Kindle Notes & Highlights
For Plato, and for the Christian story, in order to understand what is happening in the visible world, one must have a good understanding of the invisible world.
they began to seriously wonder if people knew clearly the true nature of those forces.
In postmodernity, a level of uncertainty seeped into the hearts of many people causing them to wonder if there is indeed anything called truth that a person might discover.
What he meant is that the story of a God who formed all things and gave meaning to creation is no longer the story that shapes the culture.
In the end for Nietzsche, once God is dead, life has no more meaning. Without God there is no more certainty or hope about the future.
People can’t live without a story.
if there is no larger story into which our individual stories fit, life ends up quite empty and our self-written stories end up looking and feeling quite shallow.
the story that shapes and informs their moral life—like most people—is a complicated patchwork of religious fragments, citizenship fragments, success fragments, humanism fragments, and lots of other pieces.
People living in exile have to have a coherent and cohesive story.
The people of God in exile know that what they need is to come each week to submit their lives to the authority of the Scriptures’ story and to be formed again and again to live out that story in the world.
I’m not surprised that any person shaped day after day by the fears and violence that pervade the culture would instinctively respond to being hit with immediately hitting back.
what the church also needs are practices of reconciliation and forgiveness that rehabituate the lives of the faithful into people who might actually go into the world and turn the other cheek or go the second mile.
humans are primarily driven by what they desire—what they love.
almost every human activity has some kind of vision of the good life—a vision of what is ultimate and is worth loving most—built into the practice itself.
Christian worship, in contrast, should be viewed as offering to people a set of counterformative practices that through repetition shape the hearts of the people of God to desire what is holy in order to pursue the kingdom of God.
The first reason springs from a desire many people have to be rooted in something deeper than just the present.
It would be very natural, given those circumstances, that a generation would come along hungry for forms of Christian practice that might offer to them the stability, grounding, and permanence that is lacking
These moments of sacred time were set aside to remember and be formed by God’s activity in the past in order to prepare for God’s activity in the present and into the future.
Advent forms a people who can be patient with God’s gracious redemption of all things.
In a world where the pace of life continually speeds up, where everything has to come fast, and where attention spans are rapidly declining, it might be wonderfully transformative and counterformative for a people to every year spend four weeks shaped by the patient endurance of God.
During those forty days of fasting and confession, disciples of Jesus walk together beneath the shadow of the cross not only to remember and confess their human tendencies toward sin and violence but also to be reminded of a grace that is greater than their sin.
In the church calendar Easter is not just a day but also a season in which the church dwells within the current reality and the future hope of the resurrection.
They are viewed as practices distinctively filled with transformational meaning and grace.
Baptism not only connects a person by faith to the death and resurrection of Jesus but also initiates that person into the community of the church.
serves as a means of grace to form the church into the body of Christ.
a people who embrace exile have to participate in practices that form and habituate the life of the church and those within it to the life of faithfulness to the kingdom.
The shocking thing about the word of the prophets to those in exile is that they don’t really encourage the people to look for, pray for, or try to discover a way out. Rather, the people are invited to settle down and work.
The prophet proclaims that God has not forgotten his people. Instead God plans to comfort and save them.
What a beautiful word! God has not forgotten his people in exile. He sees them. He knows them. He comforts them.
The goal is not to fix the highway so the people can get out. The objective of all the roadwork is so that the glory of the Lord can come in and all people—including, I assume, the Babylonian people who took Judah into exile—can see God’s glory together.
God never gets tired of being in relationship with people.
The obligation placed upon humans as God’s image or reflection is to have dominion over—to give loving care to—all things, imitating God’s heart and participating in God’s gracious oversight of all he created.
theologically, the people of God are convinced that it is a good thing for people to work.
One of the theological correctives that may need to take place for many in the body of Christ is for the line between the sacred and the secular to be blurred, if not eliminated.
there is no place, no responsibility, and no work that can’t be at some level sacred, holy, or caught up in God’s purposes.
There is something about work done well for the sake of the oikonomia that is beautiful and holy. It is not simply secular; it has the hints of God’s mercy and care—hints of his holiness—reflected within it.
for many Christians there was even a sense that God’s kingdom was increasing and growing—that things on earth were beginning to reflect significant aspects of heaven.
I think this kind of eschatology has deeply scarred our understanding of work.
The hopes for most early Christians—and in particular the apostle Paul—were connected to the resurrection of the body and the renewal of creation
Our eschatological hope as Christians is not an escape from the body but the renewal and redemption of life in the body. Our eschatological hope is not that the heavens and the earth would be destroyed but that God’s will would “be done on earth as it is in heaven”
work is not just something believers do to pay bills until Christ returns. Rather, work is part of our participation in God’s redemptive care and work for the whole world.
The goal of God’s people in Babylon is not to plan their escape. The goal is to live and work as salt and light in order to bless Babylon and to allow people to see the good work that they do as a reflection of the glory and goodness of God.
our actions as human beings flow from three core areas: our values, our identity, and our convictions.
Daniel and his friends seem to know that if they allow their appetites and desires to be defined by the king and his table, they will be fully captured by Babylon.
If the church in the current age is going to raise resident aliens, the people of God have to have hard conversations about the values that are modeled and taught to our children.
Values and desires are competitive with one another. Our hearts are not easily shared.
it is a story about citizenship as much as it is about worship.
The problem is a question of loyalty.
In most of the world’s great Babylons religion is only a problem when and if it gets in the way of citizenship and national allegiance.
this election was not the election of “our” president. The church doesn’t have a president.
