In a world that is hell-bent on self-destruction, Jesus calls us to gather to him and to love faithfully and vulnerably with him, rather than surrendering to the hate and fear.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Discipleship
Lent calls us to faithfulness to God and we need to assess the direction of our journey, our call to ministry and also to meet our own demons.
Acknowledging and appreciating Jesus is relatively easy, but we find it much more difficult to transform our lives in conformity with his teaching.
Most of us are addicted to achieving results and success, and it is crippling us. Jesus leads us towards an unexpected and almost unrecognisable freedom.
It is with the love of Christ taking charge of us, that we can venture into combat with the wrongs of our time without being dragged down by the very same demons that we oppose.
Suffering raises painful unanswerable questions, but Jesus leads us into a life where the sharing of our honest questions is part of shaping a community of healing and hope.
There is nothing wrong with an eager desire for a special closeness to Jesus. Jesus is eager to fulfil such desires, but warns us of the cost of sticking with him.
When we commit ourselves to following Jesus, we surrender all our personal aspirations and our share in the aspirations of our nation, in order that we might receive the life of Christ.
There is no neat finish to the Jesus story, because it is far from over. The risen Jesus is always ahead of us, calling us to follow and live the next chapter.
The life that Jesus calls us too will not be found and enjoyed until we give up trying to engineer the life we dreamed we were supposed to be living.
Jesus resisted the temptation to force his will on the world, and he pioneered a pathway for us to similarly refuse the exploitation of power.
Jesus demonstrates the need to reflect on our results and reject the easy success and popularity that are built on meeting basic needs.
The culture of God is emerging in our present world, confronting us with a choice – do we cling to our allegiance to the cultures that have raised us or let go of them and embrace the culture of God.
While we are called to be a sharing community and thus to have no need of worry for tomorrow, you can’t look to others to provide you with the fruits of a life lived in generosity and prayerfulness.
Jesus’s quest for reconciliation is far wider and more discomfortingly radical than our tendency to jump on the bandwagon of popular justice causes.
Today, as in Jesus’s day, two fundamentally different visions of God and God’s expectations compete. Jesus calls us to side with the one that centres on love rather than the one that centres on concerns for holiness.
Modelling ourselves on those who model themselves on Jesus is a healthy pathway to fulfilling the image of God within us.
Christians are to be known for what they celebrate and affirm and encourage rather than what they are against.
Recognising what sort of sacrifices we are called to make and what sort of sacrifices we are called to refrain from making is crucial to faithfully following the way of Jesus.
My journey has brought me to a place where I have begun to know the rest that Jesus offers.