Dear Friends,
I am glad to be greeting you again, today, and seeing some of you, in person. The world has changed considerably, since I was last with you. I imagine that your Christmas celebrations this year were fairly different from celebrations in previous years. In the light of the pandemic and the chaos and suffering it has brought to the world, we need to be reminded of the need to be grateful for our safety, thus far; and we need to be reminded of the hope and light the birth of the Saviour ushers in to our lives, and into the darkness of the world. No intensity of darkness is able to extinguish the light. Christ is “the light of the world”, and He came to dispel the darkness. We pray that, at this special time, the world will be flooded with the light, and the life, and the love of God. This has been an extraordinarily different and difficult year; and, to all appearances, there is a long way to go, before all people will have access to a vaccine. We have to persevere; we have to be careful, and vigilant; we have to be determined to get through; we have to believe, and trust, and hope, and see God’s glory, and reflect God’s glory, and be the good news…..

Galatians 4 verse 4: ”But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law”. Jesus came at just the right time. Why not hundreds of years earlier? Why not a decade, or a century, later? The answer is in the mind of God, and it is mystery: but we celebrate the amazing, glorious, wonderful, life-changing, world-changing, intervention of God. And we continue to welcome, and worship, the One Who came humbly amongst us; the One Who is our reason to hope, and rejoice.

Reverend Nigel Andrews 27 December 2020