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“Jesus was not revolutionary because he said we should love God and each other. Moses said that first. So did Buddha, Confucius, and countless other religious leaders we've never heard of. Madonna, Oprah, Dr. Phil, the Dali Lama, and probably a lot of Christian leaders will tell us that the point of religion is to get us to love each other. "God loves you" doesn't stir the world's opposition. However, start talking about God's absolute authority, holiness, ... Christ's substitutionary atonement, justification apart from works, the necessity of new birth, repentance, baptism, Communion, and the future judgment, and the mood in the room changes considerably.”
― Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church
― Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church
“Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts... It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.”
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“The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom.”
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
“Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.”
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
“It does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend, as well as preaching, to give a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the word of God, yet they have not an equal tendency to impress them on men's hearts and affections. God hath appointed a particular and lively application of his word, in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners with the importance of religion, their own misery, the necessity of a remedy, and the glory and sufficiency of a remedy provided; to stir up the pure minds of the saints, quicken their affections by often bringing the great things of religion in their remembrance, and setting them in their proper colours, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in them already. ”
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Tom’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Tom’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
945 books
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43 friends
923 books
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41 friends
505 books
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256 friends
1,036 books
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83 friends
1,184 books
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176 friends
561 books
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102 friends
20 books
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29 friends
391 books
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29 friends
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