Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego faithfully stand for God when that faithfulness comes with dire consequences. They trust that God can deliver them. So too, God will deliver us, although not always in the way or the time we hope for or expect. For some of us, we are delivered from the fire, spared the ordeal.…

In the story of Daniel and his friends, we can see that they choose to be different in obedience to God for the sake of others (their Babylonian captors). In our current cultural context, Christians are also called to embody a different way of life in a culture that doesn't understand us for the sake…

The Old Creation world is defined by scarcity, but the New Creation in Jesus' resurrection at Easter is a world of abundance. However, living in that abundant reality means learning to desire heavenly treasures rather than earthly ones. If we set our hearts on this world's treasures, we will live enslaved to its logic. But…

The crowd welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday welcomed him as a king because they assumed he had come to deliver on their agenda. As the church today, we can make the same mistake, welcoming God as our king because we assume he's come to solve the problems that seem most pressing to us,…

Jesus' healing of Bartimaeus is a symbol of true discipleship (something his actual disciples failed to pick up on during their time with Jesus). He is a man dishonoured by the works of darkness who is honoured and healed by Jesus who then, with eyes wide open, joins Jesus on the way of the cross.…

To enter the kingdom of God means empything ourselves of status and power For those who don't have any, giving away what they don't have is relatively easy, while for those with a great deal of either, it's a difficult ask. In this sermon we look at two stories from Mark 10 to see how…

God's people have a reason for pessimism. They always seem to get it wrong. Yet, in the end, God's promises don't depend on human effort to achieve them but on God's victory, which was won through Jesus. In Revelation 21, we read about God's final victory. When we understand that God wins despite our failures,…

God's people have a calling to be distinct from others while serving as an invitation to them. This is a difficult balance to strike. But we see Paul doing it masterfully during his brief ministry in Athens, where he translates the gospel into language that makes as much sense to the Athenians as possible while…

When Paul shares the good news in the Synagogues in Thessalonica and in Berea, he gets two very different receptions. The Thessalonians reject the message about the suffering messiah and his upside-down kingdom because it doesn't align with their hopes and expectations. The Bereans receive the message, adapting their expectations to the salvation God is…

When Paul is unjustly imprisoned in Philippi, his response to his mistreatment leads his jailer to faith. When the New Life of God's kingdom encounters the Old Life of this world, conflict is often the result. If we respond to that conflict with patient endurance as Jesus did, we can plant the seed of New…

When our experience of faith is confined to a single place or among a group of similar people, we can often start to believe that the way God has worked in our lives is the only way God can work. The downside of this is that when come into contact with others in whom God…

While it may be tempting to assume that if we're obediently following God in mission, things will go according to plan, that's just not usually the case. We are sometimes successful, but often in ways we don't expect. At other times, we encounter opposition, and it may come from places we don't expect. The reception…