If Jesus Is Lord Quotes

“The widespread (heretical) idea in many evangelical circles that the only important reason Jesus came was to die for our sins is one of the most glaring examples of failure to embrace the full biblical Christ. Tragically, other Christians seem to affirm the (equally heretical) idea that it is only Jesus’s teaching (especially his call to love enemies) that is finally important. If we believe with the church through two millennia that the teacher from Nazareth is God incarnate, then we must embrace the full biblical Christ.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“As the church demonstrates new possibilities for community grounded in Jesus’s teaching, the church models a new reality that historically has profoundly shaped surrounding society.46 Perhaps it is not an overstatement to say that “only a continuing community dedicated to a deviant value system can change the world.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“the first task of Christians is to live now the message and ethics of Jesus’s new messianic kingdom. When surrounding society says we should abandon Jesus’s teaching for the sake of short-term effectiveness, we must refuse—precisely because we know that the risen Jesus is now Lord of history and that his kingdom will finally prevail. If Jesus is truly Lord and Messiah, then in the long run his way will also be most effective.42”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“In order to retain a commitment to Jesus’s new messianic community with its countercultural values, Christians must accept the fact that the faithful church will often—perhaps always—be a minority community in a broken world.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“McKnight is right: the “atonement is all about creating a society in which God’s will is actualized—on planet earth, in the here and now.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“It is very doubtful that one can implement Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies and kill them at the same time.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“Before the United States entered World War I, forty-six million Protestants and sixty-two million Catholics were trying to kill forty-five million Protestants and sixty-three million Catholics on the other side. In that war, Christians succeeded in killing millions of other Christians. Reflecting back on the war in 1925, one Christian said, “Christian nations engaged in the most frightful carnage of history. No human device of cruelty and murder was too terrible to use. No human ingenuity was inappropriate for the purpose of destroying life. Nominal and real Christians fought other nominal and real Christians. Pulpits behind both trenches preached the crusade, held the cross before armed regiments and called down upon the carnage the blessing of God.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“I know that God’s new world of justice and joy, of hope for the whole earth, was launched when Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter morning, and I know that he calls his followers to live in him and by the power of his Spirit and so to be new-creation people here and now. . . . The resurrection of Jesus and the gifts of the Spirit mean that we are called to bring real and effective signs of God’s renewed creation to birth even in the midst of the present age.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“Miroslav Volf notes that “the certainty of God’s just judgment at the end of history is the presupposition for the renunciation of violence in the middle of it.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“The angry rioters in Thessalonica are not wrong when they say the Christians announce another king (Jesus) who is a rival to Caesar (Acts 17:5–8). When Peter tells Cornelius, the Roman centurion, that the Christian message is a gospel of peace about “Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all” (10:36) he is implicitly saying that it is Jesus who is in charge and the one who is truly Lord. Obviously, that means that Jesus’s peace is much more than personal peace with God. The implicit message is that Jesus is also the way to societal peace.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“In every single instance where pre-Constantinian Christian writers mention the topic of killing, they say that Christians do not do that, whether in abortion, capital punishment, or war.76 And Jesus’s statement about loving enemies is one of the reasons cited.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“Before I die I have given myself the modest task of convincing the Christians in America that as Christians we have a problem with war. I am not expecting the vast majority of Christians to be pacifists or even just warriors. I simply want them to see that there is a profound tension between our worship of a crucified messiah and the support of war.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence