Best 14 quotes of Benjamin L. Corey on MyQuotes

If one takes a public stand against, say, most any sin you can think of, one is considered "courageous" and a "defender of the faith." Folks will quickly applaud you and tell you how much they admire you for "taking a stand" on biblical truth. Except if you quote Matt. 5:44 and invite people to apply it in any sort of meaningful, literal way. The moment one begins to talk about loving your enemies they all of a sudden become "liberals," "extremists," or are accused of completely taking an otherwise straight forward passage "out of context.

Justice is only achieved in beautiful fullness when the oppressed has been elevated back to their rightful place, and when those who were guilty of the oppressing have experienced repentance, healing, and restoration as well.--justice is only achieved in beautiful fullness when the oppressed has been elevated back to their rightful place, and when those who were guilty of the oppressing have experienced repentance, healing, and restoration as well.

The Bible isn't a choose your own adventure book where everyone can just make up their own meaning.

As long as we are caving in to the vicious cycle of always trying harder in hopes that one day we won't feel like such an outsider, we are not being obedient to the scriptural principle of living at peace wit ourselves. Instead, we're living in turmoil, and that's not the life Jesus invites us to live. We are invited to live at peace. At peace with our neighbors. At peace with our enemies. At peace with God. At peace with ourselves. And that critical last part means we must be affirming--and not just to others who are different. We need to affirm that place inside us that desperately wants to hear that we are good, that we are beautiful, and that the ways in which we are different are gifts to be celebrated.

But what if there's really no such thing as a crisis of faith? ... What if it just feels like everything is going wrong, but really that instance is a moment when everything is about to go right? ... What if what we often call a faith crisis is actually a divine journey--not from God, or simply to God, but a journey with God?

Drawing identity from any area other than the source of life is a spiritual death sentence, and worse, it's contagious, because it gives birth to tribalism. However, when we return to our central identity of image-bearers designed to receive love from and reflect love to others, we are naturally invited to shed all of the unloving, fear-based tribal behaviors that come from loyalty to the label.

In biblical Greek the word "repent" comes from a military term similar to the command "about face." In...sermons, repentance is all about "turning away' from sin, and certainly repentance would include an element of that. However, the deeper flavor of his word is less about turning away from something and more about turning toward something. As much as the word "repent" makes many of us recoil, what if it is enjoining us to turn away from our fear of God and to turn toward the love of God? what if we simply confess that God is love, and then put a period at the end of the sentence? God is love. Period.

It's important to remember that Israel's story is a story of being in the process of getting to know God, all before Jesus presents himself as the ultimate revelation of God. It is not unlike other relationships where we need time to fully understand and appreciate the true self and identity of the other person in the relationship. The story involves moments when Israel truly sees God, and moments when they profoundly misunderstand God--both of which are normal parts of any relationship.

Orthodoxy and orthopraxy are both important and are both things that Jesus spoke to, but I no longer believe that either of these things belongs in the center of our circles. I think that spot should be reserved for the exact representation of love: Jesus. By erasing my central pursuit of orthodoxy and orthopraxy and replacing it with Jesus, the essence of love, I realized that perhaps Jesus was inviting us to pursue something even better than right thinking or right doing: he was inviting us to pursue a heart that is constantly increasing in is capacity to love.

Through a lens of navigation, then, we can see that "keeping" isn't about having a perfect, linear or flawless journey; keeping is about having a focus point that you want to keep moving toward.

Unlike the bounded-set approach where we're constantly trying to measure ourselves up to see whether we're in or out, the centered-set paradigm invites us to ask far more simple and profound questions: "Am I moving toward Jesus? Am I moving toward love?

When the opening verses of Genesis say that we were created in the image and likeness of God, it is helpful to remember that this means we are actually created in the image and likeness of LOVE. We were created by love. We were created to receive love. We were created to reflect love. Our entire purpose for existing is to love.

When we place the Bible on equal footing with God, we become paralyzed by how to deal with it--because any criticism of the Bible becomes criticism of God himself. The cure for the religion of Biblicism is the realization that Jesus is the inerrant Word of God, and the Bible is just a collection of inspired and useful writings that introduce us to him. Let me be clear: whenever we find tension between something Jesus taught and something taught elsewhere in the Bible, the tiebreaker always goes to Jesus. Always.

When we see God through a fear-based lens, we end up with an inaccurate view of ourselves.