Do You Know Your Soul Name?

Do You Know your soul Name? (A4 Paper to tear up - Scottish FudgeTablet or fudge and Samsung with me)

1/Keeping yourself secret in the world

Happy New Year, this is my first sermon of 2015 so this is my 2015 New Year sermon and here you and I are in the house of God. And this is of course, is where we ought to be as we embrace the Year 2015.

Let’s make this the year of the lamb, the year of the Lamb of God. It’s the Chinese year of the sheep as well. I’ll return to this idea of the year of the lamb later in the sermon. But I’m going to start with a question.

Did you ever wonder why New Year’s Day occurs 8 days after Christmas? On the eighth day, the Jewish child was circumcised and received his name. The eighth day is what is known as the octave day of Christmas.

And so it came about, in the Western world at least, that the octave day of Christmas became the beginning of the New Year. It is a happy omen for the New Year to begin on the day when the child Jesus received his name, the only name by which we can be saved (Matt. 1:21; Acts 4:12).

If you haven’t managed a prayer for the new year yet or even if you have how about this one:

`Lord you are mighty to save, I confess in the year past I could have served you better, but I offer my genuine sorrow and regret and I thank you with a grateful heart that you are a forgiving and forward looking God. I bow my head in awesome wonder, that I can plant my feet at the beginning of this year on the bedrock of faith that is knowing the name and the person of Jesus. Help me and mine to better know and serve you in 2015. Amen’

I don’t know if you are crazy enough to go to the sales in between Christmas and New Year, what that was like?

But I do know that my family shared the same experiences as many others in the run up.

We did much of our shopping both on the internet and from shops

There was a common feature we all shared, and had to have, as we searched for stuff and information and bought things. See if you can guess what it is.

On the internet we bought from Amazon, Tesco Direct, and PC World

we paid by PayPal, debit or credit card, from the shops we bought a number of items that asked us when we got home to register our product `on-line’ at which point you had to set up a user name and account, and then check your emails so that THEY …………… could verify that….YOU the customer who had taken the trouble to buy something from them ……………………was who you said you were.

I bought a tablet, not a delicious Scottish fudge tablet, but a Samsung Galaxy Tablet, an amazingly thin computer which apparently manages to store most of its data in the clouds, which are not the fluffy white clouds in the sky but massive big big computers linked to each other all round the world. So when I save a photo on my little tablet it can end up on a big computer in China or India or anywhere.

Anyway when I turned on my Tablet it wanted to be able to Sync. That’s not to say go under water, but to synchronise with my I-phone, google, calendar, contacts, Facebook and loads more

But to do that I had to first become a Samsung person and get a Samsung ID, then I had to get a Samsung account, Samsung user name, and a Samsung login, and then I had to remember my Google, Facebook, calendar, Amazon, email and I-phone names and I phone and other logins, And I couldn’t remember them I had forgotten half the information and I got fed up

The technology is amazing, incredible really thinking that in my lifetime a great advance was the electronic calculator from the slide rule

but in order to use this wonderful technology you have to do a certain something

Can you spot the common feature? And it’s not just to have buckets of patience and a phenomenal memory

You might have thought the common feature is the internet and you’d be right but it was something else.

Logging on to e-mail or Amazon or some account

Registering a product

Paying by credit or debit card in shop or on-line

Even sometimes to look at stuff for sale

You had to have something – and that something was………………….. a secret pin code or a password. You wouldn’t even get past Go without a password in many cases.