Quotes from Scot McKnight

The most significant passage in the Bible about the Bible is not, however, those two poignant New Testament passages that have given to us words such as inspiration (2 Tim 3:14-17; 2 Pet 1:20-21). Rather, it is Psalm 119, and it can be read as the Bible's view of the Bible.

our pain, we are invited to join Jesus so he can share our pain.

To say this once again, the focus of the Bible on fasting is not on what we get from fasting or on motivating people to fast in order to acquire something, but instead lands squarely on responding to sacred moments in life.

This both/and interpretation makes sense in the Jewish context. Jesus has in mind the Anawim, a group of economically disadvantaged Jews (Ps 149:4; Isa 49:13; 61:1—2; 66:2).27 Historians of Jewish history now mostly agree that the Anawim had three features: they were economically poor and yet trusted in God, they found their way to the temple as a meeting place, and they longed for the Messiah, who would finally bring justice.

In the potent words of Dorothy Sayers, our vocation is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

We need a generation of dissident disciples who confront and resist corruption and systemic abuses in whatever locations they are found: • corruption in the countries of the world, • our churches' complicities in these corruptions, • and the reading of Revelation as speculation, which blunts our prophetic voice.

He experiences for us what we do not want but deserve (slavery and death), and provides for us what we do want but don't deserve (a life of freedom).

Overall, then, fasting is how Israel responded when God's glory was dishonored, when God's will was thwarted, when God's people suffered defeat, or when one of God's people experienced sickness, tragedy, or death. God's people, in effect then, took up the posture of God toward grievous events when they fasted.

Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us (leading us to faith and worship), we have to see it as something done by us (leading us to repentance)." And: "As we face the cross, then, we can say to ourselves both 'I did it, my sins sent him there' and 'he did it, his love took him there.

The book of Revelation is for modern-day disciples who have eyes to see the power of the empire in our world and in our churches and in our lives and yours.

They set the kindling afire to consume the body of a man who had but one goal—to make the Bible readable for everyone.

What is not out of the question is that what the world sees as a grotesque image, the cross, has become for Christians a place of grace