Quotes about World

In temptations it is safest to behold nothing but Christ the true brazen serpent, the true 'Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world', (John 1:29). This saving object has a special influence of comfort to the soul, especially if we look not only on Christ, but upon the Father's authority and love in him. For in all that Christ did and suffered as Mediator, we must see God in him reconciling the world unto himself (2 Cor. 5:19).

In Solomon's Song, Jesus did not come out and say where He feeds His flock. He wants us to think for ourselves. But on the Day of Judgment, we will be reproached or approved for our decision to be among, or not among, this world's sufferers.

That's why the Bible is not a book about going to heaven. The action is here. The life is here. The point is here. It's a library of books about the healing and restoring and reconciling and renewing of this world. Our home.

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

So as a Christian, I am free to claim the good, the true, the holy, wherever and whenever I find it. I live with the understanding that truth is bigger than any religion and the world is God's and everything in it.

I saw how the Bible isn't a book about how to get into heaven, it's a library of poems and letters and stories about bringing heaven to earth now, about this world becoming more and more the place it should be. There is very, very little in the Bible about what happens when you die. That's not what the writers were focused on. Their interest, again and again, is on how this world is arranged.

To name is to order, to participate, to partner with God in taking the world somewhere.

But reading the Bible, you learn that it's not about trying to be something you're not—it's about learning to see the movement and motion and possibilities right in the midst of whatever world you find yourself in. We're not living in the first century or the ancient Near East—we're here, now. At this time. In this world.

Which takes us back to this creation poem, which grounds all creativity in the questions that are asked of all of us: What kind of world are we making? Which always leads to the pressing personal question: What kind of life am I creating?

The world is free to be a world. It's free to be beautiful and safe, and it's free to break your heart in a thousand ways. That free.

If you believe that you're going to leave and evacuate to somewhere else, then why do anything about this world? A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it, all with the anticipation of a coming day when things are on earth as they currently are in heaven.

She understood heaven to be about partnering with God to make a new and better world, one with increasingly complex and expansive expressions and dimensions of shalom, creativity, beauty, and design.