Quotes about Jesus

Jesus has not promised to build your ministry; he has promised to build his church.

Jesus looked at these men who had been working hard without relief and said, You deserve a break today. Let's get some rest. Let's take some time off. So they got into a boat, rowed to the other side of the lake, and went out to the desert to rest.

One reason why Jesus could handle stress is that he knew when to relax.

But in reading all of the passages in which Jesus uses the word hell, what is so striking is that people believing the right or wrong things isn't his point. He's often not talking about beliefs as we think of them--he's talking about anger and lust and indifference. He's talking about the state of his listeners' hearts, about how they conduct themselves, how they interact with their neighbors, about the kind of effect they have on the world.

If anybody didn't have a messiah complex, it was Jesus

Jesus is supracultural. He is present within all cultures, and yet outside of all cultures. He is for all people, and yet he refuses to be co-opted or owned by any one culture. That includes any Christian culture. Any denomination. Any church. Any theological system. We can point to him, name him, follow him, discuss him, honor him, and believe in him—but we cannot claim him to be ours any more than he's anyone else's.

Jesus doesn't divide the world up into the common and the sacred; he gives us eyes to see the sacred in the common.

In one of the accounts of Jesus's death we read that the curtain in the temple of God—the one that kept people out of the holiest place of God's presence— ripped. One New Testament writer said that this ripping was a picture of how, because of Jesus, we can have new, direct access to God. A beautiful idea. But the curtain ripping also means that God comes out, that God is no longer confined to the temple as God was previously.

Jesus did not use hell to try and compel heathens and pagans to believe in God, so they wouldn't burn when they die. He talked about hell to very religious people to warn them about the consequences of straying from their God-given calling and identity to show the world God's love.

For Jesus, the question wasn't, "How do I get into heaven?" but "How do I bring heaven here?

I can't find one place in the teachings of Jesus, or the Bible for that matter, where we are to identity ourselves first and foremost as sinners.

But it isn't a choice, because Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, the life." If you come across truth in any form, it isn't outside your faith as a Christian. Your faith just got bigger. To be a Christian is to claim truth wherever you find it.