Quotes about Renewal

We can be, and we are called to be, good-news people—people who themselves are being renewed by the good news, people through whom the good news is bringing healing and hope to the world at whatever level.

If we spend time in the prayer of lament, new light may come, rather than simply the repetition of things we might have wanted to say anyway.

The question ought to be, How will God's new creation come? and then, How will we humans contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator God will launch in his new world?

Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not "saved souls" being rescued from the world and taken to a distant "heaven," but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.

Put tradition first, and scripture will be muzzled and faded. Put scripture first, and tradition will come to new life. Better

Suffering and dying is the way by which the world is changed. This is how the revolution continues.

Sunday, kept as a commemoration of Easter ever since that event itself (a quite remarkable phenomenon when you come to think about it), is not simply a legacy of Victorian values but a perpetual sign, joyfully renewed week by week, that all time belongs to God and stands under the renewing lordship of Jesus Christ.4

Heaven and earth are not to be split apart; they are to be brought together; and the spirit is the sign and means in the present by which that future becomes real in advance. The spirit is the powerful breath of that new creation, bringing signs and foretastes of the heaven-and-earth reality to birth here and now.

One day the whole creation will be flooded with his presence. Then they will look back and realize that they, like the Temple itself, had been a small working model, an advance blueprint, of that renewed creation.

But in scripture itself God's purpose is not just to save human beings, but to renew the whole world. This is the unfinished story in which readers of scripture are invited to become actors in their own right. "The authority of scripture" is thus a sub-branch of several other theological topics: the mission of the church, the work of the Spirit

God's plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was "very good." Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.

You and I will never meet God in revival until we first meet Him in brokenness.