I'm very comfortable in a room with thousands of people.

Swords appear strong, but they're actually quite weak. Jesus appears weak, but he's actually quite strong.

That breath that you just took, that's a gift!

To say it again, eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life now in connection to God. Eternal life doesn't start when we die; it starts now. It's not about a life that begins at death; it's about experiencing the kind of life now that can endure and survive even death.

When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.

A lot of Christians have been taught a story that begins in chapter 3 of Genesis, instead of chapter 1. If your story doesn't begin in the beginning, but begins in chapter 3, then it starts with sin, and so the story becomes about dealing with the sin problem. So Jesus is seen as primarily dealing with our sins.

In one of the accounts of Jesus's death we read that the curtain in the temple of God-the one that kept people out of the holiest place of God's presence-ripped.One New Testament writer said that this ripping was a picture of how, because of Jesus, we can have new, direct access to God.A beautiful idea.But the curtain ripping also means that God comes out, that God is no longer confined to the temple as God was previously.