Jesus was much more interested in the quality of the people's response to him than in the quantity of the crowd.
Interpretation
Jesus valued genuine responses over large followings.
This quote by Timothy Keller emphasizes that Jesus prioritized the sincere engagement and heartfelt responses of individuals to his teachings rather than the mere number of people who followed him. It suggests that true faith and connection are measured by quality, not simply by how many people are present or claim to follow, highlighting the importance of authenticity in relationships and beliefs.
In practice
In a sermon discussing the importance of sincere worship rather than mere attendance, one could reference this quote to support the message.
Falling in love in a Christian way is to say,'I am excited about your future and I want to be part of getting you there. I'm signing up for the journey with you. Would you sign up for the journey to my true self with me? It's going to be hard but I want to get there.
Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.
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While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
God's Kingdom is "present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we're not yet what we will be, we're also no longer what we used to be.
Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition.
I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.
Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all β no one's around to write horror stories.
A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.
The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.
We call the one side [of humanity] religion, and we call the other science. Religion is always right. ... Science is always wrong; it is the very artifice of men. Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.
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