Stephen > Stephen's Quotes

“As long as we pray, love, suffer, and herald the good news that Jesus is King, we will continue to see the kingdom of God thunder against the kingdom of Satan. We need to make sure we’re fighting in the right war with the right means.”
― Preston Sprinkle, Fight: A Christian Case for Non-Violence

“The top two lines on every prophet’s job description look like this: Speak openly and clearly about what God is for. Speak openly and clearly about what God is against. The third and fourth lines look like this: I [God] am with you. Have courage. (But you may have to duck or die.)”
― Scot McKnight, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow

“Many think Jesus came to earth so you and I can have a special kind of spiritual experience and then go merrily along, as long as we pray and read our Bibles and develop intimacy with the unseen God but ignore the others-oriented life of justice and love and peace that Jesus embodied.”
― Scot McKnight, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow

“Jesus thought he was anointed by God to proclaim the gospel to the poor and to proclaim freedom for prisoners and recovered sight for the blind and to set the oppressed free. This is why he came.”
― Scot McKnight, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow

“God’s dream is the kingdom, that’s already clear. But what is not always clear is that God’s kingdom happens when human beings are empowered by God’s Spirit to do God’s kingdom work in the shape of a new community.”
― Scot McKnight, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow

“Community is like peace in that it is a result instead of an action. Peace results from acts of justice and behaviors of love. Community also emerges out of loving behaviors—like compassion and an embrace and forgiveness — and out of acts of justice.”
― Scot McKnight, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow

“Too many people think repenting means feeling terrible about something someone has done. Feeling bad is fine, and it often accompanies repentance, but repentance is not so much about what we feel but the twofold prong of owning up to our own injustices and failures to love, and starting all over by living justly and lovingly.”
― Scot McKnight, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow

“Capitalism today asks for faith in a god called “the hidden hand” and seems to have forgotten the goal of the original story. Adam Smith, capitalism's original storyteller, “wrote that the ultimate goal of business is not to make a profit. Profit is just the means. The goal is general welfare” (Wink 1992, 68).”
― Bryant L. Myers, Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development

“The net result of the fall on the economic, political, and religious systems is that they become the places where people learn to play god in the lives of the poor and the marginalized. When fallen human beings play god in the lives of others, the results are patterns of domination and oppression that mar the image and potential productivity of the poor while alienating the non-poor from their true identity and vocation as well.”
― Bryant L. Myers, Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development

“Poverty is about relationships that don't work, that isolate, that abandon or devalue. Transformation must be about restoring relationships, just and right relationships with God, with self, with community, with the “other,” and with the environment.”
― Bryant L. Myers, Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development

“One of the best gifts that we have for the poor and the non-poor is the living word of God. We need to share it with them and let the living word speak for itself.”
― Bryant L. Myers, Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development

“If there is to be any human transformation that is sustainable, it will be because of the action of the Holy Spirit, not the effectiveness of our development technology or the cleverness of our participatory processes”
― Bryant L. Myers, Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development

“But the coming of the kingdom of God in its fullness awaits the second coming of Christ at the end of history. So the kingdom of God both is, and is coming.”
― Bryant L. Myers, Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development