Famous Quotes & Sayings

Scot McKnight Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 64 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Scot McKnight.

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Famous Quotes By Scot McKnight

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I hope you agree with me that the hope for the world is the local church, and that the heart of God's plan is found in creating a whole new society in a local church. If — Scot McKnight

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As seminary students Jim and friends examined the Bible to find every reference to the poor - and they found more than two thousand. In fact, they concluded one of every sixteen verses was about the poor. Then a zealous friend decided to cut out every Bible verse about the poor to see what the Bible would look like. As he tells the story, that old Bible literally was in shreds. It wouldn't hold together. It was a Bible full of holes. — Scot McKnight

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The Eucharist profoundly enables the grace of God to be received with all its glories and blessings. — Scot McKnight

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On politics I strive as much as possible to let my passions be for God and for the Church and for others (the Jesus Creed). I place no confidence in redemption by way of politics. The political hope ebbs and flows every 8 years now; I don't get all riled up if a Republican or a Democrat wins; I don't think it matters that much to what we are called to do on a daily basis. — Scot McKnight

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As John Howard Yoder has said, If in society we believe in the rights of employees, then the church should be the first employer to deal with workers fairly. If in the wider society we call for the overcoming of racism or sexism or materialism, then the church should be the place where that possibility first becomes real. — Scot McKnight

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We need to learn to tell the story that makes sense of Jesus. Not a story that we ask Jesus to fit into. — Scot McKnight

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Put differently, we've made the church into the American dream for our own ethnic group with the same set of convictions about next to everything. No one else feels welcome. What Jesus and the apostles taught was that you were welcomed because the church welcomed all to the table. — Scot McKnight

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First we are to seek peace in our local fellowship, to end strife and to seek reconciliation with God and with one another, and out of this peace-shaped, kingdom-shaped church we spill over peace into the world. — Scot McKnight

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The consistency of the Old Testament warnings for the covenant community formed a natural bridge to the New Testament warnings. — Scot McKnight

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In his incarnate life, when he becomes one with us, Jesus recapitulates, or relives, Israel's (our) history. He becomes one of us. In fact, he becomes all of us in one divine-human being. Jesus is all Adam and Eve were designed to be, and more; he loves the Father absolutely and he loves himself absolutely and he loves others absolutely and he loves the world absolutely. He is the Oneness Story in one person. — Scot McKnight

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Grace is more than being lucky to be on God's side. Grace is God's goodness showered on people who have failed. Grace is God's love on those who think they are unlovable. Grace is God knowing what we are designed to be. Grace is God believing in us when we have given up. Grace is someone at the end of their rope finding new strength. But there's more to grace. Grace is both a place and a power. Grace is God unleashing his transforming power. Grace realigns and reroutes a life and a community. Grace is when you turn your worst enemy into your best friend. Grace takes people as they are and makes them what they can be. Grace ennobles; grace empowers. Grace forgives; grace frees. Grace transcends, and grace transforms. — Scot McKnight

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Those who aren't following Jesus aren't his followers. It's that simple. Followers follow, and those who don't follow aren't followers. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into a society where justice rules, where love shapes everything. To follow Jesus means to take up his dream and work for it. — Scot McKnight

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The assumption that the gospel can be reduced to a note card is already off on the wrong track. — Scot McKnight

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There is no kingdom that is not about a just society, as there is no kingdom without redemption under Christ. Yet I'm convinced that both of these approaches to kingdom fall substantially short of what kingdom meant to Jesus, so we need once again to be patient enough to ponder what the Bible teaches. — Scot McKnight

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Since sin is the multifaced distortion of humans in their relations with God, self, others, and the world, and since cracked Eikons create systemic injustice, inherent to the atoning work of God os restorative justice. God's redemptive intent is to restore and rehabilitate humans in their relationship with God, self, others, and the world, and when that happens justice is present and established. The followers of Jesus both proclaim and embody atoning justice by fighting injustice and establishing just that kind of justice. Their forward guard is surrounded with the banner of grace and forgiveness. — Scot McKnight

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Prayer was and is both a spontaneous act and a recitative — Scot McKnight

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The gospel is capable and designed to strike home in every culture, in every age, and in every language. — Scot McKnight

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To walk into the Jefferson memorial is to be in a temple of the pure idolatry of reason — Scot McKnight

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Prayer is the way to die to our own wishes and surrender everything to God. — Scot McKnight

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Simple acts are more valuable than extraordinary powers or spiritual gifts. For Jesus there is a categorical difference between charismatic giftedness and the ordinary fruit of love, compassion, and mercy. Perhaps we need to learn to ask ourselves, particularly if we are gifted leaders, if we value our gifts more than love, if we value the performance of a gift for the good of others or the gift of love for the good of others. When Jesus used "fruit" over against mighty charismatic gifts, he was getting at what mattered most. Do you show love to your neighbors, to your enemies, and to all those who happen to be on your path? Jesus is saying here that if you don't do the latter, he doesn't particularly care about your charismatic giftedness. — Scot McKnight

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Peter's Jesus of Nazareth, the one who lived and died and who was raised and ascended and enthroned, is both Messiah of Israel and Lord of the whole world. Those are the terms of the early gospeling in the book of Acts, and if we want to be faithful to the Bible, those should be our terms as well. Those titles for Jesus tell the gospel Story of Jesus. — Scot McKnight

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God's dream is the kingdom, that's already clear. But what is not always clear is that God's kingdom happens when human beings are empowered by God's Spirit to do God's kingdom work in the shape of a new community. — Scot McKnight

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We live in a world of evaluations, assessments, and measurements, but Jesus turns his gaze deeper because he knows that what is measurable can be faked. — Scot McKnight

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Many think Jesus came to earth so you and I can have a special kind of spiritual experience and then go merrily along, as long as we pray and read our Bibles and develop intimacy with the unseen God but ignore the others-oriented life of justice and love and peace that Jesus embodied. — Scot McKnight

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God gave the Bible not so we can know it but so we can know and love God through it. — Scot McKnight

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We can begin to focus on the eternal if we live to love God and others (the Jesus Creed), if we pursue justice as the way we are called to love others as God's creations, if we live out a life that drives for peace as how loving people treat one another, and if we strive for wisdom instead of just knowledge or bounty. — Scot McKnight

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The church becomes a community called atonement every time it reads the story of Jesus and every time it identifies itself with that story and every time it invites others to listen in to hear that story. Reading Scripture and listening to Scripture and letting Scripture incorporate us into its story is atoning. — Scot McKnight

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God was on the move; God is on the move; and God will always be on the move. Those who walk with God and listen to God are also on the move. Reading the Bible so we can live it out today means being on the move - always. Anyone who stops and wants to turn a particular moment into a monument, as the disciples did when Jesus was transfigured before them, will soon be wondering where God has gone. — Scot McKnight

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Here's our problem today. Not only do we not like ultimatums, but we have too many Christians who have accepted Jesus into their hearts and who have been baptized and who have confessed their sins and who have joined the Church and who are in Bible studies and who are absolutely 100 percent convinced they are going to heaven, but who are not followers of Jesus. There are many who haven't made it real. The mark of a follower of Jesus is following. The mark of a follower of Jesus is that she or he has given Jesus her or his heart. It's that simple. It's that demanding. It's that serious. Jesus was a moral zealot and he expected his followers to become moral zealots too. He wanted them to live the Committed. Life. — Scot McKnight

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Community is like peace in that it is a result instead of an action. Peace results from acts of justice and behaviors of love. Community also emerges out of loving behaviors - like compassion and an embrace and forgiveness - and out of acts of justice. — Scot McKnight

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What the church most needs is not heroes of faith, but faithful followers of Jesus. — Scot McKnight

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Our biggest problem is that we have an entire culture shaped by a misunderstanding of the gospel. That so-called gospel is deconstructing the church — Scot McKnight

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Prayer is not informing God of something unknown but drawing oneself in the divine life of the Trinity and into the very mission of God in this world - this God loves us and invites us into his presence with our petitions. — Scot McKnight

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Jesus is the gospel-shaped King. There is no other messianic story like the one Jesus told and lived. — Scot McKnight

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We need to shed our unearthly and nonsocial and idealistic and romantic and uber-spiritual visions of kingdom and get back to what Jesus meant. By kingdom, Jesus means: God's Dream Society on earth, spreading out from the land of Israel to encompass the whole world. — Scot McKnight

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What does it mean to persevere? It means that we continue to believe, and that we live like believers, which means obediently. It doesn't mean sinlessness; it doesn't mean that we are on some steady and never-failing incline up into pure sanctification; it does not deny stumbling or messy spirituality; it doesn't deny doubt and problems. It simply means that the person continues to walk with Jesus and doesn't walk away from him in a resolute manner. — Scot McKnight

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Jesus thought he was anointed by God to proclaim the gospel to the poor and to proclaim freedom for prisoners and recovered sight for the blind and to set the oppressed free. This is why he came. — Scot McKnight

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We need to think about that future more often. I confess I don't. My mind is tied too much to the here and now and not enough to God's future kingdom. — Scot McKnight

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One reason why so many Christians today don't know the Old Testament is because their "gospel" doesn't even need it! — Scot McKnight

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If we as Christians with a faithful witness would set the example, not by way of reaction but by way of reasoned empathy, we might set the tone for more shalom in our world. — Scot McKnight

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From nature one can learn the lessons of divine providence, and some of us need to be reminded of this because we can look and not see a world alive with God's presence. — Scot McKnight

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Any serious pondering of all of life through the Golden Rule is dangerous for our moral health because it will summon us - I know I feel this way just writing the above paragraphs - to live under the King and as one of his kingdom citizens. — Scot McKnight

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Jesus wanted far more than to be accepted into one's life. He wanted to take over, and his essential call was to trust him enough to surrender one's entire being to him. — Scot McKnight

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If you compare the written prayers from the psalms, the Lord's Prayer, or those we find in the prayer books of the church, one thing will immediately strike any reader: The prayers from those sources are theologically rich and aesthetically appropriate. I cannot always say this of the spontaneous prayers of many Christians - and I am not impugning their motives or questioning their hearts. — Scot McKnight

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The movement that has long called itself "evangelical" is in fact better labeled "soterian." That is, we have thought we were talking about "the gospel" when in fact we were concentrating on "salvation. — Scot McKnight

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The Jesus Creed teaches us that a disciple's responsibility is to love God by following Jesus. You only follow someone else when your own lights or sense of direction are not good enough. — Scot McKnight

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Love one another strenuously because it's hard. — Scot McKnight

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The way to inscribe the will of God on the hearts of people in this world is not by way of law or vote but by way of redemption through Jesus. Jesus' kingdom vision is for his redeemed people and for them alone. — Scot McKnight

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God's idea of redemption is community-shaped. — Scot McKnight

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Every scene of heaven in the Bible shows us a vision of the Church praying together and singing together and praising together. — Scot McKnight

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God did not give the Bible so we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The moment we think we've mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible. — Scot McKnight

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What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him - trusting only his role as guilt remover. — Scot McKnight

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The top two lines on every prophet's job description look like this: Speak openly and clearly about what God is for. Speak openly and clearly about what God is against. The third and fourth lines look like this: I [God] am with you. Have courage. (But you may have to duck or die.) — Scot McKnight

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Jesus is infallible and we are not. — Scot McKnight

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Why do so many today want to wander off to South Africa or Kenya or India or Russia or Honduras or Costa Rica or Peru to help with justice issues but not spend the same effort in their own neighborhood or community or state? Why do young suburbanites, say in Chicago, want to go to Kentucky or Tennessee to help people but not want to spend that same time to go to the inner city in their own area to help with justice issues? I asked this question to a mature student in my office one day, and he thought he had a partial explanation: 'Because my generation is searching for experiences, and the more exotic and extreme the better. Going down the street to help at a food shelter is good and it is just and some of us are doing that, but it's not an experience. We want experiences. — Scot McKnight

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We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things. - ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL — Scot McKnight

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The atonement is designed by God to restore cracked Eikons into glory-producing Eikons by participation in the perfect Eikon, Jesus Chirst, who redeems the cosmos. To be an Eikon, then, is to be charged with a theocentric and missional life. Prior to the fall, Adam and Eve did what they were supposed to do: they "eikoned." And cracked Eikons are being restored so that they can eikon now and so that they will eikon forever. — Scot McKnight

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Too many people think repenting means feeling terrible about something someone has done. Feeling bad is fine, and it often accompanies repentance, but repentance is not so much about what we feel but the twofold prong of owning up to our own injustices and failures to love, and starting all over by living justly and lovingly. — Scot McKnight

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Knowing God's love, knowing God's goodness, and learning to embrace those attributes of God prompt us to pray. — Scot McKnight

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We don't ask what the Bible says, we ask what God says to us in that Bible. The difference is a difference between paper and person. — Scot McKnight

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The idea that relationships are not a strategy is potent; and the sad commentary proceeds to say that often relationships are seen as a strategy, a means to accomplish great things - except love and relationship are not what is really wanted. We want to appear relational so people will like what we have to offer. It's the difference between wanting a good marriage and loving the person you married. — Scot McKnight

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This otherness problem is what the gospel "fixes," and the story of the Bible is the story of God's people struggling with otherness and searching for oneness. — Scot McKnight

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Sometimes in our zeal to "apply" a text, we fail to read the text in its context. And more often than we may all care to admit, our frustrations over how to apply a text can be completely resolved with a more accurate interpretation. — Scot McKnight

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In one simple sentence: what Christians want for the nation should first be a witnessed reality in their local church. — Scot McKnight