Nathan has been a pastor of our Church since 1994.
God is passionately in love with us and longing to give us every good thing if we will respond to his love.
Nathan has been a pastor of our Church since 1994.
God is passionately in love with us and longing to give us every good thing if we will respond to his love.
We all learn our desires from others, but most of them are destructive, and law tries to control them. The pathway to freedom and life is to follow Jesus and learn to desire as he desires.
In an increasingly polarised world, championing the radical love and mercy shown by Jesus is likely to bring hostility from all sides.
Both contemporary and ancient understandings of the rainbow sign point to God’s expansive love overcoming our fears and hostilities.
Following Jesus in ministering among the needs around us is not a call to do everything ourselves.
Jesus overcomes the demonic powers which colonise our religious structures and thinking and which rob us of our freedom, integrity and life.
The story of Jonah challenges us whenever we start thinking that we have special rights as God’s people.
In baptism, the Holy Spirit is ordaining us (all of us) for mission.
God reaches out to us through babies and elderly folks with a message of love and redemption that cuts through the theological justifications of empire and warmongering and calls us to peace.
The the birth of Jesus we see the beginning of a peace mission that is not based on force but on patience, forgiveness and presence.
Discovering who we are called to be is an ever-evolving journey as we follow Jesus in changing circumstances.
Though we are to strive for righteousness and justice now, what we achieve now is a mere shadow of what will be fulfilled in the day of the Lord.
Jesus calls us to a new world in which the lives of nations revolve around bringing the previously marginalised to the centre of our national way of being. Nations that fail to do that collapse into self-destruction.
While many have a passive-aggressive relationship with God, the gospel gives us a vision of God that liberates us to live freely, expansively and joyously.
Many parts of the Bible can be and often are weaponised as tools of oppression, but when we read it critically, with and through the teachings and example of Jesus, it calls us to liberation and life.
We we allow God’s word to work in us, it lifts the burden of oppressive teaching from us.
Living the beatitudes is tough and dangerous, and we will need the inspiration and company of the saints, before us and beside us, if we are going to make it.
If we keep imitating one another, paying back violence with vengeance, the world will be consumed in an escalating fury, but Jesus rescues us and gives us a life-giving example to follow.
There is life and nourishment hidden in the depths, and through Jesus the rock it is accessible to us.
In order to recognise and cooperate with what God is doing, we often need to recognise and see past the assumptions that come with our own privilege.