Book: Mark

Only when the world models itself on the self-sacrificial love and mercy we have seen in Jesus will it be saved from the cycles of apocalyptic violence and chaos.

Every coin you are holding already belongs to God: every bitterness, every hurt, every disappointment. Do not hold a single one back.

Jesus wants to lift us beyond the deadening conformity that seeks to silence us and confine us to a stunted life.

In Christ we have been given a new identity that dissolves the labels of first and two-thirds world, and invites us all to be poor.

Jesus’s invitation is radically open and inclusive, and we need to guard carefully against our own culturally conditioned instincts to start narrowing and policing it.

The things that make Jesus the perfect leader to lead us into new life are probably the same things that would make us turn our backs on him and seek to follow others.

God promises the best for us if we follow the way of Jesus, and faith is actively trusting that that pathway will indeed be the way of life.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that another person can do to you that can make you unclean or defiled in the eyes of God.

We have been adopted as the children of a king who does not withhold his love until we comply, who does not ask us to sing for our supper, who does not use us or abuse us, but longs to bind up our wounds.

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.

Despite our often minimal vision for ourselves, and our feeling of not being important to God, Jesus Christ is committed to bringing us to the fullness of life and wholeness.

God calls us to faithful expressions of the Culture of God which usually look unimpressive and unruly when judged by the world’s usual standards of success.