I'm thankful to have Jesus as my Savior. My relationship with God has always been one to where I'm talking to him all day, every day, about anything and everything. It's just a continuous ongoing conversation that I have with the Lord, and I feel like that's brought me closer to Him.
Jesus. . . wants us to see that the neighbor next door or the people sitting next to us on a plane or in a classroom are not interruptions to our schedule. They are there by divine appointment. Jesus wants us to see their needs, their loneliness, their longings, and he wants to give us the courage to reach out to them.
Remove the centrality-of-Jesus-Christ message from ministry and meetings, and you can forget church life or organic meetings. He must be the center of everything. . . not in lip service, but in the dynamic experiential whole.
The entire Jesus concept, that human sacrifice should be the substratum of a moral religion of love, strikes me as incongruous. God condemned us and Jesus saved us, and they are actually the same being? Christianity is the idea that you are so abhorrent that God had to kill himself. He had to embody the human form and send himself on a bizarre suicide mission just to revoke the disgustingness of the humans he created. I balk at suggestions that these ideas dictate to the concepts of morality and love.
If you are fond of dressing elegantly, or when you put on your clothes, think of the incorruptible garment of righteousness in which our souls should be arrayed, or of Jesus Christ Who is our spiritual raiment, as it is said: 'For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ' (Gal. 3:27).
In Jesus, the service of God and the service of the least of the brethren were one.
Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.
I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them.
Millennials aren't looking for a hipper Christianity. We're looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity. Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we're looking for Jesus-the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he's always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in suffering, in community, and among the least of these.
But discipleship never consists in this or that specific action: it is always a decision, either for or against Jesus Christ. . . Christ speaks to us exactly as he spoke to them. It was not as though they first recognized him as the Christ and then received his command. They believed his word and command and recognized him as the Christ--in that order.
Catholics don't scream about Jesus, they scream about the bishop.
This search for happiness can knock us out of sync with God. As the life of Jesus makes clear, keeping in sync with God is about obedience. Any other pursuit will get in the way.
To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us. To follow Jesus means picking up rhythms and ways of doing things that are often unsaid but always derivative from Jesus, formed by the influence of Jesus. To follow Jesus means that we can't separate what Jesus is saying from what Jesus is doing and the way that he is doing it. To follow Jesus is as much, or maybe even more, about feet as it is about ears and eyes" (The Way of Jesus, Eugene H. Peterson, 22).
If the distinction provided by Jesus' words: Give unto god, what is god's, and unto Caesar what is Caesar's! is carried through, then other necessary intrusions by the national state into the domain of church creeds can be completely avoided.
If you really want to love Jesus, first learn to suffer, because suffering teaches you to love.
The way to God is the opposite to that of the world. And to few, very few, are given to have God and mammon at the same time.
But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?
What landed Jesus on the cross was the preposterous idea that common, ordinary, broken, screwed-up people could be godly.
Jesus Christ never died for our good works. They were not worth dying for. But he gave himself for our sins, according to the Scriptures.
My life is like a faded leaf, My harvest dwindled to a husk: Truly my life is void and brief And tedious in the barren dusk; My life is like a frozen thing, No bud nor greenness can I see: Yet rise it shall - the sap of Spring; O Jesus, rise in me.