Quotes about Transformation

People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don't.

This is typical of what the New Testament declares: God is king, and the kingdoms of the world are thereby demoted.

Following Jesus means denying yourself, saying 'no' to the things that you imagine make up your 'self', and finding to your astonishment that the 'self' you get back is more glorious, more joyful than you could have imagined.

When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become like what you worship; what's more, you reflect what you worship not only back to the object itself but also outward to the world around.

has happened before—literally, with the ending of the slave trade and the subsequent freeing of the slaves—and it needs to happen again. And happen it will, because the victory of the cross is real, and the power of the Spirit to implement that victory is real as well.

Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess. RESURRECTION:

God will download our software onto his hardware until the time when he gives us new hardware to run the software again.25

Jesus is often seen as someone who can "teach" you to play the piano, so that you can perform Mozart and Beethoven. But Jesus was more like someone who had just invented an entirely new musical instrument, had written some stunning music for it, and was now "teaching" people to play the new music on the new instrument. Jesus was announcing that a whole new world was being born and he was "teaching" people how to live within that whole new world.

But from the start within early Christianity it was built in as part of the belief in resurrection that the new body, though it will certainly be a body in the sense of a physical object occupying space and time, will be a transformed body, a body whose material, created from the old material, will have new properties. There has been a dramatic sharpening up of what resurrection itself actually entailed.

If you belong to Jesus the Messiah, if his Spirit dwells in you, if you are a worshipper of the one true God, maker of heaven and earth—then however you may feel at the moment, whether you are sick or healthy, handsome or jaded, you are simply a shadow of your future self. God intends to transform the "you" you are at the moment into a being—a full, glorious, physical being—who will be much more truly "you" than you've ever been before.

Right through Israel's history there had been a sense that, strange though it might seem, the one true God would use this small and apparently insignificant nation as his means of transforming the entire world. This great transforming event would be, finally, the coming of the Kingdom of God.

There is no way back. No other explanations have been offered, in two thousand years of sneering skepticism toward the Christian witness, that can satisfactorily account for how the tomb came to be empty, how the disciples came to see Jesus, and how their lives and worldviews were transformed.