“ When the Holy Spirit fell in 1994, I asked God what He was doing. Instead of explaining Himself, He just said, “I am going easy on you now so you won’t be totally shocked and terrified when the real power shows up.” ”


“When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.”
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“The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature; a God who, having made Israel to share and bear the pain and horror of the world, will most naturally express himself in and as that pain-bearing, horror-facing creature. This is perhaps the most difficult thing for us to keep in mind, though the gospels are inviting us to do so on every page.”
― How God Became King: Getting to the heart of the Gospels
― How God Became King: Getting to the heart of the Gospels

“The one thing the creeds do not do—to return to the point I made a minute ago—is to mention anything that Jesus did or said between his birth and his death. Early Christians read and studied the gospels and tried to live by them. Their allegiance to them is not in doubt. But they saw no need to mention the central substance of the gospels in the creeds as well. This has had a massive, and I believe completely unintended, consequence. It is, in fact, one major part of the reason why Christians to this day find it so hard to grasp what the gospels are really trying to say.”
― How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels
― How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

“The six “days,” or “stages,” of creation indicate, to those who understand the world of the ancient Near East, that creation itself, heaven and earth together, is a kind of temple, a dwelling place for God. And, as in all ancient temples (except the one in Jerusalem, for reasons that will become apparent), there was an “image” or statue of the god in question, so the creator God places into the “temple” of his heaven-and-earth creation his own “image,” human beings made to reflect him, to bring his creativity to birth in his world, and to reflect the praises of the world back to the creator.”
― How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels
― How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

“people who believe in the resurrection, in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, are unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present.”
― Surprised by Hope: Original, provocative and practical
― Surprised by Hope: Original, provocative and practical
Désiré Rusovsky’s 2024 Year in Books
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