“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” John 10:10 (RSV)
One of the strangest misunderstandings of Christianity is the assumption that love is passive. Gentle. Nice. Harmless.
Yet when we look at the world God has made, we see something very different. Everywhere there is energy. Initiative. Desire. Courage. Competition. Protection. Creativity. Aggression. What are we to make of that?
We live on an astonishing planet. Beneath the earth’s surface, tectonic plates grind against one another with unimaginable force. Volcanoes reshape landscapes. Earthquakes level cities. Hurricanes gather over warming oceans. Lightning splits the sky. Heatwaves parch continents. Drought leaves rivers dry and harvests uncertain. The sea, so peaceful on a summer’s evening, can become terrifying overnight, hurling ships onto rocks or swallowing them whole. For most of human history, the sea represented chaos itself: beautiful, life-giving, utterly unpredictable.
None of this means that we should imagine God deliberately turning the destructive forces of nature against us. Sometimes those forces overwhelm us, with catastrophic consequences. Yet the same God who has given us a world of immense energy has also given us minds capable of understanding it. We monitor volcanoes, study earthquakes, forecast storms and extreme weather, build sea defences and develop technologies that warn us of danger. Human intelligence and creativity are themselves part of this astonishing creation.
We are learning, in other words, to live wisely within this extraordinary world—to respect its power without needing either to fear it or to extinguish it. Yet climate change confronts us with the uncomfortable truth that human intelligence does not necessarily make us wise. We have also used our extraordinary powers in ways that are profoundly damaging the world upon which we depend. We cannot abolish the storm, still the tectonic plates or drain the oceans. We learn instead to understand these immense energies and, wherever we can, to live safely alongside them.
Might not something similar be true of the powerful energies within ourselves?
Here we see why Jesus belongs at the centre of this conversation. The New Testament refuses to reduce him to a wise teacher or moral example. It declares that through him, “all things were made” (John 1:3). The extraordinary energies woven into creation—the seas and storms, the blazing stars, the living creatures, the forces that shape our world—are not alien to him. They belong to the Word through whom all things came into being.
It is therefore no surprise that, in the Gospels, Jesus moves through creation with astonishing authority. He walks across the turbulent sea. He calms the storm with a word. He multiplies bread to feed thousands. He turns water into wine. He commands disease to leave, welcomes children, restores broken minds and bodies, and even calls the dead from their graves. The powers that seem so overwhelming to us recognise their Creator.
And we are not speaking only about the natural world. Everywhere we look, life itself seems to advance through energy and determination. Trees push their roots through cracks in stone. Seeds force their way through the soil towards the light. Birds defend their nests. Animals hunt, compete and protect their young. Children seem to learn almost instinctively to say “No!” before they are taught to say “Yes”. Human beings build, strive, invent, compete, create and explore.
Yet those very same energies can also become war, oppression, cruelty, exploitation and abuse. Our prisons overflow. Nations arm themselves. Much of our entertainment is built around violence and revenge. The world is saturated with violence. At times it seems almost as though humanity feeds on violence—as though force itself were woven into the very fabric of existence.
For years I found myself assuming that aggression meant sin and must therefore be one of those unfortunate parts of human nature that Christianity exists to suppress. I grew up learning to feel guilty about it. Surely the goal of holiness was to become less forceful, less passionate, less driven; gentler, quieter and safer.
But the more I have looked at the world God has made—and the more closely I have looked at Jesus—the less convincing that explanation has become. For Jesus did not come into the world to diminish life, but to bring it to its true fullness. “I came,” he said, “that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” If that is true, then the Christian life cannot be about suppressing the powerful energies with which we have been created. It must somehow be about understanding them, redeeming them, and directing them towards love.
So the question naturally arises: If God is love, why is God’s world so full of force? That is the question I want to explore.
The forgotten meaning of aggression
Have we, in fact, misunderstood aggression itself? Today the very word almost always carries negative overtones. We hear “aggression” and think immediately of bullying, hostility, violence or war. It has become a word of accusation rather than appreciation. Yet that was not always so.
The English word comes from the Latin aggredi, meaning “to step towards”, “to approach”, “to undertake” or “to advance”. At its heart lies the idea of initiative. Before aggression came to mean attacking someone, it meant moving purposefully towards something.
That is a remarkably different picture.
Suddenly aggression is no longer confined to the battlefield. We begin to recognise something of it wherever people move courageously towards a worthwhile goal: the instinct to protect, create, persevere, overcome obstacles, defend what is precious and pursue what is good.
It is there in the explorer setting out into the unknown. It is there in parents who get up night after night to care for a sick child, or in firefighters running into a burning building while everyone else is running out. It is there in artists wrestling to bring beauty into the world, scientists pursuing cures for disease, campaigners confronting injustice, and teachers patiently drawing the best out of their more challenging pupils. It is there in the missionary crossing oceans to carry the Gospel to people who have never heard it.
None of these people are passive. All of them possess initiative. They recognise their own agency—their capacity to act, to choose, to move towards something they believe is worth giving themselves to.
Above all, we see this in Jesus. Love takes the first step.
“The Son of man came to seek and to save the lost.” — Luke 19:10 (RSV)
Jesus does not wait for the lepers to find him; he goes towards them. He does not avoid the outcast, the grieving or the possessed; he seeks them out. He sets his face resolutely towards Jerusalem, knowing full well what awaits him there. There is nothing timid or half-hearted about the love of Christ. It is active, determined, courageous and utterly relentless in its pursuit of life.
So aggredi is not the opposite of love at all. On the contrary, it can become one of love’s essential servants. The real question is not whether we possess strength, determination and initiative. Every healthy human being does. The question is what those gifts are serving.
Aggression without love seeks to overpower.
Aggression redeemed by love seeks to create, protect, resist and restore.
That, I believe, is one of the great works of redemption. Christ does not come to subdue or extinguish the powerful energies with which God has created us. He comes to teach those energies a new direction. He does not make us less alive, but more fully alive.
Why aggression goes wrong
This understanding also helps us to see the Fall in a rather different light. The opening chapters of Genesis do not suggest that human beings suddenly acquired energy, desire or determination only after they rebelled against God. Those gifts were already part of God’s good creation. We were created to cultivate the earth, to exercise responsibility, to create, to explore and to flourish. We were made in the image of a Creator whose own love is active, purposeful and life-giving.
The tragedy of the Fall is not that it created human strength. It distorted it. The same energies that enable us to build can be used to destroy. Strength can so easily become domination. Desire becomes greed. Sexual desire becomes possession. Courage becomes brutality. Competition becomes exploitation. Self-protection becomes violence. What was created to serve life begins instead to serve the ego.
This is why sin is so much more subtle than breaking rules. Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus shows that the deepest problem lies not in outward behaviour but in the human heart. Our loves become misdirected. We become capable of profound self-deception, mistaking domination for strength, greed for success, vengeance for justice, even cruelty for righteousness. The gifts God gave us lose their true direction.
But there is another way in which our strength can become distorted. It can be suppressed.
The Church has always needed people willing to exercise leadership, and such leadership naturally carries authority. Good leadership holds a shared purpose, enables different gifts to flourish and helps our energies work together rather than compete with one another. The trouble begins when authority becomes something to possess and protect. Christian institutions have sometimes been remarkably comfortable with power in the hands of leaders, while teaching those they lead to distrust their own. We have labelled passivity as holiness, inertia as faithfulness, submission as humility. Under such leadership, Christians have learned to distrust their anger, their ambition, their sexuality, their determination, even their capacity to say no.
Yet when we look at Jesus, these definitions begin to unravel. He looks remarkably unlike so many of the forms of religious leadership that have subsequently developed in his name. Jesus has nothing to prove and no position to defend. His authority does not depend upon diminishing the people around him. He draws out their gifts, entrusts them with responsibility and sends them out to act.
Suppressed strength is not the same thing as redeemed strength. Indeed, its suppression can leave destructive power unchallenged. Injustice depends not only upon those willing to exercise power badly, but often upon the reluctance of others to resist it. There are times when love must speak, intervene, protect, challenge and refuse.
The answer to destructive aggression, then, is not passivity. It is strength directed by love.
Seen in this light, redemption is not the replacement of our humanity but its restoration. Christ does not ask us to become less human, less passionate or less alive. He comes to restore the image of God within us, so that the very qualities which have become twisted by fear, pride and self-interest—or buried beneath fear and inhibition—may find their fullest expression in love. This calls for imagination and creativity as we discover how the power and vitality God has given us can become life-giving rather than exploitative.
Jesus: strength ablaze with love
Everything comes into focus when we turn our attention to Jesus.
Many of us have unconsciously inherited a picture of Christ as endlessly gentle: kind, patient and compassionate, certainly, but somehow quiet, soft-spoken and almost incapable of confrontation. Yet the Gospels paint a far richer and more compelling portrait.
Jesus is extraordinarily alive. He is imaginative, passionate, courageous and unpredictable. He tells stories that overturn people’s assumptions, asks questions that leave them searching their hearts, delights in children, enjoys the company of friends and notices people everyone else has overlooked. He can be playful and tender, provocative and fierce. People crowd around him. Others are infuriated by him. Nobody who really encounters him could ever describe him as bland.
Jesus’ love is gentle, but it is never weak.
Again and again we see in him a strength completely free from self-interest and remarkably free from self-consciousness. He is never worried about his image. He confronts hypocrisy without hesitation, yet welcomes sinners without condemnation. He overturns the tables of those who have turned worship into exploitation, yet receives little children with tenderness. He sets his face resolutely towards Jerusalem, and no threat or opposition can divert him from his purpose.
There is nothing timid about Jesus. Neither is there anything bullying.
He never humiliates people in order to make himself feel important. He never intimidates the weak. He never manipulates. He never retaliates when he is insulted. Even when he is threatened and attacked, he refuses to answer violence with violence. From the cross itself, he prays forgiveness for those who are killing him.
His strength is immense, and love does not diminish it. Love gives strength its direction, its freedom and its extraordinary power to bring life.
The freedom of love
There is something else we need to notice. Jesus does not seem to operate in a single emotional gear.
With frightened people he is gentle. With grieving people he is compassionate. With the excluded he moves towards them. With hypocrisy he is uncompromising. With injustice he confronts. With those crucifying him he forgives.
The same love takes different forms because love responds to what each situation requires.
This is very different from the way power so often works in our hands. Unredeemed power becomes grimly predictable, repeating the same destructive patterns. The angry person reaches for anger. The controlling person reaches for control. The fearful person retreats. The people-pleaser appeases. We fall back on strategies that may once have protected us, repeating them even when they no longer serve the person or situation before us.
Jesus is astonishingly free from this.
His gentleness is not weakness, because he is perfectly capable of confrontation. His confrontation is not aggression in the destructive sense, because he has no need to dominate. His silence is not passivity, because he knows when to speak. His forgiveness is not avoidance of justice, because he names evil for what it is.
This is one of the deepest freedoms that love gives us: the freedom not simply to react, but to respond.
Water offers us a beautiful picture of this.
Water possesses immense power. It can carve valleys through mountains, wear away solid rock, carry ships across oceans and turn great turbines. Yet it does not express its power in only one way. It tumbles down waterfalls. It meanders quietly through meadows. It slips around obstacles. It patiently wears away what sheer force could never break.
Its responsiveness is not weakness. It is part of its strength.
So it is with Christ. His love is not weak, but neither is it coercive. It possesses the freedom to become whatever the good of another person calls for.
Perhaps that is why C. S. Lewis’s famous description of Aslan has remained so deeply embedded in the Christian imagination. When Susan asks whether the great lion is safe, Mr Beaver replies, “Safe?... Who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
Lewis understood something that we have often forgotten. Goodness is not the same thing as harmlessness.
Indeed, there is nothing harmless about the love of Christ. It heals, but it also exposes. It comforts, but it also challenges. It forgives, but it also calls people to leave behind the patterns that destroy them. His love is fierce enough to confront everything that diminishes human life, including the darkness within our own hearts.
This is what redeemed strength looks like. Every ounce of Jesus’ determination, courage, passion and resolve is directed towards one purpose alone: giving life. He does not use his strength to control others, but to set them free. He does not overpower people, but neither does he retreat before evil. He confronts it, withstands it and refuses to become like it. He enters the darkness without allowing the darkness to determine who he will be. Even when evil appears to have won—when violence has done its worst and nailed him to a cross—his answer remains love.
This is not the avoidance of battle. It is how Christ overcomes. If we want to know what human strength looks like when it is completely alive with love, we need look no further than Christ himself.
Our own aggression
All of this brings the question rather uncomfortably close to home.
Many Christians, myself included, have so often been taught—explicitly or implicitly—to distrust their own strength. Anger. Ambition. Assertiveness. Competitiveness. Leadership. Sexual energy. Passion. Drive. We can easily begin to feel that these are somehow embarrassing parts of ourselves, unfortunate remnants of our fallen nature that holiness requires us to suppress.
After a while, such assumptions can become like an old set of clothes we have worn for so long that we scarcely notice them anymore. They may no longer fit us, but we have never been shown what we might wear instead. We know what suppression looks like. We have been less able to imagine what redemption might look like.
These qualities are not inherently sinful. They are part of the powerful energies of being human. Like every other gift God has entrusted to us, they can be directed towards life or towards destruction. The question is never simply whether we possess them. The deeper question is always:
Who are they serving?
As I have worked on my most recent articles, I have found myself wrestling with this personally. Looking at the wars, the injustices, the corruption and the needless suffering in our world, I have often felt an inner surge of anger, sometimes rage and a frightening energy. There have been moments when I have wondered whether even that was somehow unchristian. Should a follower of Jesus feel such things? Was my picture of Christ itself skewed if I found myself so deeply stirred to anger?
At the same time, I knew I did not want to join the endless cycle of outrage that now dominates so much of our public conversation. Every day seems to bring another torrent of criticism, accusation and angry judgement. It is easy to be swept along by it, yet difficult to believe that much light is produced by all the heat.
Suppressing those feelings or pretending they were not there was no answer either. Energy denied does not disappear. It usually finds other, less healthy, ways of expressing itself.
Gradually, however, I began to see that the problem was not the energy itself, but its direction. Redirection requires imagination. We need to be able to see what these powerful energies might become when shaped by Christ. The very strength that can become bitterness, frustration or condemnation can also become compassion, perseverance, courage and hope. We cannot become what we have never learned to imagine. Through the Holy Spirit, Christ awakens in us a new imagination for what human strength can become.
When anger is born of suffering
This becomes particularly important when our anger has been born out of suffering.
Many people have been deeply wounded by the Church. Some have been silenced, shamed, excluded, controlled or made to feel that something fundamental about them was unacceptable to God. In such circumstances, anger may be entirely understandable. Indeed, for someone who has spent years being taught to remain silent or submissive, recovering the capacity to become angry may itself be an important part of healing.
But our wounds cannot safely become our only guide. They may tell us, quite truthfully, that something terrible has happened. They cannot by themselves tell us what love requires us to do next.
I understand why some who have suffered deeply within Christianity reach the point of wanting to tear the whole institution down. There may be much that does need dismantling. But sometimes the first part of what needs dismantling is the authority we ourselves have attributed to those who wounded us. I recognise this in my own life. When I was younger, I could give a clever and confident preacher an almost unquestioned authority in my imagination. If something he said wounded or disturbed me, I assumed the problem must somehow lie with me. Only much later did I discover the liberating possibility that he might simply have been wrong. I did not need to burden myself further by imagining some darker purpose behind what he said. Sometimes people—including powerful and influential people—simply do not see what they are getting wrong. Recognising this does not excuse the harm they cause, but neither need we magnify their power by attributing to them motives or hidden designs for which we have no evidence.
There is another danger. If our resistance to cruelty makes us cruel, if our experience of exclusion teaches us to exclude, if being treated with contempt leaves us contemptuous of others, then the very thing we oppose has begun to reproduce itself in us.
This is why I believe we have to keep looking towards Christ. Not because Jesus asks us to minimise what has happened. Not because forgiveness means protecting institutions from accountability. And certainly not because Christians should become quieter and less troublesome.
We look towards Christ because our anger needs redemption too.
We have to be willing to ask what Christ is changing in us. It is not enough to recognise what needs changing in the world or in the Church while leaving ourselves outside the question.
This is where action and contemplation belong together. We need people who will speak, challenge, campaign, protect and resist. But Christians have nothing distinctive to contribute merely by becoming another campaigning organisation, however worthy the cause. If we never allow Christ to confront our own bitterness, rivalry, pride, fear and desire to win, we may reproduce within our movements the very struggles for power that we set out to oppose.
Looking towards Christ is not a retreat from action. It is what prevents our action from being captured by the very forces we are resisting.
That challenge has shaped much of my own journey over these past months. Instead of allowing my attention to be ensnared by the darkness, I have found myself wanting to look more steadily at Christ himself—to keep returning to the one I now recognise as the Light of the World. For much of my life I have known about Jesus. Increasingly, I have found myself wanting to encounter him more deeply in all the experiences of life—the ordinary and the extraordinary alike. The more closely I have looked, the more I have begun to see that his strength and his love are never in conflict. This is what I am slowly learning:
Our wounds may awaken our strength.
Christ must teach that strength where to go.
That discovery has been unexpectedly liberating. The goal of holiness is not becoming weaker. It is becoming more loving.
Christ does not ask us to abandon the strength, passion and vitality God has given us. He teaches us, patiently and faithfully, what they can become when they are alive with love.
Redemption
This, I believe, lies at the very heart of redemption. The work of redemption is not to diminish our God-given strength, but to teach us how to express it in love.
We often imagine redemption as though God were applying the brakes to our strongest impulses. Anger must be restrained. Desire controlled. Ambition subdued. Passion moderated. Certainly all these energies can become destructive. But love is not the brake applied to human strength.
Love is what gives strength its direction.
Think again of water. A riverbank does not suppress a river. It gives it boundaries and a course, enabling its power to flow where it can become life-giving. Without such boundaries, water may flood fields, undermine foundations or wash away the very ground beneath our feet. Channelled wisely, the same water irrigates, cleanses, refreshes and brings life wherever it flows.
So it is with the powerful energies within us. They need neither suppression nor unrestricted release, but loving direction. And because we are moving through territory where anger, desire, passion and hurt can easily confuse us, we need more than rules to keep us within safe limits. We need guidance. We need the Good Shepherd who knows us, walks with us and teaches us where life is to be found.
And we are not left to make that journey alone. Christ gives us his Spirit—the Spirit who continues his work within us, awakening conscience, reshaping desire and patiently teaching our strength the ways of love. The transformation we are describing is not something we have to accomplish by sheer effort. It is the work of God within us, requiring our attention, our trust and our willingness to follow.
So it is with the energies God has placed within us. Anger can become courage in the face of injustice. Determination can become perseverance. Protectiveness can become self-giving service. Leadership can become humble responsibility. Desire can become delight in another rather than possession of them.
Our strength is not removed. It is redeemed.
Notice how Jesus works with people in the Gospels. He does not strip away what lies deepest in them. There is something here of the wisdom in his parable of the wheat and the tares: in our eagerness to tear out what seems wrong, we may uproot what is good along with it. Christ releases the energies within us from what has distorted them and redirects them towards love. He sees not only who we are, but who we are capable of becoming.
Peter is a wonderful example. Jesus looks at Simon—impetuous, courageous, loyal, yet also unstable and capable of both extraordinary boldness and sudden fear—and gives him a new name: Peter, the Rock. Jesus names what he can already see this man becoming. Peter’s readiness to throw himself into things does not disappear. The man who once reaches for a sword gradually becomes someone capable of laying down his life in the service of others. Jesus does not extinguish his boldness. He transforms the man who wavers into the Rock.
Paul loses none of his astonishing zeal. The man who once persecuted the Church with relentless determination now spends his life proclaiming the very Christ he had opposed. The energy remains. Its direction is transformed. Here again we see Christ envisioning and calling forth the person Paul was created to become.
Again and again, Christ works in this way. He does not extinguish initiative, remove passion or weaken determination. Through the Holy Spirit, light is gently shed upon what is happening within us—our motives, our fears, our desires and the direction in which our energies are taking us. Like a wise and trusted mentor, the Spirit helps us recognise what is life-giving and what is not, and patiently guides our strength towards love.
As I have reflected on my own life, I have begun to recognise this pattern more clearly. Some of the most significant turning points have not come because Christ asked me to become a different kind of person, but because he quietly redirected convictions I already held. There have been times when I have had to acknowledge that work I once believed to be faithful was, despite the best of intentions, causing harm rather than healing. There have been other occasions when conscience has compelled me to challenge accepted assumptions—whether within the Church or elsewhere—not because I wanted conflict, but because love demanded something better.
None of those moments has felt comfortable. Every one has required energy, perseverance and, at times, a willingness to stand apart from people whose respect I valued. Looking back, however, I do not see Christ asking me to become less determined. If anything, he has asked me to become more determined—but in the service of truth, compassion and life rather than fear or tradition.
And perhaps this is something many of us need to discover. Just as Christ restores our conscience so that we begin to see more clearly, he also restores our strength so that we begin to love more faithfully.
Many people have lived with the fear that following Christ means the gradual erasure of who they are—the slow disappearance of everything distinctive about their personality. But the opposite is true. Holiness is not the erasure of our humanity but its transformation.
The passionate person need not stop being passionate; nor the courageous become timid, the thoughtful stop questioning, the strong become weak, or the person with a fierce sense of justice stop caring about what is wrong. Christ asks something much more searching:
What will all that strength become when it learns to love?
This is the miracle of redemption. Christ does not erase the people God created us to be. He teaches us, day by day, how to become those people in love.
Desire fully alive
Nowhere has the Church found this understanding more difficult than in the realm of sexuality.
Christian teaching has too often treated sexual desire primarily as a danger to be contained, surrounding one of the most powerful energies of being human with anxiety, suspicion and guilt. Yet if our argument so far is right, sexual desire cannot simply be placed outside God’s work of redemption, as though holiness required us to become less embodied, less passionate or less capable of desire.
Here too, the question is not whether desire is strong. The question is what gives that strength its direction.
Nor should we imagine that redemption makes sexual desire tame. There is something gloriously earthy about it: an energy felt not so much in the mind as deep within the body, capable of unsettling our composure and drawing us towards another person with extraordinary force. Especially when we are young, desire can arrive with an intensity for which experience has scarcely prepared us. There is risk in such vulnerability, and perhaps part of its exhilaration lies precisely in the fact that we are encountering something more powerful than our carefully managed selves. Love does not remove that wildness. It gives us a way of inhabiting it without allowing either ourselves or another person to be consumed by it.
Scripture itself is far less embarrassed by erotic desire than Christians have sometimes been. The Song of Songs positively revels in attraction, beauty, longing and delight. The lovers desire one another without apology: “your love is better than wine” (1:2). Yet the Song also respects the mysterious timing and power of desire: “do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready” (2:7). And finally comes its magnificent declaration: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it” (8:7).
One sometimes wonders whether, if the Church had studied the Song of Songs with as much enthusiasm as the writings of Paul, we might have developed a healthier and more joyful understanding of our sexuality.
But precisely because desire carries such power, what we do with it matters. When it becomes detached from love, it can indeed steal, kill and destroy. Another person becomes an object to possess, consume or control. Desire turns inward upon itself and asks only what the other person can provide for me.
But when desire is mutual and directed by love, something profoundly different becomes possible. Why would passion need to be diminished? It can become one of the deepest ways in which two people delight in one another, give themselves to one another, become vulnerable before one another, and know one another.
Scripture knows many forms of profound human intimacy—the souls of David and Jonathan are described as being “knit” together. But its language for sexual intimacy is strikingly beautiful: “Adam knew Eve his wife.”
Sex is not merely an act of the body. At its richest, it becomes a way of knowing and being known. Here again, love is not the brake applied to desire. Love is what enables desire to become communion rather than consumption.
The energy has not disappeared. It has discovered what it is for.
Redeemed Aggression
What, then, does redeemed aggression look like in everyday life? It is seldom dramatic. More often it is quietly courageous.
It is speaking the truth when silence would be easier. Standing beside someone who is being excluded rather than protecting our own reputation. Resisting dishonesty when everyone else has learned to live with it. Challenging an institution we care about when its practices are causing harm. Persevering through illness or disappointment without surrendering hope.
Sometimes love requires us to stand firm.
Sometimes it requires us to move.
Sometimes it requires us to wait.
This is where the image of water becomes helpful again. A river does not overcome every obstacle by smashing through it. Sometimes it wears away rock through patient persistence. Sometimes it finds another course. Sometimes its power is almost imperceptible. Yet it continues to move towards its destination. And the river does not propel itself. It is drawn onwards by gravity, an unseen force quietly determining the direction of its flow.
There is something here, perhaps, of the work of the Holy Spirit. The Christian life is not sustained by determination alone. Beneath our choosing, striving and learning is the quiet pull of God, drawing us towards love. We may resist that movement, lose our way or become caught for a time in places where little seems to be happening. Yet the Spirit continues to work within us, patiently drawing our lives towards Christ.
So too, redeemed strength does not need to prove itself by winning every confrontation. It asks instead: What does love require here?
That may mean refusing to remain silent. It may mean saying no. It may mean protecting someone who cannot protect themselves. It may mean persevering with a difficult person long after others have given up. It may mean forgiving someone without pretending that what they did was acceptable. And sometimes it may mean refusing to retaliate, even when retaliation would feel entirely justified.
Redeemed strength is patient. It understands that people are not formed overnight. Every one of us needs time to recognise our mistakes, time to find confidence in our convictions, time to change, and time to become more like Christ. Strength that knows what it believes does not always need the last word. Sometimes wisdom means leaving space for another person to think, question and discover for themselves. The goal is not to prove that we are right, but to become the kind of person whose life quietly bears witness to the truth.
When reaction outruns wisdom
We live in an age in which reaction can outrun wisdom. Never before have so many people possessed the means to broadcast an immediate response to events they may only partially understand. Social media has dangerously shortened the distance between feeling something and expressing it. Anger can become accusation before reflection has begun; suspicion can become “certainty” before the facts are known; judgement can travel around the world before the person being judged has even had an opportunity to respond.
Something essential is lost when there is no space between reaction and response. We need time to think, to listen, to question our first assumptions, to test what we believe, and sometimes just to remain silent until we understand more. Wisdom grows in that space. Without it, people are condemned long before they have had time to listen, learn, repent or grow.
There is an intoxicating satisfaction in joining the crowd when we are convinced that we are right. But redeemed strength does not need an enemy in order to know who it is. It can resist injustice without becoming consumed by hatred for those who perpetrate it. It can protect the vulnerable without needing to humiliate the powerful. It can forgive without becoming passive. It can love enemies without abandoning justice.
There is nothing weak about such a life. It requires enormous vision and courage. This is one of the greatest differences between power and love.
Power asks, “How can I get my own way?”
Love asks, “How can my strength become life for someone else?”
Those two questions may sometimes produce outwardly similar actions. Both may confront. Both may protest. Both may refuse. Both may overturn a table. But they arise from profoundly different hearts. One seeks to control. The other seeks to give life.
And that difference may be almost invisible from the outside. Which is why the work Christ is doing within us matters just as much as the work we are trying to accomplish in the world.
The power of abundant life
We began by asking why God’s world is so full of force. We can now see that force itself was never the problem. The world God created overflows with life, energy, initiative and strength. The tragedy is that those gifts have become bent towards ourselves. Strength becomes domination. Desire becomes possession. Anger becomes hatred. Courage becomes violence. The energies created to serve life become instruments of fear, pride and self-interest.
But Christ does not come to drain those energies away. He comes to redeem them. This is why the image of living water seems so fitting.
Throughout Scripture, God’s life is repeatedly pictured as water in motion. Ezekiel sees a river flowing from the presence of God, bringing life wherever it goes. Jesus speaks of rivers of living water. Revelation ends with the river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God.
Not a stagnant pond. A flowing river. Love moves. And as the life of Christ is awakened within us, so do we. The work of redemption is not to drain away the river. It is to reconnect it to its Source and allow it to flow where it was always meant to bring life.
That changes the way I hear one of Jesus’ most familiar commandments. We are to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind—and all our strength. For years I think I understood the first three more easily than the last. What does it mean to love God with our strength?
It means precisely this. We bring to God not only our prayers, our beliefs and our good intentions, but the whole force of our humanity: our energy, our determination, our courage, our anger, our imagination, our sexuality, our longing, our capacity to protect and protest and persevere. God does not ask us to leave our strength at the door. He asks us to love with it.
The question, then, is not whether we possess strength. The question is whether our strength has learned whom it loves. That is why Jesus’ words at the beginning of this article now seem to me even more extraordinary: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
The abundance he offers is not a longer life, nor even a happier life. It is humanity restored to its true vocation: seeing as Christ sees, loving as Christ loves, and discovering that our greatest strength is found not in overpowering others, but in becoming a source of life to them.
There is still an enormous amount of healing to be accomplished in our world. Violence remains terrifyingly real. Nations still destroy one another. Institutions still abuse their power. People still wound one another, and wounded people still wound others in return. At times the forces of destruction can seem infinitely more powerful than the quiet work of love.
But the cross tells another story. There we see Christ confronting the worst that human violence can do without allowing violence to reproduce itself in him. He does not overcome evil by becoming better at evil than those who oppose him. He refuses to let hatred determine the terms of the battle.
And Easter declares that such love is not defeated.
This is the fierce love of Christ. Not passive. Not harmless. Not afraid of confrontation. But neither controlling, retaliatory nor destructive.
It is love with strength.
And this is the life into which Christ calls us—the restoration of our deepest energies, their fulfilment in love, and our becoming fully alive for the sake of others.
For evil has no life of its own. It is always parasitic upon something good. Falsehood depends upon truth to distort; greed grasps at a creation it did not make; domination exploits strength it did not create; violence destroys life it cannot give. Evil can corrupt, exploit and consume, but it cannot create. Everything it uses ultimately belongs to God.
The thief steals life. Christ restores it.
The thief destroys. Christ brings abundance.
God’s final victory is not a scorched-earth victory in which half of reality must be destroyed because it has become contaminated by evil. God saves his creation from the parasite that has been feeding upon it.
In the end, evil will be revealed as utterly bankrupt. All its apparent power will dissolve like a wisp of smoke in the light of God’s fulfilled purposes. What remains will be the life it could distort but never create, now finally set free.
This does not mean that evil escapes judgement. Quite the opposite. Everything that steals, diminishes and destroys life must finally be brought into the light and exposed for what it is. But God’s judgement is not the triumph of a greater violence over a lesser one. It is the triumph of truth over falsehood, love over hatred, and life over everything that has fed upon it. If I am looking forward to God’s judgement because I want to watch my enemies burn, then there is something in me that needs to pass through God’s judgement too.
This is the miracle of redemption: the strength that once protected only ourselves can learn to protect others; the anger that could have become hatred can become courage; the desire that could have consumed another can become communion; the determination that once insisted on its own way can become perseverance in love.
The Lamb is what God is really like.
The energy has not disappeared. It has discovered what it is for.
The question is not whether we possess strength. The question is whether our strength is becoming love.
“The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” — John 4:14
by Jeremy Marks, 23rd August 2026