Status Updates From Joined-up life: A Christian...

“Even while Christ's killers are utterly enmeshed in their self-justifying action of killing him, Christ's magisterial prayer pleads with the Father to forgive them anyway (Luke 23:34).
This beautiful willingness to forgive, despite the unrepentant wretchedness of, the wrongdoet, is an important, significant and often difficult moral task.”

stout But are. Steadfast love is an inexorable, unimaginable determination to care for people both by holding to account those who do evi, and by reconciling with
those who do evil.
This triad - God's justice, mercy and steadfast love - is the backbone of God's character as it emerges. The Bible's story arc describes how God lives out this triad in his relationship with humanity.

To walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit' (Rom. 8:4, Esv), while people around me are often controlled by the terms of the physical, is the practice of seeing more to true humanity now that Jesus has walked by the Spirit. It's also a kind of dawning joy: that my 'flesh' no longer has to walk alone.

Faith includes the quiet and hopeful expectation that the Spirit will work everything out.

According to the Bible, 'Christian ethics' is only the response of that team of misfits to its awesome captain - the responses of those who really don't have a clue, participating alongside someone who really, really does.

By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another,' he states (john 13:35). Jesus is content to summarize hundreds of pages of Scripture as building a deep love for God and for each other. Later New Testament authors repeat this summation. In over five hundred references to love, they wholeheartedly agree that it's at the core of Christian identity.

Those in Christ learn that suffering is a regular occurrence. 'It is necessary to pass through many troubles on our way into the kingdom of God' (A 14:22). In Christ, we begin to receive, construe and respond to suffering differently.

In its rejection of standard humanity and its unveiling of a new purpose, we begin to see how Christ's death functions to reveal and form our new identity (ch. 14). We begin to find that our true self is Jesus-shaped - a version of ourselves we couldn't possibly have anticipated, engineered or conjured without him.

“Christians know that claims about Christ, when stated in abstract, sound outlandish. But when we know Jesus' history, they don't. So much about the
'Christ hymn' can make sense for those who saw, touched and lived with Jesus.
They realize it's hard for those who didn't encounter him, and urgently set about passing on what they saw, touched and heard (e.g. Luke 1:1-4; John
20:29-31; or 1 John 1:1-4).”

An old adage describes military combat as weeks of boredom punctuated by moments of terror'. An overemphasis upon decisions turns ethics into something similar. There will always be acts to get right and decisions to make.
But we do well to imagine ethics as a terrain far more rich and wide-ranging than mere decision-making.

Well written, well referenced. Not afraid to dive into topics we're not usually keen to think about.