Nathan has been a pastor of our Church since 1994.
We are often blind to our own entanglement in evil, but when our eyes are opened, we are called into pathways of repentance and transformation that lead to life and healing.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons by Nathan Nettleton (Page 13)
All of us, men especially, share responsibility for confronting and changing the culture that enables men to feel entitled to rape, and Jesus leads us into the new culture that sets us all free.
Our common access to God through Christ breaks down walls of hostility, but we need to resist the universal impulse to build new ones.
Glimpses of the transformed world that God makes possible transfix us and leave us hungering for more.
Pretending to be better than we are alienates us from God and one another. Being open and real about our weaknesses and failures open us to God and one another.
Jesus calls us to move beyond hostile identity politics, whether shaped by Sabbath keeping or #Outrage, and to welcome a new culture of love, forgiveness and welcome.
The doctrine of the Trinity helps us to see that, though exalted and transcendent, God is nevertheless close and personally involved with us.
Jesus’s priestly identity and mission have been passed on to us and are to be seen in our prayer and our lives.
Rather than close the book on who can and cannot be accepted into the church, the Bible calls us to follow Jesus on a path of continually expanding inclusion.
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.
There is no neat finish to the Jesus story, because it is far from over. The risen Jesus is always ahead of us, calling us to follow and live the next chapter.
The life that Jesus calls us too will not be found and enjoyed until we give up trying to engineer the life we dreamed we were supposed to be living.
God has promised the whole world to all God’s children, but not exclusive rights to some bits of it to some people.
Jesus resisted the temptation to force his will on the world, and he pioneered a pathway for us to similarly refuse the exploitation of power.
When Jesus heals, he is not seeking to minister solely to the individual, but to heal a sick culture, and the culture we live in needs his healing.
Jesus demonstrates the need to reflect on our results and reject the easy success and popularity that are built on meeting basic needs.
The culture of God is emerging in our present world, confronting us with a choice – do we cling to our allegiance to the cultures that have raised us or let go of them and embrace the culture of God.
Our freedom in Christ renders the law irrelevant as a factor in our relationship with God, but we are set free to grow into union with Christ, not to fall into new slaveries.