cheap grace – encrusted words

It’s probably fair to say that we Canadians like things made easy. This become particularly obvious when we think of the various technologies ar out disposal:

Why get off the couch when you can change the channel with a remote control?

Why plant a large garden when you can get your vegetables at Metro?

Why change your whole lifestyle when you can just change your light-bulbs and consider yourself “green”?

At some level of course we can only be grateful for technologies that take some of the pain and harshness out of life. But it seems we always go one step further – yes, we want the pain and harshness out of our lives – but we also want everything to be a little easier. It applies to most living in modern western culture. You can only imagine the financial resources, the production time and the energy that go into making things easier for us. Continue reading →

The first sermon in a series of four that explore the lives of men and women who are models for us of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. For this sermon I relied in part on the biographical piece by Burton, in the Cambridge Companion to Bonhoeffer – particularly on the question of his conversion.

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Let me ask a couple of questions as we begin this morning:

What does it look like when someone is following Jesus?

What does a genuinely Christian life look like?

And then another question that flows from these – perhaps a more important question:

How do we learn to really follow Jesus, to live a genuinely Christian life?

These are fundamental questions for us. They are fundamental questions for those who claim to be Christian. What does it look like when someone is following Jesus? What does a truly Christian life look like? And, does my life look that way?

Continue reading →