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.
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.
The cross is the place where, and the means by which, God loved us to the uttermost.
You can’t reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.
Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen.
When you’re writing theology, you have to say everything all the time, otherwise people think you’ve deliberately missed something out.
God has committed himself, ever since creation, to working through his creatures – in particular, through his image-bearing human beings – but they have all let Him down.
The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you’re now invited to belong to it.
When Jesus wanted to explain to his disciples what his death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.
My aim has been to expound Scripture and to expound Scripture in such a way that I do not set one Scripture over against another.
True worship doesn’t put on a show or make a fuss; true worship isn’t forced, isn’t half-hearted, doesn’t keep looking at its watch, doesn’t worry what the person in the next pew is doing. True worship is open to God, adoring God, waiting for God, trusting God even in the dark.
God’s plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was “very good.” Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.
If you believe in the Bible, you’ve got to do business with it and not just screen it out.
The Bible is there to enable God’s people to be equipped to do God’s work in God’s world, not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly, knowing they possess all God’s truth.
True worship is open to God, adoring God, waiting for God, trusting God even in the dark.
Heaven is important, but its not the end of the world.
The Holy Spirit in enabling the already-justified believers to live with moral energy and will so that they really do please God again and again.