Topic: Conflict

Perhaps amidst the increasingly depressing state of the world, Jesus is calling us to learn the path of faithfulness from those who never win.

In calling us into the culture of God, Jesus calls us to give up our addictions to tribalism, competitive grief, and selective compassion.

Healing the world’s tribalism and uniting us as one human family is the central goal of the gospel, the mission of salvation, the realisation of the kingdom of God.

God is most likely and able to work through those who accept their own weakness and don’t try to forcefully assert their own power and influence.

In an increasingly polarised world, championing the radical love and mercy shown by Jesus is likely to bring hostility from all sides.

The story of Jonah challenges us whenever we start thinking that we have special rights as God’s people.

God reaches out to us through babies and elderly folks with a message of love and redemption that cuts through the theological justifications of empire and warmongering and calls us to peace.

If we keep imitating one another, paying back violence with vengeance, the world will be consumed in an escalating fury, but Jesus rescues us and gives us a life-giving example to follow.

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.

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

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.

Living out the unity we have in Christ, is more difficult and more important when we are at odds with one another.