Quotes about Jesus

Nondiscipleship costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God's overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil. In short, nondiscipleship costs you exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring (John 10:10).

Now, Jesus himself was and is a joyous, creative person. He does not allow us to continue thinking of our Father who fills and overflows space as a morose and miserable monarch, a frustrated and petty parent, or a policeman on the prowl.

Very few people today find Jesus interesting as a person or of vital relevance to the course of their actual lives. He is not generally regarded as a real-life personality who deals with real-life issues but is thought to be concerned with some feathery realm other than the one we must deal with, and must deal with now. And frankly, he is not taken to be a person of much ability.

Anger and condemnation like vengeance, are safely left to God. We must beware of believing that it is okay for us to condemn as long as we are condemning the right things. It is not so simple as all that. I can trust Jesus to go into the temple and drive out those who were profiting from religion, beating them with a rope. I cannot trust myself to do so.

Mark 12 lists every dimension under the governance of Jesus' love.

But the final step in becoming a disciple is decision. We become a life student of Jesus by deciding.

The problem comes when we mistake the vessel for the treasure, for the treasure is the life and power of Jesus Christ.

For our Christian groups and their leaders, it means that there is a simple, straightforward way in which congregations of Jesus' people can, without exception, fulfill his call to be an ecclesia, his "called out" ones: a touch point between heaven and earth, where the healing of the Cross and the Resurrection can save the lost and grow the saved into the fullness of human beings in Christ.

They bring the life of the kingdom to other people. They bring that life in themselves. That's what Jesus himself said, and that's what he did. When he came, he said, "Repent for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand." What was at hand? The kingdom that was in him. As people looked at him and listened to him, they realized that the kingdom of God was there and that it was available to them, and they became disciples of Jesus because of that.

Believe our only hope for leaders to increasingly work in the way of Jesus, for the glory of Jesus, in the power of Jesus and under the direction of Jesus will be as they have passed through stages that help them learn the soul work of surrender, abandonment, contentment and participation. There simply are no shortcuts.

A great deal of what goes into "training them [us] to do everything I said" consists simply in bringing people to believe with their whole being the information they already have as a result of their initial confidence in Jesus—even if that initial confidence was only the confidence of desperation.

The Christian story is a story of human redemption from sin and from the power of evil. It is a story of the power of Jesus to overcome evil without engaging in it—of how he lives beyond all that evil can do against him or us. He has to be victorious in this battle.