Quotes about Life

We can begin to focus on the eternal if we live to love God and others (the Jesus Creed), if we pursue justice as the way we are called to love others as God's creations, if we live out a life that drives for peace as how loving people treat one another, and if we strive for wisdom instead of just knowledge or bounty.

I hope at some time you can read J. R. R. Tolkien's brilliant short story called "Leaf by Niggle," because I can think of no better description of the continuity of this life in the New Heavens and the New Earth.)

The release of souls from this embodied life into a celestial disembodied existence is not a biblical notion. The opposite is the case with Jesus and for the entire Bible.

If you want to know how Jesus understands the Christian life, the place to begin is with what he means by kingdom of God.

Martin Luther offers a powerful reminder in our temptation to go at life on our own: The world is insane. It tries to get rid of its insanity by the use of wisdom and reason; and it looks for many ways and means, for all sorts of help and advice on how to escape this distress.

Torah is not theoretical morality but lived theology, a life enflamed by knowing God.

To say this once again, the focus of the Bible on fasting is not on what we get from fasting or on motivating people to fast in order to acquire something, but instead lands squarely on responding to sacred moments in life.

as life is a story, so also is spiritual formation a story—a journey from earth to heaven.

Am I absorbed with an Ethic from Beyond? Is my life too absorbed with the here and now?

We aren't called to live first-century lives in the twenty-first century, but twenty-first-century lives as we walk in the light of the revelation God gave to us in the first century.

The Sermon on the Mount crystallizes what Jesus gave to his disciples as the new way of life, the kingdom way of life in a world surrounded by the power brokers of empire.

The Sermon on the Mount is the moral portrait of Jesus' own people. Because this portrait doesn't square with the church, this Sermon turns from instruction to indictment. To those ends—both instruction and indictment—this commentary has been written with the simple goal that God will use this book to lead us to become in real life the portrait Jesus sketched in the Sermon.