Faith: the door of opportunity?

I've been reading the gospels recently looking for God's perspective on authority and in the process have come across some really amazing, and in some cases quite random, things. I've done Matthew and Mark and I'm halfway through Luke but one thing which is a consistant theme is the relation between faith and authority in Jesus' ministry.

I'm pretty used to the idea that faith is integral to receiving healing, deliverance or miracles but this looks rather different; it seems that in his ministry Jesus understood himself and was understood by others to be exercising authority. So when we pray for healing are we just asking God to do something for us or rather speaking with authority and commanding the sickness which is in opposition to the kingdom of God to fall in line?

Jesus appears to do the latter and this adds a different twist to our understanding of faith. In this scenario faith stops being something that we do which inclines God to act of our behalf - a persuader; instead faith is a declaration of allegience to the kingship of Jesus, to the way things are in heaven rather than the way things are on earth. This declaration then unleashes his authority in our lives and necessarily effects transformation in the shape of healing, deliverance, miracles. In a nutshell, salvation!

Hi There!

Welcome to my new blog! I suddenly find myself with a bit more time on my hands and a whole lot of crazy ideas so I thought I would try to share them and in the process give myself a bit of brain space!

So to get the ball rolling here are my current big questions:

• How can a Christian devotional life relate to Christian social concern?
• How can we lead people into a full on, captivated by Jesus, discipleship which lasts a lifetime?
• Is is true to say that humans are basically motivated by incentives?

I feel like I should explain myself a bit... ...I have just finished a theology degree in which I focused primarily on Christianity and the relation of theology to society, I have loved every minute of my degree and it has made me even more hungry to explore the massive depth and breadth of truth available in Christ. I also have a few really practical reasons for wanting to do so, firstly I'm a Christian trying to live a life in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, I love the streets that I live in and the people I come into contact with and I feel God's heartbeat for them. Secondly, I work for a Christian youth charity administrating an awesome project called Eden which involves lots of thought and activity helping our teams to live incarnational Christianity and deliver a top quality youth service at the same time. Thirdly I seem to have got myself into some really interesting research forums namely the William Temple Foundation and Manchester Centre for Public Theology. My contact with both of these is a really amazing and mind stretching experience and again pushes me to the limits of my own understanding and encourages me to strain to see beyond the horizon.

All of these influences, along with a few others, encourage me to think broadly but most of all I seem to come back again and again to a desire to explore God in all of his multi-faceted wisdom in a one on one devotional life which somehow encompasses the whole of the created world with all of its issues and needs. So you can see I need a bit of help to sort it all out!