Book: Luke

A Christmas Message from the leader of the Baptist World Alliance

To name Christ as King is to identify ourselves as dissenters to the claims of any other authority and to critique all power-mongering.

Jesus warns us that disasters are ubiquitous and do not all herald the end of time, and calls us to persevere in the life of love even when we are blamed and persecuted.

The saints of God are engaged in a war between conflicting empires battling for control of the world, but Jesus has radically transformed our understanding of how we fight.

When we respond to others with judgement and contempt instead of empathy and compassion, we fail to understand God and live God’s love for others.

The relationship between God’s work and our work in salvation is not a puzzle to be solved, but a mystery to be lived in prayer and faithful discipleship.

Jesus constantly seeks to upend our prejudices in order to breakdown and overcome our divisive tribalism.

Even in the face of a catastrophic collapse of the world as we know it, God calls us to imagine and invest in a beautiful future.

Hope for our troubled world requires turning anger into tears, resentment into prayers, and financial power into generosity.

In order to find our way into the good news of life in all its fullness, we need to first stop denying and distracting ourselves from the bad news we are drowning in.

Despite first appearances, Jesus’s call to “count the cost” of following him is not so much about ensuring we can succeed as it is about ensuring we can faithfully persevere in the face of failure.

In the face of social breakdown and environmental catastrophe, we are called, not to angry protest, but to creative expressions of love, compassion, and hospitality.