Sunday 27th September 2026
Rhythm of Life series – teaching after the sermon, Luke 17: 11-19
Last week our Rhythm of Life focus was on Generosity, and we thought about how thankfulness, counting our blessings and recognizing God’s generous love to us is the beginning of our hearts becoming more like God’s own – generous, sacrificial, and loving. And today’s Gospel reading sees a similar story of gratitude – of the 10 lepers who were healed, only one returns to give thanks for what God has done for him through Jesus. His heart was turned towards God as a result of recognising God’s generous love towards him. This is of course a key harvest theme: we thank the Lord, O thank the Lord for all his love. We give thanks to God for creating a world rich in good things which sustain life. In addition to looking at the beauty of nature, and giving thanks for all that is good in the world and in our lives, we have the Bible to draw upon to help lead us into being people of generous living.
The Bible is a library of books, comprising law, history, poetry, prophecy, teaching, letters, stories, warnings, encouragements and much, much more. And across this library of books, several metanarratives unfold – overarching narratives, stories and themes which play out across hundreds of years, telling us more about God and us: the character and nature of God and what it means to live as God’s children.
If we get into a holy habit of reading the Bible, this will feed our sense of who God is, who we are, and that cannot help but feed a sense of thankfulness, and be a cause for our own generous love. So how? On a practical level, you can of course simply pick up a Bible, choose a book of the Bible and read it, perhaps a chapter a day. Another way is to use the Daily Prayer app on your phone – we use this in church for Morning and Evening Prayer as a clergy team. Every day, in short acts of worship there are readings from Old and New Testaments as well as Psalms and other materials which are rooted in Scripture. There are all kinds of study materials for Scripture out there from organisations such as Scripture Union and the Bible Society to help you get into a daily rhythm of Bible readings, too. And starting soon, we have a small group meeting here at St Mary’s, Boston Spa on Monday evenings, Living Holiness, which explores the themes from Rhythm of Life which we are looking at each Sunday at the moment, and uses Scripture as a lens to explore these themes more deeply in conversation with others. Details of that group are in the Newsletter and I heartily commend it to you all – it meets in the choir vestry 7.30 to 9pm starting a fortnight on Monday.
So why bother to get into a holy habit of Bible reading? Well, it feeds our faith. If God’s Word infuses our lives, it infuses our thinking, it opens our hearts to the workings of the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth and shape our lives in the image of Jesus, the Word made flesh. We find ourselves better able to act as God’s hands, to reach out in love to God’s world, to respond to the needs of the world with generous hearts. It helps us know and love God more. And if the Word is sown in our hearts, our lives will bear Gospel fruit, fruit that will last. That is the harvest God calls us to in our church community: to respond generously to God’s loving provision for us, inspired by what we learn of God’s generous love revealed in the Bible. Let us pray:
Prayer: O God of wisdom, you inspire our hearts and minds through your gift of Scripture; help us to receive and to respond to your Word, that we may be shaped into the likeness of Christ and continually learn to live faithfully. Amen.
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