71 Quotes by Brian Zahnd

The gospel is the beautiful story of how God is bringing the world out of bondage to sin and death through the triumph of Jesus Christ. If you don’t know how to preach the gospel without making appeals to afterlife issues, you don’t know how to preach the gospel!

Can you feel the falseness that prevails in Babylon? Babylon is always religious and knows how to keep up appearances, but that only serves to conceal the idols Babylon really worships. Money and Power. Economy and Military. The falseness is the phony assumption that the pursuit of money and power is sustainable and leads to a life worth living.

American Christians especially should keep in mind that we as the modern Romans – the privileged citizens of the world’s lone superpower – have more in common with Pontius Pilate than we do with Galilean peasants.

The resurrection is not only God’s vindication of his Son; it is the vindication of all Jesus taught. Easter Sunday is nothing less than the triumph of the peaceable kingdom of Christ. Easter changes everything. Easter is the hope of the world, the dawn of a new age, the rising of the New Jerusalem on the horizon of humanity’s burned-out landscape. Easter is God saying once again, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!

I pledge no allegiance to elephants or donkeys, only to the Lamb.

Our responsibility is not to chaplain the state but to call the state to repentance and to surrender to the King who is Lord. Our responsibility is to be an alternative to the state. Christians would do far more good for our country by learning not to look to DC for solutions but to the glorious Son of God, who loves us and gave himself for us and, in doing so, gave us a whole new way of life – one not shaped by the power of force but the force of the gospel.

The path to paradise is often the path of suffering. If our chief goal is to avoid suffering, we will probably never find paradise. Paradise is not found in the mall, it’s found on the Easter side of Good Friday.

Christianity is a confession, not an explanation. We will attempt to explain what we legitimately can, but we will always confess more than we can explain.

Jesus does not lead his people as an angry crowd. Jesus does not lead his people to join an angry crowd. Jesus never leads anything other than a gentle and peaceable minority.