That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it.
Pastors are highly susceptible to the sin of sloth.
There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible – at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.
We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.
Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner.
Prayer gets us in on what God is doing.
There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church.
If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.
The religious leader is the most untrustworthy of leaders; in no other station do we have so many opportunities for pride, covetousness and lust, and with so many excellent disguises to keep such ignobility from being found out and called to account.
Prayer is the disciplined refusal to act before God acts.
Our Father in heaven, Reveal who you are. Set the world right; Do what’s best – As above, so below. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You’re in charge!
Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be – you get a fresh start, your slate’s wiped clean. Count yourself lucky – God holds nothing against you and you’re holding nothing back from Him.
The moment the organic unity of belief and behaviour is damaged in any way, we are incapable of living out the full humanity for which we were created.
Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God.
Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of righteousness gets headlines.
The task of the prophet is not to smooth things over but to make things right.
One of the reasons that Christians read Scripture repeatedly and carefully is to find out just how God works in Jesus Christ so that we can work in the name of Jesus Christ.
Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.
If we get our information from the biblical material there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.
The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract.