Ali Grinnell’s Reviews > Joined-up life: A Christian Account Of How Ethics Works > Status Update

“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.”

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.