Inclusive Bible Quotes

The greatest encouragement throughout the Bible is God's love for His lost race and the willingness of Christ, the eternal Son, to show forth that love in God's plan of redemption. The love of Jesus is so inclusive that it knows no boundaries. At the point where we stop caring and loving, Jesus is still there loving and caring

Believers can search the Scriptures on their own, and allow the Word of God, coinciding with the Holy Spirit, to enlighten their understanding, and open their spiritual eyes.

All believers need to become teachers, shepherds, ministers, and good-news-bearers.

My conversion left my former friends and family thinking I was loony to the core. How could I leave a worldview that was open, welcoming, and inclusive for one that believes in Original Sin, values the law of God, seeks conversion into a born-again constitution, believes in the truthful ontology of God’s Word as found in the Bible, claims the exclusivity of Christ for salvation, and purports the redemptive quality of suffering? Only one reason: because Jesus is a real and risen Lord and because he claimed me for himself.

In fact, as I will show in the next chapter, the Bible contains an extravagant welcome for sexual minorities. In church governance, our confessions and Book of Order embody a trajectory of evergreater inclusiveness.

The Christian message is not an inclusive message that embraces all religions; it’s not a message that there are many paths to the same place. The Christian message is summed up in the brave words of Peter before the Sanhedrin: “Jesus is ‘the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone.’ Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:11–12).

You want to prove that the Bible is right? It is not done by self-fulfilling prophecies or by pointing to world events as prophecy fulfillment. That is not how you prove that the Bible is right. We prove that the Bible is right by radical obedience to the teachings of Jesus and by validating that Jesus' teachings actually do work and can make our world better. Let us love our enemies, forgive those who sin against us, feed the poor, care for the needy and oppressed, walk the extra mile, be inclusive not exclusive, turn the other cheek, and maybe then the world will start taking us seriously and believe our Bible!

This, the universal Christ who, in grace and love, holds all things and all people and all creatures in that grace, is what gives me hope in this world. The universal Christ, who is not a colonizer, who does not seek after profit or create empires to rule over the poor or to oppress people, is constantly asking us to see ourselves as we fit in this sacredly created world. It is what my Potawatomi ancestors saw when they prayed to Kche Mnedo, to Mamogosnan, and is what our relatives still see when they pray today, a sacred belonging that spans time and generations and is called by many names. Today, it is what I continue to see in my own faith—not a Christianity bound by a sinner’s prayer and an everyday existence ruled by gender-divided Bible studies and accountability meetings but a story of faith that’s always bigger, always more inclusive, always making room at a bigger and better table full of lavish food that has already been prepared for everyone and for every created thing.

It is one of the strangest of historical paradoxes that the King James Bible, whose whole purpose had been nation-building in the service of a ceremonial and episcopal state church, should become the guiding text of Puritan America. But the translation’s lifeblood had been inclusiveness, it was drenched with the splendour of a divinely sanctioned authority, and by the end of the seventeenth century it had come to be treasured by Americans as much as by the British as one of their national texts.

Jesus understood the sacred texts and God’s intention for humanity. So when we read the Bible through the lens of Jesus’ redemptive life and ministry, we are better able to discern God’s revelation. Jesus welcomed every kind of person into God’s community—especially the outcast, the alien, the marginalized, the forgotten, and the foreigner. Reading the Bible through the lens of Jesus’ redemptive life and ministry we see over and over again, God’s radically inclusive grace that welcomes all who have faith. Let us examine three passages that show how Jesus’ teachings illuminate God’s extravagant welcome.

the rapture — is just for Christ’s ‘church universal’; in other words, those who belong to Him, regardless of denomination, church attendance, or any other external factor —” “Sounds exclusionary. Not very inclusive.” “Maybe it strikes you that way, but the standard has to be not what you or I think about it, but what God has said in His Word. And the Bible is clear that the true believers in Christ will be ‘caught up,’ literally snatched up to Christ. They are the ones who have trusted in Christ and in the sacrifice He made on the Cross right here in Jerusalem, a sacrifice for sins. That sacrifice, by the way, wasn’t just for my sins; it was for yours as well.

Plenty of tolerant people out there say, “Okay, you’re into this cross thing, and Jesus being crucified, and that’s your truth. Good for you—we are an inclusive people. You’re welcome to your foolish view of religion, your foolish perspective, your simple, silly story of a crucified Jew, and that’s fine if that’s your truth. But that’s not our truth.” Well, here’s the rub: It is your truth. It’s everybody’s truth. It’s the only truth. The power of the crucified Christ is the only power of God by which He saves. Salvation comes only through a belief in that gospel, the gospel of Jesus. No gospel, no salvation. The absolute exclusivity of it has always been a shameful, embarrassing, inconvenient message to worldly-wise sinners, but the truth is nonnegotiable. Other religions are not truth and lead only to eternal damnation. Islam is a damning system. Buddhism is a damning system. Hinduism is a damning system. Simply not believing the gospel is itself enough to damn a person. People in false religions do not worship the true God by another name, as some suggest. They unwittingly worship Satan’s demons. Here is what the Bible says: “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons and not to God” (1 Cor. 10:20). Even so, a book called The Christ of Hinduism actually exists, and it argues that Hinduism’s symbols and doctrines contain the Christian message. But there is no Christ of Hinduism, nor has the true God any part in Hinduism. Christ is the only way to the one true God, and biblical Christianity is the only way to the one true Christ. Misguided people who recognize any other god and engage in any other religion are not worshipping and sacrificing to God, but to demons. I didn’t make this up. This isn’t my theology. This is Christianity 101.

Peter announced: “There is salvation in no one else! God has given no other name under heaven by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12 NLT). Many recoil at such definitiveness. John 14:6 and Acts 4:12 sound primitive in this era of broadbands and broad minds. The world is shrinking, cultures are blending, borders are bending; this is the day of inclusion. All roads lead to heaven, right? But can they? The sentence makes good talk-show fodder, but is it accurate? Can all approaches to God be correct? Islam says Jesus was not crucified. Christians say he was. Both can’t be right. Judaism refuses the claim of Christ as the Messiah.6 Christians accept it. Someone’s making a mistake. Buddhists look toward Nirvana, achieved after no less than 547 reincarnations.7 Christians believe in one life, one death, and an eternity of enjoying God. Doesn’t one view exclude the other? Humanists do not acknowledge a creator of life. Jesus claims to be the source of life. One of the two speaks folly. Spiritists read your palms. Christians consult the Bible. Hindus perceive a plural and impersonal God.8 Christ-followers believe “there is only one God” (1 Cor. 8:4 NLT). Somebody is wrong. And, most supremely, every non-Christian religion says, “You can save you.” Jesus says, “My death on the cross saves you.” How can all religions lead to God when they are so different? We don’t tolerate such illogic in other matters. We don’t pretend that all roads lead to London or all ships sail to Australia.

The call for justice was a protest as fierce as those of the biblical prophets and of Jesus, and the similarity of the call was no coincidence. As with early Judaism and early Christianity, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo. Its protest of inequity would be an integral part of the demand for inclusiveness, for unity and equality under the umbrella of the one god regardless of lineage, wealth, age, or gender. This is what would make it so appealing to the disenfranchised, those who didn't matter in the grand Meccan scheme of things, like slaves and freedmen, widows and orphans, all those cut out of the elite by birth or circumstance. And it spoke equally to the young and idealistic, those who had not yet learned to knuckle under to the way things were and who responded to the deeply egalitarian strain of the verses. All were equal before God, the thirteen-year-old Ali as important as the most respected graybeard, the daughter as much as the son, the African slave as much as the highborn noble. It was a potent and potentially radical re-envisioning of society. This was a matter of politics as much as of faith. The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.

The king who could get so drunk with his brother-in-law was also the king who was anxious for an inclusive church and an inclusive Bible. It was the dream of civilisation

No, it’s not. It’s bigger and more expansive and inclusive and embracing and enlightened than that because the Jesus story is bigger and more expansive and inclusive and challenging and dangerous and enlightened than that.

Matthew’s Gospel reflects the difficulty that Jews had in understanding their distinctiveness in God’s program along with the inclusion of Gentiles. Jesus’ ministry to Jews throughout his ministry was a fulfillment of the promises to Israel of messianic blessings (see comments on 10:5–15, 23). But throughout his ministry Jesus had increasingly revealed that now was the time to include Gentiles as well (see comments on 8:5–13; 10:16–22). This concluding commission of Jesus’ earthly ministry coheres with Jesus’ intention to include Gentiles, which is soon reemphasized in the book of Acts in his charge to the disciples before his ascension: “you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). During his earthly ministry Jesus’ followers struggled to comprehend how Israel could retain its distinctiveness in God’s program, yet include Gentiles in the kingdom that Jesus was establishing. And that difficulty remained in the early church. A significant breakthrough came with the vision from the Lord to Peter to go to the Gentile centurion Cornelius with the gospel (Acts 10:1–48). The early church continued to struggle with the inclusion of Gentiles (Acts 11:1–18; 15:1–6) until Peter and the other leaders of the church finally acknowledged that God’s intention was that the church was to be made up of disciples of all the nations, Jews and Gentiles alike (Acts 15:7–29).

But by the end of the first century there is evidence to suggest that his surviving correspondence began to be collected into a Pauline corpus, which quickly circulated among the churches—first a shorter corpus of ten letters and soon afterwards a longer one of thirteen, enlarged by the inclusion of the three Pastoral

The vision of the Center for Progressive Christianity is to encourage churches to focus their attention on those for whom organized religion has proven to be “ineffectual, irrelevant, or repressive.” They define progressive Christians as individuals who: (ProgressiveChristianity.org, “The 8 Points.” Accessed June 24, 2012) Believe that following the path and teachings of Jesus can lead to an awareness and experience of the Sacred and the Oneness and Unity of all life; Affirm that the teachings of Jesus provide but one of many ways to experience the Sacredness and Oneness of life, and that we can draw from diverse sources of wisdom in our spiritual journey; Seek community that is inclusive of ALL people, including but not limited to: a. Conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, b. Believers and agnostics, c. Women and men, d. Those of all sexual orientations and gender identities, e. Those of all classes and abilities; Know that the way we behave towards one another is the fullest expression of what we believe; Find grace in the search for understanding and believe there is more value in questioning than in absolutes; Strive for peace and justice among all people; Strive to protect and restore the integrity of our earth; and Commit to a path of life-long learning, compassion, and selfless love. To these guidelines, Borg adds two more key aspects of Progressive Christianity: Focus on this life more than on the next life; Accept a non-literal reading of the Bible.

Good Seed (The Sonnet) It is existentially impossible, For all republicans to be inhuman fiend. But when they violate human rights as daily choir, It is also impossible to notice the good seed. It is existentially impossible, For all republicans to incite hate and violence. But when a party coddles guns over children, It is difficult to find anything good in them. It is existentially impossible, For all republicans to confuse divinity with division. But when a party uses bible as an excuse for bigotry, It is impossible to see the silent vessels of inclusion. Forgive me, if at times I have been harsh at an entire party! I know you're there, o good seed - it is time to grow some greenery.

The Lord Jesus lived on earth for thirty three and a half years. On some occasions He exercised His divinity, but most of the time He lived out His humanity. People mostly saw Him as a man, as a proper, perfect, and extraordinary man. His extraordinary quality was His divinity. One day, He went to the cross to put away sin. At the same time, He destroyed Satan, the source of sin. As the Lord destroyed sin and Satan, He tasted death (Heb. 2:9), and by tasting death He swallowed it. Through the Lord’s all-inclusive death, every negative thing in the whole universe, including sin, Satan, and death, was terminated and made a history. After His crucifixion, the Lord rested for three days. According to the Bible, while He was resting in the grave, He took a tour of Hades, offering it the opportunity to do everything to Him and proving that it could do nothing with Him. After His [428] rest and His tour, He walked out of Hades and arose from the tomb, coming forth in His resurrection. By His resurrection, He was born with His humanity into the divine sonship and became the Firstborn Son of God. The most striking thing about Christ as the Firstborn Son of God is that with Him all the negative things, including sin, Satan, and death, have become a history. He is a person who has divinity mingled with an uplifted humanity and who has humanity that is one with divinity. Ultimately, He entered into glory, even into glorification. Being in glorification is superior to being in glory, because being in glory does not require a process, whereas being in glorification does. The Lord Jesus, as the Firstborn Son of God, has passed through a process to enter into glory. That was His glorification.

In Greek the word for covenant is also the word for testament. Every proper covenant eventually becomes a testament. Before the person who enacted the covenant dies, it is the covenant. After he dies, that covenant becomes a testament. A testament in today’s terms is a will....We have a will full of hundreds of bequests. My heavenly Father has given me all these bequests, and they have been covenanted to me as a testament. That is the new testament. We have the New Testament of the Bible in our hands, but this is not the reality. The reality of all the hundreds of bequests in the New Testament is Christ. Without Christ, the Bible is empty, so the real testament, the real will, is Christ. Christ is our title deed, and this title deed is in our spirit as the all-inclusive, life-giving, indwelling, consummated Spirit.

The gospel is radically exclusive, because the gospel declares that Jesus is the only way to God (John 14:6; Acts 4:12). But the gospel is just as radically inclusive, for it says that anyone can come to Jesus and find welcome.

Among the papyri interpreted as fragments of books once used by teachers and students, the Psalter is better represented than any other volume of Jewish or Christian canonical Scripture, strongly suggesting that the Davidic Psalter was more used and read ‘than any book of the Old Testament, perhaps more than any book of the Bible, throughout the Christian centuries in Egypt’. A recent inventory of papyrus notebooks lists eleven items for the period between the third century and the seventh inclusive, of which eight give primarily or exclusively the texts of the psalms. Narrowing the period of the third century to the fifth gives seven papyrus items of which five contain copies of psalms. These notebooks are the best guide to what the literate slaves of larger households, grammar masters and attentive parents were teaching their infants in Egypt, both Jewish and Christian, and they suggest that the psalms were a fundamental teaching text in the social circles where men and women used writing, or aspired to it for their children. That is hardly surprising, since the psalms were ideal for teaching the young in households wealthy enough to afford the luxury of an education for an offspring. An almanac of prayer and counsel for times of good and adverse fortune, the poems of the Psalter are arranged in sense-units of moderate length by virtue of the poetic form. This makes them amenable to study, including the slow process of acquiring the skills of penmanship (Pl. 29).

If you are gay, then the Bible is very forbidding with regards to your sexuality.

Our need is to see that our God today has passed through the process of incarnation, human living, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and enthronement to become the all-inclusive life-giving Spirit for us to drink. He is such a compound Spirit, and we have a spirit with which to drink of Him. In spirit we are one with Him. If we see this vision, the focal point of the divine revelation in the Bible, we shall know how to drink the Lord as the water of life. (Life-study of Exodus, pp. 515-518)

The evangelical position, represented by the personal stories in this book, including my own, understands that a fully authoritative Bible supports the freedom of women under Christ without male supervision to follow their God-given callings and special gifts of the Spirit, including full leadership ministries. This view can be called the “inclusive” view of ministry

Agora que já se ouviu tudo, aqui está a conclusão: Tema a Deus e guarde os seus mandamentos, pois isso é o essencial para o homem. Pois Deus trará a julgamento tudo o que foi feito, inclusive tudo o que está escondido, seja bom, seja mal." Eclesiastes 12:13,14

Gn 1:11a In  -   cf. John 1:1-2 The Bible, composed of two testaments, the Old Testament and the New Testament, is the complete written divine revelation of God to man. The major revelation in the entire Bible is the unique divine economy of the unique Triune God (Eph. 1:10; 3:9; 1 Tim. 1:4b). The centrality and universality of this divine economy is the all-inclusive and unsearchably rich Christ as the embodiment and expression of the Triune God (Col. 2:9; 1:15-19; John 1:18). The goal of the divine economy is the church as the Body, the fullness, the expression, of Christ (Eph. 1:22b-23; 3:8-11), which will consummate in the New Jerusalem as the union, mingling, and incorporation of the processed and consummated Triune God and His redeemed, regenerated, transformed, and glorified tripartite people. The accomplishing of the divine economy is revealed in the Bible progressively in many steps, beginning with God’s creation in Gen. 1 — 2 and consummating with the New Jerusalem in Rev. 21 — 22. In the Old Testament the contents of God’s economy are revealed mainly in types, figures, and shadows, whereas in the New Testament all the types, figures, and shadows are fulfilled and realized. Thus, the Old Testament is a figurative portrait of God’s eternal economy, and the New Testament is the practical fulfillment.

Union with Christ highlights God’s character as it relates to all aspects of redemption and our inclusion in the gospel story. As Colijn remarks, “For Paul, ‘being in Christ’ is not a transaction but a real spiritual union between Christ and the believer that determines the believer’s identity and shapes all of the believer’s life.

Of all the goals and outcomes for a special needs ministry, there is one that is most important: To enable parents of kids with special needs to attend their own worship and Bible study. After all, any child (with or without special needs) has the greatest opportunity to experience the love of Christ when they are raised by parents with a mature faith of their own.

We’re told that a time is coming when God will restore everything. This is an inclusive promise. It encompasses far more than God merely restoring disembodied people to fellowship in a spirit realm. (Because living in a spirit realm is not what humans were made for and once enjoyed, it would not qualify as “restoring.”) It is God restoring mankind to what we once were, what he designed us to be—fully embodied, righteous beings. And restoring the entire physical universe to what it once was.

The Christian belief is that Jesus, as God, is the only one who can bring humanity back to God. He was the only person in history with such a pedigree. 1 Timothy 2:5 tells us plainly, “There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” As a man, he could represent humanity. He was tempted in every way, and yet he never sinned. Jesus is our proverbial “best foot forward” as far as humanity goes. Jesus is also God. As such he is able to serve as a “middle man” and usher us into the very presence of God. The amazing thing is that Jesus offers his righteousness to anyone who will receive it. Rather than being receptive to this offer, we complain there are not other ways to God. While it is incredibly gracious that God would offer any way back to him, people complain that he did not provide ten ways. The offer for salvation is available to all. Instead of being exclusive, Christianity is actually very inclusive. Everyone is welcome to come to Jesus. It does not matter who they are, or what they have done. The Bible tells us, “…whoever believes in him shall have eternal life” (John 3:16). Whether they be Jew, Hindu, Sikh, Greek, Canadian, African, athlete, entrepreneur, lawyer, or academic, the offer is there — come to Jesus.

tc א* Θ 28 l2211 pc sams Or lack υἱοῦ θεοῦ (huiou theou, “son of God”), while virtually all the rest of the witnesses have the words (A ƒ1,13 33 M also have τοῦ [tou] before θεοῦ), so the evidence seems to argue for the authenticity of the words. Most likely, the words were omitted by accident in some witnesses, since the last four words of v. 1, in uncial script, would have looked like this: iu_c_r_u_u_u_q_u_. With all the successive upsilons an accidental deletion is likely. Further, the inclusion of υἱοῦ θεοῦ here finds its complement in 15:39, where the centurion claims that Jesus was υἱὸς θεοῦ (huios theou, “son of God”). Even though א is in general one of the best NT MSS, its testimony is not quite as preeminent in this situation. There are several other instances in which it breaks up chains of genitives ending in ου (cf., e.g., Acts 28:31; Col 2:2; Heb 12:2; Rev 12:14; 15:7; 22:1), showing that there is a significantly higher possibility of accidental scribal omission in a case like this. This christological inclusio parallels both Matthew (“Immanuel…God with us” in 1:23/“I am with you” in 28:20) and John (“the Word was God” in 1:1/“My Lord and my God” in 20:28), probably reflecting nascent christological development and articulation. sn The first verse of Mark’s Gospel appears to function as a title: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is not certain, however, whether Mark intended it to refer to the entire Gospel, to the ministry of John the Baptist, or through the use of the term beginning (ἀρχή, archē) to allude to Genesis 1:1 (in the Greek Bible, LXX). The most likely option is that the statement as a whole is an allusion to Genesis 1:1 and that Mark is saying that with the “good news” of the coming of Christ, God is commencing a “new beginning.

In a world that was even more chauvinistic than our own, the Torah mandates that the Israelite people love peaceful non-Israelites living among them no less than they love themselves. The German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen rightly identifies this law as the beginning of what is known as 'ethical monotheism': 'The stranger was to be protected, although he was not a member of one's family, clan, religion, community or people, simply because he was a human being. In the stranger, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity.

They show us what it looks like for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, and they invite us to buy into that future now, with every act of compassion and inclusion, every step toward healing and reconciliation and love.

Pushback and questioning make a system more flexible and resilient, and this intuition clearly informed the inclusion of a couple of other controversial books.

Bible without benevolence is bogus, Church without reason makes SCOTUS. Faith without common sense, and intellect without sentiment, are both equally dangerous.

When Thomas Jefferson sat on the steps of the White House and, with a pair of scissors, began to cut out all portions of the Bible that he felt were mythic nonsense, he was expressing a rational point of view.

The emphasis on masculine language continued throughout English bibles until Zondervan's attempt to restore gender-inclusive language to the text. From this perspective, gender-inclusive language isn't distorting Scripture. Gender-inclusive language is restoring Scripture from the influence of certain English Bible translations.

This first edition of A Tome of Idioms has been published as a comprehensive, concise, compact, and efficient guide to the meanings and origins of Idioms, Proverbs, and Sayings. Each inclusion is written in a clear and uncomplicated style. First published in 2019 this book contains over 900 easily readable entries in systematic order augmented by an extensive Bibliography. This book will be of general interest to everyone who has a curious, inquisitive, questioning, or enquiring intellect. Sometimes, without knowing, we quote idiomatical expressions in our everyday conversations. An idiom is used to communicate something that other words do not convey as clearly or as meaningfully. Idioms tend to be colloquial and are more effective when used in spoken rather than written English. The origins of idioms are sometimes difficult to trace which means that finding a precise date a particular idiom came into existence is never easy. A number of idioms, proverbs, and sayings originate in well-known literature and Holy texts such as, William Shakespeare (60 entries), the Bible (47 entries), John Heywood (27 entries), Aesop (15 entries), and Geoffrey Chaucer (12 entries), to name but a few. Some of these have evolved in many different forms over several years into the expressions we use today. Extract from @A Tome of Idioms

However, when the Bible speaks of the fatherhood of God, it doesn't characteristically do so with regard simply to creation, but specifically to redemption. Since that is the case, the fatherhood of God is not inclusive, but exclusive and restricted.

When students are taught, their minds expand and open. When students are indoctrinated, their minds narrow and close. Friedersdorf quotes a parent of a child in the program—a parent who was generally supportive of the school’s “BLM week”: They present every issue with such moral certainty—like there is no other viewpoint. And we’re definitely seeing this in my daughter. She can make the case for defunding the police, but when I tried to explain to her why someone might have a Blue Lives Matter sign, why some families support the police, she wasn’t open to considering that view. She had a blinding certainty that troubled me. She thinks that even raising the question is racist. If she even hears a squeak of criticism of BLM, or of an idea that’s presented as supporting equity, she’s quick to call out racism.109 The problem in all these cases is not the inclusion of SJF ideas in a student’s education—it’s the teaching of those ideas as if they’re Bible verses in a religious school, not to be challenged or questioned.