Acts for Everyone, Part One Quotes

“Being saved’ doesn’t just mean, as it does for many today, ‘going to heaven when they die’. It means ‘knowing God’s rescuing power, the power revealed in Jesus, which anticipates, in the present, God’s final great act of deliverance’.”
― N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12

“God’s kingdom is coming in and through the work of Jesus, not by taking people away from this world but by transforming things within this world, bringing the sphere of earth into the presence, and under the rule, of heaven itself.”
― N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12

“There is a story told of C. S. Lewis, as a small boy – about six or seven, I think. One day he announced to his father, ‘Daddy, I have a prejudice against the French.’ ‘Why?’ asked his father, not unreasonably. ‘If I knew that,’ replied the precocious youngster triumphantly, ‘it wouldn’t be a prejudice.’ He was quite right, of course. The point about a prejudice is that it’s what you have when you are ‘pre-judging’ a case: making your mind up before you know the facts.”
― Tom Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12

“But there is no such thing as a small errand in the kingdom of God.”
― N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12

“within the institution, breaking out into new worlds, leaving behind the shrine which had become a place of worldly power and resistance to his purposes.”
― N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12

“But the demonstration of the power of Jesus’ name took place, not in the Temple, but outside the gate. God is on the move, not confined”
― N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12

“If God’s ultimate intention was to ‘save’ only disembodied ‘souls’, that wouldn’t be rescue from death. It would simply allow the death of the body to have the last word. ‘Salvation’ regularly refers constantly, not least in Luke and Acts, to specific acts of ‘rescue’ within the present life: being ‘saved’ from this potential disaster, here and now.”
― N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12

“God’s ultimate intention was to ‘save’ only disembodied ‘souls’, that wouldn’t be rescue from death. It would simply allow the death of the body to have the last word. ‘Salvation’ regularly refers constantly, not least in Luke and Acts, to specific acts of ‘rescue’ within the present life: being ‘saved’ from this potential disaster, here and now.”
― N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12

“When Paul talks in his letters about ‘the gospel’, he doesn’t primarily mean ‘the way you too can get saved’. He means ‘the message that says that Jesus, the crucified and risen one, is the Lord of the whole world’.”
― N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12

“Cornelius didn’t want God (or Peter) to tolerate him. He wanted to be welcomed, forgiven, healed, transformed. And he was.”
― N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12

“people today find real debate about actual topics difficult, and much prefer the parody of debate which consists of giving a dog a bad name and then beating him for it, and lashing out, too, at anyone who associates with the dog you happen to be beating at the time.”
― N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12

“(a) God intended Jesus to die as the climax of his rescue operation; (b) the intentions and actions that sent Jesus to his death were desperately wicked. This doesn’t for a moment justify the wickedness. Rather, it declares that God, knowing how powerful that wickedness was, had long planned to nullify its power by taking its full force upon himself, in the person of his Messiah, the man in whom God himself would be embodied.”
― N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-12