Election week sheds new light on how we can participate with Jesus in bringing satanic principalities and powers crashing down.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Evil (Page 2)
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that another person can do to you that can make you unclean or defiled in the eyes of God.
En Cristo somos uno con toda la carne y la sangre, y por lo tanto nuestra lucha no es contra ningunas personas, sino contra los espíritus y los principados y los potestades que dividirían a la gente y les harían enemigos.
We only reliably recognise and combat evil by listening to Jesus and taking his wisdom into our hearts.
Satan casts out satan all the time in our divisive attempts to protect ourselves by demonising and expelling others.
Lent is a time to walk knowingly into the wilderness, to face the Accuser and the wild beasts that emerge when we live out our identity as God’s children.
Jesus urges us to take stock, to recognise the sicknesses which warp us and the demons which colonise our hearts and our minds, to renounce them so that we become free to minister to one another, and to proclaim the good news in our words and our lives.
God saves us by changing our hearts, but one of the great temptations for the church is to try to turn that back into a system of exclusion and control.
Unquestioning allegiances to family and nation keep us bound to satanic systems, but Jesus binds the satan and breaks us free to be the new family of God.
In Christ we are set free from all that would oppress us in order that we might be free to live in gracious and life-giving service of God and others.
Though we get caught up in violent rivalries like Herod, God breaks through with the promise of a new kingdom where all are honoured.
Jesus sends the Holy Spirit as a Defence Counsel to defend us against the demonic accusations that trouble and disempower us.
Demonic temptations do not usually look demonic, but are usually a subtle undermining of our sense of who we are that cause us to grasp for quick fixes.
Jesus reveals that God is a God of abundance who will lovingly provide plenty for all, but the common perception of scarcity easily corrupts us and leads to treachery and abuse.
The Catechumenate, and the annual Lenten journey, are about writing the Word of God into our hearts so that it can protect us from evil and bear fruits of righteousness.
In the face of human evil, God has made a personal commitment to persevere in loving us and drawing us towards fulfilment.
Our struggles against evil, temptation and suffering are all framed by the security of God’s unshakable love and resolve to bring us safely to fullness of life.
The Cross is the tree at which we come to know the fullness of good and evil, and as we choose to bear the consequences of good and evil, it becomes for us the tree of life.
In the face of powerful evil, our choice like Jesus’s choice is between the natural human instincts of flight or fight, and the third way of obedience to God.
As the victim of the ultimate in human evil, the risen Christ is the One who can offer the complete forgiveness, to us, and through us to the rest of the world.