Quotes about Gospel

The gospel doesn't impose a way of life on us from without and tell us that we have to live up to it. It creates a new life within and then encourages and directs us to the living out of it.

The core message of the gospel is that God invades us with new life, but the setting for this is most often in the ordinariness of our lives. The new life takes place in the place and person of our present. It is not a means by which God solves problems. God creates new life. He is not a problem solver but a person creator.

There is no way that I can preach the gospel to these people if I don't know how they are living, what they are thinking and talking about. Preaching is proclamation, God's word revealed in Jesus, but only when it gets embedded in conversation, in a listening ear and responding tongue, does it become gospel.

God reveals himself, that is, in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for. And that is how we come to identify as apostles of the gospel the men and women and, yes, children, who use words and images and sounds and textures to wake us up to beauty latent and implicit all around us.

Christian spirituality means living in the mature wholeness of the gospel. It means taking all the elements of your life - children, spouse, job, weather, possessions, relationships - and experiencing them as an act of faith. God wants all the material of our lives.

Cross and resurrection are the South and North polls, true gospel polarities, of a single, undivided, salvation world. Remove either Paul and you've got salvation.

There is nothing quite as destructive to the gospel of Jesus Christ as the use of language that dismisses the way Jesus talks and prays and takes up instead the rhetoric of smiling salesmanship or vicious invective.

The gospel offers a different view of suffering: in suffering we enter the depths; we are at the heart of things; we are near to where Christ was on the cross.

Those of us who preach the Scriptures, along with being nourished by it ourselves, have to figure out along with our congregations how we can incarnate the gospel in our community, or we will preach to a religious ghetto.

The gospel is entirely a message about what someone else has done not only for me but also for the renewal of the whole creation.

The gospel is not a philosophy of repression, as so many regard it. It is a plan of freedom that gives discipline to appetite and direction to behavior.

Our assignment has never been about what we can do for God, but what can God do through us. That is the essence of the gospel: to do exactly what Jesus did and destroy the works of the devil.