Happy New Year

Well, it's 2006. This blog is nearly a year old - amazing!

Happy New Year to all of you who read it. May God be more real and active in your lives this year than last.

I've had a quiet Christmas - except for the day at the Ikea sale (if ever you need a metaphor for eternal punishment....!)

I have also been writing some of the book on Galatians that I need to finish by the end of February - four sections in two days (not bad going).

The more I read and wrestle with Galatians, the more I love it - it's raw emotion, creative thinking, incredible grasp of the implications of the life, faithfulness and death of Jesus, its sheer radical take on what it means to be a Christian. Sometimes I read Galatians and then I look at the church and I wonder where the connection is.

I've also been finishing off a workbook for our major New Year series - What Christians Believe - without finding a snappier title for it. Perhaps I should call it the full Monty or true spirituality (but those titles have gone). I've been trying to capture the fact that the Christian faith is a relationship with God that's open to examination and explanation because God has spoken to us through his Word in both the Bible and in Jesus and he still speaks as his Spirit interprets his word to us in our daily lives.

For this reason, Christianity is less a religion and more a spirituality - and thus very trendy, according to the sociologists! But it's far more than that. If Jesus is God incarnate and if we can meet him in the power of his Spirit, then the Christian faith is a relationship that should lead to personal and social revolution.

So maybe our new year's resolution should be to get into this Christian faith so that we and our neighbourhoods are turned upside down.

Happy 2006.