Quotes About Faith

Take Psalm 73. The writer knows the 'normal' line: good things come to good people, bad things to bad. But it hasn't worked out like that. The wicked are flourishing, and the righteous are crushed under their feet. It's only when the poet goes into God's temple that a larger, healing viewpoint can be glimpsed.

we should be in no doubt that, for the gospel writers themselves, there was never a kingdom message without a cross

What the early Christians meant by "belief" included both believing that God had done certain things and believing in the God who had done them. This is not belief that God exists, though clearly that is involved, too, but loving, grateful trust.

Instead of "thinking God's thoughts after him," science was now studying the world as though God didn't exist.

The risen Jesus is both the model for the Christian's future body and the means by which it comes about. Similarly

The heritage mattered, but the hope was all-important—hope for a new world, for the One God to become king at last.

humans were made to be "vicegerents." That is, they were to act on God's behalf within his world. But that is only possible and can only escape serious and dangerous distortion when worship precedes action.

We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like someone who lit a candle to see whether the sun had risen.

Jesus of Nazareth was a real man, living and dying at a turbulent moment in real space-time history. His message, and the message about him that the early Christians called good news, was not about how to escape that world. It was about how the one true God was changing it, radically and forever.

But what Saul believed about Jesus meant that the underlying center of spiritual gravity had shifted.

genuine faith is always seeking the Word hidden in the flesh, not using the Word simply as a way of getting at the flesh.

Redemption," as we saw, is an Exodus term.

Our task in the present is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

Jesus as a "teacher" is much safer than Jesus as the gospels actually present him.

This is why too for every theologian who puzzles over abstract definitions of "atonement," there are thousands who will say, with Paul, "The son of God loved me and gave himself for me"—and who will then get on with the job of radiating that same love out into the world.

Those who choose to live without God will one day find that they have forfeited their likeness to him.

I received mercy, because in my unbelief I didn't know what I was doing.

Resurrection and forgiveness are not strange things that might perhaps happen in the old creation.

everyone who wants to live a godly life in King Jesus will be persecuted

As I have written elsewhere, the larger biblical narrative offers us a framework for developing and taking forward a holistic mission which refuses to split apart full-on evangelism, telling people about Jesus with a view to bringing them to faith, and full-on kingdom-of-God work, labouring alongside anyone and everyone with a heart for [154] the common good so that God's sovereign and saving rule may be glimpsed on earth as in heaven.

Jesus has all kinds of projects up his sleeve and is simply waiting for faithful people to say their prayers, to read the signs of the times, and to get busy.

obvious Greek term for "loyalty" is one of Paul's favorite words, pistis, regularly translated "faith," but often carrying the overtones of "faithfulness," "reliability," and, yes, "loyalty.

Put like that, of course, it seems absurd; and yet the absurdity lies in the attempt to picture God as just like us only a bit bigger and more all-seeing.

We mustn't imagine that our feeling of being close to God is a true index of the reality.