Quotes about Life

God's ultimate intention was to 'save' only disembodied 'souls', that wouldn't be rescue from death. It would simply allow the death of the body to have the last word. 'Salvation' regularly refers constantly, not least in Luke and Acts, to specific acts of 'rescue' within the present life: being 'saved' from this potential disaster, here and now.

If God's ultimate intention was to 'save' only disembodied 'souls', that wouldn't be rescue from death. It would simply allow the death of the body to have the last word. 'Salvation' regularly refers constantly, not least in Luke and Acts, to specific acts of 'rescue' within the present life: being 'saved' from this potential disaster, here and now.

This was something new. They recognized the Jesus followers as a strange new presence in their midst, neither a "religion" nor a "political power," but a whole new kind of life, a new way of being human.

Hence too the promise that those who receive the abundance of divine grace will "reign in life" (v. 17). Here again is the goal of salvation, the restoration of the truly human destiny, of the covenant of vocation in which humans are called as the royal priesthood. The passage is dense, but when we take it slowly it all makes sense—within this framework. The Adam project, for humans to share in God's rule over creation, is back on track.

The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection, from the present on to the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story. It is where we are now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings which form the gateway to life.

Our task in the present is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

everyone who wants to live a godly life in King Jesus will be persecuted

Stories are a basic constituent of human life; they are, in fact, one key element within the total construction of a worldview. I

Somehow, these scenes suggest, the big issues of human life are to be resolved by being put into a quite different frame from the normal one. It is the frame we could summarize in Jesus's own agenda—the coming of God's kingdom—and in his words: "Follow me!

the life of Jesus recapitulates key elements in the earlier story of Israel.

I believe, as I said before, that this could result in a revolution—a revolution in the way in which Christians approach the whole question of "how to think about what to do," and also, out beyond that, a revolution in the way human beings in general approach the question of what it means to live a fulfilled, genuinely human life.

in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life—God's dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever. And when we come to the picture of the actual end in Revelation 21—22, we find not ransomed souls making their way to a disembodied heaven but rather the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace.