When humans take up their divinely appointed role, looking after God's world on his behalf, this is not a Promethean attempt to usurp God's role. It is the humble, obedient carrying out of the role that has been assigned. The real arrogance would be to refuse the vocation, imagining that we know better than God the purpose for which we have been put here.

The future goal is the thing which produces character in the present.

Wise Christian worship takes fully into account the fact that creation has gone horribly wrong, has been so corrupted and spoiled that a great fault line runs right down the middle of it ... worship of God as redeemer, the lover and rescuer of the world, must always accompany and complete the worship of God as creator.

The claim advanced in Christianity is of that magnitude: Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation. Now

What the Bible offers is not a "works contract," but a covenant of vocation. The vocation in question is that of being a genuine human being, with genuinely human tasks to perform as part of the Creator's purpose for his world.

According to the book of Revelation, Jesus died in order to make us not rescued nonentities, but restored human beings with a vocation to play a vital part in God's purposes for the world.

God made humans to reflect his glory, his love, his wisdom into the world, and in the new creation God will not revoke this vocation. He will gloriously fulfill it. We will become more human, not less.

In God's kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king.

Those who belong to Jesus are called, here and now, in the power of the Spirit, to be agents of that putting-to-rights purpose.

The dreams we have that refuse to die—dreams of freedom and beauty, of order and love, dreams that we can make a real difference in the world—come into their own when we put them within a framework of belief in a God who made the world and is going to sort it out once and for all, and wants to involve human beings in that process.

Human" is a kind of midway creature, reflecting God into the world, and reflecting the world back to God.

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.