Quotes About Renewal

the principle that God's kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus, is all about restoring creation the way it was meant to be. God always wanted to work in his world through loyal human beings.

Maybe what we are faced with in our own day is a similar challenge: to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all.

The tabernacle, and then the Temple in Jerusalem, are designed as a microcosmos, a little creation, a small working-model of creation as a whole which functions as a signpost to YHWH's intention to renew the whole world. The New Testament declares in a hundred different ways that this is precisely what's happened in and through Jesus:

Jesus was announcing that a whole new world was being born and he was "teaching" people how to live within that whole new world.

Cornelius didn't want God (or Peter) to tolerate him. He wanted to be welcomed, forgiven, healed, transformed. And he was.

Thus it won't do to say there is nothing that can be done to improve matters before Jesus returns. Yes, the second coming will accomplish all sorts of things of which at present we can only dream. I do not expect to see the wolf lying down with the lamb within the present state of creation, and if I were to meet a lion in the street (fortunately, an unlikely event in eastern Scotland), I would not rely on its having read Isaiah 11 and knowing that it should now be vegetarian.

To be baptized was therefore to die and rise with Jesus, to leave behind the old life and to be reborn into the new one.

One Corinthians 15, one of Paul's longest sustained discussions and the climax of the whole letter, is about the creator God remaking the creation—not abandoning it, as Platonists of all sorts, including the gnostics, would have wanted.

Jesus was not offering a teaching that could be compared with that of other teachers—though his teaching, as it stands, is truly remarkable. He was not offering a moral example, though if we want such a thing he remains outstanding. He was claiming to do things through which the world would be healed, transformed, rescued, and renewed. He was, in short, announcing good news, for Israel and the whole world.

We can be, and we are called to be, good-news people—people who themselves are being renewed by the good news, people through whom the good news is bringing healing and hope to the world at whatever level.

The question ought to be, How will God's new creation come? and then, How will we humans contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator God will launch in his new world?

Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not "saved souls" being rescued from the world and taken to a distant "heaven," but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.

Put tradition first, and scripture will be muzzled and faded. Put scripture first, and tradition will come to new life. Better

Suffering and dying is the way by which the world is changed. This is how the revolution continues.

Sunday, kept as a commemoration of Easter ever since that event itself (a quite remarkable phenomenon when you come to think about it), is not simply a legacy of Victorian values but a perpetual sign, joyfully renewed week by week, that all time belongs to God and stands under the renewing lordship of Jesus Christ.4

One day the whole creation will be flooded with his presence. Then they will look back and realize that they, like the Temple itself, had been a small working model, an advance blueprint, of that renewed creation.

But in scripture itself God's purpose is not just to save human beings, but to renew the whole world. This is the unfinished story in which readers of scripture are invited to become actors in their own right. "The authority of scripture" is thus a sub-branch of several other theological topics: the mission of the church, the work of the Spirit

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.

Il faut se séparer, il faut se couper non seulement de l'être aimé, mais de tout ce qui a été notre vie jusque-là, notre bien-être, notre chez-soi, notre vie calme et sans histoires. Sans cette coupure radicale, sans cette séparation douloureuse, le nouveau feu ne jaillira pas. Nous resterons près de la terre.

Si la vie s'est écoulée, sa racine est le présent. Arrose-là de l'eau du repentir. Alors le poison de l'an dernier se change en sucre, les mauvaises actions se transforment en dévotion, le passé lui-même devient sans tache.

llium snorted. "I look like a damned duck." His words weren't far off the mark. The feathers that had grown over the injured section were soft, white, and delicately … fluffy. "I hope to hell these baby feathers fall off and get replaced by real ones. They will, won't they?" He sounded worried.

No," he responded, reaching out to trace the shell of her ear. "They grew back even more beautiful. Blue edged with silver." Elena laughed at the scowl in his voice.

Lo que está roto puede arreglarse.

But plants grow again," She murmured, focusing on the verdant beauty around her. "They put down new roots, create room for themselves in foreign soil.