Quotes About Meaning

There is no kingdom that is not about a just society, as there is no kingdom without redemption under Christ. Yet I'm convinced that both of these approaches to kingdom fall substantially short of what kingdom meant to Jesus, so we need once again to be patient enough to ponder what the Bible teaches.

Christopher Rowland, who has plumbed apocalyptic literature as well as anyone in the modern era, counters much of the common interpretation of Revelation when he says, "We should not ask of apocalypses, what do they mean? Rather, we should ask, how do the images and designs work? How do they affect us and change our lives?

If you want to know how Jesus understands the Christian life, the place to begin is with what he means by kingdom of God.

When Jesus calls his disciples 'the salt,' instead of himself, this transfers his efficacy on earth to them. He brings them into his work." But he adds the warning of Jesus: "The call of Jesus Christ means being salt of the earth or being destroyed.

Until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living.

Jesus is probing into the heart of his followers to ask them if they value life more than kingdom and righteousness.

Sometimes in our zeal to "apply" a text, we fail to read the text in its context. And more often than we may all care to admit, our frustrations over how to apply a text can be completely resolved with a more accurate interpretation.

Jesus is the gospel-shaped King. There is no other messianic story like the one Jesus told and lived.

It is a fact that many statements about what the Bible says are derived from contextless exegeses of a former generation

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me; it is the parts I do understand." Whoever said that may well have been thinking about Matthew 5 or even our specific passage.

In his book The Indelible Image, New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III reiterates a common piece of interpretive wisdom: "A text without a context is just a pretext for what we want it to mean.

History creates context; context creates meaning.

Because religious beliefs and experiences cannot be reliably validated through logical deduction or observational induction, validation occurs only by satisfying the emotions that motivate religion in the first place. Religious

Emotivism maintains that the only statements capable of having meaning are those that are empirically verifiable, but this underlying principle is itself not empirically verifiable.

Second, emotivism is actually a theory of the use of moral language, not of its meaning.13 The emotivist has jumped from a theory of use to a theory of meaning without any justification for that leap.

With no universal measure for meaning to compare with the seemingly solid accounting for income, we fall into the data trap. Our larger culture, and our pesky parents, push us toward decisions that seem to score well but are blind to the most important elements of healthy careers and meaningful lives.

Imparting trust, the real meaning of delegation, is a powerful thing.

It's not a new, radical idea for work to have meaning and for workers to have both great freedom and pride in the work itself. Instead those ideas are rooted in the origins of work; we've just lost our way.

but I recognize the distinction between work that matters to me and work that doesn't, and the difference has defined the choices I've made in my career. What I've sacrificed in income has been compensated for in things money can't buy.

somewhere in the wash of interactions and split attentions is the missed possibility we're looking for: meaning. Depth of experience. Connection.

While we have a universal measure of wealth called money, there is no comparable measurement for meaning.

take words and make them useful,' she told me. 'drain them of all the crappy meanings they used to mean and make them mean something useful instead.

I think we might as well believe in Christ as believe in anything," Beatrice said. "I mean, Christ makes as much sense and anything else I can think of." "Like Success," Rodney said. "Or Self," I said. "Or Family," Beatrice said. "Or Woman. Love. Disease. Heartbreak. Death. God. Goals. Reification. Fried food. High fiber optics. Disinvestment. Cancer. AIDS. Genes, skin, tissue, soul.

Oh God, don't you want us to live, to stop killing ourselves? Will they come to see me when I die? Which begs the question, what about now? They say you need other people in your life, but do they need you? Do they?