Quotes about Redemption

To make the cross of Jesus just about human salvation is to miss that God is interested in the saving of everything. Every star and rock and bird. All things.

God has to punish sinners, because God is holy, but Jesus has paid the price for our sin, and so we can have eternal life. However true or untrue that is technically or theologically, what it can do is subtly teach people that Jesus rescues us from God.

Forgiveness is unilateral. God isn't waiting for us to get it together, to clean up, shape up, get up - God has already done it.

Jesus says, he "did not come to judge the world, but to save the world" (John 12). We can name Jesus, orient our lives around him, and celebrate

Why didn't they just skip the whole sacrificial system all together? That would have been amazing. Just scrap the whole thing. Announce that the final sacrifice has been offered and there's no more need to do such things. Declare that the temple is going to be torn down. Proclaim that it is finished. Oh wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we? (Please tell me you enjoyed that last paragraph.)

And so, beginning with the early church, there is a long tradition of Christians who believe that God will ultimately restore everything and everybody, because Jesus says in Matthew 19 that there will be a "renewal of all things," Peter says in Acts 3 that Jesus will "restore everything," and Paul says in Colossians 1 that through Christ "God was pleased to . . . reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

He's alive in death, but in profound torment, because he's living with the realities of not properly dying the kind of death that actually leads a person into the only kind of life that's worth living.

Failure, we see again and again, isn't final, judgment has a point, and consequences are for correction.

heaven has the potential to be a kind of starting over. Learning how to be human all over again. Imagine living with no fear.

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God.

And now here's the twist, the mystery, the unexpected truth about admitting that takes us back to the counterintuitive power of gospel: When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.

simply claims that whatever God is doing in the world to know and redeem and love and restore the world is happening through him. And so the passage is exclusive, deeply so, insisting on Jesus alone as the way to God. But it is an exclusivity on the other side on inclusivity.