Jesus preached a vision of the Kingdom of God that re-orders our lives and communities, and finds an honoured place for those often excluded for not conforming to the pervasive norms of marriage and family.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Faithfulness
God created us and set us in a network of relationships with God, with the creation, with one another, and with ourselves, and all four connections need to be maintained for health.
Where affluence creates consumers, abundance creates neighbours. It is the ethic of possessions which Jesus commends to us as a promise of how God deals with us.
The things we have we are to hold with open hands, looking with a generous eye for the oppotunities to share our resources in ways that make a difference.
God knows our tribulation and will keep us in the right way if we will trust to do right without fuss and without favour.
Like the Emmaus travellers, Jesus calls us to pay attention to what is happening in these strange times, to what makes our hearts burn within us, and so to be changed ready to live differently.
Jesus calls us to follow his lead in bringing healing, hope and positive leadership to others, and not to be too worried about anxious and vexatious criticism.
Jesus calls us to neither conservatism nor iconoclasm, but to a faithful reckoning with the gifts and the sins of the past as we welcome and adapt to the new.
Faithful waiting for for the fulfilment of God’s promises can leave us feeling compromised and alienated in the world around us.
We can face the unknown future with confidence because we know that the one who holds the future loves us and can be trusted.
The biblical pictures of marriage reflect our struggle to live our way into the vulnerable intimacy and relational fruitfulness that God wants for us and with us.
The saints of God are engaged in a war between conflicting empires battling for control of the world, but Jesus has radically transformed our understanding of how we fight.
Reading scripture with God’s people keeps us honest as we seek to interpret and live by God’s law written on our hearts.
When God calls us to invest in the places we live, it is a call to active agents of positive change, not compliant patriots.
Facing an epidemic of depression and despair, Jesus calls us to follow on a tear-stained path of prophetic faithfulness.
Faithfulness to God means sticking to the ways in which Jesus has led us, but we are constantly tempted to idolise his name while avoiding his ways.
Lived faith is the way to life in God, but it passes through a baptism of fire.
When we crusade against the evil of others, we end up crusading against Jesus himself, for he asks us to become givers and lovers of life.
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.
Acknowledging and appreciating Jesus is relatively easy, but we find it much more difficult to transform our lives in conformity with his teaching.