Monthly Archives: November 2011
Rescuing Ambition
“God makes our forward momentum his business. That’s why so much of Scripture is dedicated to getting us walking, keeping us moving, and ensuring that we finish our course. But if God truly desires our forward momentum, why does it sometimes feel like I’m banging my glass head against a stone wall? My longings for impact are confusing and fragile; I just don’t know what I should do. Or maybe I’m not the ambitious type. I hunger for nothing more than a good magazine and a peaceful place to read it.God has an agenda: it’s to change us into the image of his Son. And one way he brings about this change is through our dreams and ambitions. God works in us through that to which we aspire.Sometimes God brings our dreams to life; sometimes he doesn’t. But how we respond to his work becomes an important intersection for change in our lives. As we cooperate with him, we discover that it’s not ultimately about nailing the promotion,or raising well‐behaved kids, or wining the Daytona 500 – as good as all those things may be. It’s about something much bigger: how I become like Christ while I pursue those dreams.Do you understand your relationship with God that way? He doesn’t need us to get things done, but he delights to use us, so he must shape us for his service. That’s exactly what creates godly ambition – the activity of God in us and around us to ultimately work through us.”Dave Harvey, Rescuing Ambition (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 90‐1.
Filed under Uncategorized
On the Resurrection Body
Body, therefore, affirms the biblical tradition of a positive attitude toward physicality as a condition for experiencing life in its fullness, but also assimilates, subsumes, and transcends the role of the physical in the public domain of earthly life.
Hence it would be appropriate to conceive of the raised body as a form or mode of existence of the whole person including every level of intersubjective communicative experience that guarantees both the continuity of personal identity and an enhanced experience of community which facilitates intimate union with God in Christ and with differentiated “others” who also share this union.
If the marriage bond, e.g., ceases at death, this is also not because the the resurrection body offers any “less,” but because interpersonal union is assimilated and subsumed into a “more” that absorbs exclusivity but “adds” a hitherto unimagined death.
Such mutuality of union and respect for difference, however, presupposes a “pattern of existence controlled and directed by the Holy Spirit“, and a mode of existence designed by God for the new environment of the eschatological new creation.
(emphasis his, paragraph spacing mine)
Anthony Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 2000), 1279.
Filed under 1 Corinthians, body, community, heaven, quotes, resurrection
In Anticipation 