Status Updates From Surprised by Hope: Rethinki...

In terms that the author of Acts might have used, when the church is living out the kingdom of God, the word of God will spread powerfully and do its own work.

then it is not only natural to speak of Jesus himself and to encourage others to worship him for themselves and find out what belonging to his family is all about but it is also natural for people, however irreligious they may think of themselves as being, to recognize that something is going on that they want to be part of.

when people realize that those who pray for the Spirit to work in and through them are the people who seem to have extra resources of love and patience in caring for those whose lives are damaged, bruised, and shamed,

But it also leads directly into evangelism. When the church is seen to move straight from worship of the God we see in Jesus to making a difference and effecting much-needed change in the real world; when it becomes clear that the people who feast at Jesus's table are the ones in the forefront of work to eliminate hunger and famine;

And the church that is renewed by the message of Jesus's resurrection must be the church that goes to work precisely in that space, time, and matter and claims it in advance as the place of God's king-dom, of Jesus's lordship, of the power of the Spirit.

God's redeeming of time as years, weeks, and days speak the language of renewal; and God's redeeming of matter itself, in the sacraments, which point in turn to the renewal of the lives that are washed in baptism and fed with the Eucharist.

The mission of the church must therefore include, at a structural level,the recognition that our present space, time,& matter are all subject not to rejection but to redemption. Living between the resurrection of Jesus and the final coming together of all things in heaven and earth means celebrating God's healing of his world not his abandoning of it; God's reclaiming of space as heaven and earth intersect once more;

If Calvary means putting to death things in your life that need killing off if you are to flourish as a Christian and as a truly human being, then Easter should mean planting, watering, and training up things in your life (personal and corporate) that ought to be blossoming, filling the garden with color and perfume, and in due course bearing fruit.

in applying the gospel to the major problems of the world to the intimate details of our daily lives. Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the new world we publicly entered in our baptism.

The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it. And precisely because the resurrection was and is bodily, albeit with a transformed body, the power of Easter to transtorm and heal the present world must be put into effect both at the macrolevel,

The Spirit, the sacraments, and the scriptures are given so that the double life of Jesus, both heavenly and earthly, can become ours as well, already in the present.

You really know God and share his life only when you understand that he is the creator and lover of earth just as much as of heaven.

Sin is the root cause of death; if death has been defeated, it must mean that sin has been dealt with. But if the Messiah has not been raised, we are still in a world where sin reigns supreme and undefeated so that the foundational Christian belief, that God has dealt with our sins in Christ, is based on thin air and is reduced to whistling in the dark.

The difference between the kingdoms of the world and the kingdom of God lies exactly in this, that the kingdom of God comes through the death and resurrection of his Son, not through naked displays of brute force or wealth.

They are not telling them that they can now go to heaven when they die, though they will, if they believe, there to wait until the resurrection itself. Nor are they telling them that God has done an extraordinary miracle that shows how powerful he is, though he has.
They are to go and tell the world that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, is the world's true Lord and to summon them to believing obedience.

in the whole book of Acts. The apostles are not offering people a new religious experience, though that will come as we..

Jesus's resurrection summons us to dangerous and difficult tasks on earth.

Easter commissions Jesus's followers for a task; Pentecost gives them the necessary equipment to accomplish it.

For Luke, the point of the resurrection is that the long story of Israel, the great overarching scriptural nar-rative, has reached its goal and climax and must now give birth, as it always intended, to the worldwide mission in which the nations are summoned to turn from their idolatry and find forgiveness of sins.

the Old Testament; must be read as a story that reaches its climax in Jesus and will then produce its proper fruit not only in Israel but also in Jesus's followers and, through them, in all the world.

"repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

resurrection doesn't mean escaping from the world; it means mission to the world based on Jesus's lordship over the world.
Matthew gives us the clear message of what the resurrection means:Jesus is now enthroned as the Lord of heaven and earth.His kingdom has been established. And this kingdom is to be put into practice by his followers summoning all nations to obedient allegiance to him,marking them out in baptism.

this is a very thick book with very many words on the page