Jesus did not use hell to try and compel heathens and pagans to believe in God, so they wouldn't burn when they die. He talked about hell to very religious people to warn them about the consequences o...
Jesus responds to almost every question he's asked with...a question.What do you think? How do you read it? he asks, again and again and again.
As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn't come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in...
Jesus is God's way of refusing to give up his dream for the world.
When people stepped forward and said, You have heard it interpreted this way, but I tell you it really means this, it was progressive for their day. They were making new claims about what it means to...
If anybody didn't have a messiah complex, it was Jesus
[The Bible] has to be interpreted. And if it isn’t interpreted, then it can’t be put into action. So if we are serious about following God, then we have to interpret the Bible. It is not possible to s...
Jesus is supracultural. He is present within all cultures, and yet outside of all cultures. He is for all people, and yet he refuses to be co-opted or owned by any one culture. That includes any Chris...
It’s one thing to be in love; it’s another to act because of love. Love is a noun—a feeling you have—and it’s also a verb, something you do.
Why didn’t they just skip the whole sacrificial system all together? That would have been amazing. Just scrap the whole thing. Announce that the final sacrifice has been offered and there’s no more ne...
To say it again, eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life now in connection to God. Eternal life doesn't start when we die; it s...
As we experience this love, there is a temptation at times to become hostile to our earlier understandings, feeling embarrassed that we were so simple or naive, or brainwashed or whatever terms arise...
People wrote these stories down because they found in them something that helped restore their dignity; the stories gave them a sense of identity; they helped give voice to their pain.
Some communities don't permit open, honest inquiry about the things that matter most. Lots of people have voiced a concern, expressed a doubt, or raised a question, only to be told by their family, ch...
If your faith is threatened by something that’s true, then it wasn’t much of a faith to begin with, was it?
It's as if Thomas Kinkade and Dante were at a party, and one turned to the other sometime after midnight and uttered that classic line You know, we really should work together sometime...
How we respond to what happens to us - especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over - is a creative act.
If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody. And this is because the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and convin...
It's the voices in your head that speak doubt and insecurity and fear and anxiety. Like a tape that's jammed on repeat, these destructive messages will drain an extraordinary amount of your energies i...
Success is when you're seduced into thinking that your joy and satisfaction are not here but there--somewhere in the future, at some moment when you accomplish X or you win Y.Success can never get eno...
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