As we head with Jesus towards the cross, carrying the pain and injustice of the world, God does not hide his face from us but hears our cries for justice.
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Seeking and Sharing the Fullness of Life
Sermons on Suffering
God will walk with us in suffering and work redemptively within it, but God is not powerful enough to just remove it.
The stories of Moses, Elijah and Jesus on various mountain tops reveals a process of God’s self-revelation as the one who loves us and suffers for us.
In the culture of Jesus, the very conditions that create discomfort, struggle, suffering and even scorn, paradoxically are transformed into the essential ingredients to inherit and inhabit the kingdom of God.
In the worldwide lockdown, we stand on an uncomfortable threshold and wonder where God is. God responds to our need, sending the Holy Spirit to stand with us.
True martyrdom involves suffering even unto death. But, no less important, the martyr sees what other people may not be seeing, and opens their eyes to it.
In the face of monumental devastation and suffering, God speaks a word, and the word becomes flesh.
The coming kingdom culture confronts the world’s violence by redemptively suffering and absorbing it, not by reciprocating it with even greater violence.
There are plenty of reasons to despair of the future, but Jeremiah and Jesus show us a pathway of hope that overcomes despair.
Facing an epidemic of depression and despair, Jesus calls us to follow on a tear-stained path of prophetic faithfulness.
Jesus sets out to reshape our view of the relationships between sin, repentance and disaster, and if possible, to call us out of our spiral into global self-destruction.
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.
When we want to know what God is like, our primary source of information is Jesus.
Most suffering is random and unfair, but Jesus has joined us in it to lead us into new life.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that another person can do to you that can make you unclean or defiled in the eyes of God.
It is in our woundedness, this woundedness we try to avoid and would rather not acknowledge, that we find our identity as the body of Christ, our identity as the church.
When we respond to the call to model our lives on his life, the life of the One who has seen the Father, then, like him, we must not sidestep or avoid suffering.
The glory of God is most fully revealed in Jesus’s willingness to suffer death at the hands of the law.
We are prepared to sacrifice and kill in the name of our God, but God is willing to be sacrificed and be killed to save us, even when we were enemies.
Expecting God to always appear as an exalted triumphant victor blinds us to the reality of God’s glory which is made known in suffering, self-sacrificial love.