The call to love our enemies is not a new law to slave at, but a call into a culture of love so wild and free and strong that no one can hate it out of us.
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
An Open Table where Love knows no borders
Sermons on Love
God is love, and so love is the only real measure of spiritual maturity or accomplishment.
Faced with the decline and disintegration of the Church, we are called to offer ourselves to God as the new branch who faithfully carry God’s love and mercy into a new era.
Jesus’s primary aim was not saving us for heaven after we die, but establishing a culture of whole-hearted loved in the here and now.
The measure of the value of our worship is the measure of the transformation of our lives into imitations of the love and kindness of Jesus.
In order for men to step up and end the scourge of domestic violence, they need to experience themselves as loved and valued, liberating them to love others.
God is passionately in love with us and longing to give us every good thing if we will respond to his love.
We all learn our desires from others, but most of them are destructive, and law tries to control them. The pathway to freedom and life is to follow Jesus and learn to desire as he desires.
In an increasingly polarised world, championing the radical love and mercy shown by Jesus is likely to bring hostility from all sides.
When we approach everyone with meet with the conviction that the one thing we owe them is love, Christianity will again be experienced as good news.
Jesus did not come with the goal of making some gentle improvements to the status quo, but to disable the status quo by exposing its lies and revealing its victims. Without our culture being radically converted by that, the result is escalating chaos, to which Jesus offers himself as a victim and calls us to do the same.
Repetition of everything God-like is an important pathway to Christian maturity.
The world finds the message of Jesus almost incomprehensible because it seems too simplistic and unrealistic to be taken seriously.
The global social breakdown of which Jesus speaks is caused by the failure of our old oppressive ways of maintaining peace, but God has promised us a better way on the other side.
When you know yourself truly beloved by God in Christ, you are freed from fear and shame to live fully and generously and courageously.
Those who are insiders in the life of God are characterised by their love and compassion for all, especially those deemed unworthy of it, and by the humility to be schooled by outsiders.
Christian spirituality is full of yearning and hungering and reaching for a God who can never quite be satisfyingly grasped.
God’s generosity provides the context for our worship and the model for our living, especially when we are faced with hostility.
The only measure of our progress in Christian faith is our love for others, including those we are least inclined to love.
The promise of baptism with fire may surprisingly lead us to a loving suffering messiah.