Living the good news

Come to me.

Get away with me and you'll recover your life. (Mt 11)

Your business is life, not death. And life is urgent. (Lk9)

Change your life and believe in the message. (Mk 1)

Let me give you a new command.
Love one another.
In the same way I loved you, you love one another. (Jn 1)

Sell everything you own
and give it to the poor.
You will have riches in heaven. (Lk 18)

Travel light. (Luke 10)

Let me tell you
it is easier to gallop a camel
through a needle's eye
than for the rich
to enter God's kingdom. (Mt 19)

Don't hoard treasure down here... .Stockpile treasure in heaven. (Mt 6)

Don't get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. (Mt 6)

Don't run away from suffering, embrace it. Follow me and I'll show you how. (Mk 8)
I'm telling you to love your enemies.

When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer. (Mt 5)

This is the very best way to love. Put your life on the line for your friends. (Jn 15)

Whoever wants to be great amongst you must become your servant. (Mk 10)

When you practise some appetite-denying discipline to better concentrate on God,
don't make a production out of it. (Mt 6)

Be especially careful when you are trying to be good
so that you don't make a performance out of it. (Mt 6)

It is who you are, not what you say and do that counts.
Your true being brims over into true words and deeds. (Lk 6)

What I am saying is, if you walk round with your nose in the air,
you're going to end up flat on your face.
But if you are content to be simply yourself, you will
become more than yourself. (Lk 13)

If you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you,
go to this friend and make things right. (Mt 5)

I'm telling you that anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. (Mt 5)

There is nothing done or said that can't be forgiven.
But if you persist in your slanders against God's Holy Spirit,
you are repudiating the very one who forgives,
sawing off the branch on which your are sitting,
severing by your own perversity all connection with the one who forgives, (Mk 3)

Keep your life as well lighted as your best lighted room. (Lk 11)

Live generously and graciously toward others. (Mt 5)

Bring health to the sick. Raise the dead. Touch the untouchables. Kick out the demons.
You have been treated generously so live generously. (Mt 10)

If you practise what I am telling you, you'll never have to look death in the face. (Jn 8)

If the Son sets you free, you are free through and through. (Jn 8)

Throw your lot in with the One that God has sent.
That kind of commitment gets you in on God's works. (Jn 14)

Unless you accept God's kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you'll never get in. (Lk 18)

Stay with it to the end and you won't be sorry; you'll be saved. (Lk 21)

If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.
Rivers of living water will brim and spill out of the depths of anyone who believes in me
this way, just as the scripture says. (Jn 7)

The person who trusts me will not only do what I am doing but even greater things,
because I, on my way to the Father
am giving you the same work to do that I have been doing. (Jn 14)

Eventually everything is going to be out in the open,
and everyone will know how things really are. (Mt 10)

Live in me. Make your home in me. (Jn 15)

The truth will free you. (Jn 8)

You are my friends when you do the things I command you. (Jn 15)

You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope.
With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
You're blessed when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the one most dear to you.

You're blessed when you're content with just who you are- no more, no less.
That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners
of everything that can't be bought.
You're blessed
when you've worked up
a good appetite for God.
He's food and drink
in the best meal you'll ever eat.
You're blessed
when you care.
At the moment of being 'care-full'
you find yourselves cared for.
You're blessed
when you get your inside world
- your mind and heart - put right.
Then you can see God in the outside
world.
You're blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of
compete or fight.
That's when you discover who you really are, and your place in God's family.
You're blessed
when your commitment to God provokes persecution.
The persecution drives you even deeper into God's kingdom.

Not only that-count yourselves blessed every time people put you
down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it
means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are
uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens-give a cheer,
even!-for though they don't like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And
know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have
always gotten into this kind of trouble. (Mt 5)

Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life,
marking them by baptism in the threefold name: Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. Then instruct them in the practise of all I have commanded you.
I'll be with you,
day after day after day,
right up to the end of the age. (Mt 28)

The time has arrived - I mean right now!
- when dead men and women
will hear the voice of the Son of God,
and hearing, will come alive. (Jn 5)

Yes, yes, yes!





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Scripture quotations above taken from THE MESSAGE. Copyright © by Eugene Peterson, NavPress Publishing Group.