Simply Christian Quotes
"We dream the dream of justice. We glimpse, for a moment, a world at one, a world put to rights, a world where things work out, where societies function fairly and efficiently."
"A sense of justice comes with the kit of being human."
"You can fix a broken leg, a broken toy, a broken television. So why can’t we fix injustice?"
"The line between justice and injustice, between things being right and things not being right, can’t be drawn between 'us' and 'them.' It runs right down through the middle of each one of us."
"How does it happen that, on the one hand, we all share not just a sense that there is such a thing as justice, but a passion for it...and yet, on the other hand...we still can’t seem to get much closer to it?"
"The kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdom of God, so the beauty of this world will be enfolded in the beauty of God."
"Beauty, like justice, slips through our fingers."
"The beauty we see at the moment is complete, but it is not complete."
"The present world of space, time, and matter always was and still is the good creation of a good God."
"The most interesting thing in the world remains that which is two inches or so on the near side of the lens—in other words, the human brain."
"Those who come with arguments to prove the existence of God are always in danger of the kind of surprise received by the women who went to Jesus’s tomb on Easter morning."
"God is in heaven, and you are upon earth; so let your words be few" (Ecclesiastes 5:2).
"We can probe toward the center of the maze as much as we like but we shall never reach that center by our own efforts."
"If God isn’t up in the sky, where is he?"
"The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings" (Psalm 115:16).
"God, the world’s creator, was going to come true in him."
"The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary."
"The world and ‘the divine’ are what they are, and you’d better get used to it."
"The right thing to do is to enjoy life as best one can."
"The belief in heaven and earth as quasi-independent but mysteriously overlapping spheres goes a long way toward explaining several otherwise puzzling things in ancient Israelite and early Christian thought and life."
"The creation of the world was the free outpouring of God’s powerful love."
"The prophet is holding out a vision of peace and hope, not only for Israel but for all the nations."
"Christianity is all about the belief that the living God, in fulfillment of his promises and as the climax of the story of Israel, has accomplished all this—the finding, the saving, the giving of new life—in Jesus."
"First, we are talking here about resurrection, not resuscitation."
"One theory that went against this conclusion was very popular a few years ago, but is now widely discredited."
"Nobody was expecting anyone, least of all a Messiah, to rise from the dead."
"The best explanation by far for the rise of Christianity is that Jesus really did reappear."
"Science, after all, rightly studies phenomena which can be repeated in laboratory conditions. But history doesn’t."
"It is always open to anyone to say, 'Well, I haven’t got a better explanation for the rise of Christianity; but since I know dead people never rise and never could, there must be some other explanation.'"
"Sometimes, to make sense of the actual evidence before us, we have to pull our worldview, our sense of what’s possible, into a new shape."
"Resurrection isn’t a fancy way of saying 'going to heaven when you die.'"
"If Jesus’s resurrection 'proves' anything about what happens to people after they die, it is that."
"They have tried to fit the events of Easter into a version of the view I outlined earlier as Option Two—that is, the view of God and the world according to which the two of them are normally poles apart."
"When Jesus rose again God’s whole new creation emerged from the tomb, introducing a world full of new potential and possibility."
"The music he wrote must now be performed."
"The earliest Christians, those who had followed Jesus during his short public career, had never imagined that a Messiah would be divine."
"The early Christians had no intention of departing from Jewish-style monotheism."
"And they said it even though it meant a direct political confrontation with the claims of Rome."
"But—and this is the most mysterious thing of all—he was sustained not only by his reading of scripture, in which he found so clearly the lines of his own vocation, but also by his intimate prayer life with the one he called Abba, Father."
"It’s where the homeless drop in for a bowl of soup and the elderly stop by for a chat."
"The wind and the fire and the brooding bird are given to enable the church to be the church."
"The Spirit is given, in fact, so that the church can share in the life and continuing work of Jesus himself, now that he has gone into God’s dimension."
"The Spirit is given to begin the work of making God’s future real in the present."
"You, he says, are the Temple of the living God."
"The Spirit is given so that we ordinary mortals can become, in a measure, what Jesus himself was: part of God’s future arriving in the present."
"That is why, when Jesus went to Jerusalem that last time, he told stories about a king (or a master) going away and eventually coming back to see how his subjects or servants were getting on."
"It is Jesus, riding into the city on a donkey, assuming authority over the Temple, declaring to the high priest that he will be seated at the right hand of Power, giving his own flesh and blood for the sins of the world."
"Jesus was speaking of YHWH himself, having left Israel at the time of the exile, coming back at last to judge and to save."
"Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."
"Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we too have forgiven our debtors."
"Do not bring us to the time of trial, But rescue us from the evil one."
"For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, Now and forever. Amen."
"Some suits of clothes don’t fit; they constrict both movement and personality."
"Old forms and traditions of worship and prayer can indeed be a way of fueling genuine prayer, but living traditions can turn quite quickly into deadweight."
"It’s time to give ourselves a shake—to recognize that different people need different kinds of help at different stages of their lives—and get on with it."
"Prayers like the one I quoted a moment ago are there to help us grow, not to keep us shrunken."
"The Lord’s Prayer isn’t the only prayer that has formed the basis of deep and rich traditions of Christian praying."
"Praying for mercy doesn’t just mean 'I’ve done something wrong, so please forgive me.' It’s a much wider petition."
"The church exists, in other words, for what we sometimes call 'mission': to announce to the world that Jesus is its Lord."
"God has raised Jesus from the dead, and has thereby declared in a single powerful action that Jesus has launched the long-awaited kingdom of God."
"The church is first and foremost a community, a collection of people who belong to one another because they belong to God."
"God’s plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was 'very good.' Rather, he intends to remake it."
"God’s new world will at last be in place, full of new prospects and possibilities."
"Christian ethics is not a matter of discovering what’s going on in the world and getting in tune with it."
"It is the way which anticipates, in the present, the full, rich, glad human existence which will one day be ours when God makes all things new."
"Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again."
"The whole world is now God’s holy land, and God will reclaim it and renew it as the ultimate goal of all our wanderings."
"God’s new world, for heaven and earth to be joined forever."
"The arts are highways into the center of a reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way."
"The present world is good, but broken and in any case incomplete; art of all kinds enables us to understand that paradox in its many dimensions."
"The way to make sense of it all is to look ahead."
"We are called to be part of God’s new creation, called to be agents of that new creation here and now."