Preaching from Memory to Hope Quotes

“The old American revival hymn wonders about Jesus, “You ask me how I know He lives?” The hymn’s answer breathes the claustrophobic air of American piety, “He lives within my heart.”7 A small space indeed for the Lord of all time and space. With our democratic and individualistic impulses, our entrepreneurial instincts, our revivalist past, and our current psychotherapeutic preoccupations, it is small wonder that the more inward, the more “sincere” Christian faith is deemed to be, the more we tend to prize it.”
― Thomas G. Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope

“The only knowledge perfectly acquired is the knowledge of our limitation.”
― Thomas G. Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope

“The scriptures begin not with a set of principles or proverbs but with the voice of a narrator, a storyteller: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:1–2), and they end with a worshipful cry for the story of God to move to its next, dramatic chapter: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20). The Bible contains diverse literary forms and genres, but they are all enclosed in a grand narrative parenthesis. To the eye of faith, to be human is to be a creature, and to be a creature is to be enmeshed in the story of creation. A major theme in the theology of baptism, to name another place of narrative investment, is that through baptism Christians are gathered up into the identity of Jesus Christ, which means at least in part that we now see our lives in the shape and pattern of the story of Jesus. Jesus is, as Hebrews puts it, the “pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2). He has blazed the trail ahead of us, and his story is now our story.”
― Thomas G. Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope