Slow It Down

From Radio Free Babylon 

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Colony of Heaven

Some great N. T. Wright quotes for Easter:

“Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.”

― N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church


“Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.” 

― N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

Using the Family Prayer

"Let us pray as God our master has taught us. When we approach the Father with the words his Son has given us, and let him hear the prayer of Christ repeated with our own voices, we recite a family prayer. Let the Father recognize the words of his Son. Let the Son, who lives in our hearts, be spoken from our lips. He is our advocate before the Father; when we ask for forgiveness for our sins, why not use the words given to us by our advocate. He tells us: 'Whatever you ask the Father in my name, He will give you' (John 16:23) What could be a more effective prayer than the words of Christ's own prayer?"

- Cyprian of Carthage (3rd Century AD)

Awakening Faith, page 5

Owning the Daily Present

"...remember that the life in which we ought to be interested is 'daily' life. We can, each of us, only call the present time our own...Our Lord tells us to pray for today, and so he prevents us from tormenting ourselves about tomorrow."

           - St. Gregory of Nyssa

Not Invented Yesterday

Winfield Bevins, lead pastor of Church of the Outer Banks and author of Grow: Reproducing through Organic Discipleship, has written a soon to be released book called Creed: Connect to the Basic Essentials of the Christian Faith. Creed ties the needs of the changing, current culture to the historic faith of the church by providing the essentials of the faith in an easy-to-understand format.  From a post at The Resurgence:

Christianity wasn’t invented yesterday and the church is much larger than one denomination or nationality. These three standards— the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments— have been used as a sturdy foundation for discipleship and doctrine for nearly two thousand years. If they were essential for the early generation of believers, shouldn’t they be important for us as well? Why should we reinvent the wheel?

I suspect we do because of our obsession of the new. We live in a culture of change where we value everything new. We tend to focus on the “now” or the “moment” at the expense of the “eternal.” But just because something is new doesn’t mean it is better. Likewise, just because something is old doesn’t mean it is useless and outdated.

There is also a web page promoting the book.  Another one for my wish list.