In an us-and-them world, people hope to find a way to get God on their side, but Jesus confounds our expectations of God siding against others.
The refining fire made known in Jesus is not targeting “morality” issues, but our hatreds, hostilities and inhospitableness.
In the fact of the climate apocalypse, we hold on to our hope: hoping and working for the radical, impossible change that is necessary.
In a world increasingly divided between violent powers, Jesus leads a kingdom that is a radical peaceful challenge to both of them.
Only when the world models itself on the self-sacrificial love and mercy we have seen in Jesus will it be saved from the cycles of apocalyptic violence and chaos.
Every coin you are holding already belongs to God: every bitterness, every hurt, every disappointment. Do not hold a single one back.
Jesus wants to lift us beyond the deadening conformity that seeks to silence us and confine us to a stunted life.
Most suffering is random and unfair, but Jesus has joined us in it to lead us into new life.
In Christ we have been given a new identity that dissolves the labels of first and two-thirds world, and invites us all to be poor.
Jesus’s invitation is radically open and inclusive, and we need to guard carefully against our own culturally conditioned instincts to start narrowing and policing it.
The things that make Jesus the perfect leader to lead us into new life are probably the same things that would make us turn our backs on him and seek to follow others.
Good gossip, listening in love to each other’s stories and seeking the presence of God, helps us to build connection and community and to grow in love.
God promises the best for us if we follow the way of Jesus, and faith is actively trusting that that pathway will indeed be the way of 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.
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.
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.
Jesus rejects the opportunity to fulfil our hopes and expectations in order that he might give us more than we thought possible.
Building impressive buildings can be about a desire to monopolise and contain God, whereas God wants us to break down any walls that divide and exclude anyone.