Quotes About Transformation

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

Romans 6:2–11 is all about the death of the Messiah and about the fact that those who are baptized into him must "reckon" that they too have died. This death was like the passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea: those who pass through the waters of baptism are reminded that they have left behind the old world of slavery ("Egypt") and are on the way home to their inheritance

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

Forgiveness is the new reality. It is the power of the revolution.

We do not "build the kingdom" all by ourselves, but we do build for the kingdom. All that we do in faith, hope, and love in the present, in obedience to our ascended Lord and in the power of his Spirit, will be enhanced and transformed at his appearing.13 This too brings a note of judgment, of course, as Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 3:10–17. The "day" will disclose what sort of work each builder has done.

Despite what skeptics and critics sometimes say, followers of Jesus have transformed the world in all sorts of ways in the last two thousand years. It was Jesus's followers, after all, who went about caring for the poor, tending the sick, and providing education for people of all sorts (not only the rich or the elite). There is no reason why Jesus's followers should not continue this work and every reason why they should.

many people today assume that Christianity is one or more of these things—a religion, a moral system, a philosophy. In other words, they assume that Christianity is about advice. But it wasn't and isn't. Christianity is, simply, good news. It is the news that something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place.

In his appearing we find neither a dualist rejection of the present world nor simply his arrival like a spaceman into the present world but rather the transformation of the present world, and ourselves within it, so that it will at last be put to rights and we with it. Death and decay will be overcome, and God will be all in all. This

Jesus—the Jesus we might discover if we really looked!—is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we—than the church!—had ever imagined.

Those who belong to him are to believe and to live by the belief that they died and rose again with him, so that they are no longer under any slavish obligation to obey the old master.

Somehow, these scenes suggest, the big issues of human life are to be resolved by being put into a quite different frame from the normal one. It is the frame we could summarize in Jesus's own agenda—the coming of God's kingdom—and in his words: "Follow me!

To imagine a world without the gospel of Jesus is to imagine a pretty bleak place

I believe, as I said before, that this could result in a revolution—a revolution in the way in which Christians approach the whole question of "how to think about what to do," and also, out beyond that, a revolution in the way human beings in general approach the question of what it means to live a fulfilled, genuinely human life.

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.

We are saved not as souls but as wholes. (All

They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.

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.

work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.

No, insists Paul, once you learn the meaning of the gospel, you have to see everything inside out.

Paul does of course want the young Christians to develop to the point where, as mature followers of Jesus Christ, they will gradually find that the Christian habits of heart and life "come naturally." But to get to that point they must learn

What, in particular, might it mean to say that 'as Jesus was to Israel, so the Church should be for the world'?