Quotes About God

To begin with, you have to grasp the fact that Christian virtue isn't about you—your happiness, your fulfillment, your self-realization. It's about God and God's kingdom, and your discovery of a genuine human existence by the paradoxical route—the route God himself took in Jesus Christ!—of giving yourself away, of generous love which constantly refuses to take center stage.

Our task [as Christians] is to be faithful to the calling of the cross; to live in God's new world as the agents of his love,and to pray that the cross we carry today will become part of the healing and reconciliation of the world. We will not understand in the present time how it is that our pain, our illness, our heartbreak, our deep frustration, is somehow taken up into the pain of God and the healing of the world; but if we offer it back to God that is precisely what will happen.

But what then is this "righteousness of God"? In Israel's scriptures, to which Paul explicitly appeals in 3:21b ("the law and the prophets bore witness to it"), God's "righteousness" is not simply God's status of being morally upright. It is, more specifically, God's faithfulness to the covenant—the covenant not only with Abraham and Israel, but through Israel to the wider world.

God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world.

This is typical of what the New Testament declares: God is king, and the kingdoms of the world are thereby demoted.

This idea of God being faithful to the covenant clearly seems to be Paul's meaning here in Romans 3.

Caesar is only mentioned once in the gospels, and there Jesus says that there's a clear division between God and Caesar, a split of church and state, so that never the twain shall meet. Well, not so fast. We'll get to that. It sounds suspiciously modern. Did Jesus really anticipate post-Enlightenment Western ideology so exactly?

But the demonstration of the power of Jesus' name took place, not in the Temple, but outside the gate. God is on the move, not confined

Passover takes precedence—it was, after all, the ultimate divine rescue operation and the ultimate revelation of God in action

That vision of the future—an ultimate glory that has left behind the present world of space, time, and matter—sets the context for what, as we shall see, is a basically paganized vision of how one might attain such a future: a transaction in which God's wrath was poured out against his son rather than against sinful humans.

it is possible to allow the study of the text, and of different interpretations of the text, to become a substitute for allowing the text to bring us into the presence of the living God.

The four gospels, again in their very different ways, are all written to tell the story of Jesus as the story of Israel, and the story of Israel's God, reaching their proper climax, so as thereby to tell the story of how Israel's God becomes king of the whole world.

Paul is talking about the present body, which is animated by the normal human psych? (the life force we all possess here and now, which gets us through the present life but is ultimately powerless against illness, injury, decay, and death), and the future body, which is animated by God's pneuma, God's breath of new life, the energizing power of God's new creation. This

One way and another, all three synoptic gospels are clear: in telling the story of Jesus they are consciously telling the story of how Israel's God came back to his people, in judgment and mercy.

We should allow ourselves, on a regular basis, to be struck anew by the thick, rich, multilayered nature of these four documents, so full of vivid human scenes, but so evocative in their resonance of meaning about the world, God, life and death, and pretty much everything else.

The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love. That is the good news.

suggestion that "sin" does not make God angry (a frequent idea in modern thought as a reaction against the caricatures of an ill-tempered deity) needs to be treated with disdain.

the famous opening of the central poem in the book of Isaiah stresses comfort: "Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

The wrath of God is simply the shadow side of the love of God for his wonderful creation and his amazing human creatures. Like a great artist appalled at the way his paintings

Sin," then, is not simply the breaking of God's rules. It is the outflowing of idolatry.

When God looks at sin, what he sees is what a violin maker would see if the player were to use his lovely creation as a tennis racquet.

If you want to know what it means to talk about God being 'in charge of' the world, or being 'in control', or being 'sovereign', then Jesus himself instructs you to rethink the notion of 'kingdom', 'control' and 'sovereignty' themselves, around his death on the cross.

This emerges clearly in the gospels, where Jesus's "authority" consists both in healing power and in a different kind of teaching, all of which the gospel writers—and Jesus himself—understood as part of the breaking-in of God's Kingdom.

that God's call of Abraham and his family was designed to put right what was wrong with the world.