Quotes about Jesus

you ought not judge" is itself a judgment! (Pluralists misinterpret Jesus' comments on judging [Matt. 7:1-5]. Jesus did not prohibit judging as such, only judging hypocritically.)

Take away the stories of Jesus's birth, and all you lose is four chapters of the Gospels. Take away the resurrection and you lose the entire New Testament, and most of the second-century fathers as well.

As the early church boasted rightly, the message of Jesus is both simple enough for a child to paddle in and deep enough for an elephant to swim in.

God is the God of truth. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. The Scriptures are the truth. The gospel is the word of truth. Conversion is a turnaround triggered by truth. Discipleship is the way of life that is living in truth. Confession is a realignment with the truth. Spiritual growth is life formation through the power of the Spirit of truth. And the Last Judgment is the final vindication and restoration of truth for humanity and for the very cosmos itself.

The Christianization of the modern world is leading to the modernization of the Christian faith and away from the way of Jesus. Similarly, as we shall see, the Christianization of America has led to the Americanization of the Christian faith and away from the way of Jesus.

We have pointed to the way of Jesus, and then through our behavior we have stood squarely in the path of anyone who might like to join it. Plainly, there is a time in our arguments to confess, and confession and changed lives have to be a key part of our arguments. When it comes our responding to hypocrisy, words will never be enough.

To see apologetics only as technique is an insult to the gospel and to the high importance of what God is saying and doing in Jesus. From the humblest pun to the greatest double entendre of all time—the incarnation—the Bible is full of stories, parables, drama, ploys and jests that serve the ultimate purpose of the gospel and are shaped by the truth and logic of the message of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.

Without truth there is no freedom, and without truth there is no freedom from hypocrisy. No one has ever seriously accused Jesus of hypocrisy, no one has ever been more severe on hypocrisy than Jesus, and no one has ever offered a sterner but more gracious and effective cure to hypocrisy than Jesus.

A striking symptom of the church's problems in the West today is the fact that in a country such as the United States, Christians are still the overwhelming majority of citizens, but the American way of life has moved far from the way of life of Jesus—which means simply that the Christians who are the majority are living a way of life closer to the world than to the way of Jesus. In a word, they are worldly and therefore incapable of shaping their culture.

we Christians are not practicing what we preach, we cannot expect our society to enjoy the fruits of the way of life of Jesus, and our Christian faith is likely to be implausible and off-putting to the wider world.

Or of the fact that in the United States, where Evangelicals, the people of the good news, are still strong numerically, they have become one of the shallowest, noisiest and most corrupt parts of the Christian Church, bringing down an unprecedented avalanche of disdain on their heads—almost none of which has anything to do with Jesus?

but conformity to the will and the way of Jesus is life and freedom itself—under his authority.