Quotes about Devotion

Humans are designed to worship God and exercise responsibility in his world. But when humans worship idols instead, so that their image-bearing humanness corrupts itself into sin, missing the mark of the human vocation, they hand over their power to those same idols. The idols then use this power to tyrannize and ultimately to destroy their devotees and the wider world. But when sins are forgiven, the idols lose their power.

obvious Greek term for "loyalty" is one of Paul's favorite words, pistis, regularly translated "faith," but often carrying the overtones of "faithfulness," "reliability," and, yes, "loyalty.

Turn back' —turn back from doing things your own way, from organizing your life according to your own hopes and whims. If God is becoming king, and if Jesus is being installed as the human king through whom God's kingdom is now happening, the only appropriate reaction is to abandon our own little hopes and schemes and let God be God in our lives. And through our lives.

And, since the exile was the result of Israel's idolatry (no devout Jew would have contested the point, since the great prophets had made it so clear), what they needed was not just a new Passover, a new rescue from slavery to pagan tyrants. They needed forgiveness.

My fourth starting-point towards a fresh approach is to insist on some kind of lectio continua, both personally and publicly. There are, to be sure, many times and occasions when we need to choose special readings to suit a particular moment or challenge. But the church's staple diet ought to be to work through the books of the Bible on a more or less continuous loop.

will be painful. That is part of the point, not that we seek the pain, but that we seek to follow Jesus.

the human calling to worship God and reflect him into his world.

your praying and your preaching should be of the same length. You don't want to find yourself limping, with one leg shorter than the other. God works as a result of prayer and faithfulness, not technique and cleverness. But

Saul had been absolutely right in his devotion to the One God, but absolutely wrong in his understanding of who that One God was and how his purposes would be fulfilled.

He had been absolutely right in his devotion to Israel and the Torah, but absolutely wrong in his view of Israel's vocation and identity and even in the meaning of the Torah itself.

You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.

When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven't yet really understood who he is or what he's done.