Simply Good News Quotes

“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.”
― Tom Wright, Simply Good News: Why The Gospel Is News And What Makes It Good

“The wrath of God is simply the shadow side of the love of God for his wonderful creation and his amazing human creatures. Like a great artist appalled at the way his paintings have been defaced by the very people who were supposed to be looking after them, God’s implacable rejection of evil is the natural outflowing of his creative love. God’s anger against evil is itself the determination to put things right, to get rid of the corrupt attitudes and behaviors that have spoiled his world and his human creatures. It is because God loves the glorious world he has made and is utterly determined to put everything right that he is utterly opposed to everything that spoils or destroys that creation, especially the human creatures who were supposed to be the linchpins of his plan for how that creation would flourish. That’s why, as Paul’s argument progresses in this same letter, he frames its central passage not with God’s anger but with his powerful, rescuing love (Rom. 5:1–11; 8:31–39).”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“When we say, “Jesus died for our sins” within a message about how to escape this nasty old world and go to heaven, it means one thing. When we say, “Jesus died for our sins” within a message about God the creator rescuing his creation from corruption, decay, and death, and rescuing us to be part of that, it means something significantly different.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“The good news was, and is, that all this has happened in and through Jesus; that one day it will happen, completely and utterly, to all creation; and that we humans, every single one of us, whoever we are, can be caught up in that transformation here and now.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“The resurrection declared that Jesus was not the ordinary sort of political king, a rebel leader, that some had supposed. He was the leader of a far larger, more radical revolution than anyone had ever supposed. He was inaugurating a whole new world, a new creation, a new way of being human. He was forging a way into a new cosmos, a new era, a form of existence hinted at all along but never before unveiled. Here it is, he was saying. This is the new creation you’ve been waiting for. It is open for business. Come and join in.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“The only reason the death of Jesus was ever thought of as good news was because of what happened next.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“We know what the power of the world looks like. When push comes to shove, as it often does, it is the power of violence, using the threat of pain and death. It is, yes, the power of tanks and bombs, and also of guns and knives and whips and prisons and barbed wire and bulldozers. Weapons to destroy people’s lives; machines to destroy their homes. Cruelty in the home or at work. Malice and manipulation where there should be gentleness, kindness, and wisdom. Jesus’s power is of a totally different sort, as he explained to the Roman governor a few minutes before the governor sent him to his death—thereby proving the point. The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love. That is the good news.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“What good news regularly does, then, is to put a new event into an old story, point to a wonderful future hitherto out of reach, and so introduce a new period in which, instead of living a hopeless life, people are now waiting with excitement for what they know is on the way.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“Jesus wasn’t just a great character, a hero figure for subsequent generations to look up to. He was announcing good news—something that was happening and has now happened, something that changes the world. And either he was right or he was wrong.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“The good news that Jesus announced, like the good news that his first followers announced about him, was not a piece of advice, however good. It was about something that had happened, about something that would happen as a result, and about the new moment between those two, the moment in which people were in fact living, whether they realized it or not.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“Once people grasp that the events of the Messiah’s death and resurrection have transformed everything and that they are now living between that initial explosive event and God’s final setting right of the world (when God is “all in all”), then everything will change: belief, behavior, attitudes, expectations, and not least a new love, a real sense of belonging, which springs up among those who share all this. That is what so much of Paul’s writing is about.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“So instead of suggesting that we could escape the earth to go to heaven, Jesus’s good news was about heaven coming to earth.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“The resurrection declared that Jesus was not the ordinary sort of political king, a rebel leader, that some had supposed. He was the leader of a far larger, more radical revolution than anyone had ever supposed. He was inaugurating a whole new world, a new creation, a new way of being human. He was forging a way into a new cosmos, a new era, a form of existence hinted at all along but never before unveiled.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“In fact, like most things in life that really matter—love, beauty, justice—you can’t prove things in history the way you can prove Pythagoras’s theorem. But there are lots of things you can be certain of nonetheless.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“God made humans to reflect his glory, his love, his wisdom into the world, and in the new creation God will not revoke this vocation. He will gloriously fulfill it. We will become more human, not less.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“Jesus wasn’t content to leave existing structures in place and start up a nice, quiet, unobtrusive movement somewhere else. He didn’t want the rest of the world to go on with its idea of kingship while he started a sect, a separatist movement that wouldn’t challenge that notion. That might have been the effect of allowing human rulers to keep the word king while choosing a different slogan altogether. What he was doing was far more radical. Not only was Jesus plugging in to the ancient scriptural promises that spoke of God coming back at last to be king of his people and the whole world. He was insisting that this kingdom of God, this new reality, the heart of his good news, was a different sort of rule based on a different sort of power. And that it was designed to challenge the present powers of the world with a new kingship that would trump theirs altogether.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“Jesus’s message to his contemporaries, and the church’s message about Jesus, never fit what people expect. Often enough, they don’t fit what the church itself expects.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“In many churches, the good news has subtly changed into good advice: Here’s how to live, they say. Here’s how to pray. Here are techniques for helping you become a better Christian, a better person, a better wife or husband. And in particular, here’s how to make sure you’re on the right track for what happens after death. Take this advice: say this prayer and you’ll be saved. You won’t go to hell; you’ll go to heaven. Here’s how to do it. This is advice, not news.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“Albert Schweitzer, a century or more ago, used another strong image. Jesus, he said, was like a man convinced the wheel of history was going to turn in the opposite direction. He waited for this to happen, but it didn’t. Then he threw himself upon the wheel, and it crushed him—but it did indeed start to turn in the other direction.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“News is an announcement that something significant has happened. And good news is what Jesus and his first followers were all about.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“Christian spirituality—an awareness of the loving and guiding presence of God, sorrow for sin and gratitude for forgiveness, the possibility and challenge of prayer, a love for God and for our neighbors, the desire for holiness and the hard moral work it requires, the gradual or sudden emergence of particular vocations, a lively hope for God’s eventual new creation—is generated by the good news of what has happened in the past and what will happen in the future. All this and much, much more is what is meant by the good news in the present.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“Despite what skeptics and critics sometimes say, followers of Jesus have transformed the world in all sorts of ways in the last two thousand years. It was Jesus’s followers, after all, who went about caring for the poor, tending the sick, and providing education for people of all sorts (not only the rich or the elite). There is no reason why Jesus’s followers should not continue this work and every reason why they should.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“And if anyone tries to say that the good news is not about all these things—about freeing slaves, about helping the poor, about reconciling warring factions, ethnic groupings, and whole nations, about looking after the blessed world we live on and in—but instead is only about coming to faith in the present and going to heaven in the future, then we must reply that something has gone very, very wrong in their thinking.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“His intention was to bring his creation forward from its beginnings to be the glorious place he always intended and to do so through this human family.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“The whole truth is that Jesus himself, in his risen physical body, is the beginning of God’s new creation.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“The point about Philippi being a colony of Rome was not that the citizens would go back to Rome one day, but that (so it was hoped) they would bring the benefits of Roman civilization to Philippi.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“The wrath of God is simply the shadow side of the love of God for his wonderful creation and his amazing human creatures. Like a great artist appalled at the way his paintings”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“Science does this all the time. People who work at the cutting edge in, say, physics are constantly adjusting their big picture, sometimes modifying it quite radically”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“But the early Christians—who themselves knew only too well that the world had not turned into Utopia overnight and that they still faced suffering, prison, and death—firmly believed that what had happened on the cross was the Messianic victory. That is why they told the story the way they did.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good