True Christianity is not transactional but transformational. It is not a series of prescribed actions intended to please God, but the formation of a culture of grace and other-centred love.
The people who blame Jesus for increasing violence may be right. He has kicked out the foundations of our peace-keeping strategies, and now violent chaos will grow unless we learn the ways of love and mercy.
There are numerous competing claims about what a faithful Christian life looks like, and sometimes the truth about following Jesus may be the least palatable of them all.
If we delight in shaming and punishing wrongdoers, we will not recognise the scandalous love and mercy revealed in Jesus, but instead find ourselves being harshly judged by an outraged condemning god who we have created in our own image.
The ways of God’s Kingdom are different to the ways of this world. One thing is needed, prioritising God’s ways, and when we get that right, all the other things follow.
Discerning the will of God is a skill that needs work if you want to develop it, whether as a community together or as individuals.
Election week sheds new light on how we can participate with Jesus in bringing satanic principalities and powers crashing down.
When we offer hospitality to, and accept hospitality from, anyone who comes – every sinner, wretch, reprobate, and wicked woman – we will encounter Christ and experience forgiveness.
Sometimes God has to kill off our hopes and destroy our faith structures in order to create space for new life and truth to arise among us.
The gospel of love and grace revealed by Jesus is always at risk of being distorted into a false gospel of ‘holy’ hostility.