Ezekiel 36:24-28

²⁴ I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. ²⁵ I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. ²⁶ And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. ²⁷ And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. ²⁸ You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.

L. Ann Jervis

Spending time studying Paul is a corrective to viewing Christianity as the same as certain moral frameworks, or to equating particular cultural expressions, or even patriotism, with Christianity. Paul’s argument against circumcision, which is an argument against identifying with a certain religious disposition and a particular nation, speaks to our current struggles to be shaped by Christ apart from inherited standards of behavior or national allegiance. Further, spending time studying Paul is a summons to be less attuned to the pressures and pleasures of our social context and more aware of the presence of Christ in our midst. Paul’s attempt to put into words the fundamental importance of the profound and all-encompassing knowledge of being “in Christ” speaks to the possibility of living by faith, not achievement, in our time. Paul invites us to be molded not by inner needs or external circumstances, but to know freedom – the freedom of being “in Christ.”

Francis of Assisi

I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.

Henri Nouwen

Although the world in which we live keeps suggesting that realism is an outlook on life based on power, confusing but at the same time attractive prophets keep saying that there is another possible alternative, the alternative of love.

1 John 4:20

If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.

Keith Cox

When one says that one of the attributes of God is Love I believe one is approaching the central fact of God’s existence, and ours. “God is love,” John tells us (1 John 4:8 and 1 John 4:16) and “whoever abides in love abides in God” (John 4:16). When asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus replied:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. (Mt. 22:37-40)

Love is the unifying principle. When the omnipresence of God is referred to, it is in love that God is encountered everywhere. The image of God in man is the intended love relationship between the Creator and His creatures, and the phenomenon we refer to as “the Fall” is in fact the act of man turning away from that intended love relationship.[1] God expresses His love for his creatures by sacrificing himself to atone for their sin and restore the intended relationship (John 3:16), and thus sets the standard for how His creatures are to love Him, each other, and the world (John 13:34, 15:9, 15:12). In other words, love finds its fullest expression in self-sacrifice for the other, even the enemy (Mt. 5:44).

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[1] Emil Brunner, Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1952), 58-59.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

“There was a time when the church was very powerful. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being ‘disturbers of the peace’ and ‘outside agitators.’ But they went on with the conviction that they were ‘a colony of heaven,’ and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be ‘astronomically intimidated.’ They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest.”