The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were all written within two generations of the time of Jesus – in other words, by the end of the first century at the latest – though most scholars would put most of them earlier than that.
God’s kingdom” in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God’s sovereign rule coming “on earth as it is in heaven.
The future goal is the thing which produces character in the present.
Virtue is what happens when habitual choices have been wise.
Forget happiness. You were called to a throne. How will you prepare for it? That is the question of virtue, Christian style.
Human” is a kind of midway creature, reflecting God into the world, and reflecting the world back to God.
The closer you get to the truth, the clearer becomes the beauty, and the more you will find worship welling up within you. That’s why theology and worship belong together.
Our culture is so fixated on dying and going to heaven when the whole Scripture is about heaven coming to earth.
I really don’t care too much what the different later Christian traditions say. My aim is to be faithful to Scripture.
God is the one who satisfies the passion for justice, the longing for spirituality, the hunger for relationship, the yearning for beauty. And God, the true God, is the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s Messiah, the world’s true Lord.
People often get upset when you teach them what is in the Bible rather than what they presume is in the Bible.
Often people see doctrines as a checklist. Here are the following nineteen truths which you’ve got to believe to be a good sound Christian.
The whole point of the kingdom of God is Jesus has come to bear witness to the true truth, which is nonviolent. When God wants to take charge of the world, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the poor and the meek.
I’m a people person. I like being with people. So I like being a teacher, and so on.
When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven’t yet really understood who he is or what he’s done.
Jesus himself, as the gospel story goes on to its dramatic conclusion, lives out the same message of the Sermon on the Mount: he is the light of the world, he is the salt of the earth, he loves his enemies and gives his life for them, he is lifted up on a hill so that the world can see.
It’s partly that I’m an extrovert and that I like being with people. If you shut me up in a library with nothing else around for weeks on end, I’d go mad! I have to sort of go out...
Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God’s new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.
Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don’t light a candle in a room that’s already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that’s so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are.
When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves – that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.