Matthew Wright’s Reviews > Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church > Status Update

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.

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.

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,