Book: Colossians

Being a disciple of Jesus is not about changing behaviour, it’s about changing life! It’s about being changed at our very core so that our inner motivations and attitudes are transformed.

Jesus comes to break us free from oppressive understandings of God and of God’s expectations of us.

The Lord’s Prayer is a manifesto for a whole new way of relating to God and the world.

The Ascension is not a story about the absence of Christ, but of Christ’s extraordinary presence with us everywhere and always.

The culture of God’s beloved Son is born at the cross and takes root amidst a hostile world, spreading forgiveness and hospitality.

Through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection we are reconciled to God, made free to be the person that God created us to be, and we live into it by embracing a positive culture of love, mercy and consideration.

Jesus models for us a willingness to listen, learn and grow rather than a domineering certainty that insists on knowing who’s right and who’s wrong.

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.

We grow into the likeness of Christ as we model ourselves on him, and he is a model of growth rather than a model of static perfection.

When we follow Christ in being pain-bearers, we are participating in the reconciliation of the world.

God’s call to us is to be the embodiment of divine compassion.

Christ calls us to continue to grow in the measure of our love, prayer and good works.