“ When the Holy Spirit fell in 1994, I asked God what He was doing. Instead of explaining Himself, He just said, “I am going easy on you now so you won’t be totally shocked and terrified when the real power shows up.” ”


“But many people today assume that Christianity is one or more of these things – a religion, a moral system, a philosophy. In other words, they assume that Christianity is about advice. But it wasn’t and isn’t. Christianity is, simply, good news. It is the news that something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place.”
― Simply Good News: Why The Gospel Is News And What Makes It Good
― Simply Good News: Why The Gospel Is News And What Makes It Good

“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.”
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

“The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom.”
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

“The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature; a God who, having made Israel to share and bear the pain and horror of the world, will most naturally express himself in and as that pain-bearing, horror-facing creature. This is perhaps the most difficult thing for us to keep in mind, though the gospels are inviting us to do so on every page.”
― How God Became King: Getting to the heart of the Gospels
― How God Became King: Getting to the heart of the Gospels

“The one thing the creeds do not do—to return to the point I made a minute ago—is to mention anything that Jesus did or said between his birth and his death. Early Christians read and studied the gospels and tried to live by them. Their allegiance to them is not in doubt. But they saw no need to mention the central substance of the gospels in the creeds as well. This has had a massive, and I believe completely unintended, consequence. It is, in fact, one major part of the reason why Christians to this day find it so hard to grasp what the gospels are really trying to say.”
― How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels
― How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels
Désiré Rusovsky’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Désiré Rusovsky’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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