Loraena

“For Jesus’ first followers, then, his death and resurrection were now the single, ultimate ‘sign’. Prophets like Amos had been forerunners. God has now spoken through the Son, once and for all. For us to try to read God’s secret code off the pages of the newspapers may look clever. We may even get a reputation for spiritual insight – but actually, we are doing it because we have forgotten where the true key to understanding is now to be found. Similarly, any claim to tell from world events when the ‘second coming’ will occur is a claim to know more than Jesus himself (Mark 13.32). Jesus himself is the reason why people should turn from idolatry, injustice and all wickedness. The cross is where all the world’s sufferings and horrors have been heaped up and dealt with. The resurrection is the launch of God’s new creation, of his sovereign saving rule on earth – starting with the physical body of Jesus himself. Those events are now the summons to repent and the clue to what God is doing in the world. Trying to jump from an earthquake, a tsunami, a pandemic or anything else to a conclusion about ‘what God is saying here’ without going through the Gospel story is to make the basic theological mistake of trying to deduce something about God while going behind Jesus’ back.”
― N.T. Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath

“Yet Jesus went further. When people asked him for ‘a sign from heaven’, he saw their request as a sign of unbelief. They wanted things to be obvious. The only sign he would give them, he said, was another prophetic sign: the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12.39). Jonah disappeared into the belly of the whale – and then came out alive, three days later. That, said Jesus, was the ‘sign’ that would tell his generation what was going on. The other ‘signs’ that Jesus was doing were not negative ones. They were not like the prophetic ‘signs’ to which Amos referred, or indeed like the ‘signs’ that Moses and Aaron performed in Egypt to try to shake Pharaoh out of his complacency and allow the Israelites to go free. Those ‘signs’ were strange warning signals: plagues of frogs, or locusts, or rivers turning into blood. Jesus’ ‘signs’ (John gives us a neat catalogue of them) were all about new creation: water into wine, healings, food for the hungry, sight for the blind, life for the dead. The other Gospels chip in with several more, including parties with all the wrong kind of people, indicating a future full of forgiveness. All these were forward-looking signs, declaring the new thing that God was doing. Was doing now.”
― N.T. Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath

“Sometimes (and perhaps more often than not), the best ideas for church culture transformation arise from the congregation. Unfortunately, many pastors, elders, deacons, and other leaders dismiss, disagree with, dispute, and silence those best ideas—which may well be a form of quenching the Spirit. Those who embrace (as we do) “the priesthood of all believers” should be the ones who listen the most to others in the congregation.”
― Scot McKnight, Pivot: The Priorities, Practices, and Powers That Can Transform Your Church into a Tov Culture

“Prayer is the courageous act of bringing our authentic desires before God. Prayer is the place where, in Jesus’ name, we meet a holy God with all of our humanity hanging out. In our bravest moments of unscripted, unedited prayer, we find ourselves telling God what we want, how we’re afraid to want this, how we fear he’ll withhold, how we fail to trust and to worship and to reverence. We allow ourselves to see—and be seen. In this struggle, prayerful and raw, we willingly wait for the mercies of God to deliver us into the abiding belief that he is good. Prayer, bold and beautiful and brave, takes on the quality of our struggle to surrender to the God who is holy, to the God whose holiness produces our surprise. This kind of prayer is courageous because as we pray, we enter the throne room of God, just as Isaiah did in Isaiah 6. As happened to Isaiah, one glimpse of holiness can produce knee-knocking terror. “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (v. 5). The threads of Isaiah’s humanity unravel and fall into a clumsy, ugly heap. Standing painfully aware of the gap lying between human and holy, his own reflection in the mirror undoes him. This is the double vision of prayer: we see God and we see ourselves.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith