Quotes about Bible

We in the Western world are obsessed with our individual relationship with God, which leads us to read the Bible as morsels of blessings and promises and as Rorschach inkblots. But reading the Bible as Story opens up a need so deep we sometimes aren't aware we need it: oneness with others under the King who rules his Kingdom.

Until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living.

It is impossible for us to indwell this Story and not assume that narrative's perspective. Again, that perspective is God's perspective. It is not our perspective; it is God's perspective. It is God's perspective on us, not our perspective on others. Bible readers, especially pastors (and commenters on blogs), inevitably begin to think like God about ourselves and others.

This otherness problem is what the gospel "fixes," and the story of the Bible is the story of God's people struggling with otherness and searching for oneness.

It is a fact that many statements about what the Bible says are derived from contextless exegeses of a former generation

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me; it is the parts I do understand." Whoever said that may well have been thinking about Matthew 5 or even our specific passage.

Fourth lesson in Bible reading: we are challenged to be better than nonfollowers. Followers are marked by a greater righteousness or by more righteousness. (Just what that more will look like can be found in the antitheses of 5:21—48.)

But Augustine knew the Bible's main mission: so that we can become people who love God and love others. If our reading of the Bible leads to this, the mission is accomplished. If it isn't …

It tells us that God gave the Bible a mission: God speaks to us so we will be the kind of people he wants and will live the way he wants us to live.

God gave the Bible not so we can know it but so we can know and love God through it.

the God of the Bible is so immense, omnipotent, and omniscient that for God, knowing each of us in the depths of our beings is an afternoon walk in Sydney's botanical garden. The God of Jesus knows us by name, knows our minds and hearts and emotions, loves us (anyway), and summons us, as it were, into the divine presence to lay out our requests.

I believe that the broad sweep of the way in which prayer works in the Bible — and I'm thinking here of Jonah and the repentance of Nineveh — teaches us that God, in his sovereignty, has established a kind of contingency in the universe, and that God genuinely interacts with humans who pray in such a way that the universe changes as a result of our prayers.