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#99 Jesus for everyone - NT Wright at London Bible Week

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#99 Jesus for everyone - NT Wright at London Bible Week

January 6, 2022
Ask NT Wright Anything
Ask NT Wright AnythingPremier

Tom Wright speaks on 'Jesus for Everyone' at London Bible Week in 2017.

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[Music]
The Ask NTY anything podcast.
[Music]
Oh hello! Happy new year and welcome along! This is Justin Briley with the show that brings you the thought and theology of New Testament scholar and former Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright. And as usual, the programs brought you in partnership with NT Wright online and SBCK, Tom's UK publisher, and also the ministry I head up, Premier Unbelievable.
And we'll be revealing a new look website soon where you can explore faith in all kinds of different ways in 2022. Well today on the show and for the next couple of weeks we're taking a break from the usual Q&A format to bring you some special talks that Tom gave at Premier's London Bible Week a few years ago, starting today with Jesus for everyone. But just a shout out first to Heath from Davis, California, who left a review for us on the podcast page.
Super happy about this podcast was listening at work yesterday and really excited to hear NT Wright answer my question. I replayed it for my fiance and later for my housemates who were all gracious enough to bear with my excitement. I could tell Tom thought about and probably wrote some notes on my question, which I appreciated.
Or maybe he's like a tap that can go off just like that. Either way, really great to listen. This podcast is a beacon of peace for me as I learn more about the ins and outs of my faith.
He thank you for leaving a review and that was lovely to read about the way that you were so pleased that Tom answered your question. Rate and review us. It does help others to discover the podcast too, wherever you're listening to the podcast.
And thanks to all those who've been supporting us from 2021 into 2022 with your year end gifts. And it's not too late to do that if you'd like to do so. The links are with today's show you can give from anywhere in the world.
And if you want more from the show, including regular updates and bonus content, do sign up at askNT Wright.com. But right now, here's Tom Wright at London Bible Week a few years ago, speaking on Jesus for everyone. Delighted that Premier and SBCK have teamed up for this. As Justin said, I've done work with Premier on and off over several years.
And I forget exactly when it was. I think it was 1990 that I first signed a contract with SBCK. Almost before its present director was born, maybe not quite Sam, but it's been wonderful to be partnering with them over many projects in many years.
And that's been terrific. So when they said, "Come to London and talk about Jesus," I thought, "Well, what's not to like, that's fine." And then I saw that you wanted me to talk today, this afternoon, this particular session, about Jesus' call to disciples. And whether that was in a sense inclusive and if so what, and whether it was in a sense challenging and demanding and if so what.
And I was reflecting on this and thinking, "This is a very modern question. It's a very 21st century question. How to be inclusive and demanding together?" And as usual, my agenda for reading the Bible is to say that we must try to give today's answers to the first century questions and not simply confine ourselves to the questions that our culture throws up.
Those are important. We live with them and we'll come back to them. But my task throughout my adult life really has been to try to understand Jesus and the New Testament in its original context.
And then from that to see what is generated afresh for us today. I was thinking about Jesus' call to the disciples in his call of 12 this morning when I was in a rather different sort of event to this. There were a lot of people in a hot ecclesial space but it was actually a church in West London where a primary school was having its primary levers service.
And the reason I was there is that my five-year-old granddaughter has just finished her year in the reception class and she had to read a tiny little piece of paper thanking one of the levers for something that they'd done for her. And so my wife and I were sitting in the back thinking, "Ooh, isn't that sweet?" and taking photographs and all that as you do. But at the beginning of this event when there was music playing, the headmaster, who's quite a character, suddenly said, "I want 20 volunteers." And of course, you know what it's like with little kids.
All the hands went up and he walked around and was picking out you and you and you and you. And I was thinking, "What's he doing? What are they going to be doing? Is he going to do some magic trick with them or whatever?" And the entire school had learned various songs but he wanted a kind of impromptu choir as became clear and he led them back out to the stage and the ones that he had picked then sang to everyone else. And it was great.
It was a happy occasion.
But I thought what it looked like when Jesus, after doing his stuff for a little while, then selected 12 of his followers and took them off. And everyone's thinking, "What's going on? What's this mean? What are they about to do? What's this for?" And I don't think at that point anyone much was thinking, "Is this inclusive or exclusive or is this demanding or radical or whatever?" They were thinking, "Something is going on here and we want to know what it is." And what I'm going to try and do right now is to explore what it was that Jesus thought was going on and how we get from there a very specific one-off context to us today or any Christians at any period in history.
But perhaps particularly in our culture. Because when Jesus calls people, he doesn't just call them so that they can be with him. Of course, he calls them to be with him.
That's part of the deal.
To stay with him, to learn who he is, to enjoy his company. That's always got to be there.
When Jesus calls you, it isn't an impersonal thing like you get a letter through the post saying, "Turn up at such and such." And you don't know quite what. It's a very personal thing. You are drawn by this extraordinarily powerful, strange, attractive character who we call Jesus.
But he calls people for a purpose. He calls people because God is on the move and God wants to share his on the move-ness, if you like, with people who he wants to work through as well as with. It's a call with a purpose.
It always is.
And so before we can ask our questions, we need to think, "What is this purpose?" And I go back to the beginning of Mark's Gospel as one does again and again and again. And after John was arrested, Jesus, who had been baptized by John a little while before, came into Galilee announcing the good news of God, this is Mark 1, 14, and saying, "The time is fulfilled.
The kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news." And the very next thing he does is to start calling Peter, Andrew, James, John, and then more as we go on. So something about the calling of the first disciples, which seems to be, in Mark at least, the immediate implication of the announcement that the kingdom of God has come near. The time is fulfilled.
But what on earth does that, and I mean, what on earth?
Because often today, despite all the things that many of us have written about the New Testament over the years, ordinary Christians go back into default mode and they think that the kingdom of God is simply about heaven or about the afterlife. And it really, really, really isn't. We pray day by day in the Lord's Prayer, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
That's what it's all about. The last scene in the Bible is not about saved souls going up to heaven, it is about the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth. I'm not going to labor the point if this sounds strange or fresh to you.
Thanks for the plug, by the way, Justin. My book, Surprised by Hope, does deal with all these sorts of heaven and earthy questions.
But in order to see what was going on when Jesus said the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near, we need to grasp the biblical context.
What is this time? In what sense is it fulfilled? Well, they knew because they knew their Bibles, particularly they knew the book of Daniel. The Jewish historian Josephus, an extraordinary writer in the middle of the first century and then on towards the end of the first century, says that one of the main reasons that Jewish groups were driven to revolt against Rome in the 60s of the first century was because of an oracle in their scriptures which said that at that time a world ruler would arise from Judea. They were waiting for the kingdom of God.
And they believed that this oracle, which we can track back to the book of Daniel, said that there was actually a chronology effect. It wasn't just at some miscellaneous time. It was going to be 70 weeks of years after the people had gone into exile in Babylon and they were calculating.
They didn't always agree about their calculations.
But many of them believed that at this time God was at last going to do the thing that he had promised that he would do. What was that thing? Well, that after the long night of Israel's desolation and extended exile as in Daniel chapter 9, then eventually history would turn its single great corner and God would do the new thing, rescuing Israel, judging the world, bringing about a new world order.
And Jesus is saying that calendar has got there. The time is fulfilled. God's kingdom is coming near right now.
This, in other words, is the time for God to become king. That's what it's all about. What does it mean then for God to become? I was writing about this some years ago.
And my wife, bless, always specializes in asking the key questions that I wish people wouldn't ask because they forced me back to think again. When SPCC or somebody asked me 10 years ago to write another book on Jesus, which came out as simply Jesus, my wife said, you're writing another book on Jesus. I said, yes.
I said, haven't you written three already? And I said, well, yes. I said, well, has Jesus changed?
And I said, well, no, but maybe I have because as you go on trying to be a disciple, you find out more about Jesus. You all know that.
I know that.
And so I was trying to say what I was seeing. But in the same way with the question of God becoming king, I said, I was writing a book called How God Became King.
And she said, well, isn't God always king? I mean, if God wasn't king, the world would simply stop existing. I said, no, but we have to get our heads around the fact that in the Psalms and in Isaiah and in Daniel, they are constantly celebrating the fact that something new is happening namely that God is going to take his power and reign in a fresh way. And they wrestle with this because they realize that actually if God stepped in and said, OK, I'm in charge now.
Bang, that's it. Then the world might well be in a sorry state. People wouldn't be ready.
But the time was fulfilled. Now was the time for God at last to do what he'd always said he was going to do.
And so as we go back to that Old Testament context, we see in Daniel, we see in those glorious Psalms, the idea of God becoming king is about the whole creation being put right at last.
Think of the Psalms. I read the Psalms through day by day and I always get a special lift when I get into the 90s because all those Psalms in the 90s are about creation celebrating because God is coming to sort everything out. He is coming to judge the world and judge doesn't mean to destroy the world.
It means to put everything right at last. That's what it's all about. God is coming to sort out the mess for his whole creation to be wonderfully restored.
And in Isaiah, one of the key passages about God becoming king. Jesus is alluding to it again and again. Isaiah 52 verses 7 to 12.
The watchmen lift up their voices and shout for joy because how lovely on the mountains are the feet of the one who comes to Zion and says, your God reigns.
What does that mean? It means after the Babylonian exile and after the extended exile that's gone on beyond that. At last God is coming back and is going to show the world whose boss.
But what does it look like when God shows the world whose boss? Read on from Isaiah 52 to Isaiah 53 where we suddenly get the picture of the suffering servant. Bruised for our iniquities wounded for our trespasses despised and rejected upon him was the suffering that made us whole. And somehow these two go together in a way that the churches have often found it very difficult to imagine.
When I became Bishop, which was what? 14 years ago now, going around the Darciss of Durham, I was aware that several churches had as their basic slogan, the kingdom of God. And what they meant by that was that Jesus went around feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, being kind to people, healing people who are crippled or blind or whatever. This was a wonderful mission of making life better for many, many people.
And these churches had grasped that vision and were saying, we're going to follow Jesus and we're going to get out there into the world and do it with him.
But those churches often then had a puzzle. Why did Jesus need to die? Just then he was getting going.
What a pity his work was cut short.
And so there were churches which celebrated the kingdom but had no idea how the cross fitted into it. And then there were many other churches in the Darciss which did it the other way around.
Many that said the whole point of Jesus coming was that he would die for the sins of the world. And what was all that sort of kingdom stuff about in between? For churches like that, there are many for whom it would be quite sufficient if Jesus of Nazareth had been born of a virgin and died on a cross and never done anything in between. And I imagine Matthew, Mark, Luke and John standing there saying, excuse me, we spent a long time talking about all the stuff.
You just have to figure out how this goes together. The kingdom means what it means in the light of the cross which is its destination. And the cross means what it means in the light of the kingdom.
I'll be saying more about that this evening, God willing.
But here it is in Isaiah 52 and 53 that God is coming back to sort everything out to be king. And the means by which he is doing that is the death of the servant.
So when Jesus says, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand now, you, you, you and you for a start, you come with me. He is enfolding them into his own kingdom mission. Even though at the moment they don't understand what this is.
Of course, if they had understood, they probably said, no, you must be crazy. We're going to carry on fishing. Thank you very much.
Just like later, even after they've said, you are the Messiah in Mark chapter 8 and the parallels in Matthew and Luke. And Jesus says, okay, we're going up to Jerusalem. The Son of Man is going to be handed over to be killed and on the third day be raised.
I think they think that this is just a strange metaphor. I think they think he's using biblical picture language to say something like, okay, if I'm the Messiah, we know what we have to do. We're going up to Jerusalem.
Some of us may get hurt. Some of us may get killed, but we're going to win.
That's why they go with him because they are looking for God to become king and they think that this will happen by the ordinary means of military conquest.
They tried it 200 years before in the revolt under Judas Maccabees. Read about it in the Apocrypha. It had worked for a short time against the Syrians.
Would it work now against the Romans? They were hoping it would.
Jesus constantly tells them that there is a different sort of battle to fight, a different sort of victory to be won. Again, we'll come back to that later.
So the first thing to grasp is the Old Testament context within which the idea of God becoming king makes the sense it makes. Then there are the Old Testament models. When Jesus says, you stop what you're doing and come with me.
If we have our ears attuned, the call to discipleship echoes the call of people like Abraham. Leave your country and your father's house. Go to the country.
I'll show you. I've got a plan for you.
Abraham goes.
He wobbles every other chapter he believes and then the every other chapter in between he wobbles and then he believes again.
He's no plaster cast saint. But then the call of Aaron to be the priest, the call of Elijah and the other great prophets.
The call of David to be the man after God's own heart. He wobbled a bit too and how. But God made promises to him.
These are background models which help us see when God is operating. God wants to do it, not despite people, not just for people, but through people. Where does that come from? How does that work? God's purposes from Genesis 1 onwards were always to be put into operation, not entirely, but in key parts, through image bearing humans.
When God creates Adam and Eve in Genesis 1, he doesn't simply say, I'm setting you a moral examiner. I hope you're not going to fail it. And of course they do.
That's kind of the side issue in a sense. Again, come back to that this evening.
The important thing is they are to look after the garden.
They are to name the animals. They are to be vice regents over God's world.
God from the beginning is the God who desires to work through image bearing human beings.
And even though we have marred his image in us, God's call to discipleship, Jesus call to discipleship, is a way of saying, you are image bearers.
Now come with me and I'll show you what that's going to mean. I've got work for you.
That's the foundation of it all.
So the point is that God is coming to fulfill his age-old purposes, his purposes for Israel, his purposes for the human race, his purposes through Israel for the human race, and through the human race for the world. Because God is not going to save us from creation.
He is going to save us for creation. Read Romans 8 where it's quite clear that God's desire is to liberate the entire created order from its slavery to decay.
The whole created order is like Israel in Egypt, in slavery, or like Israel in Babylon in exile.
And how is God going to renew it through renewed human beings?
Here's a side bracket, but it may be important. This is how justification works. God is going to put the whole world right at last.
God has declared that intention by raising Jesus from the dead, and in the present time God puts us right so that we can be part of his putting right project for the world. That's the call to discipleship. Not simply come with me and there's a beautiful disembodied bliss.
Okay, be a platonist if you like, but that's not New Testament theology.
The call is become a genuine human and become part of God's project for the world. And here's how it works.
The title I was given for this session was Jesus for everyone, which is a wonderful title.
But how does it happen that one man in the first century can be the man for everyone, can be the one who is relevant to everybody? Many people in the last few hundred years have said, well, he was an interesting teacher, first century Jew, of course, so we don't expect him to be particularly significant for us. That misses the point.
In the way the Bible story works, the whole history of creation is funneled down onto the story of Israel.
God calls Abraham to be the means of rescuing Adam and through that rescue, rescuing the whole creation. But then what happens with Israel is that Israel goes to the bad.
They not only wobble, they crash. They go into exile.
And Daniel says there will come a time when God will become king.
And then those strange promises about a new coming king, a Messiah.
And the Messiah represents Israel, represents Adam and Eve, represents the whole world. This is how it makes sense that Jesus is forever.
The church has often tried to do it by short circuiting the argument and saying, well, he was divine, he was the Son of God, so he's there forever.
Well, of course, that's true. But the way the Bible tells the story is with the story of Israel and the story of God both coming to the same point.
And the name of that point is Jesus. That's one of the extraordinary things about the New Testament, that the language about Jesus as Israel's representative king and the language about God coming back in person, rushed together. And they mean what they mean in relation to one another.
That is how Jesus is for everyone.
So Jesus, back to the idea of him going around and calling these 12 people. Jesus summons these two.
And everyone's seeing that actually knows the answer.
Because 12 is not an accidental number. Of course it isn't.
This is about the restoration of Israel.
So many people were on tiptoe waiting for God's people to be restored because that was how God was going to do what he was going to do. And Jesus is symbolically restoring Israel.
There's a little problem for that, large problem for that.
Many in our day say, how come Jesus only chose 12 men? What about the women? And the answers read the resurrection narratives. Who's the first person to tell anyone else that Jesus is alive from the dead? That's the foundation of all Christian ministry.
And it's Mary Magdalene who gets to do it.
This is a story for another time, just in case anyone was kind of worried about that. So for Mark and the others, Jesus is restoring Israel in order to restore the world.
That's what kingdom of God means.
And he is calling helpers. And at this point, actually it doesn't matter if we say this is inclusive or exclusive because it is for everyone.
It is an outward flowing movement. It is never saying, come with me and we'll stay apart from everybody else and they can do their own thing. It's no, come with me for the same.
What does he say to them? I will make you go and fish for people. That's the whole point.
The kingdom of God is an outward moving thing, not an inward timid thing.
But here's what gives so much of the gospels. It's dynamic drive and twist. What Jesus is telling them about the kingdom is not what they expect and is often not what they want.
As I said about him going to Jerusalem, the point of the parables is to say, I'll tell you what the kingdom of God is like. And it's not exactly as you had expected. All those parables about sowing, the sower in Mark 4 and so on, those look back to stories in the Old Testament where the prophets say that one day after the exile, Israel's God will sow his people again.
And the fields will be full of corn and wheat and new plants will come up. And Jesus is saying, yes, God is in the business of sowing and harvesting. But this one's going to get spalled by the weeds.
This one's going to get eaten by the birds. This one's going to be trampled.
But there will be some that bears fruit, 30 and 60.
And he's saying in other words, yes, God is doing what he'd always expected, what he'd always promised.
But don't imagine that this is going to be easy for you, that it's going to look exactly like you wanted it, that you're just going to be able to sit there smugly with God fulfilling your agendas. And my friends, I think God says that to us in every generation.
Don't think that I'm just going to come and bless the plans that you dreamt up last night or last week.
God may do that. God may be giving you plans and ideas and dreams and hopes, which you will then gloriously fulfill.
But in my experience, after 40 years in ministry and helping lots of others in ministry, often God allows you to dream great dreams and have great plans so that a little later on, you will actually do the much harder thing that he wants you to do, which will help you. And he wants you to do, which was not what you'd signed on for, and in fact you mightn't have signed on for it at all. I often say to people about Paul writing the letter to the Romans.
Why did Paul write Romans? Because he wanted to go to Spain, and Rome was going to be the staging point on the route to, did Paul go to Spain? We don't know.
Quite possibly he didn't. God wanted Paul to write Romans.
And so he allowed him to dream of going to Spain to get him to do the thing that he really wanted, which was tough.
And I think God often works like that. And then in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus is calling people to follow him, he takes them away, he says, "Now look, here's the agenda." And we read the Beatitudes at the start of the Sermon, and we think of this as an impossible ethical ideal.
Be at blessed to the pure in heart, and we think, "Well, that's me done for a start." Blessed to the merciful, and I'm not very merciful. Blessed to the peacemakers, "Well, I'm not terribly good at that," and so on. As though these were moral qualities, and either you had them or you didn't, that's not the point of it at all.
The point of it works like this. People often say, people in this part of London say when they harumphed in Parliament and elsewhere about, if there was a God, he should be doing this. He should have stopped the Holocaust.
He should step in and prevent bad things happening. He shouldn't allow terrorism.
The trouble is when people imagine God in our culture.
They imagine a faceless CEO sitting in the office upstairs somewhere, pulling strings to make things happen.
And if they don't happen, they think he's incompetent. As Woody Allen once said, "I sort of believe in God, it's just that he seems to be a bit of an underachiever." But that idea of God as the celestial CEO is completely wrong.
People want God to send in the tanks and sort the stuff out.
But the whole point of the Kingdom of God is a different vision of power. And it goes like this.
When God wants to sort the world out, he doesn't send in the tanks. He sends in the pure in heart.
He sends in the meek.
He sends in the peacemakers. He sends in the hungry for justice people. And by the time the power brokers and the politicians have woken up and realized what's happening, then the meek and the broken heart is in the humble and the peacemakers have built schools and hospitals and are looking after the poor and are transforming God's world into something that begins to look as if God really is in charge after all.
One of the privileges my life has been to share ministry of people who are doing this stuff, who never get into the newspapers, even the church newspapers, but who are Kingdom of God people where they are, humble people getting on with the Sermon on the Mount Work. This is what we are called to. This is what Jesus called his first disciples for.
To be part of the new creation project, you can only do that as you are with Jesus as you are learning his way.
And as we'll see later on tonight, you can only actually do any of it because what happened in Jesus ministry in his public career was dependent as it were in advance on what he was going to do on the cross, breaking the grip of the power of darkness which kept the world in slavery. And so we see the call to take up the cross.
We see the call to abandon everything and follow. Think of the rich young ruler in Mark 10 when he says, "Yeah, I've kept all the commandments, that's fine." And Jesus says, "One thing you lack, sell all and follow me." And he goes away ashamed and sorry because he can't make that sacrifice.
Of course, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, when Christ calls a person, he bids them come and die.
Of course, this is, as T.S. Eliot said, a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything.
So yes, it is radically inclusive. Of course it is.
Think of Matthew the tax collector. Nobody wanted to be Matthew's friend, but Jesus wanted him to be one of his twelve. Radically inclusive if you like.
But inclusion is always transformative when Jesus says, "You come with me. You do not stay the same. You do not say, "Okay, but I'm still going to be a mean grasping so and so," or whatever it is.
No, you will be transformed, radically transformed from top to bottom.
Of course it is inclusive, but of course it is totally demanding because when God is becoming king, then he wants to do that kingdom of God work through transformed and transforming human lives. That's how it works.
And the point then is the purpose for which Jesus is calling people and the point for which we are to call people as well because think how it works at the end of Matthew 28, Jesus says, "Finally, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." That's very interesting because earlier on in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus says that he's doing something in particular healing a paralyzed man so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. And now after his death and resurrection, he claims all authority in heaven and on earth. And this is the fulfillment of Psalm 2, of Psalm 8, of Psalm 72, of Isaiah 52, of so many other biblical passages which envisage Israel's Messiah and now envisage God himself.
And we with hindsight see these two, as I said, coming together, Israel's Messiah who we recognize tremblingly as the personal presence of Israel's God. He is now enthroned and he says, "You therefore go and make disciples, teaching them all I commanded you and baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Spirit. And I'm with you always right to the end, right through to the end of the age." In other words, as Jesus called disciples from the people of Israel, to be part of, to be the spearhead of his project for the renewal of Israel and so for the renewal of creation.
So we are to be disciple callers if you're in ministry or even if, even if, if you're somebody who's not officially a ministry but obviously your self-selected group you chose to come here on a nice Friday afternoon when you might have been watching cricket or goodness knows what else. Presumably you're taking this seriously. You are to be disciple callers as well as disciples yourselves.
And how does this work?
The key passage for me is in John chapter 20 where Jesus raised from the dead meets his disciples in the upper room. John chapter 20 verses 19 to 24. And Jesus breathes on them and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit as the Father sent me so I send you." And that as so tells us everything we need to know because the as means go back through Jesus ministry, study prayerfully alone or in a group or in your church all the ways in which Jesus was doing what he was doing for Israel healing, teaching, celebrating, mourning with the mourners, rejoicing with the rejoices and giving them more to rejoice about.
Out there explaining in story and symbol that God was becoming king and this was what it looked like and then say to yourself, what would it mean in the power of the Spirit for us to be for today's and tomorrow's world what Jesus was for Israel. And you see I hope the point that I'm making technical terms this is a kind of a hermeneutical point. It's about how we understand the New Testament that the gospels are not simply an example of how to do it.
They are an example of how to do it, but they are that because they are unique. They are telling the one off story. This is Reformation year where celebrating 500th anniversary of the Reformation.
One of the great slogans of the Reformation was the belief that when Jesus did what he did, he did it once and once only. It was unique. You do not have to repeat it.
There are echoes. There are resonances, but you study what Jesus himself did and learn its historical meaning for all its worth in order then to take a deep breath, the breath of the Spirit and say, Lord, please now help us to see. What would it mean as you called those disciples then, as you gave them your kingdom agenda then, what would it mean for us to say what would the kingdom of God look like in London, in Britain, in the world, in the Middle East.
What would the kingdom of God look like as we are faced with all today's extraordinary horrors, with terrorism, with the refugee crisis, with social and civil unrest and disturbance and turbulence of all sorts. They had all that in the first century as well. In spades, far worse than anything we have got.
And Jesus says, as the Father sent me, so I send you.
Then he says, whosoever sins you forgive, they're forgiven whosoever sins you retain, they're retained because this work is about human beings coming face to face with the reality of who they are and the reality of who God is. And in God's new creation, there is only room for new creation.
There is no room for people to come in and say, well, of course it doesn't matter. And since Jesus loves us all, who cares about how we behave, no, this is actually radical stuff, radical forgiveness leading to radical holiness in the service of radical mission.
As the Father sent me, so I send you Jesus calling disciples through us now to be kingdom workers for tomorrow's world.
Thanks for listening today, that was Tom's talk on Jesus for Everyone, recorded a few years ago at London Bible Week for Premier, and we'll be back with another talk from the event next week. And again, thank you for supporting us out of 2021 and into 2022 with your year-end gift and not too late to add yours if you'd like to do so. The links are we today's show to give from anywhere in the world.
And you can find more from the show at askntright.com. For now, God bless and see you next time.
[Music]
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Tom Wright speaks on 'Sacrificial Love' at London Bible Week in 2017. · Support the show – give from the USA or UK & Rest of the world · For bonus con
#102 Does God predetermine everything?
#102 Does God predetermine everything?
Ask NT Wright Anything
January 27, 2022
What does Tom think of the Calvinist view that God predetermines everything? What is his view on Open Theism? What about the idea that Christ only die
#98 Is it ok to be wealthy and go on nice holidays?
#98 Is it ok to be wealthy and go on nice holidays?
Ask NT Wright Anything
December 30, 2021
How should Christians handle personal wealth in a way that honours God? Is it wrong to take time for myself and even go on nice holidays? And find out
#97 Christmas special - your Qs about Tom‘s life and work
#97 Christmas special - your Qs about Tom‘s life and work
Ask NT Wright Anything
December 23, 2021
Tom answers listener questions about his role as Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall Oxford, his work habits and love of classical music... plus a
#96 Qs on Marriage - Help...I‘ve become a Christian but my partner isn‘t interested in getting married
#96 Qs on Marriage - Help...I‘ve become a Christian but my partner isn‘t interested in getting married
Ask NT Wright Anything
December 16, 2021
Does the church idolise marriage? I've become a Christian but my partner isn't interested in marriage - what should I do? What if I no longer respect
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