The culture of God rises in defiance of the empires of this world, but it will look more like an annoying outbreak of self-sown, invasive weeds than an alternative empire.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Spiritual Warfare
Jesus calls us to resist the satanic desire to credit violence and disaster with meaning, and instead to acknowledge meaning and truth only in God’s suffering love and mercy.
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.
In Christ we are one with all flesh and blood, and so our struggle is not against any other people, but against the spirits and powers and forces which would divide people and make them enemies.
There are forces conspiring to keep us in the dark, but Jesus opens our eyes so that we can see that our deepest yearnings are satisfied only in God.
Christ calls us together into a spirit-filled body in the face of demonic forces that would seek to drive us apart and trick us into the fatal error of going it alone.
The world will try to domesticate the gospel and get it to reinforce the world’s status quo and moral codes, but as people identified with Christ on the cross, we live the radical (and offensive) life of the new creation.
Christian ascetic discipline is not about earning God’s acceptance, but about banishing the demons so that we can live life more fully in the here and now.
Following Christ may take us into costly confrontation with the powers of the world, and we cannot be protected from the costs of that, but Christ will bring us through to the land of promise beyond.
The forces seeking to destroy any chance of real Christian living are formidable, but so are the weapons God gives us.
Our bodies are integral to who we are and are destined for resurrection and glorification, but the fracturing of the integrity of creation affects us too in ways that mean we often find our bodies at war with our spirits. The pathway to sanctification involves a reintegration of body and spirit, and sometimes that means denial and disciplining of physical desires.