Sermon Quotes
New Creation
William Booth
To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labor. You must in some way or other graft upon the man’s nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine.
Ludwig Feurbach (For Contrast)
Nature, the world, has no value, no interest for CHristians. The Christian thinks only of himself and the salvation of his soul.
Meredith Kline
Redemption is a recovering and restoring of the original. The person who experiences redemption in Christ remains the same person, even though the transformation from the sinner dead-in-sins to the saint alive-forevermore-in-Christ is so radical as to be called a new creation.
C.S. Lewis
He goes ‘to prepare a place for us.’ This presumably means that He is about to create that whole new Nature which will provide the environment or conditions for His glorified humanity and, in Him, Jesus Ascended for ours … It is the picture of a new human nature, and a new Nature in general, being brought into existence. We must, indeed, believe the risen body to be extremely different from the mortal body: but the existence, in that new state, of anything that could in any sense be described as ‘body’ at all, involves some sort of spatial relations and in the long run a whole new universe. That is the picture — not of unmaking but of remaking. The old field of space, time, matter, and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not.
C.S. Lewis
God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.
Martin Luther
Thus a Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, begun once and continuing ever after. For we must keep at it without ceasing, always purging whatever pertains to the old Adam, so that whatever belongs to the new creature may come forth.
D. Douglas Meeks
Hope orients all thought, action, and relationships to God’s ultimate redemption of the creation and to the ultimate communion with the triune God…hope is the steady orientation to God’s making all things new in the “constant communion” God creates with us and with the whole creation.
Wesleyan Perspectives on the New Creation. Kingswood Books, 2004.
D. Douglas Meeks
The natural environment is our home, but it is first God’s creation. The cosmic scope of God’s new creation embraces the whole of nature. According to the biblical notion of shekinah, God intends to dwell in the whole of God’s creation, not just in the human part of it. The light that the new creation throws on the plight of the earth makes us aware of the groaning of creation and should lead Christians to a new theology of life with the earth.
Wesleyan Perspectives on the New Creation. Kingswood Books, 2004.
John Wesley
There will be a greater deliverance than all this; for there will be no more sin. And to crown all, there will be a deep, an intimate, an uninterrupted union with God; a constant communion with the Father and his son Jesus Christ, through the Spirit; a continual enjoyment of the Three-One God, and of all the creatures in him.
Rowan Williams
Where his activity is recognized, there is ‘new creation’ (2 Cor. 5.17): his active presence is associated with an entirely new frame of reference for perceiving human agency and human hope.
Rowan Williams
Jesus is identified historically quite independently of the history of his followers in the sense that his followers depend wholly on his incarnate life for their life as his Body, as inhabitants of the new creation.
Rowan Williams
Christ as incarnate Word does not ‘exercise an influence’ on finite agents like that of ordinary finite causal agencies, nor does he introduce extra causal factors into the finite world or simply initiate a tradition of teaching and speculation…the effect of Jesus’ life is both historical, in the sense that there comes to be a community with certain distinguishing marks, and theological, initiating a new set of human possibilities, a new creation (2 Cor. 5.17). The theological claim is that in the movement – the ‘culture’ if you will – that has its traceable historical roots in Jesus of Nazareth a connection is made between human subjects and the divine Word.
N.T. Wright
Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.
N.T. Wright
Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion.
The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is, InterVarsity Press, 199.
N.T. Wright
God’s kingdom is launched through Jesus and particularly through his death and resurrection; but, by the Spirit, this kingdom is not an escape from the present world but rather its transformation, already in the present (starting with Jesus’ resurrection) and in the ultimate future (the new heaven and earth including our own resurrection).
N.T. Wright
God’s plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was “very good.” Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.
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