A fortified inner self not only enables a person to offer love properly but to receive love properly, even from God, to give without strings, to receive without suspicion.
The answers to the questions about our future directions are not easy, but we can trust the God who holds our future in his hands.
If we can lose ourselves in the worship of Christ, then Christ will come to fill our emptied egos with his own self which now dances in the freedom of God.
Rediscovering the mission of Jesus is one pathway through which we might re-enter the experience of dependence on God.
The day of Pentecost is the day when the Spirit comes to interrupt and call into question the inevitability of our despair.
The resurrection has broken open many old certainties, and our ethics must now be grounded in the new things God is doing, characterised by radically inclusive love, rather than in the old restrictions.
God has promised that if we stay connected to him, then he will give us the energy and the love to go out from our comfort-zones into the alien territory of those who need God’s love most of all.
The message that salvation is exclusively in the hands of the risen Christ may be unfashionable, but it is the only message of salvation we have to offer.
The experience of resurrection results in joy and mission.
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.
God invites us to be immersed in another possible reality, to look at the world with the dark and contrary light that comes from the cross of Jesus.
Christ crucified is both a sign of the ultimate consequence of evil, and of the ultimate victory of Christ over evil through the power of suffering love.
What God has promised, God will make good on, no matter what the apparent obstacles, and our job is simply to set about cooperating with the promise-maker rather than with the obstacles.
Lent can be a dark night filled with tears and mourning and loss, but it is worth it, for God’s joy comes in the morning.
The Transfiguration points us back to Jesus’ baptism and forward to his resurrection, and reiterates that the only way from one to the other is the way of the cross.
God has bound pastors and people together in Christ, that we might share in the ultimate victory of Christ as all God’s promises are fulfilled.
By preparing ourselves to die with Christ, we are raised and transfigured, new people with a new vocation.
God in Jesus Christ touches our grubby humanity to make it clean, so that human beings and human community might regain their colour, shape and original purpose.
The demonic forces of our culture and time colonise our lives but if we turn to Christ, he will drive away the demons and fill us with his Spirit. His truth will set us free.
We are called to take sides in a conflict between the prophet of love and peace and the prophets of hatred and violence.