Status Updates From Surprised by Hope: Rethinki...

“when we reintegrate what should never have been separated…we find that the gospels tell a different story… of God‘s kingdom being launched on earth as in heaven… in which the power of evil has been decisively defeated, the new creation has been decisively launched, and Jesus‘s followers have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice.” p.204

Good book but probably could cut out half of it and get the same point across

The point of 1 Cor. 13 is that love is not our duty; it is our destiny. It is the language Jesus spoke, & we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God's new world, & we must acquire the taste for it here and now.

Forgiveness is a way of life, God's way of life, God's way to life; and if you close your heart to forgiveness, why, then you close your heart to forgiveness.

Glorify God in your body because one day God will glorify the body itself. What is to be true in the future must begin to be true in the present, or it will be called into question whether you are really on track in the first place.

You don't get to share God's life and escape without wounds. Look what happened to Jesus himself.

The Jesus who gives himself to us as food and drink is himself the beginning of God's new world. At communion we are like the children of Israel in the wilderness, tasting fruit plucked from the promised land. It is the future coming to meet us in the present.

What happens in the Eucharist is that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, this future dimension is brought sharply into play. We break this bread to share in the body of Christ; we do it in remembrance of him; we become for a moment the disciples sitting around the table at the Last Supper.

Baptism; should be the foundational event for all serious Christian living, all dying to sin and coming alive with Christ.

Baptism; is one of the points, established by Jesus himself, where heaven and earth interlock, where new creation, resurrection life, appears within the midst of the old.

a mission-shaped church must have its mission shaped by its hope; that the genuine Christian hope, rooted in Jesus's resurrection, is the hope for God's renewal of all things, for his overcoming of corruption, decay, and death, for his filling of the whole cosmos with his love and grace, his power and glory.