Topic: Faithfulness

The culture of God is so radical in its loving embrace of everyone that mainstream society will see it as a dangerous rejection of all it holds dear.

True Christianity is not transactional but transformational. It is not a series of prescribed actions intended to please God, but the formation of a culture of grace and other-centred love.

The ways of God’s Kingdom are different to the ways of this world. One thing is needed, prioritising God’s ways, and when we get that right, all the other things follow.

Election week sheds new light on how we can participate with Jesus in bringing satanic principalities and powers crashing down.

The Revelation’s surprising image of the absence of church buildings in the fulfilled holy city is a helpful reminder that they have always been a risky concession and that their dangers need to be carefully avoided.

There is no more waiting; there is no more longing. The wait is over. Jesus is alive, and he lives in all those who hear his voice and follow him.

Our lives are gift: a gift from abundance, a gift to be shared, a gift given for the life of the world, a gift we can give away because we are confident that the eternal source of life, the God who promises healing and freedom, will always replenish us.

Whether we think of the devil as a personal being or as a metaphor, our call to put our trust in Jesus to strengthen our resistance to the temptation of expedient short-cuts is the same.

We grow into the likeness of Christ as we model ourselves on him, and he is a model of growth rather than a model of static perfection.

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.

Jesus calls us to turn away from pathways of judgement and condemnation and to follow him on the harder path of love and new life.

Lent is a time to walk knowingly into the wilderness, to face the Accuser and the wild beasts that emerge when we live out our identity as God’s children.