At the core

What Jesus advocated, then, was a cruciform existence for his followers. The moral fellowship of the kingdom, then, is a fellowship in the cross. Think briefly over the pages of the New Testament where cross becomes the norm for discipleship (and not just the atoning sacrifice). Jesus maps the Christian life along the coordinates of the cross (Luke 9:23), Paul sees the cross as pattern of his own ministry (2 Cor. 4:10; Phil. 3:10–11), and the pattern of Christ’s own self-sacrifice becomes the solution to the local church’s struggle for a loving fellowship (Phil. 2:5–11).— Kingdom Conspiracy, page 162