Taking part

Scripture - the Old and New Testaments - is the story of creation and new creation. Within that, it is the story of covenant and new covenant. When we read scripture as Christians, we read it precisely as people of the new covenant and of the new creation. We do not read it, in other words, as a flat, uniform list of regulations or doctrines. We read it as the narrative in which we ourselves are now called to take part. We read it to discover "the story so far" and also "how it's supposed to end." To put it another way, we live somewhere between the end of Acts and closing scene of Revelation. If we want to understand scripture and to find it doing its proper work in and through us, we must learn to read and understand it in the light of that overall story.

N.T. Wright

Surprised by Hope

The value of small

Don't despise the small but significant symbolic act. We live still in this modernist dream which says, "Unless you can change the whole thing, it's not even worth trying." That's not what Jesus did. Jesus did small but significant symbolic acts, each one of which was freighted with kingdom meaning. God probably doesn't want you to reorganize everything overnight -- learn to be symbol-makers and storytellers for the kingdom. Learn to model genuine humanness in your worship and your stewardship and your relationships -- the Church's task vis-a-vis the world is to model true humanness as a sign, as an invitation.
N.T. WrightThe Challenge of Jesus

God builds

Let's be quite clear ... God builds God's kingdom. But God ordered his world in such a way that his own work within that world takes place not least through one of his creatures in particular, namely, the human beings who reflect his image. That, I believe, is central to the notion of being made in God's image. God intends his wise, creative, loving presence and power to be reflected -- imaged, if you like -- into his world through his human creatures. And, following the disaster of rebellion and corruption, he has built into the gospel message the fact that through the work of Jesus and the power of the Spirit, he equips humans to help in the work of getting the project back on track.

N.T. Wright in Surprised by Hope

Suffering as the teacher

I think what [George] Herbert is getting at (Hopkins* is marvellous at this, too) is that our suffering is the terrible and only teacher—Kierkegaard said famously suffering is the characteristic of God’s love—and I think everyone senses that failure and brokenness and loneliness cause us to perceive us as God might, as naked and ignorant and blind. Our suffering may be the real form love takes, but we also know that at the end of it waits infinite peace and radiance, that has been my experience anyway. Why things are arranged this way, who knows—pretty soon we are all going to find out.

Poet Franz Wright in an interview with Ernest Hilbert entitled, The Secret Glory.

*Gerard Manley Hopkins

Affliction

From the additional notes to Charles Spurgeon's The Treasury of David, on Psalm 119 verse 71. 

It is good for me to be afflicted. I am mended by my sickness, enriched by my poverty, and strengthened by my weakness, and with Saint Bernard desire, "Irasecaris mihi; Domine", O Lord, be angry with me. For if you chide me not, you consider me not; if I taste no bitterness, I have no physic; if you correct me not, I am not thy son. Thus was it with the great grandchild of David, Manasseh, when he was in affliction, "He besought the Lord his God": even that king's iron was more precious to him than his gold, his jail a more happy lodging than his palace, Babylon a better school than Jerusalem. What fools are we, then to frown upon our afflictions! These, how crabbed soever, are our best friends. They are not indeed for our pleasure, they are for our profit; their issue makes them worthy of a welcome. What do we care how bitter that potion be that brings Health. — Abraham Wright [most likely from A Practical Commentary on the Psalms,’ 1661]

  
It's worth adding another comment, this time from George Bowen [in his Daily Meditations]:
Even the profoundest affliction does not, perhaps, teach us everything; a mistake we sometimes make. But why should we compel God to use harsh measures with us? Why not sit at the feet of Jesus and learn quietly what we need to learn?

The intermediate hope

The intermediate hope -- the things that happen in the present time to implement Easter and anticipate the final day -- are always surprising because, left to ourselves, we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present ... is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

N.T. Wright
Surprised by Hope

Coming rather than going

"May we go where he is gone," we sing at the end of one well-known hymn, "rest and reign with him in heaven!" But that is precisely not the point that the New Testament draws from Jesus's resurrection. Yes, there is a promised rest after the labors of this life, and word heaven may be an appropriate, though vague, way of denoting where this rest takes place. But this time of rest is the prelude to something very different, which will emphatically involve earth as well. Earth -- the renewed earth -- is where the reign will take place, which is why the New Testament regularly speaks not of our going to be where Jesus is but of his coming to where we are.

N.T. Wright
Surprised by Hope

God's new creation

With Easter, God's new creation is launched upon a surprised world, pointing ahead to the renewal, the redemption, the rebirth of the entire creation.... every act of love, every deed done in Christ and by the Spirit, every work of true creativity -- doing justice, making peace, healing families, resisting temptation, seeking and winning true freedom -- is an earthly event in a long history of things that implement Jesus's own resurrection and anticipate the final new creation and act as signposts of hope.

N.T. Wright
Surprised by Hope

New World?

The created order, which God has begun to redeem in the resurrection of Jesus, is a world in which heaven and earth are designed not to be separated but to come together. In that coming together, the "very good" that God spoke over creation at the beginning will be enhanced, not abolished. The New Testament never imagines that when the new heavens and the new earth arrive, God will say, in effect,"Well, that first creation wasn't so good after all, was it? Aren't you glad we've got rid of all that space, time and matter?" Rather, we must envisage a world in which the present creation, which we think of in those three dimensions, is enhanced, taken up into God's larger purposes, no doubt, but certainly not abandoned.


N.T. Wright
Surprised by Hope

Turning a corner

Jesus exploded into the life of ancient Israel -- the life of the whole world, in fact -- not as a teacher of timeless truths, nor as a great moral example, but as one through whose life, death and resurrection God's rescue operation was put into effect, and the cosmos turned its great corner at last.

N.T. Wright
Simply Christian

Tyrannizing Creation

The creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, some of the most profound and evocative stories ever written, certainly don’t envisage humans tyrannizing creation. Try doing that to a garden, forcing it to do what you want whether the soil will take it or not, and you may well create a wilderness.

N.T. Wright
After You Believe

Jesus: King of the World

If Jesus is the true King of all the world, whose kingdom redefines power and glory so that they are now seen in the manger, on the cross, and in the garden, then to pray "Thy kingdom come" from the Lord's Prayer is to ask that this kingdom, this power, and this glory may be seen in all the world. It is not enough, though it is the essential starting point, that we submit in our own lives to God's alternative kingdom-vision; we must pray and work for the vision to come in reality, with the rulers of this world being confronted with the claims of their rightful King.

N. T. Wright
"The Most Dangerous Baby" from Christianity Today