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“We Protestants—and I’m a Protestant—we reacted in the 16th century against what we saw as this, you know, artificial hierarchy built around the church. Well, it’s a little bit ironic, but here we are in the 21st century, and we have our own ‘hierarchies’ that we have built around it.”
“The gospel that Paul prescribes to the Romans in the first century is the same gospel that transforms American society in the 21st century.”
“Religion is the universal human response to the gap that we feel between us and God.”
“Every college student and young professional that comes to our church comes in with an assumption about what we believe and an assumption about how we believe it. And if I don’t get ahead of that, it’s a nonstarter.”
“There’s a lot of kind of a tangled mess that people have to weave through to say, ‘Ok, who is Jesus and what is he actually saying to me and what is he offering to me?’”
“We have a blogosphere culture, especially in evangelical Christianity, that loves the defenders of orthodoxy, and we have some who are just like all missionary, and they think there’s no role of kind of like contending for these core things of the faith. We really need both.”
“Jesus said they would know us by our love. And I think that in a truly gospel community you’re just going to see a kind of love and forgiveness and tenderness and acceptance that thaws the ice that forms around a heart that has been hurt. And I routinely tell people, ‘There’s literally no shortcut to that.’”
“The idea that there are certain views that are exclusive and certain views that are not is logically inconsistent.”
“Any truth claim is going to be by definition, it’s going to be exclusive. There’s no way around that. Well, Christianity actually takes that idea and says, ‘You’re included, not because you’re smarter, not because you’re better, not because of anything about you, but because of a gift that was offered to you.’”
“Wherever you see the gospel preached historically in the New Testament, throughout history, it’s going to create bodies of people that come from different backgrounds.”
“I really do want to distinguish between primary and secondary issues. I have my own political answers to some of those, but as a pastor, I never talk about those secondary questions from the pulpit…that’s part of the beauty of the gospel, is there can be a unity even when there is a range of opinion on some of the secondary questions.”
“We make a big mistake when we try to mute what the Bible clearly teaches in order to make our message more palatable to our society.”
Mentioned in the Show
1 Corinthians 15
Daniel
2 Timothy 1:14
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Check out J.D.’s website
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