Regardless of their origin, the dispensations are kind of like the contents of Pandora’s box. The box has been opened, and there’s no putting the dispensations back inside—at least not for those who believe they’ve uncovered a great biblical secret.

When we try to bind the Christian faith to the affirmation of ideology and dogma, we strip it of its life-giving, creation-transforming power. Faith is about transformation, not affirmation. It’s about believing that no matter how flawed we are, how riddled with doubt we might be, how broken and sinful our lives may have become, God loves us anyway

if we’re using the Bible to cause harm to others, we’re wrong. Period.

humanity is God-breathed. And yet . . . we’re not perfect. If we were, we would simply be God or, at the very least, a bunch of little gods. But we’re not perfect; we’re God-breathed, not God-incarnated. God-breathed doesn’t mean perfection, because God doesn’t take over our lives and control us like puppets.

the fundamental problem with the rapture: it calls us to escape, while Jesus calls us to incarnation. The rapture calls us to look only at ourselves, while Jesus calls us to die to self and live our lives for others. For all the rapture’s focus on going off to heaven to live with Jesus forever, the life it calls us to lead in the here and now is, a

Remember, those epistles of his are real letters to real churches; in them he gives real advice for how people in those churches should live their lives.

heaven is not so much a destination as it is a source of hope and inspiration.

when Jesus ascended into heaven, leaving his disciples behind with the great commission to go and make disciples of all the nations on earth, some still doubted. But Jesus didn’t excommunicate them. He gave them the same authority as the rest of the disciples to be his agents of grace in the world (Matthew 28:16-20).

what Christianity looks like when we stop focusing on trying to escape earth for heaven and start trying to bring heaven to earth.