The place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short.

Like the prodigal's father, God accepts us as we are. But He doesn't want to leave us that way. God will change us.

Jesus completely abolishes all ordinary ideas and expectations people have of a Supreme Being.

Jesus never allowed himself to be defined by the political conflicts of his day, and neither should we.

The reason God now calls kingdom people to remain separate from the ways of the kingdom-of-the-world is not to isolate them from their culture but to empower them to authentically serve their culture and ultimately win it over to allegiance to Jesus Christ. The reason we are not to be of the world is so we may be for the world.

The radically countercultural and revolutionary movement that Jesus birthed has, in our country (as in every other "Christian" country), been largely reduced to little more than a preservation society for a national civil religion.

We tend to become the decisions we make. The more we choose something, the more we become that something. We are all in the process of solidifying our identities by the decisions we make. With each decision we make, we pick up momentum in the direction of that decision.

The result is that it has become humanly impossible for many around the globe to hear the good news as good. Instead, because of its kingdom-of-the-world associations, they hear the gospel as bad news, as American news, exploitive capitalistic news, greedy news, violent news, and morally decadent news. They can't see the beauty of the cross because everything the American flag represents to them is in the way.

God acts toward his people, as much as possible, but since he is a God of persuasion rather than coercion, God also allows his people to act on him and to thereby condition the form his self-revelation takes, as much as this is necessary to remain in solidarity with, and to continue to work through, his fallen and culturally conditioned people.

The kingdom of God is not a Christian version of the kingdom of the world. It is, rather, a holy alternative to all versions of the kingdom of the world, and everything hangs on kingdom people appreciating this uniqueness and preserving this holiness.

He came to ultimately put the kingdom of the world out of business by establishing a counterkingdom of radical love that would eventually render it obsolete.

I believe one of the most pervasive problems in contemporary Western Christianity is that we mistakenly assume that information automatically translates into transformation.