Quotes about Salvation

Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian. It is the declaration that they have become a Christian. And the total context of this doctrine, here in Philippians 3, is that of the expectation - not of a final salvation in which the individual is abstracted from the present world, but of the final new heavens and new earth, as the Lord comes from the heavenly realm to transform the earthly

Part of the hope the Christian faith offers is the knowledge that God will not allow injustice to be the last word. That is a central element in the good news of the gospel.

has made, and particularly to and within his people Israel.

The old idea that the goal of Christian existence is simply "going to heaven" doesn't, in fact, do very much to stimulate the fully fledged virtue we find advocated in the New Testament.

A fully Christian view of the Bible includes the idea of God's self-revelation but, by setting it in a larger context, transforms it. Precisely because the God who reveals himself is the world's lover and judge, rather than its absentee landlord, that self-revelation is always to be understood within the category of God's mission to the world, God's saving

Passover takes precedence—it was, after all, the ultimate divine rescue operation and the ultimate revelation of God in action

But over against this downplaying or mocking we also see, from the earliest documents of the New Testament right on through the first five or six centuries of church history, the resolute affirmation of the cross not as an embarrassing episode best left on the margins, but as the mysterious key to the meaning of life, God, the world, and human destiny.

Read John 14:1-31. Why does Jesus feel the need to reassure the disciples at this point (v. 1)? 2. What bold claim does Jesus make about himself in verse 6? 3. Why does this kind of claim often make people uncomfortable?

God called Israel to be the means of rescuing the world, so that he might himself alone rescue the world by becoming Israel in the person of its representative Messiah. This

Private spiritual growth and ultimate salvation come rather as the byproducts of the main, central, overarching purpose for which God has called and is calling us.

The cross stands at the heart of John's kingdom theology, which in this stunning passage is revealed as the heart of John's redemption theology, the vision of the love of God revealed in saving action in the death of his Son, the Lamb, the Messiah.

This summary may be enough to alert us to the fact that, in Paul's presentation of salvation, the goal is for humans to share the "royal" and "priestly" ministry of the Messiah himself.