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Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the long-awaited project of new creation, of which the communities of baptized and believing Jesus-followers were the pilot project.
The God of all comfort . . . comforts us in all our trouble, so that we can then comfort people in every kind of trouble, through the comfort with which God comforts us. . . . If we are troubled, it’s for the sake of your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it’s because of your comfort. . . . Just as you’ve shared in our sufferings, so you will also share in our comfort.
The frightened slave, hearing the news of one who died the slave’s death out of sheer love—the same love that had made the world—was captivated by it.
he has given them an example by his own refusal to be drawn into the snares of materialist culture. He wasn’t in this preaching and teaching business for money, and nor should they be.
Jesus himself had said (in a saying unrecorded elsewhere), “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Intrigued why St Paul quotes Jesus so seldom. Did he take Jesus’ teaching as given? Would have liked the author’s perspective on this.
Isaiah 49, the text which meant so much for Paul: the Lord’s servant will not only “raise up the tribes of Jacob and restore the survivors of Israel”; God will give him “as a light to the nations, that [God’s] salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
He was much more afraid of not being true to the gospel than of any consequences a “bold” proclamation might have had.
“heaven” is not “up in the sky,” but is rather God’s dimension of present reality.
The here and now of the Lord’s Prayer...
The gospel, incomprehensibly foolish to Greeks and blasphemously scandalous to Jews, nevertheless worked powerfully in hearts and minds. Listeners discovered that it made sense and that the sense it made transformed them from the inside out.
The “heart transplant” foreseen by Ezekiel perhaps.
When someone believes the gospel and discovers its life-transforming power, that person becomes a small but significant working model of that new creation.
through gospel and spirit, God is now putting people right, so that they can be both examples of what the gospel does and agents of further transformation in God’s world.
The Creator works in a thousand ways, but one central way is through people—people who think, who pray, who make difficult decisions, who work hard, especially in prayer. That is part of what it means to be image-bearers.
Paul’s emphasis here is all about communities through whose regular practice the surrounding world is made a better place.
Paul’s vision of a united and holy community, prayerful, rooted in the scriptural story of ancient Israel, facing social and political hostility but insisting on doing good to all people, especially the poor, would always be central.
