Quotes about Followers

the gospels are consciously telling the story of how God's one-time action in Jesus the Messiah ushered in a new world order within which a new way of life was not only possible, but mandatory for Jesus's followers.

Jesus and his first followers, as Second Temple Jews, believed as well in an eschatology of new creation. This did not involve the abolition of the present world and its replacement with a totally different on. Nor did it imply the steady evolution-from-within of the Stoics, let alone the escapist 'eschatology' of the heading-for-heaven Platonists. They believed in the redemptive transformation of the present world into a new one.

Despite what skeptics and critics sometimes say, followers of Jesus have transformed the world in all sorts of ways in the last two thousand years. It was Jesus's followers, after all, who went about caring for the poor, tending the sick, and providing education for people of all sorts (not only the rich or the elite). There is no reason why Jesus's followers should not continue this work and every reason why they should.

Jesus only appeared to people who believed in him. Answer: the accounts make it clear that Thomas and Paul do not belong to this category; and actually none of Jesus's followers believed, after his death, that he really was the Messiah, let alone that he was in any sense divine.

When Matthew has the angel tell Joseph that the child to be born will be "Emmanuel," "God with us," and then finishes his gospel with Jesus himself telling his followers that he will be "with them always," alert readers know that the entire story ought to be read with this in mind.

enjoined on all Jesus followers—takes place in the context of the initial victory won on the cross.

Some people, including some who wanted to think of themselves as followers of Jesus, took exactly that line. We can watch the process taking place in the so-called Gnostic gospels (books like the Gospel of Thomas).

New creation can happen because the power of the satan, of Babylon, of Pharaoh has been broken. That is how the story works. That is what is different by six o'clock on the evening of Good Friday, though Jesus's followers don't realize it until the third day, which is the first day of the new week, the start of the new world.

I always remember the regent's axiom: a leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind. It

Paul doesn't call followers of Jesus "Christians." He calls them "in Christ." That isn't the easiest thing to understand, let alone explain, but it suggests an intimacy with Jesus that defies words. That intimacy also includes—somehow—suffering.

It took a while, but the early followers of Jesus began to put the pieces together. Resurrection is a future thing, part of the "world to come." Raising Jesus now meant that the "world to come" was already here—at least a preview of it.

Then he said to Korah and all his followers, “Tomorrow morning the LORD will reveal who belongs to Him and who is holy, and He will bring that person near to Himself. The one He chooses, He will bring near to Himself.