Faithfulness to God means sticking to the ways in which Jesus has led us, but we are constantly tempted to idolise his name while avoiding his ways.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Faithfulness (Page 3)
Lived faith is the way to life in God, but it passes through a baptism of fire.
When we crusade against the evil of others, we end up crusading against Jesus himself, for he asks us to become givers and lovers of life.
In a world that is hell-bent on self-destruction, Jesus calls us to gather to him and to love faithfully and vulnerably with him, rather than surrendering to the hate and fear.
Acknowledging and appreciating Jesus is relatively easy, but we find it much more difficult to transform our lives in conformity with his teaching.
Most of us are addicted to achieving results and success, and it is crippling us. Jesus leads us towards an unexpected and almost unrecognisable freedom.
What is God challenging you to return to? Will you be a witness to the joy and love, and the possibilities of the alternative world heralded by Jesus?
Angry prophets who tell us the hard-to-hear truth about ourselves pave the way for a new world to emerge.
There is nothing wrong with an eager desire for a special closeness to Jesus. Jesus is eager to fulfil such desires, but warns us of the cost of sticking with him.
When God is seeking to communicate with us, we usually need the prayerful support of others to help ensure that we remain open to hearing what God is calling us to.
When we commit ourselves to following Jesus, we surrender all our personal aspirations and our share in the aspirations of our nation, in order that we might receive the life of Christ.
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’s priestly identity and mission have been passed on to us and are to be seen in our prayer and our lives.
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.
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.
Jesus was born to reveal and fulfil what God had long sought to do; set people free to live joyously as God’s children.
While we are called to be a sharing community and thus to have no need of worry for tomorrow, you can’t look to others to provide you with the fruits of a life lived in generosity and prayerfulness.
Modelling ourselves on those who model themselves on Jesus is a healthy pathway to fulfilling the image of God within us.
The marriage equality debate raises questions about authority, but prophetic authority is not proved by fidelity to past rules, but by its power to produce a harvest of new life and love among the people.
What we do with our children is one of the great tests of our faithfulness to the God of Jesus, and tragically, child sacrifice is common in our society.