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Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense QUOTES

Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense QUOTES

1 " The church exists primarily for two closely correlated purposes: to worship God and to work for his kingdom in the world ... The church also exists for a third purpose, which serves the other two: to encourage one another, to build one another up in faith, to pray with and for one another, to learn from one another and teach one another, and to set one another examples to follow, challenges to take up, and urgent tasks to perform. This is all part of what is known loosely as fellowship. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

2 " After defending the value of prepared prayers, the author cautions against over-reliance on them. Just as David could not fight in the armor of King Saul, we are called to fight in the way God has equipped us uniquely. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

3 " The author chuckles at the resistance to using a prepared, written liturgy in prayer. He compares it to being unwilling to dress in any clothing we did not make ourselves, or being unwilling to drive a car we did not construct entirely by ourselves. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

4 " The only sure rule is to remember that the Bible is indeed God's gift to the church, to equip that church for its work in the world, and that serious study of it can and should become one of the places where, and the means by which, heaven and earth interlock and God's future purposes arrive in the present. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

5 " The author extols the power of having significant portions of God's Word read in public worship with the following analogy. He says that by reading a few short verses, we are like someone glimpsing nature through window from across the room. But by taking in more lengthy passages of Scripture, we are like someone who, intrigue, gets right next to the window to take in more of the view that it offers, basking in more of the arc of the whole the whole narrative. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

6 " The Bible is the story so far in the true novel that God is still writing. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

7 " We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically in a Church, where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love, and to promise what we already desire. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

8 " That is what worship is all about. It is the glad shout of praise that arises to God the creator and God the rescuer from the creation that recognizes its maker, the creation that acknowledges the triumph of Jesus the Lamb. That is the worship that is going on in heaven, in God's dimension, all the time. The question we ought to be asking is how best we might join in. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

9 " Christian spirituality combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of His intimate presence. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

10 " The author compares rationalism and much of organized religion do a dictator who paves over natural springs in order to dispense water in a more organized fashion. The pushback of the world hungry for wonder may be compared to the break out of those springs from their constraints. Not everything they produce is healthy, but the overreaction of eliminating them is worse. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

11 " The author explains the evidence for they would help from astronomy. He says that if planets are behaving in a way that cannot be explained by what is already known, then another planet is searched for which would explain their behavior. This, he says, is actually how the more distant planets were discovered. We look, then, for something that would explain what is not inexplicable from what we already see. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

12 " Setting the stage for the Tower of Babel, the author says that, while humanity had a mission to reflect God, it had been distracted by its own reflection and was both fascinated and fearful of what it saw. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

13 " Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God's new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

14 " For Christians it's always a love game ... that He is love itself ... Indeed, some have suggested that one way of understanding the Spirit is to see the Spirit as the personal love which the Father has for the Son and the Son for the Father. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

15 " The debate that has been conducted in terms of "creation versus evolution" has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion of other parts of the Bible. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

16 " It is not about "life after death" as such. Rather, it's a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: "life after 'life after death. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

17 " Christians do not avail ourselves of Plato's safety-hatch and say that the real world is not a thing of space, time, and matter, but another world into which we can escape. We say that the present world is the real one, and that it's in bad shape, but expecting to be repaired. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

18 " Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world ... That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

19 " 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. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

20 " [Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining. "

― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense