Quotes about Purpose

not for a rescue operation that would snatch Israel (or humans or the faithful) from the world, but for a rescue operation that would be for the world, an operation through which redeemed humans would play once more the role for which they were designed.

I believe, as I said before, that this could result in a revolution—a revolution in the way in which Christians approach the whole question of "how to think about what to do," and also, out beyond that, a revolution in the way human beings in general approach the question of what it means to live a fulfilled, genuinely human life.

the world is beautiful not just because it hauntingly reminds us of its creator but also because it is pointing forward: it is designed to be filled, flooded, drenched in God, as a chalice is beautiful not least because of what we know it is designed to contain or as a violin is beautiful not least because we know the music of which it is capable.

The divine rescuing purposes and Israel's vocation come rushing together in the same human being, the same event.

science takes things apart to see how they work, but religion puts things together to see what they mean.

Mission, in its widest as well as its more focused senses, is what the church is there for.

How we are saved is closely linked to the question of what we are saved for.

humans finding themselves called to play a vital role in the larger purposes of the creator for the creation.

But of course you can only do what you're meant to do with a baseball bat when you're playing with other people. And salvation only does what it's meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them.

The purpose of forgiving sin, there as elsewhere, is to enable people to become fully functioning, fully image-bearing human beings within God's world, already now, completely in the age to come.

the human calling to worship God and reflect him into his world.

Christians have assumed that virtually the only point in Jesus's death was "to save us from our sins," understood in a variety of more or less helpful ways. But for the gospels themselves, that rescue of individuals (which of course remains a central element) is designed to serve a larger purpose: God's purpose, the purpose of God's kingdom.