christian living on Consummation

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.

We may say that in the possession of the Spirit we who are in Christ have a foretaste of the blessings of the age to come, and a pledge and guarantee of the resurrection of the body. Yet we have only ...

The big issue . . . is not whether one applauds or disapproves of the growth of consumerism. The central issue is that consumerism is now a fact of life.”11

When we keep purchasing, keep consuming, and keep envying and coveting, we are pining for what the objects represent: peace, ease, meaning, beauty, stability, adventure, knowledge, renown, connection,...

Conversion in the U.S. seems to mean we’ve exchanged some of our shopping at Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, and Borders for the Christian Bookstore down the street. We’ve taken our lack of purchasing control ...

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, dest...

In every repetition of communion by presenting the sacrament God confirms his resolution to stick to his covenant; and by eating it the receiver commits himself to keep close to the condition of faith...

Let us treasure up in our soul some of those things which are permanent..., not of those which will forsake us and be destroyed, and which only tickle our senses for a little while.

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that is has little power to believe or to act.

But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of k...

I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...

Man must eat in order to live; he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-em...

“Act” is a good word. Baptism and Communion are like mini-dramas. And we are not just in the audience; we are part of the cast. We do not look on from afar, merely learning information. We participate...

TV is imago populi—all of society’s trendy appetites incarnated into visible form and broadcasted.

What, for example, does it mean to celebrate the Eucharist as food (bread and wine) in a place where we are increasingly obsessed with and yet deeply afraid and ashamed of food, where we idolize and d...

People go through three conversions: The conversion of their head, their heart, and their pocketbook. Unfortunately, not all at the same time.

The god of Consumer Christianity does not inspire awe and wonder because he is nothing more than a commodity to be used for our personal satisfaction and self-achievement.

There are two ways to get enough: One is to accumulate more and more, the other is to desire less.

You cannot build a church on consumers. They'll desert you at a moment's notice because they have no commitments beyond meeting their own needs. Jesus can take twelve disciples and build a mov...

The boundary between living and nonliving is actually removed in food. Food is natural communion – partaking of the flesh of the world. When I take food, I am eating world matter in general, and in so...

We are complicit and we do not even realize it, O Holy God. Every day we participate in systems of idolatry, and we promote the captivity of a nation to gods. We have bought the subtle lies of our cul...

We are not producing worshippers in this country. Rather we are producing a generation of spectators, religious onlookers lacking, in many cases, any memory of a true encounter with God, deprived of b...

Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues...you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity...you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to...

This being born again is no longer the active transfer of our will from the realm of inclination into that of obedience. It is, in the sense of the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, t...

So while conversion is the most important step in the journey, involving a fundamental change in our identity, life transformation is the end goal.

Creation in its totality exists as a means to the fulfillment of some specific purpose that terminates on and for the sake of Jesus Christ.

Den som köper det han inte behöver stjäl från sig själv. He who buys what he does not need steals from himself.

American culture is probably the least Christian culture that we’ve ever had because it is so materialistic and it’s so full of lies…. The problem is people have been treated as consumers for so long ...

To partake of the new creation is to see Christ for the first time. And his glory changes us. “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image fr...

American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.