Messages inviting us to live in and from the Love of God revealed in Christ Jesus.
Notes will be posted here Photo by Hossein Nasr on Unsplash
Here is the good news we are proclaiming today - In this sign the cross - to choose love over power and control. To give love and life to the point of death that triumphs over sin, fear and the grave. I dare say the word that Constantine heard is our word - In this sign the cross - conquer - by this all men will know you are my disciples ‘In this environment of love for one another everyone will come to know your discipleship unto me' John 13:35
None of us are saved because we looked up - God reached down through His Son to meet us in our darkness. Our moment of recognizing light is not the evidence of its beginning. For God so loved the world - He looked down long before we could ever look up and that is Good News. In an our hour of increasing darkness and confusion it is the gospel of Jesus Christ that is the light of reality - we are born from above not by how well we have understood God or even by a prayer we have prayed - reality is that God recognized us and our need before we ever recognized Him.
The incarnate God is the key to the healing the soul of man and life itself - the gospel is the declaration - not that man grasped divinity but that God descended completely into what He created to rescue man from the dust and invite man again into what He had in mind when He created man - a loving progression of partnership revealing beauty, abundance and goodness. It is a journey from Dust to Destiny.
The good news we proclaimed today is that what God spoke over his son he speaks today over us and if you will hear it that is what can transform and changes if we listen because what God has spoken in his son is that he loves you with an unchanging love
To Come and See means loosing our life so we actually find life a whole new way of seeing the world - we are given life as it was intended to be - a life of knowing and loving God and representing Him upon the earth and that is good news!
In His baptism Jesus chooses to become a womb for all of humanity to encounter life. He reveals righteousness that is not about obligations fulfilled but a life lived in deep and abiding connection with His Father that when chosen not even death can snuff out and invites us to the same and that beloved is good news.
God that we thought was up there, out there - has come to be with us. A God who has chosen to be present so present that no mess can keep Him away - He comes into humanity to become what He created. How? In weakness, meekness and vulnerability He is formed in the womb of a woman Mary whose womb is literally nurturing, sustaining and growing God who has become man. And it does not just end at His birth, Joseph uses His voice to name the helpless babe - Joseph empties himself to become a ‘womb' to protect and provide for the security of both Mary and the child. Both Mary and Joseph are participants - co-creators of this One named Jesus. God has come to reveal justice and restoration to mankind - not by overpowering the rulers and powers but by becoming - by being created in a womb of love to become the revelation of God's love for humanity. Love that can be seen, heard, touched and will ultimately give Himself in self giving love and forgiveness.
Beloved the arrival of God's Kingdom transcends the darkest most delayed places and spaces to reveal beauty, goodness and truth. A Kingdom that is not limited or contained by our expectations or measured by our ideas of distance or delay but that reveals the life of heaven on earth and that beloved is good news.
Repentance is not how good a team can rehearse their mistakes - repentance is to perceive whats true - God has come near. He was not content to leave man isolated and alone. Repentance is to turn and see the lovingkindness of God has an irresistible affect that we are invited to consent to - here is what is revealed in Christ coming - you are not alone, you are loved and you matter to God.
Christ is King - as He is literally crushed and killed for daring to proclaim Himself to be a King to the ruling Powers of the day – is proclaiming forgiveness and revealing another power. The Cross the setting of extreme vulnerability, rejection and physical torture as the ruling powers exert their dominance - Jesus is using His power...to intercede of their behalf! The Cross the ultimate demonstration of violent power becomes the revelation of self giving mercy and love. The tool intended for Crushing has become the means of connection for every man woman boy and girl to the Father - in the revelation of forgiveness and that is good news!
Finding life in the face of death is not about seeking power but being faithful to the witness of Jesus and that is good news.
Jesus is revealing life and hope for the the future are not based in human certainty and control. Jesus is telling the story of Who God actually is and who we are. Jesus is revealing a God who has chosen to relate to us not on the basis of our brokenness and failure, not on the basis of our success, certainty or control but on the basis of the Fathers love for all mankind. He has not come to fulfill our imagined story but to tell the truth of His measureless love for us and that is Good News!
Mercy that is more than forgiveness or a generous response to our failures. Mercy that dares us to believe that the truest thing about us is not that we are broken, flawed, alienated or disconnected but that we are beloved and that is good news.
Notes here (soon) Photo by nikhil uttam on Unsplash
Mercy dares us to believe that the truest thing about us in not that we are broken or flawed but that we are beloved and that beloved is Goo
The truth is that all of us have traveled in or been touched by the ‘borderlands' leaving the indelible marks of shame, guilt, pain, and brokenness - no matter how life has left us limited and marginalized the good news we proclaim Mercy - Gods mercy that has chosen to act according to His character towards us in our deepest need an
Faith is not about how much you have ( currency of accomplishment, accumulation or information) but rather how we are living in love and trust in our relationship with Jesus, ourselves and others. The mustard seed of faith is already planted in us and to be specific it is Christ Himself ( it is by grace we have been saved through faith and this not from ourselves - it is a gift of God). Yet He has withheld nothing - we already have and are enough in Him- and that beloved is Good News!
The good news we proclaim today is that we have but one gate one door that matters the most - the One who said I am the gate enter through Me. He has crossed the chasm and invites us to love and value what He loves and values. Jesus parable is an unveiling of the heart - an invitation to repent. In this case to recognize heart issues - when something other than love controls the heart we are the ones who are poor!
“the world's true history is not that built on war (including culture wars), but that offered by a community that witnesses to God's refusal to give up on his creation. There is only one true history - the history of God's peaceable kingdom. For what is war but the desire to be rid of God, to claim for ourselves the power to determine our meaning and destiny? Our desire to protect ourselves from our enemies, to eliminate our enemies in the name of protecting our common history...”
hope to every heart - maybe someone could be there in my darkest night and that is exactly the God that Jesus reveals and describes. Not a God waiting to be found but the one who is searching to find the lost and forgotten and that beloved is Good News.
Oh beloved one of the most basic foundations of the gospel is this reality that no matter how bound and distorted and unable to ASCEND we have become. Jesus DESCENDED, God sees us not with eyes of judgment but the same eyes of Jesus - the eyes of Compassion - He sees and beloved that is good news!
I do believe in the Kingdom come! A space where we as followers of Jesus embrace the promised gift of the Father and He becomes visible in real time in human lives - I believe the greatest hope for post modernity in the west is that the Kingdom of God is revealed in human lives beginning in me. It is His gift to us and it is good news!
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom” Luke 12:32 ‘With' is the actual order and reality of God's kingdom... When our culture and our bodies tell us the story of fear that God is absent and we are alone. Jesus reveals the truth of God's presence and participation. He is God with us. As it was in the beginning is now and will be forever, amen. And that is good news. You see to proclaim ‘the Lord be with you' is to proclaim the change that has shifted human history! He is not absent and we are not alone! What began in a garden of beauty, delight and abundance with man that was disrupted, distorted and deformed by the fracturing of sin we discover a God who is unwilling to allow man's weakness to define the story. God became what He created so that man could become more than a forgiven soul but a people restored to life ‘with' God!
So what are you staring at? To answer that question well is to live rich. I have titled this message living rich. The Good News we proclaim is Jesus invitation to become rich toward God is not achievement or the accumulation of good behavior but in the storing up of what is true - we have a Good Father whose intent is to provide and protect us that we can trust. That Father wants to protect us from what can in the end control and take His most treasured gift to us - life. That life is found not storing but in giving what we have been freely given - love, mercy, compassion and forgiveness.
The resolve of Jesus that Luke describes in our text is not just about confrontation its about an inhabited revelation of the heart of the Father that involves more than just known power religious and political powers of the day - its about something much more personal. Jesus is inviting His friends and followers to a life led by the power and authority of self giving self emptying love and forgiveness - this is not about perceived dominance. This is about revealing a whole new way of living and being where Heaven is revealed upon the earth and that beloved is good news.
This man has come to a land and a people over run and fractured - His very presence proclaiming ‘you are not invisible or forgotten' and now to the ‘man of the tombs' identified by his oppression Jesus presence unmistakably proclaims you sir may have forgotten who you are but I have not. Who is this Man? His name is Jesus, He who has come to the most disintegrated proclaiming by His very presence you are loved, you belong and you still have a story to tell and that is good news.
Notes Here Horatio Spafford. “It Is Well with My Soul.” Manuscript hymn, 1871. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (8)
Into a world longing for a Power strong enough to remove their oppressors Jesus looked past the Palms to embrace the Passion of the cross to unveil real and lasting Peace. Not by might, not by power as it had been known and defined but by My Spirit. A power revealed in self giving self emptying love and forgiveness - Peace for every man woman boy and girl and that is good news.
The Good News we proclaim in a world filled with distortion, distance and disconnection of every kind. There is a Man who trusts His Love is enough to Liberate and give life to the most broken to restore - Sonship like Jesus!
You see repentance is not just about our decision to stop doing certain things - its more about agreeing with God about what is real and true! Repentance beloved is agreeing with God about reality.
The Words God spoke over Jesus at His baptism were enough not just to rescue Jesus from temptation but allow Him to proclaim and reveal another Kingdom – His belovedness is the basis of His life and ministry. In a world filled with 'good ideas' of how to use power to make our life work, the Fathers words of love over you and me today are still the basis His Kingdom is revealed and that is Good News.
Transfiguration then is not just an event to Peter, James and John but a glimpse of themselves, weighed down with sleep - with the weight of life. When they awake they see the dazzling glory of Jesus, is this what a human being looks like transformed from the fatigue and weight of by the good opinion of God towards all He has made - maybe this is reality? Beholding what you are and Becoming what you see – is to be formed and transformed by what is lasting and true.
Beloved the Good News we proclaim today in a world divided by wounds, fears and innumerable barriers God's Kingdom still comes when we hear His invitation and surrender to His Mercy! Mercy that enables us to freely love our enemies. Not as a spiritual task but as a result of mercy being rooted in us.
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