Search Results: love your nieghbor
What are the main principles of the warfare worldview?
Category: Q&A
Tags: Q&A, Spiritual Warfare, Warfare Worldview
Topics: Spiritual Warfare, Cosmic Conflict
…this fact. Love Requires Freedom: By definition, love must be freely chosen. We are able to program computers to obey our commands perfectly, but we don’t consider them “loving.” They lack the capacity for love because they have no choice but to do what we program them to do. Humans…
The Purpose of the Church
Category: General
Tags: Church, Kingdom Living
Topics: The Church
…is to be about by discussing three closely related aspects of its purpose, as spelled out in the New Testament. Serving God. First, in response to God’s unfathomable love to us expressed in Jesus Christ, the church is called to love and serve God. As people who are submitted to…
Christus Victor Atonement and Girard’s Scapegoat Theory
Category: General
Tags: Atonement, Character of God, Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Cruciform Theology, Love, Rene Girard, Warfare Worldview
Topics: Christus Victor view of Atonement, Interpreting Violent Pictures and Troubling Behaviors
…the other-oriented love that God eternally is. Like light naturally dispelling the darkness, the result of this eruption of perfect other-oriented love was that the devil and his kingdom were “driven out,” defeated, and brought “to nothing” (Jn 12:31; I Cor 2:6; Col 2:15; Heb 2:14; I Jn 3:8). This…
The Call to a Cruciform Life
Category: General
Tags: Cruciform Theology, Enemy Love, Kingdom Living
Topics: Following Jesus
…is explicitly ruled out by the teachings of Jesus and Paul. Jesus commanded us not merely to love our enemies as an inner disposition, but to express this love by how we actually treat them. The love that Jesus teaches and models is both active and nonviolent. We are specifically…
Part 3: Disarming Flood’s Inadequate Conception of Biblical Authority
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Biblical Authority, Biblical Criticism, Book Reviews, Derek Flood, Disarming Scripture, Jesus, OT Violence
…the Bible is inspired by God when it leads us to an encounter with the Spirit of God in Christ,” which is to say, “when it leads us to love” (251). But when our conscience and life experience discern a portion of Scripture doesn’t lead to love, then it is…
How God is Glorified
Category: General
Tags: Attributes of God, God's Character, Love
…put it, we are loved by God “in the Beloved” (Eph1:6). We are, in short, loved with the same love that unites the three Persons of the Trinity! (see post). Jesus’ prayer is that our participation in God’s love would result in his followers glorifying God by reflecting the love…
The Worst Heresy That Never Got Anyone Burned at the Stake
Category: General
Tags: Calvinism, Enemy Love, Heresy, Love Your Enemies, Self-Sacrificial Love, Torture
Topics: Following Jesus
…Jesus” wasn’t expressing Christ-like agape love. And since the NT teaches that anything that doesn’t express Christ-like love is devoid of Kingdom value, however true and impressive it might otherwise be, we can only conclude that the Church that engaged in this anti-Christ activity was not the Kingdom. Without love,…
Jesus and those “Other People”
Category: General
Tags: Friends, healing, Kingdom, Love, Nicky Marshall, Prejudice
…as you would have them do to you. “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that….
Is homosexual love without homoerotic behavior okay for a Christian?
Category: Q&A
Tags: Christian Life, Q&A, Sexuality, Sin
Topics: Ethical, Cultural and Political Issues, Relationships, Sin
…one another. At one point Scripture says: “So Jonathan made a covenant with the house of David, saying, ‘May the LORD call David’s enemies to account.’ And Jonathan had David reaffirm his oath out of love for him, because he loved him as he loved himself” (I Sam 20:16-17). Then,…
Six Theses of the Warfare Worldview
Category: General
Tags: Spiritual Warfare, Warfare Worldview
Topics: Spiritual Warfare, Cosmic Conflict
…experience with the war-zone reflected in the world around us. 1. Love Requires Freedom By definition, love must be freely chosen. We are able to program computers to obey our commands perfectly, but we don’t consider them “loving.” They lack the capacity for love because they have no choice but…
The Distinguishing Mark of a Child of God
Category: General
Topics: Enemy-Loving Non-Violence
…that, since God’s nature is reflected in his indiscriminate, self-sacrificial, non-violent, servant love toward enemies—the kind of love that would soon be unambiguously displayed in Jesus’ crucifixion—then only those who replicated this kind of cruciform love in their own lives could be considered to look like this God, and in…
A ReKnew Manifesto
Category: General
Tags: ReKnew
…reveals the truth that God’s nature is other-oriented, self-sacrificial love. We thus believe that all of our thinking about God, as well as all of our reading of Scripture, must be done through the lens of the cross and with this cruciform understanding of God’s love. 4. ReThink the Kingdom…
The Good Samaritan, Non-Violence & Eternal Life
Category: General
Tags: Judgment, Love, Mennonerds, Non-Violence, Violence
…purge ourselves of the self-justifying reasoning that characterized the expert of the law. We must collapse all our self-serving judgments about who deserves our love and who doesn’t. We must be willing to love like God loves, as indiscriminately as the sun shines and the rain falls. In the kingdom,…
The Kingdom of God While Mowing the Lawn
Category: General
Tags: Blessing, Discipline of Blessing, Ed Silvoso, Kingdom Living
…in which we love God and others in special moments, with the bulk of our ordinary life being spent completely on ordinary things. We love God during devotional times, and love people when it occurs to us—when we’re around loved ones, or perhaps when we see a person in need….
What We Long For
Category: General
Tags: Benefit of the Doubt, Desires, Doubt, Longing, Love of God, Trinity, Triune Love
…arrangement. The God of overflowing love longs to pour his love into others, so he created beings that long for his love to be poured into them. It wasn’t God’s original intention for us to ever go a moment with this longing unsatisfied. Living without the fullness of God’s love…
From Boston, With Love
Category: General
Tags: Boston Bombings, Cruciform Theology, Forgiveness, Jesus, Mercy, Peacemaking, T.C. Moore
…embodiment of God’s loving reign, is to model our love after the love of God demonstrated on Jesus’s cross: a love that prays for its murderer’s forgiveness. In Jesus’s death and life, he modeled a love that identified with those who were wounded, as well as those who were stigmatized—even…
Repenting of Religion: Turning from Judgment to the Love of God
Category: General
Topics: Following Jesus
…love, but this is precisely what our judgmentalism prevents. Unfortunately, Christians tend to be at least as guilty of this foundational sin as the world. Boyd challenges Christians to repent of our judgmental religious attitudes and commit to living in God’s outrageous love. Believers wrestling with the reality of God’s…
How Judging Blocks Love
Category: General
Tags: Judgment, Kingdom Living, Love, Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
Topics: Following Jesus
…be evil. And this judgment is the primary thing that keeps us from doing the central thing God created us to do, namely, love like he loves. Because we do not usually understand and internalize the nature of our foundational sin, we usually think our job as Christians is to…
The Cross in the Manger, Part 2
Category: General
Tags: Christmas, Cross, Jesus, Power, Upside-Down Kingdom
Topics: Christology
…God’s foolish-looking, humble, self-sacrificial love. And it is this same power, and this same love, that we begin to glimpse on that first Christmas morning, when God humbly set his divine prerogatives aside to become a weak, vulnerable baby. The helpless baby we celebrate on Christmas became the helpless crucified…
Review of Proof of Heaven (Eben Alexander)
Category: General
Tags: Book Reviews, Heaven, Proof of Heaven
…of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being more genuine and pure than all of them (40). Without giving anything away, I’ll simply note that this radiant girl ends up playing…