41 Quotes by Scot McKnight

For Mother Teresa, love is only of use if it is seen in action. Her famous words are: “Do ordinary things with extraordinary love: little things like caring for the sick and the homeless, the lonely and the unwanted, washing and cleaning for them.” And, “You must give what will cost you something.” Her creed – call it her Shema – is simple: The fruit of silence is prayer. The fruit of prayer is faith. The fruit of faith is love. The fruit of love is service. The fruit of service is peace.

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.

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.

On the basis of what the New Testament does say, the final home should not be called “heaven” but instead the “new heavens and the new earth,” and this makes a significant difference for understanding that what we do now really does matter – for we will continue doing it on the other side of life after death.

And I always do this aloud, or at least at a mumble level, making sure I am doing more than just glancing at the psalms or prayers. Glancing at prayers is the fastest path toward vain repetitions I know of. For that reason, the church has always advocated reading our prayers aloud so we will go more slowly and concentrate more on what we are saying. Prayer books are designed to be read aloud.

What we are looking for in reading the Bible is the ability to turn the two-dimensional words on paper into a three-dimensional encounter with God, so that the text takes on life and meaning and depth and perspective and gives us direction for what to do today.

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.

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.

One reason why so many Christians today don’t know the Old Testament is because their ‘gospel’ doesn’t even need it.