Brad

“But many people today assume that Christianity is one or more of these things – a religion, a moral system, a philosophy. In other words, they assume that Christianity is about advice. But it wasn’t and isn’t. Christianity is, simply, good news. It is the news that something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place.”
― Tom Wright, Simply Good News: Why The Gospel Is News And What Makes It Good

“Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing.
Aim at pleasing Him more than yourself, or any other creature. In order to do this
attend strictly to
the sense of what you sing, and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered
to God continually; so shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here, and
reward you when
he cometh in the clouds of heaven.”
― John Wesley

“What good news regularly does, then, is to put a new event into an old story, point to a wonderful future hitherto out of reach, and so introduce a new period in which, instead of living a hopeless life, people are now waiting with excitement for what they know is on the way.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“In biblical Greek the word "repent" comes from a military term similar to the command "about face." In...sermons, repentance is all about "turning away' from sin, and certainly repentance would include an element of that. However, the deeper flavor of his word is less about turning away from something and more about turning toward something. As much as the word "repent" makes many of us recoil, what if it is enjoining us to turn away from our fear of God and to turn toward the love of God? what if we simply confess that God is love, and then put a period at the end of the sentence? God is love. Period.”
― Benjamin L. Corey, Unafraid: Moving Beyond Fear-Based Faith