Financial crashes happen precisely because the people who remember the last one have either died or retired and thus are no longer around, with memories and character formed by that previous experience, to warn people not to be irresponsible.
We applaud patience, but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.
Human was simultaneously the bearer of God’s wise rule into the world, and also the creature who would bring the loyalty and praise of that creation for its Creator into love, speech, and conscious obedience.
Sing these songs, and they will renew you from head to toe, from heart to mind. Pray these poems, and they will sustain you on the long, hard but exhilarating road of Christian discipleship.
Christians do not avail ourselves of Plato’s safety-hatch and say that the real world is not a thing of space, time, and matter, but another world into which we can escape. We say that the present world is the real one, and that it’s in bad shape, but expecting to be repaired.
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.
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.