Quotes about Whole

While the Bible clearly defines roles within the Church, the mission of the Church was intended to be shared by the whole body.

The four gospels, again in their very different ways, are all written to tell the story of Jesus as the story of Israel, and the story of Israel's God, reaching their proper climax, so as thereby to tell the story of how Israel's God becomes king of the whole world.

The gospels have been emasculated in much of the church by being split up into small portions and never seen as a whole, rather as if a great symphony were only ever heard in twelve-bar snatches; and it is this, incidentally but importantly, that has left the door open to those who want, for quite other reasons, to suggest that works such as the so-called Gospel of Thomas belong in the same category as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

This is part of the paradox of love, in which love freely given creates a context for love to be freely returned, and so on in a cycle where complete freedom and complete union do not cancel each other out but rather celebrate each other and make one another whole.

When it comes to the whole Bible, I believe we should not only be reading right through the Bible individually at least once a year — for clergy I'd say twice a year at least, and perhaps the gospels four times a year, and if this means reworking your personal schedules then fine, do it — but that we should make it possible for our congregations to try creative experiments for how to experience the whole Bible.

One day the whole creation will be flooded with his presence. Then they will look back and realize that they, like the Temple itself, had been a small working model, an advance blueprint, of that renewed creation.

Faith is the whole man rightly related to God by the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

Christ labored in redemption to redeem the whole world and to place it perfectly whole and restored before the throne of God.

It is an injustice to say that Jesus Christ labored in redemption to make me a saint. Jesus Christ labored in redemption to redeem the whole world and to place it perfectly whole and restored before God.

We are not commissioned to preach salvation or sanctification—we are commissioned to lift up Jesus Christ (see John 12:32). It is an injustice to say that Jesus Christ labored in redemption to make me a saint. Jesus Christ labored in redemption to redeem the whole world and to place it perfectly whole and restored before the throne of God. The fact that we can experience redemption illustrates the power of its reality, but that experience is a by-product and not the goal of redemption.

When the natural power of vision is devoted to the Holy Spirit, it becomes the power of perceiving God's will and the whole life is kept in simplicity.

Faith…is a concern of the whole person; it is the most personal concern, and that which determines all others. …it is not something which we can produce by the will to believe, but that by which we are grasped.