Kindle Notes & Highlights
Prayer is a foundational practice of the Christian faith, one that connects human beings to the one who holds our ultimate allegiance.
When we acknowledge our allegiance to God, we will find the source of our identity and the freedom to live lives that reflect that identity.
The assumption of this book is that prayer has a subversive quality to it, because it upends the usual flow of our allegiances.
God’s name is made holy, not just in our words, but in our very lives. It is for this reason that, even though our relationship with God might be intimate in nature, it isn’t one of equals, lest we seek to take advantage of God’s name and profane that name in the way we live.
The kingdom of God is, as John Dominic Crossan notes, the “standard expression for what I have been calling the Great Divine Cleanup of this world. It was what this world would look like if and when God sat on Caesar’s throne, or if and when God lived in Antipas’ palace” (Crossan, God and Empire, pp. 116-117).
churches. To live out the reign of God is to embrace the call to be a missional presence in the communities in which we live. It won’t be wealth and power that will determine success. Instead, it will be our willingness to allow God to use us for the transformation of the world.
The message of the kingdom is this: we no longer need to live in anxiety. We need not fear scarcity, for we live in the midst of God’s abundance.
The kingdom of God is an “open We” in which “the people of God are not a hermetically sealed group of holy men and women who stand apart from culture or society.” Instead, he suggests that “our new networked identity as a people is to be a blessing to others, like yeast worked through dough, like a cluster of blessing in the complexity of a city” (Friesen, Thy Kingdom Connected, p. 55).
