N.T. Wright - God Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

View all N.T. Wright Quotes
The Bible is there to enable God's people to be equipped to do God's work in God's world, not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly, knowing they possess all God's truth.

N.T. Wright
Jesus, to be sure, often spent long times alone in prayer. But he was also deeply at home where there was a party, a kingdom party, a celebration of the fact that God was at last taking charge.

N.T. Wright
The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God.

N.T. Wright
God has taken us utterly seriously. How can we not do the same with him?

N.T. Wright
Swords don't glorify the creator-God. Love does. Self-giving love, best of all.

N.T. Wright
It is faith that looks up at the creator God and knows him to be the God of love. And it is faith that looks out at the world with the longing to bring that love to bear in healing reconciliation, and hope.

N.T. Wright
Worship is humble and glad, worship forgets itself in remembering God; worship celebrates the truth as God's truth, not its own.

N.T. Wright
For now we see the beauty of God through a glass, darkly, but then face to face; now we appreciate only in part, but then we shall affirm and appreciate God, even as the living God has affirmed and appreciated us. So now our tasks are worship, mission, and management, these three; but the greatest of these is worship.

N.T. Wright
The cross is the place where, and the means by which, God loved us to the uttermost.

N.T. Wright
If you have never felt or known the sheer power and strength of God's love, take another look at Jesus dying on the cross.

N.T. Wright
Think about the way God rules. He doesn't do it by sending in the tanks. He does it by calling servants.

N.T. Wright
The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.

N.T. Wright
Deism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent.

N.T. Wright
Good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, exciting and worthwhile though that is, but thought through and relished, planned and prepared -- an ultimately better way for the relationship to grow and at the same time a way of demonstrating what the relationship is all about.

N.T. Wright
Blessed are the pure in heart; how will people believe that, unless we ourselves are worshipping the living God until our own hearts are set on fire and scorched through with his purity?

N.T. Wright
True worship doesn't put on a show or make a fuss; true worship isn't forced, isn't half-hearted, doesn't keep looking at its watch, doesn't worry what the person in the next pew is doing. True worship is open to God, adoring God, waiting for God, trusting God even in the dark.

N.T. Wright
The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights.

N.T. Wright
Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don't light a candle in a room that's already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that's so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are.

N.T. Wright
We could cope—the world could cope—with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples' minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God's new creation right in the middle of the old one.

N.T. Wright
God is the one who satisfies the passion for justice, the longing for spirituality, the hunger for relationship, the yearning for beauty. And God, the true God, is the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, the world's true Lord.

N.T. Wright
Many of the questions we ask God can't be answered directly, not because God doesn't know the answers but because our questions don't make sense. As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, many of our questions are, from God's point of view, rather like someone asking, "Is yellow square or round?" or "How many hours are there is a mile?

N.T. Wright
God's plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was "very good." Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.

N.T. Wright
[Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining.

N.T. Wright
That is what worship is all about. It is the glad shout of praise that arises to God the creator and God the rescuer from the creation that recognizes its maker, the creation that acknowledges the triumph of Jesus the Lamb. That is the worship that is going on in heaven, in God's dimension, all the time. The question we ought to be asking is how best we might join in.

N.T. Wright
The only sure rule is to remember that the Bible is indeed God's gift to the church, to equip that church for its work in the world, and that serious study of it can and should become one of the places where, and the means by which, heaven and earth interlock and God's future purposes arrive in the present.

N.T. Wright
Without God's Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God's kingdom. Without God's Spirit, the church simply can't be the church.

N.T. Wright
The point of following Jesus isn't simply so that we can be sure of going to a better place than than this after we die. Our future beyond death is enormously important, but the nature of the Christian hope is such that it plays back into the present life. We're called, here and now, to be instruments of God's new creation, the world-put-to-rights which has already been launched by Jesus and of which Jesus's followers are supposed to be not simply beneficiaries but also agents.

N.T. Wright
God has committed himself, ever since creation, to working through his creatures—in particular, through his image-bearing human beings—but they have all let Him down.

N.T. Wright
The resurrection completes the inauguration of God's kingdom.... It is the decisive event demonstrating thet God's kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven." "The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.

N.T. Wright
Someone who is determinedly trying to show God how good he or she is is likely to become an insufferable prig.

N.T. Wright