Quotes about Message

Caesar's messengers didn't go round the world saying, 'Caesar is lord, so if you feel you need to have a Roman-empire kind of experience, you might want to submit to him'.

We can glimpse it in the book of Acts: the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom…goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always — as Paul puts it in one of his letters — bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed.

Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don't have a New Testament; you don't have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins.

When we say, "Jesus died for our sins" within a message about how to escape this nasty old world and go to heaven, it means one thing. When we say, "Jesus died for our sins" within a message about God the creator rescuing his creation from corruption, decay, and death, and rescuing us to be part of that, it means something significantly different.

News is an announcement that something significant has happened. And good news is what Jesus and his first followers were all about.

Jesus's message to his contemporaries, and the church's message about Jesus, never fit what people expect. Often enough, they don't fit what the church itself expects.

Once you lose the kingdom theme, which is central to the gospels, everything else becomes reinterpreted in ways that radically distort, that substitute a subtly different "gospel" message for the one Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are eager to convey.

This emerges clearly in the gospels, where Jesus's "authority" consists both in healing power and in a different kind of teaching, all of which the gospel writers—and Jesus himself—understood as part of the breaking-in of God's Kingdom.

My main argument in this book is that when we understand the Christian message, we will see that it does indeed "make sense" of our world, because it helps us both to understand the world the way it is and to be able to contribute fresh "sense" through our own lives.

we should be in no doubt that, for the gospel writers themselves, there was never a kingdom message without a cross

Jesus of Nazareth was a real man, living and dying at a turbulent moment in real space-time history. His message, and the message about him that the early Christians called good news, was not about how to escape that world. It was about how the one true God was changing it, radically and forever.

Rules of faith and creeds are like the guard rails on the side of the highway, which prevent you from skidding off into the path of oncoming traffic. They do not themselves tell you everything you need to know about your journey and destination, nor do they put fresh gas in your tank. Only the scriptural message about God's kingdom in Jesus Christ will do that.