Quotes about Relevance

We are to be in the world, though not of it. Often Christians have evaded the challenge of this call by defining their role as salt in negative terms. They have simply denounced bad things in the culture and been against things rather than for them.

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us...it is outside the proper sphere of art.

But I am tremendously interested in what religion does for me, just as I am interested in what electricity and good food and water do for me.

Old ways of doing things cease to be effective, though they may have been very powerful in the past. There arises a very real danger that we will set ourselves in opposition to what God truly is doing now and aims to do in the future.

More than any other single thing, in any case, the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.

Jesus' enduring relevance is based on his historically proven ability to speak to, to heal and empower the individual human condition. He matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weakness he gives us strength and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity.

He comes where we are, and he brings us the life we hunger for. An early report reads, "Life was in him, life that made sense of human existence" (John 1:4). To be the light of life, and to deliver God's life to women and men where they are and as they are, is the secret of the enduring relevance of Jesus. Suddenly they are flying right-side up, in a world that makes sense.

Very few people today find Jesus interesting as a person or of vital relevance to the course of their actual lives. He is not generally regarded as a real-life personality who deals with real-life issues but is thought to be concerned with some feathery realm other than the one we must deal with, and must deal with now. And frankly, he is not taken to be a person of much ability.

Knowledge is the basis of belief, and, when it is, it gives the belief a very different bearing upon life.

I think I do speak to all ages, but the emphasis is, unlike everybody else who is chasing the Millennials, I'm not chasing the Millennials.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally — and often far more — worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.