often when something difficult happens we want to know why—why did this happen? Sometimes the answer that people come to is that “it was meant to be”. But is that true? What does that even mean? How should we think about all the different things that happen in our lives? | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (30m 11s)

The Tabernacle, Part 2 - A Model for Life in a Complex World

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - April 26, 2020

This Sunday we’re talking some more about the Tabernacle—the mobile worship centre that God told the Children of Israel to build. If you read about the Tabernacle you can quickly become overwhelmed by the complexity and detail. Why is it so complicated? Well, life is also pretty complicated and in this complicated explanation of the structure of the Tabernacle we can find a model of how the Lord can help us to deal with the complexity of life. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (38m 37s)

Why the Lord Appeared First to Mary Magdalene

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - April 12, 2020

This Easter Sunday we are going to be focussing on the women at the tomb. Mary Magdalene, Mary (who had given birth to Jesus), and some other women were the first people at the tomb on Easter morning. And Mary Magdalene was the first person to see the Lord in His resurrection. Why was this and what can we learn from this about what in us will be most able to see and believe in the risen Lord? | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (51m 07s)

Finding Jesus in the Life of Elisha: Under Siege

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - March 29, 2020

We're in the midst of a sermon series on the life of Elisha and the story we were scheduled to talk about this Sunday, in the midst of a national lockdown, is the story of the Children of Israel being besieged by an enemy in the city of Samaria. As we experience our version of being besieged in our houses by an enemy, we will talk about what help the Lord can offer us in times when we feel trapped. During the lockdown we will be streaming the worship services from our homes instead of from the church, to abide by the mandate to stay home. Find more details about how to watch the service at http://newchurchwestville.co.za/online/ We will also send out a WhatsApp with a direct link to the service on Sunday. Let us know if you'd like to receive that WhatsApp. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (40m 45s)

Finding Jesus in the Life of Elisha: The Word Made Flesh

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - March 15, 2020

The New Church teaches that, at their deepest level, the stories in the Word are all about the Lord and what He went through while He was in this world. We are going to be looking for connections to the life of Jesus in the dramatic and sometimes quite confusing stories of the prophet Elisha. In this first part we will be looking at the relationship between Elijah and Elisha and exploring how the Lord in the Word made flesh can help us with our real problems and challenges. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (33m 24s)

From Dust to Living Souls

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - March 01, 2020

We are all going to die someday. That’s not exactly a pleasant thought but it can be useful. It can be useful to spend some time reflecting on our mortality—the reality that our lives in this world will not last forever and in fact they could end at any moment. And so, on Sunday evening, we’re going to take some time to think about this and the value of knowing that we are dust and to the dust we shall return. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (29m 28s)

Observing Lent

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - February 16, 2020

Have you heard of Lent? Have you ever given something up for Lent? People often think of Lent as a Catholic or Anglican thing because those are some of the churches that observe Lent. We’ve never observed it at New Church Westville before, as far as I’m aware. But could there be a value in giving something up for the period leading up to Easter? Come on Sunday and we’ll talk about it. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (30m 53s)

Cycles and Seasons of Time

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - February 02, 2020

This Sunday evening I want to give the adults a chance to hear about the "Circle of the Church Year" that we use in Godly Play. It's an opportunity to think about the different religious celebrations we have in the year the value of those times and the times of preparation that lead up to them. And it will also be an opportunity to reflect more broadly on the value and purpose of the time, state, or season that we find ourselves in. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (30m 00s)

Make Covenant with the Lord

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - January 19, 2020

Would you be willing to sign a legal agreement with the Lord, committing to do what He tells you to do? The Children of Israel made covenants with the Lord and, if we want to make progress in our relationship with Him, then we need to as well. Part of us does not want to do that. Let's talk about the value of a covenant with the Lord and how we can get through our resistance to the idea and make that commitment in a meaningful way. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (27m 15s)

"Teach Us to Number Our Days..."

Worship Service: Informal Family - January 05, 2020

It's a new decade (or not, depending on how you think about it) and it's a time when a lot of people are thinking about time and all that's happened in the past decade or two. People are also looking to the future and wondering what will happen in the 2020's. With these thoughts on our minds it seemed like it be useful, this Sunday evening, to reflect on Psalm 90 where it says, "teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (22m 59s)

Grief and Gratitude

Worship Service: Informal Family - December 29, 2019

A different baby was born in Bethlehem, hundreds of years before Jesus was born there. The mother of that baby died in childbirth and soo named her son "son of my sorrow" before she died. Later the father renamed that baby, "son of the right hand" or "son of strength". This story offers an opportunity to reflect on our sorrows and the strength that the Lord has given us through our sorrows and also gives us another way of understanding why the Lord was born in Bethlehem. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (11m 22s)

Why Was Jesus Born in Bethlehem?

Worship Service: Informal Family - December 25, 2019

Jesus was birn in Bethlehem, a town that did not seem particularly interesting or exciting. And if we want to find our Savious we need to be willing to look in places that also don't seem particularly interesting or exciting. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (18m 30s)

We Might Not Want the Lord to Come, But We Need Him To

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - December 01, 2019

As we approach Christmas we often talk about the Lord coming into the world and Him coming into our lives in a new way. At this Sunday’s evening service we will be talking about prophecies from Malachi about the Lord’s coming and why we might not actually want the Lord to come into our lives. That might sound strange but some of the prophecies about the Lord’s coming do not sound very pleasant. But we actually do need to go through those unpleasant things to really be ready for the Lord to come into our lives in a new way. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (25m 39s)

Invitation

Worship Service: Childrens Talk & Adult Sermon - November 17, 2019

As a church we are focusing on invitation for the next couple of months. As we work on invitation I want our thinking and our actions to be informed by what the Lord teaches about it. And when you look for it, you can find teachings and stories about invitation and even direct invitations from the Lord throughout the His Word. Let’s learn from the Lord about how to invite. | By Rev. Malcolm G. Smith | Westville, RSA

See Event (25m 38s)

101 - 125 of 303