As Christians on mission, we are faced with a choice. We can either play down the message of the cross and make it less offensive or we can go the uncomfortable route of talking about judgement and forgiveness.
I can’t speak for other religions, but if your God was not born into a human family and laid in a feeding trough, then you don’t worship the God that Christians worship.
What I do know, is that from the Eastern Mediterranean, to the North of England, the message was passed from person to person until it reached me.
All to often, the peace of God is presented as some sort of “morphine haze” that allows us to float above life’s troubles and worries; totally untouched and unaffected by the mayhem all around us. Life may be going completely to pot, but we are unperturbed because we have the peace of God.
Brief notes on an amazing book.
Some links on politics, mental health, eschatology, Pauline studies and a great cartoon.
Paul simply could not have done everything he did without the quiet, encouraging work of Barnabas in the background. Barnabas saw God at work in Paul and in the Church in Antioch, while the Apostles in Jerusalem were nervous and afraid. He stepped out in faith and took risks, but he never stole the headlines.
there could be no mistaking where Paul got his marching orders: they came from the Old Testament. The case for evangeliszing the Gentiles had not been a recently devised switch in the plan of God, but had always been the long-term commitment of the Living God who is a missionary God.
Romans 1-11 summed up in one presentation, with two bad puns. It might be helpful, or it might give you motion sickness!
The first Christians lived in a very diverse environment which was very hostile to the the new, growing Christian Church. In his journeys, Paul confronted this multi-cultural environment and demonstrated that there is an intellectual and moral depth to Christianity that lifted it above the other religions of the day. When Luke came to write down his account of Paul’s life in the Acts of the Apostles, he was very careful to give us models of how Paul defended the Gospel in different contexts in a pagan society.