For God So Loved The World featuring Lucy Stimpson – Maynard recorded live at a performance of His Story

With it having been St Valentine’s Day this week I thought I would do some research and find out a bit more about the Saint- I then realised I had already done so a couple of years ago. I still thought that it was repeating and so “History.com” states ::
The history of Valentine’s Day–and the story of its patron saint is shrouded in mystery. We do know that February has long been celebrated as a month of romance and that St. Valentine’s Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. But who was Saint Valentine, and how did he become associated with this ancient rite?
The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred. One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death. Still others insist that it was Saint Valentine of Terni, a bishop, who was the true namesake of the holiday. He, too, was beheaded by Claudius II outside Rome.
Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons, where they were often beaten and tortured. According to one legend, an imprisoned Valentine actually sent the first “valentine” greeting himself after he fell in love with a young girl–possibly his jailor’s daughter–who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter signed “From your Valentine,” an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories all emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic and–most importantly–romantic figure. By the Middle Ages, perhaps thanks to this reputation, Valentine would become one of the most popular saints in England and France.
While some believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine’s death or burial–which probably occurred around A.D. 270–others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia. Celebrated at the ides of February, or February 15, Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.
As well as being the patron saint of lovers St Valentine is also the patron saint of beekeepers and epilepsy,
Chaucer may have invented Valentine’s Day. The medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer often took liberties with history, placing his poetic characters into fictitious historical contexts that he represented as real. No record exists of romantic celebrations on Valentine’s Day prior to a poem Chaucer wrote around 1375. In his work “Parliament of Foules,” he links a tradition of courtly love with the celebration of St. Valentine’s feast day–an association that didn’t exist until after his poem received widespread attention. The poem refers to February 14 as the day birds (and humans) come together to find a mate. When Chaucer wrote, “For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day / Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate,” he may have invented the holiday we know today.

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The Name That’s On My Lips featuring Lucy Stimpson- Maynard from the album “Where Would I Be Without You? ” recorded and produced by Ross Gill

Came across this on social media and just had to share it

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One of the great Christian worship songs that came out of lockdown was “The Blessing.” The featured song today is a great compilation of over 500 different versions.
Courtesy of Wikipedia here are a few basic facts about the song but basically the idea today is to simply watch the video and enjoy.
The original “ The Blessing” was performed by Kari Jobe, Cody Carnes and Elevation Worship, released as the lead single from Elevation Worship’s twelfth live album, Graves into Gardens (2020), The song was written by Chris Brown, Cody Carnes, Kari Jobe and Steven Furtick.
“The Blessing” won the GMA Dove Award for Worship Recorded Song of the Year at the 2020 GMA Dove Awards, and the GMA Dove Award for Song of the Year at the 2021 GMA Dove Awards. It has also garnered a Grammy Award nomination for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song at the 2021 Grammy Awards. It was further recorded into dozens of cover versions by various artists, produced in various languages and in different parts of the world.
The lyrics are largely taken from the priestly blessing found in the Book of Numbers within the Old Testament of the Bible.

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Jesus You Are Everything featuring Lucy Stimpson- Maynard from the album I Look Up To The Heavens recorded and produced by John Hodgkinson

So here is the final episode on prayer which I read in the “Word For Today” and thought worthy of sharing:
Your prayer style should be consistent with the way God designed you. Yes, you can learn from people who are more experienced in prayer than you are, but you need to be careful not to make them your standard, or become a ‘clone’. It’s wrong to force yourself to do what others do, if you are not comfortable with it in your spirit. Don’t try to keep up with someone else, or copy their prayer style. And don’t feel compelled to work every prayer principle you have ever learned, every time you pray. Most of us are afraid not to be like everyone else. We are more comfortable following specified rules than daring to follow the leading of God’s Spirit. When we follow man-made rules, we please people. But when we step out in faith and follow God’s Spirit, we please Him. You don’t need to feel pressured to pray a certain way, or for a certain length of time, or to focus on specific things because other people are doing so. ‘Untie the boat from the dock,’ so to speak, and let the tide of God’s Spirit take you wherever He wills. When you are in control, you know what will happen next. But when you let God’s Spirit take the lead, you are in for a lot of surprises in life. Wonderful surprises! You need to be determined to be yourself, and refuse to spend your life feeling guilty because you’re not like somebody else. The Bible says, ‘He fashions their hearts individually.’ So when it comes to prayer, the word for today is, ‘Be yourself’.

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When I Think Of You Jesus featuring Lucy Stimpson-Maynard from the album Precious recorded and produced by Ross Gill

As I said last week, prayer can be very challenging and so I continue with this second part of a series from “Word For Today” which I thought to be most helpful.
God is far too creative to insist that every person interacts with Him in exactly the same way. He designed each of us differently. There are prayer principles that apply to all of us, but God leads each of us as individuals. We are all at different places in our walk with Him, we are all at different levels of spiritual maturity, we all have different types of experiences in prayer. Yes, we need to learn the fundamentals of prayer. But then we need to move beyond intellectual knowledge about how to pray, and take those principles to the Lord and say: ‘Teach me to apply this to my life, in my situation, to my heart. Show me how this idea is supposed to work for me. God, I’m depending on You to teach me to pray, to make me effective in prayer, to make my relationship with You through prayer the richest, most rewarding aspect of my life.’ When you say, ‘Lord, teach me to pray,’ you’re asking Him to teach you to pray in a distinctly personal way, and to enable your prayers to be easy, natural expressions of who you are. You need to go before God just the way you are, and give Him the pleasure of enjoying the company of the ‘original’ that He made you to be. You need to approach Him with your own strengths, weaknesses, uniqueness and everything else that so wonderfully distinguishes you from everyone else. God enjoys meeting you where you are, developing a personal relationship with you, and helping you grow to become everything He wants you to be.

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Because of Your Grace featuring Harun Kotch from the album The Season of Singing recorded and produced by Ross Gill

Prayer can be very challenging and I found these words in “Word For Today” most helpful. I hope you do too.
In his book With Christ in the School of Prayer, Andrew Murray writes: ‘None can teach like Jesus…therefore we call on Him, “Lord, teach us to pray.” A pupil needs a teacher who knows his work, who has the gift of teaching, who in patience and love will descend to the pupil’s needs. Blest be God! Jesus is all this and much more…Jesus loves to teach us how to pray.’ If you: a) are not sure God is really listening when you talk to Him; b) don’t understand why some prayers seem to go unanswered; c) wonder if you are praying ‘right’ or generally feel frustrated in prayer; d) are eager to know what to do to feel more connected with God and gain confidence that your prayers really do make a difference, say, ‘Lord, teach me to pray.’ Although there are principles of prayer that apply to everyone, God will lead each of us individually. He wants to take you just the way you are, and help you discover your own rhythm of prayer; to develop a style of prayer that maximises your relationship with Him. He wants prayer to be an easy, natural, life-giving way of communicating as you share your heart with Him and allow Him to share His heart with you. Prayer is so simple; it’s nothing more than talking to God and taking time to listen to what He has to say to you. God has a personalised prayer plan for you, a way for you to communicate most effectively with Him. So begin by saying, ‘Lord, teach me to pray.’

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Great and Marvellous featuring Lucy Stimpson and The Mustard Seed Girls’ Choir recorded live at the Millennium Concert, Crofton Community Centre, Stubbington

Michael was the Vicar of Holy Rood who led the Alpha course during which I became a Christian on February 22nd 1997. See blogs http://www.risen.org.uk/?p=85 and http://www.risen.org.uk/?p=90
Merilyn, Michael’s wife was also incredibly supportive when I began to compose Christian songs – please see blog http://www.risen.org.uk/?p=250
I received a wonderful message from them this Christmas that I have great pleasure in sharing:
Recently we have been watching “Universe” with Brian Cox which shares Hubble telescope glimpses of the Milky Way and beyond, revealing immeasurably extents, immense time scales and the ultimate burn out of our sun. In contemplating it all Brian Cox said “We don’t need to invent imaginary gods to explain the universe- we can replace them with the real thing.”
I wanted to say to him what I said to Richard Dawkins over 50 years ago! (I had a small part in a student mission, a speaker had fallen out and I was asked to second a motion, something like “Is God there?” which Richard Dawkins opposed.) He was not yet a star in the atheistic firmament but I was nervous and inexpert and can’t remember the details, however I did get coffee with speakers afterwards. I said to RD “You look at the universe as if it is a closed system of cause and effect, but it is bigger than you think – your view is too limited! … So is Brian Cox’s!
Genesis 1.1 In the beginning God created … He is outside the box, He made it. He is outside the system, outside all the immeasurables and unimaginables, the wonderful causes and effects that have been discovered. We don’t believe in God in spite of scientific discoveries. We don’t believe in God because of scientific discoveries. We believe because of revelation. We are not inventing something that is not there, but responding to someone who is real beyond imagining, beyond measuring. While creation itself is evidence for God, He is more fully revealed as we celebrate Christmas, In the beginning was the Word … the Word became flesh and dwelt among us – inviting us to give our lives to Him.
And I would add my Amen to that !

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My good friend Tim Downs, who played baritone sax in the Mustard Seed Soul Band, put this absolutely fantastic piece together – made even the more extraordinary by the fact that Tim is not very well at the moment- so here’s to a speedy and complete recovery in 2022 Tim.
By the way just for your information Wikipedia says:
“In dulci jubilo” (Latin for “In sweet rejoicing”) is a traditional Christmas carol. In its original setting, the carol is a macaronic text of German and Latin dating from the Middle Ages. Subsequent translations into English, such as J. M. Neale’s arrangement “Good Christian Men, Rejoice” have increased its popularity, and Robert Pearsall’s 1837 macaronic translation is a mainstay of the Christmas Nine Lessons and Carols repertoire. J. S. Bach’s chorale prelude based on the tune (BWV 729) is also a traditional postlude for Christmas services.
So, there you have it!!

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ALL AT MUSTARD SEED SONGS – THE TRUSTEES, MUSICIANS, MUSICAL DIRECTOR AND OUR WEBMASTER WISH YOU ALL A VERY HAPPY AND PROPEROUS NEW YEAR.

In The Beginning Was The Word from the unpublished album “His Story Live” featuring the Lord Is Truth Gospel Choir recorded and produced by Ross Gill

I came across this interesting and very topical article by Karen Murdarasi which discusses the Bible’s attitude to the Virgin birth. The article was from Premier Christian Media and I thought worth sharing with you.
Along with Jesus’s resurrection, the virgin birth is one on Christianity’s wildest – and most disputed – claims. But did the Gospel accounts really tell us that Mary became pregnant before she ever had sex, or was it all just a case of misinterpreted Greek?
”The Virgin Mary had a baby boy” the song tells us, and at this time of year (Covid regulations permitting), children up and down the country wear tinsel around their heads and act out the familiar scene: the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and announces that she is to have a miracle baby. But this is also the time of year when the claim starts to appear on social media that the Bible never really claims that Mary was a virgin, and that this outlandish idea was added by Christians later to sprinkle the fairy dust of a miracle onto a perfectly ordinary conception.
Obviously, virgins do not get pregnant. Therefore, either the Bible is claiming that a truly astounding miracle happened, or Christians have been reading it wrong for centuries. The debate centres around the word translated ‘virgin’, and what it meant in the original language. We have two accounts of Jesus’ conception in the Bible, in the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke and, on the face of it, they both seem to say that Mary was a virgin when she conceived. But do they?
Matthew 1:23 quotes a verse from Isaiah 7:14, saying that Jesus’ birth fulfils the prophecy: “’The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ (which means ‘God with us’).” That appears clear enough, until you examine the original verse from Isaiah more closely. The Hebrew word used for ‘virgin’ is almah, and while it can certainly mean virgin, it doesn’t have to; it could just mean ‘young woman of marriageable age’. Also, from the way it is phrased, it is not clear whether this young woman/virgin is going to conceive while she is still unmarried. The prophecy speaks of the future, and it could be that the virgin/young woman in question is soon going to get married and conceive her son naturally.
Matthew’s Gospel is written in Greek, not Hebrew, so the word he used was parthenos. Parthenos was the word used to translate almah in the Septuagint (the standard Greek version of the Jewish scriptures) and, again, it means virgin or young woman – or, to be more accurate, both. The closest parallel in English is probably maiden, which means a young woman but has unmissable connotations of virginity (a women’s hymen was known as her ‘maidenhead’). Even so, it still leaves open the possibility that Mary was an ‘unmaidenly’ maiden who was already sexually active.
But fixating on the word parthenos means missing the places where the Gospel writers tell us much more clearly that Mary was not sexually active. In Luke’s account, when Gabriel announces to Mary that she will become pregnant, modern translations usually render Mary’s question to him as something like: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34) but the Greek actually says: “since I do not know a man.” Mary is delicately referring to her lack of carnal knowledge, not saying she has never met a male human. Her question makes perfect sense: as someone brought up in an agricultural environment, she knows the facts of life and doesn’t see how she can become pregnant without having had sex. Gabriel’s answer is that the Holy Spirit will accomplish it, concluding “Nothing will be impossible with God.” (Luke 1:37) It is clear to Mary, and should be to the reader also, that the angel is talking about a miraculous, not a natural, conception.
Another look at Matthew’s Gospel makes the case even clearer. Joseph’s reaction to the pregnancy is to dissolve the relationship, because (it is implied) he assumes that Mary has been unfaithful. That rules out the possibility that Mary had been having sexual relations with him. Once Joseph had been assured in a dream that the unborn child was “from the Holy Spirit”, he agreed to take Mary home but not have sexual relations with her. Here, Joseph’s (in)action is variously translated as ‘he kept her a virgin’ or ‘did not consummate their marriage’ until after Jesus was born (Matthew 1.25). But it’s the Authorised Version that gets closest to the original Greek: “he did not come to know her [carnally] until she had given birth to her firstborn son.”
None of this is going to convince anyone who thinks the Bible is a book of fairy stories, and, as with most events in history, science can tell us very little. There were no DNA tests in first-Century Judea. But when it comes to the argument over the historical evidence, there is no wriggle room: the biblical accounts tell the reader, without any ambiguity, that Mary conceived miraculously, without ever having had sex. The Virgin Mary did indeed have a baby boy.

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ALL AT MUSTARD SEED SONGS – THE TRUSTEES, MUSICIANS, MUSICAL DIRECTOR AND OUR WEBMASTER WISH YOU ALL A VERY HAPPY CHIRSTMAS AND PROPEROUS NEW YEAR.

The Fire of Sacrifice featuring Lucy Stimpson- Maynard from the album Precious recorded and produced by Ross Gill

Nine days to Christmas- a time to celebrate the birth of Jesus and also a time for families to enjoy being together- so last weekend I drove up to Hucknall to see the legend that is my brother Jack and his lovely wife Eileen. I wrote a blog about Jack in celebration of his 90th birthday back in June,2021 http://www.risen.org.uk/?p=2322
Driving up there were problems on the M40 and A43 with many diversions – I knew I was going to be late when I was diverted to “Hinton in the Hedges.” Now I had heard of places called “on the water” “on the moor” or “in the marsh” but “in the hedges” that had to be a first.
Anyway, I eventually got to my bros. Now our dad had been a gymnast and had taught Jack how to swing “Indian clubs.” Dad had not, however taught me (very wise was dad) but sometime previously Jack had kindly acquired two clubs in order for me to carry on the club swinging tradition. I found it totally impossible – more difficult than I could have ever imagined and much more difficult than a hole in one in golf!
Anyway, just out of interest I wanted to see if Jack still had the skill and so I took a video of him

I hope you agree his performance is fantastic, however not quite as good as his performance some fourteen years ago when he “club swung” to the whole of Village People’s YMCA at our mum’s 100 birthday party. This is the first of today’s featured videos – the second is of my cousin, Pete dancing with Eileen at the same birthday bash -not sure what Craig Revel- Horwood would have said but we all thought it was “Ama zing!

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