Quotes about Purpose

When humans take up their divinely appointed role, looking after God's world on his behalf, this is not a Promethean attempt to usurp God's role. It is the humble, obedient carrying out of the role that has been assigned. The real arrogance would be to refuse the vocation, imagining that we know better than God the purpose for which we have been put here.

What the Bible offers is not a "works contract," but a covenant of vocation. The vocation in question is that of being a genuine human being, with genuinely human tasks to perform as part of the Creator's purpose for his world.

According to the book of Revelation, Jesus died in order to make us not rescued nonentities, but restored human beings with a vocation to play a vital part in God's purposes for the world.

When Jesus gave his disciples this prayer, he was giving them part of his own breath, his own life, his own prayer. The prayer is actually a distillation of his own sense of vocation, his own understanding of his Father's purposes. If we are truly to enter into it and make it our own, it can only be if we first understand how he set about living the Kingdom himself.

In God's kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king.

Those who belong to Jesus are called, here and now, in the power of the Spirit, to be agents of that putting-to-rights purpose.

Human" is a kind of midway creature, reflecting God into the world, and reflecting the world back to God.

God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world.

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.

The divine purpose through Israel for the world is the subject of the passages both before and after 3:21—26. There is every reason, therefore, for taking "God's righteousness" in 3:21 in its normal biblical sense of "covenant faithfulness.

within the institution, breaking out into new worlds, leaving behind the shrine which had become a place of worldly power and resistance to his purposes.

the reason Israel's story matters is that the creator of the world has chosen and called Israel to be the people through whom he will redeem the world.