Quotes About Cross

We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more.

reality. It is the resurrection that declares that the cross was a victory, not a defeat. It therefore announces that God has indeed become king on earth as in heaven.

The only way we can get to the heart of understanding the moral challenge Jesus offered, and offers still today, is by thinking in terms not of rules or of the calculation of effects or of romantic or existentialist "authenticity," but of virtue. A virtue that has been transformed by the kingdom and the cross.

Like so many other early Christians and in line with Jesus himself, Paul interprets the cross in relation to Passover: a new Passover, a new Exodus.

His point is that the cross has liberated people from sin, so that they can be God-reflecting, image-bearing, working models of divine covenant faithfulness in action.

The story told by all four gospels is the story of 'how God became king': not by the usual means of military revolution, but by the inauguration of sovereignty during Jesus' public career, and the strange but decisive victory on the cross itself.

We have failed to realize that the four canonical gospels (as opposed to the non-canonical ones) see Jesus' kingdom-work as completed on the cross and see the cross as the ultimate kingdom-bringing moment.

This is how the cross establishes God's kingdom: by bearing and so removing the weight of sin and death.

In whatever way the New Testament tells the story of the cross, it is always the story of self-giving divine love.

The point is this. If you want to know what it means to talk about God being 'in charge of' the world, or being 'in control', or being 'sovereign', then Jesus himself instructs you to rethink the notion of 'kingdom', 'control' and 'sovereignty' themselves, around his death on the cross.

By the time Jesus's body was taken down from the cross, Paul believed, these "rulers and authorities" had been stripped, shamed, and defeated.

Because of the cross, the world as a whole is free to give allegiance to the God who made it.

From the earliest writings we have, it was seen as the direct and necessary result of the creator God overthrowing on the cross the powers that had kept the nations captive. Up to now the nations had been enslaved; the cross had opened the gates to freedom.

Christian mission means implementing the victory that Jesus won on the cross. Everything else follows from this.

The revolution of the cross sets us free to be the royal priesthood, and the only thing stopping us is our lack of vision and our failure to realize that this was why the Messiah died in the first place.

enjoined on all Jesus followers—takes place in the context of the initial victory won on the cross.

As we shall see, it is only when we take fully into account the gospel writers' belief that Jesus was involved in the ultimate battle against the ultimate forces of evil that we can begin to see how their combination of kingdom and cross—and, looking wider, of incarnation, kingdom, cross, and resurrection—makes sense.

The New Testament insists, in book after book, that when Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, something happened as a result of which the world is a different place. And the early Christians insisted that when people are caught up in the meaning of the cross, they become part of this difference.

Jesus did not die on the cross to give you a certain number of days of health on this earth but to fit you, body and soul, for eternity in a new heaven and a new earth.

When God sent His only Son, Jesus, to this earth to bear your sin and mine on the cross, He put a price tag on us—He declared the value of our soul to be greater than the value of the whole world. Whose opinion are you going to accept? Believing a lie will put you in bondage. Believing the Truth will set you free.

They say: only exceptional people can cross the borders. The truth is: anyone can cross, everyone has it in them. But only exceptional people can bear to look it in the eye.

But, with a bewildering contrariness, the intimacies of the Mars were between us and too vertiginous to cross.

They were all to cross the Atlantic and link up with Admiral Missiessy off Martinique.

was said to have been made from the nails that had pinned Jesus to the cross.