If we want to understand how Jesus saves us and what Jesus saves us from, we are going to have to abandon the most widely taught explanation.
If we want to understand how Jesus saves us and what Jesus saves us from, we are going to have to abandon the most widely taught explanation.
The more challenging life in this world becomes, the more opportunity for Christians like us to live out the love of God by loving our neighbours.
We mostly don’t see ourselves as either terrible sinners or as gloriously Christ-like, but in the resurrection we are called to fully imagine both as world-changing truths.
When God is moving to do something new among us, it almost always seems scandalous, immoral and offensive to many, and is just as likely to involve those who are regarded as morally suspect.
Tonight we farewelled Peter from our congregation as he moves north, and he shared his reflections of what his time in this church has meant to him.
In his own demonstration of self-sacrificial love, Jesus has shown us what God is like and called us to love God and one another by loving likewise.
By lifting us out our enthralment to evil and death, Jesus sets us free from all that corrupts us and opens us to share real life with him.
When we expected to be shamed as we have shamed others, we are shocked and saved by the unexpected mercy of the crucified and risen Jesus.
We are not added to a particular church flock in order to be in the “right” group, but in order to learn, with Christ, to love others and lay down our lives for the world.
We shall be ourselves when we are able to surrender ourselves to Christ and say ‘not my will, but yours’.
With every step we take towards God’s economy, we will become more powerful in our witness to God’s saving action and love for the world, and be filled ever more deeply with God’s good grace.
As we gather with the saints of all times to worship the crucified victim, we are immersed in a culture that is so at odds with the values of this world that those who truly embrace it just appear odd for now, but strangely and alluringly familiar too.
When we encounter Jesus, we are seeing the truth about God and the truth about life as it is meant to be lived. To embrace that truth will put us at odds with the world, but on the pathway to fullness of life.
The knowledge that we are loved by God and the tenacious sharing of that love break the power of the world’s systems to lock us in to destructive cycles overwork, over consumption, and compliance with injustice and war.
The image of Jesus as the good shepherd can speak of tough life-on-the-line love, not just cuddling lambs.
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.
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.
The extent of God’s grace constantly astounds us as it floods over ever social barrier we erect.