Tag: Christianity
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When God rescues your heart from its natural rebellion, and makes it new through your trust in him, your baptism and your following of Jesus, the way this newness works must be through your own decisions, your own thinking things through, your own will power (aided and strengthened at every point, Christians would say, by the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ own spirit).
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 2 -
Forgiveness is more like the air in our lungs. There’s only room for you to inhale the next lungful when you’ve just breathed out the previous one. If you insist on withholding it, refusing to give someone the kiss of life they may desperately need, you won’t be able to take in any more yourself and you will suffocate very quickly.
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 2 -
While the words aren’t a magical formula – the “proper” words could be uttered with no forgiveness transpiring – I am convinced that it matters to utter them. To say “I apologize” or “I forgive you” is to carry out a speech act, not unlike saying “I do” or “I promise”. The words accomplish the thing they say in the saying of them. Just as the Lord says, “Let there be” and reality comes to be, just as the words “I do” or “I promise” bring a new family into existence, so saying “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you” seem to reach down into the stuff of the universe and shift it toward something more and new.
Ester Lightcap Meek, Forgiveness -
When Jesus desires baptism, he does it as the sole good one, the one without sin, the one who does not need forgiveness, different from all human beings. As the good one, he desires baptism, even though he does not need it for himself, for the sake of those who need it, for the sake of sinners. Precisely because he is the sole good one, he doesn’t allow himself to be separated from sinners; he does not become a Pharisee who wants to claim what is good for himself. The sinlessness, the goodness of Jesus, is attested precisely in his unconditional love for sinners. Jesus goes to baptism not out of penitence but out of love and in this way takes the side of sinners.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditation on Epiphany, January 1940 -
What sort of baptism is this, when the one who is dipped is purer than the font, and where the water that soaks the one whom it has received is not dirtied but honored with blessings? What sort of baptism is this of the Savior, I ask, in which the streams are made pure more than they purify? For by a new kind of consecration the water does not so much wash Christ as submit to being washed.
St. Maximus of Turin, Sermon 13A -
Somehow Jesus wanted his followers to live with the tension of believing that the kingdom was indeed arriving in and through his own work, and that this kingdom would come, fully arrive, not all in a bang but through a process like the slow growth of a plant or the steady leavening of a loaf.
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1 -
We in our modern world have many ways of dealing with personal impurity. Contemporary hygiene and chemicals mean we don’t need to worry about it nearly as much as people in the ancient world … there are still other types of pollution as well: the pollution which gets into our minds and hearts, into our imagination and memory. How can we get rid of that? One way is to spend time with a story like this.
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1 -
If we are truly praying this prayer to God’s honour, we can never simply pray for food for ourselves. We must pray for the needs of the whole world, where millions go hungry and many starve. And already we may sense, bubbling up out of the prayer, the realization that if we truly pray it we might also have to do something about it, to become part of God’s answer to our praying.
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1