Book: Matthew

Jesus calls us to follow his lead in bringing healing, hope and positive leadership to others, and not to be too worried about anxious and vexatious criticism.

Jesus calls us to neither conservatism nor iconoclasm, but to a faithful reckoning with the gifts and the sins of the past as we welcome and adapt to the new.

Godly love and respect doesn’t prevent disagreements in the church community, but it should enable us to address them without having to call in the lawyers.

God’s people are called to generously share their gifts, but also to humbly receive the gifts that are offered to us from unexpected sources.

When God is moving to do something new among us, it almost always seems scandalous, immoral and offensive to many, and is just as likely to involve those who are regarded as morally suspect.

Faithful waiting for for the fulfilment of God’s promises can leave us feeling compromised and alienated in the world around us.

The coming kingdom culture confronts the world’s violence by redemptively suffering and absorbing it, not by reciprocating it with even greater violence.

We can face the unknown future with confidence because we know that the one who holds the future loves us and can be trusted.

God has created a world that becomes healthy, free and full of life when its nations honour and care for the most vulnerable. Nations that fail to build cultures of compassion and care are doomed to destroy themselves.

While we are called to be a sharing community and thus to have no need of worry for tomorrow, you can’t look to others to provide you with the fruits of a life lived in generosity and prayerfulness.

Jesus’s quest for reconciliation is far wider and more discomfortingly radical than our tendency to jump on the bandwagon of popular justice causes.

Today, as in Jesus’s day, two fundamentally different visions of God and God’s expectations compete. Jesus calls us to side with the one that centres on love rather than the one that centres on concerns for holiness.