Quotes from Leonard Sweet

The Second Testament authors used the same First Testament texts independently of one another. And they interpreted them in exactly the same way, often citing the texts in the same order.

God dwells in eternity but time dwells in God. He has already lived all our tomorrows as He has lived all our yesterdays. —A.W. TOZER112

Christians have made the gospel about so many things—things other than Christ. But Jesus Christ is the gravitational pull that brings everything together and gives it meaning. Without Him, all things lose their value. They are but detached pieces floating around in space. That includes your life.1

The hunger and hunt for identity is a driving force of the modern world. But the nature of the self in an age of simulacra, pseudonyms, avatars, gender/racial fluidity, "the wisdom of crowds," and online friends makes having an identity a massive maze of conquest and confusion.

What counts in evangelism is not cognition, but recognition. Can

Jesus expressed an earthy, semiotic theology by materializing his message through various media, including images, stories, actions (stilled storms, healed limbs), and objects like spit, fig trees, bursting baskets, etc. He was a master semiotician. You might even say that Jesus' ministry was more a semiotics ministry than a preaching, teaching, or healing ministry.

There is within you a yearning for the divine that nothing else can satisfy.

The church doesn't lose its kids when they go to college. We start losing them in middle school. We lose children in the church when we send them out of worship to children's church or Sunday school. This is one reason why Jesus kept insisting, "Let the little children come to me."[222

What do you mean?" they asked Jesus. "I mean this," he replied; and he took the bread, gave thanks, broke it into fragments, and shared those broken pieces with his disciples. And that piece, and those broken pieces, have been shared in every conceivable setting and played in every known language ever since. Faith is the gift of reading the signs of the presence of God. The point of reading signs is not the signs themselves, but the Signifier, Jesus the Christ.

How many Nicodemites are there in every corner of Christianity whose versitis has caused them to be more committed to words than to the Word Made Flesh? How many have made a religion of words and lost sight of God's Image-Made-Story?

The more we are the Presence of Christ for others, the more present we are for Christ to speak to us.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair. —G. K. Chesterton12