Quotes from Leonard Sweet

Semiotic nudge is more about "Speak, Lord; your servant is listening" than it is "Listen, Lord; your servant is speaking."58

Worship is what you do when you've heard Jesus speak. A worship life is what you live when you walk with Jesus.

Followership starts with Jesus, stays with Jesus, goes with Jesus, and ends with Jesus.

People around the world drink more coffee than any other drink besides water: four hundred billion cups a year.

Adam means "human." Eve means "life." A human needs another for "life" to come alive and become living. Identity can't grow ferally, only communally. We were meant to eat together, not solo. Eve's solitary eating is what got her in trouble.

Haddon Robinson once said, "I have come closer to being bored out of the Christian faith than being reasoned out of it. I think we underestimate the deadly gas of boredom. It is not only the death of communication, but the death of life and hope.

If sign and image are central to the New Testament, then it has to be read as a kind of narrative poetry. In the Scripture, we encounter types and symbols and emblems of transfiguration, and that is how the early Church, which created the New Testament, understood its own creation.

Followership is not an easy path, and Jesus never pretended otherwise.

Jesus was best known as a master of metaphor, a legendary storyteller, and a powerful healer who communicated in signs, images, and gestures. Therefore, to understand Jesus and the Scriptures, we need to train ourselves and others not to exegete more words but to exegete images.

The currency of the gospel of religion is fear and imposition. The currency of the gospel of Christ is love and invitation.

flowers, or our feet from dancing. If you don't meet God along the way, you'll never meet God at the destination. That's the dynamic tension.

For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For I believe that "Unless I believe, I shall not understand." —ANSELM OF CANTERBURY1

The US once held all its diverse components together on a declaration of "self-evident" truths about a government of/by/for the people. Today truth is not self-evident but self-constructed, fabricated from the moist finger in the winds of opinion research and social media.

Christ does not say to me, "Be yourself." He says, "Be with me." BROTHER ROGER OF TAIZÉ

there are more biographies of Jesus than of any other human—one hundred thousand biographies in English alone.4

The Second Testament authors used the same First Testament texts independently of one another. And they interpreted them in exactly the same way, often citing the texts in the same order.

God dwells in eternity but time dwells in God. He has already lived all our tomorrows as He has lived all our yesterdays. —A.W. TOZER112

Christians have made the gospel about so many things—things other than Christ. But Jesus Christ is the gravitational pull that brings everything together and gives it meaning. Without Him, all things lose their value. They are but detached pieces floating around in space. That includes your life.1

The hunger and hunt for identity is a driving force of the modern world. But the nature of the self in an age of simulacra, pseudonyms, avatars, gender/racial fluidity, "the wisdom of crowds," and online friends makes having an identity a massive maze of conquest and confusion.

What counts in evangelism is not cognition, but recognition. Can

Jesus expressed an earthy, semiotic theology by materializing his message through various media, including images, stories, actions (stilled storms, healed limbs), and objects like spit, fig trees, bursting baskets, etc. He was a master semiotician. You might even say that Jesus' ministry was more a semiotics ministry than a preaching, teaching, or healing ministry.

There is within you a yearning for the divine that nothing else can satisfy.

The church doesn't lose its kids when they go to college. We start losing them in middle school. We lose children in the church when we send them out of worship to children's church or Sunday school. This is one reason why Jesus kept insisting, "Let the little children come to me."[222

What do you mean?" they asked Jesus. "I mean this," he replied; and he took the bread, gave thanks, broke it into fragments, and shared those broken pieces with his disciples. And that piece, and those broken pieces, have been shared in every conceivable setting and played in every known language ever since. Faith is the gift of reading the signs of the presence of God. The point of reading signs is not the signs themselves, but the Signifier, Jesus the Christ.