"Long my imprisoned spirit lay

Fast bound in sin and nature's night:

Thine eye diffused a quickening ray;

I woke; the dungeon flamed with light;

My chains fell off: my heart was free:

I rose, went forth, and followed thee."

"When you become a Christian, Jesus will invade your life and make you into somebody he can use to change the world. Through you, he will challenge racism. Through you, Jesus will attack sexism, poverty, and militarism. That was never taught to me when I was growing up. I never heard that I could be an instrument that God could use to change the world. All I was told was that being a Christian meant I would go to heaven when I died. I was never told that the primary reason Jesus saved me was to make me into somebody whom he could use to change the world into the kind of world he willed for it to be when he created it." - Tony Campolo

so true...

"To forgive is not to forget but to transform all that happened into something positive because the other route can only bring more suffering to [ourselves] and to those around [us]." Ishmael Beah

we settle for

Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengence. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we settle for sentiment. BUT, new creation has already begun, the sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokeness and incompletness of the broken world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role as agents and heralds and stewards of the new day that is dawning. That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian, to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which He has thrown open before us.         - NT Wright's

God intends us to penetrate the world.  Christian salt has no business to remain snugly in elegant little ecclesiastical salt cellars; our place is to be rubbed into the secular community, as salt is rubbed into meat, to stop it going bad.  And when society does go bad, we Christians tend to throw up our hands in pious horror and reproach the non-Christian world; but should we not rather reproach ourselves?  One can hardly blame unsalted meat for going bad.  It cannot do anything else.  The real question to ask is: Where is the salt? -John Stott

"The foundation has been laid. The garden has been planted. The musical score is written. The principalities and powers that kept us in exile have been defeated; they need reminding of this, and we need reminding of it too, but it is a fact -- if it isn't, the cross was a failure. Our task is now to build the house, to tend the garden, to play the score. The human race has been in exile; exiled from the garden, shut out of the house, bombarded with noise instead of music. Our task is to announce in deed and word that the exile is over, to enact symbols that speak of healing and forgiveness, to act boldly in God's world in the power of the Spirit."

- N.T. Wright