Quotes About People

Good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, exciting and worthwhile though that is, but thought through and relished, planned and prepared -- an ultimately better way for the relationship to grow and at the same time a way of demonstrating what the relationship is all about.

The Psalter forms the great epic poem of the creator and covenant God who will at the last visit and redeem his people and, with them, his whole creation.

When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn't.

Israel isn't chosen in order to be God's special people while the rest of the world remains in outer darkness. Israel is chosen to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth. Israel is chosen so that, through Israel, God can bless all people. And now Jesus is calling Israel to be the light of the world at last. He is opening the way, carving a path through the jungle towards that vocation, urging his followers to come with him on the dangerous road.

The reason history is fascinating is because people in other times and places are so like us. The reason history is difficult is because people in other times and places are so different from us. History is, to that extent, like marriage

the reason Israel's story matters is that the creator of the world has chosen and called Israel to be the people through whom he will redeem the world.

Never before have so many people tripped over one another in their eagerness to get rich and thereby impaled themselves on the consequences of their own greed. The greatest irony of it all is that it's done in the name of contentment

His larger position is what we might call messianic eschatology: if Jesus is Israel's Messiah, then Israel's God is regrouping his people around Jesus, just as other first-century messianic movements tried to corral loyal Jews around their central figure.

This pattern—God intending to live among his people, being unable to because of their rebellion, but coming back in grace to do so at last—is, in a measure, the story of the whole Old Testament.

Basically, I believe that scripture is the book through which the church is enabled to be the church, to be the people of God anticipating his sovereign rule on earth as in heaven, and that this fleshes out what our formularies say in a three-dimensional and energetic fashion.

Whenever God does something new, he involves people – often unlikely people, frequently surprised and alarmed people. He asks them to trust him in a new way, to put aside their natural reactions, to listen humbly for a fresh word and to act on it without knowing exactly how it's going to work out.

Did Paul think that Jesus was the Messiah? Of course. Did recognizing someone as Messiah imply that God's people were regrouped around him? Naturally. Was that a non-Jewish or even anti-Jewish thing to suggest? Of course not. The point, anyway, is that for Paul the Messiah's people are both a 'new creation' and the fulfilment of the divine intention for Israel.

especially when you add in his apparent fondness for parties, on the one hand, and prayer, on the other, and his remarkably shrewd ability to sum up situations, people, and problems in a pithy phrase or to tease out fresh meaning with a neat, telling story. What a man, we say to ourselves.

Among the many highly complex and artistic patterns which have been discerned throughout these chapters we may highlight the rather obvious one: that the judgments, like the plagues in Egypt, are the prelude to the rescue of God's people.

The death of Jesus launched the revolution; it got rid of the roadblock between the divine promises and the nations for whom they were intended. And it opened the way for the Spirit to be poured out to equip God's people for their tasks.

More satisfactory by far, at the level of history, is to say with Gerhard Lohfink that Jesus did not intend to found a church because there already was one, namely the people of Israel itself. Jesus' intention was therefore to reform Israel, not to found a different community altogether.

The Creator works in a thousand ways, but one central way is through people—people who think, who pray, who make difficult decisions, who work hard, especially in prayer. That is part of what it means to be image-bearers. The question of divine action and human action is seldom a zero-sum game. If the worlds of heaven and earth have rushed together in Jesus and the spirit, one should expect different layers of explanation to reside together, to reinforce one another.

hope it is clear, in fact, that this task of telling people about Jesus remains vital.

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 second speaker contributing to what we hear the gospels saying is the one that enables us to hear the story of Jesus as the story of Israel's God coming back to his people as he had always promised.

It is that they learn to think of themselves as characters in the story of God and his people, whose earlier chapters set out characteristic lessons to be mastered by those who find themselves in the later chapters. But the overall point is this: they are in the same story, not a different story which happens to be parallel to another earlier one.

Pakistan produces people of extraordinary bravery. But no nation should ever require its citizens to be that brave.

Equality was not freedom, it had only been the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom.

If you want to move people, you look for a point of sensitivity, and in Egypt nothing moves people as much as religion.