Topic: Abundance

Paul’s word play on drunkenness is both a useful contrast and a useful comparison for Christian living.

The indiscriminate ways Jesus shared and spoke about food broke the rules of his society and the rules of many churches down to this day.

We are often afraid to face what must be faced in order to enter the new world God has promised, but God continues to promise an abundance of blessings when we overcome our fears and obey.

God created the earth and gave it to us, but mistreated, it rebels. Jesus, rising form the earth, redeems the earth, so that if can again be our true home.

Where affluence creates consumers, abundance creates neighbours. It is the ethic of possessions which Jesus commends to us as a promise of how God deals with us.

Sexual Intimacy is an exquisitely beautiful gift from God, but attempts to control and repress it frequently distort it into a hypocritical and malevolent force.

When Jesus exposes our aversion to having others recognised as our equals, he calls us to repent and celebrate God’s generosity to all. The marriage equality debate exposes another frontier of his challenge to us.

The parable of the sower is not about us and our shortfalls but on the generosity of our Maker – the Prolific Sower.

Jesus gives us an abundance of all that we need, and when we learn to trust that, we are set free from rivalry and possessiveness and enabled to share generously.

Our deepest thirst will never be satisfied by cautious morality and religious compliance, but it will be abundantly quenched when we drink deeply of the living water of joyous intimacy that Jesus pours out freely.

Being truly alive is a gift so extravagantly rich and wonderful that it can’t even be meaningfully contrasted with simply not being dead.

If we construct our identity around a pursuit of social esteem, we will degrade our true selves, but if we model ourselves on the generosity of God, we will find true life where few look for it.