Top 45 Scot McKnight Quotes
#1. Sometimes in our zeal to "apply" a text, we fail to read the text in its context. And more often than we may all care to admit, our frustrations over how to apply a text can be completely resolved with a more accurate interpretation.
Scot McKnight
#2. Our biggest problem is that we have an entire culture shaped by a misunderstanding of the gospel. That so-called gospel is deconstructing the church
Scot McKnight
#3. Jesus wanted far more than to be accepted into one's life. He wanted to take over, and his essential call was to trust him enough to surrender one's entire being to him.
Scot McKnight
#5. Any serious pondering of all of life through the Golden Rule is dangerous for our moral health because it will summon us - I know I feel this way just writing the above paragraphs - to live under the King and as one of his kingdom citizens.
Scot McKnight
#6. We need to learn to tell the story that makes sense of Jesus. Not a story that we ask Jesus to fit into.
Scot McKnight
#7. The assumption that the gospel can be reduced to a note card is already off on the wrong track.
Scot McKnight
#8. Love one another strenuously because it's hard.
Scot McKnight
#9. Jesus thought he was anointed by God to proclaim the gospel to the poor and to proclaim freedom for prisoners and recovered sight for the blind and to set the oppressed free. This is why he came.
Scot McKnight
#10. The Eucharist profoundly enables the grace of God to be received with all its glories and blessings.
Scot McKnight
#11. Prayer is not informing God of something unknown but drawing oneself in the divine life of the Trinity and into the very mission of God in this world - this God loves us and invites us into his presence with our petitions.
Scot McKnight
#12. 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.
Scot McKnight
#13. I hope you agree with me that the hope for the world is the local church, and that the heart of God's plan is found in creating a whole new society in a local church. If
Scot McKnight
#14. Those who aren't following Jesus aren't his followers. It's that simple. Followers follow, and those who don't follow aren't followers. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into a society where justice rules, where love shapes everything. To follow Jesus means to take up his dream and work for it.
Scot McKnight
#15. Many think Jesus came to earth so you and I can have a special kind of spiritual experience and then go merrily along, as long as we pray and read our Bibles and develop intimacy with the unseen God but ignore the others-oriented life of justice and love and peace that Jesus embodied.
Scot McKnight
#16. God's dream is the kingdom, that's already clear. But what is not always clear is that God's kingdom happens when human beings are empowered by God's Spirit to do God's kingdom work in the shape of a new community.
Scot McKnight
#17. We need to shed our unearthly and nonsocial and idealistic and romantic and uber-spiritual visions of kingdom and get back to what Jesus meant. By kingdom, Jesus means: God's Dream Society on earth, spreading out from the land of Israel to encompass the whole world.
Scot McKnight
#18. Community is like peace in that it is a result instead of an action. Peace results from acts of justice and behaviors of love. Community also emerges out of loving behaviors - like compassion and an embrace and forgiveness - and out of acts of justice.
Scot McKnight
#19. One reason why so many Christians today don't know the Old Testament is because their "gospel" doesn't even need it!
Scot McKnight
#20. 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. The moment we think we've mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible.
Scot McKnight
#21. The top two lines on every prophet's job description look like this: Speak openly and clearly about what God is for. Speak openly and clearly about what God is against. The third and fourth lines look like this: I [God] am with you. Have courage. (But you may have to duck or die.)
Scot McKnight
#22. Knowing God's love, knowing God's goodness, and learning to embrace those attributes of God prompt us to pray.
Scot McKnight
#23. 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.
Scot McKnight
#24. In one simple sentence: what Christians want for the nation should first be a witnessed reality in their local church.
Scot McKnight
#25. Jesus is the gospel-shaped King. There is no other messianic story like the one Jesus told and lived.
Scot McKnight
#26. Every scene of heaven in the Bible shows us a vision of the Church praying together and singing together and praising together.
Scot McKnight
#27. We live in a world of evaluations, assessments, and measurements, but Jesus turns his gaze deeper because he knows that what is measurable can be faked.
Scot McKnight
#28. God gave the Bible not so we can know it but so we can know and love God through it.
Scot McKnight
#29. Prayer was and is both a spontaneous act and a recitative
Scot McKnight
#30. From nature one can learn the lessons of divine providence, and some of us need to be reminded of this because we can look and not see a world alive with God's presence.
Scot McKnight
#32. The way to inscribe the will of God on the hearts of people in this world is not by way of law or vote but by way of redemption through Jesus. Jesus' kingdom vision is for his redeemed people and for them alone.
Scot McKnight
#33. What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him - trusting only his role as guilt remover.
Scot McKnight
#34. This otherness problem is what the gospel "fixes," and the story of the Bible is the story of God's people struggling with otherness and searching for oneness.
Scot McKnight
#35. What the church most needs is not heroes of faith, but faithful followers of Jesus.
Scot McKnight
#36. We don't ask what the Bible says, we ask what God says to us in that Bible. The difference is a difference between paper and person.
Scot McKnight
#37. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things. - ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL
Scot McKnight
#38. The consistency of the Old Testament warnings for the covenant community formed a natural bridge to the New Testament warnings.
Scot McKnight
#39. If we as Christians with a faithful witness would set the example, not by way of reaction but by way of reasoned empathy, we might set the tone for more shalom in our world.
Scot McKnight
#40. The gospel is capable and designed to strike home in every culture, in every age, and in every language.
Scot McKnight
#41. Prayer is the way to die to our own wishes and surrender everything to God.
Scot McKnight
#42. We need to think about that future more often. I confess I don't. My mind is tied too much to the here and now and not enough to God's future kingdom.
Scot McKnight
#43. To walk into the Jefferson memorial is to be in a temple of the pure idolatry of reason
Scot McKnight
#44. The movement that has long called itself "evangelical" is in fact better labeled "soterian." That is, we have thought we were talking about "the gospel" when in fact we were concentrating on "salvation.
Scot McKnight
#45. The Jesus Creed teaches us that a disciple's responsibility is to love God by following Jesus. You only follow someone else when your own lights or sense of direction are not good enough.
Scot McKnight
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