ŷ������

“Virtue is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices requiring effort and concentration to do something which is good and right, but which doesn't come naturally. And then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what's required automatically. Virtue is what happens when wise and courageous choices become second nature.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Someone who is determinedly trying to show God how good he or she is is likely to become an insufferable prig.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“The church is often called a killjoy for protesting against sexual license. But the real killing of joy comes with the grabbing of pleasure. As with credit card usage. the price tag is hidden at the start, but the physical and emotional debt incurred will take a long time to pay off.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“we have developed a corollary that is neither love nor forgiveness—namely, tolerance. The problem with this is clear: I can “tolerate�� you without it costing me anything very much. I can shrug my shoulders, walk away, and leave you to do your own thing. That, admittedly, is preferable to my taking you by the throat and shaking you until you agree with me. But it is certainly not love.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“We have to grow into Scripture, like a young boy inheriting his older brother's clothes and flopping around in them, but he gradually builds out and grows up. Perhaps it's a measure of our maturity when parts of Scripture that we found odd or even repellent suddenly come up in a new light. Our sense is overtaken by a sense of the whole thing, wide, multicolored, and unspeakably powerful.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“We applaud patience, but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Forget happiness. You were called to a throne. How will you prepare for it? That is the question of virtue, Christian style.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, exciting and worthwhile though that is, but thought through and relished, planned and prepared -- an ultimately better way for the relationship to grow and at the same time a way of demonstrating what the relationship is all about.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Scripture trains us to listen to and learn from stories of all kinds, inside the sacred text and outside, and to discern patterns and meanings within them. Stories of all sorts form and shape the character of those who read them. We live within the narrative as creatures in search of an ending, in search of happiness.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“The future goal is the thing which produces character in the present.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“The New Testament’s vision of Christian behavior has to do, not with struggling to keep a bunch of ancient and apparently arbitrary rules, nor with “going with the flow�� or “doing what comes naturally��, but with the learning of the language, in the present, which will equip us to speak it fluently in God’s new world.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Virtue, in this strict sense, is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices, requiring effort and concentration, to do something which is good and right but which doesn’t “come naturally”—and then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what’s required “automatically,�� as we say.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Successful resistance to temptation may result in an increase of moral muscle, but that is because one is going to need it. A temptation resisted may become more, not less, fierce.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Virtue is what happens when habitual choices have been wise.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem, as Daniel did (6:10), no matter where our exile may have taken us.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Financial crashes happen precisely because the people who remember the last one have either died or retired and thus are no longer around, with memories and character formed by that previous experience, to warn people not to be irresponsible.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Talk about the freedom of the Spirit, about the grace which sweeps us off our feet and heals and transforms our lives, has been taken over surreptitiously by a kind of low-grade romanticism, colluding with an anti-intellectual streak in our culture, generating the assumption that the more spiritual you are, the less you need to think. I cannot stress too strongly that this is a mistake. The more genuinely spiritual you are, according to Romans 12 and Philippians 1, the more clearly and accurately and carefully you will think.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“It is one thing to insist on walking south when the compass is pointing north. But to “fix�� the compass so that it tells you that the wrong way is the right way is far, far worse. You can correct a mistake. But once you tell yourself it wasn’t a mistake there’s no way back.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Human was simultaneously the bearer of God's wise rule into the world, and also the creature who would bring the loyalty and praise of that creation for its Creator into love, speech, and conscious obedience.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“I do not imagine for a minute that in the coming age we shall arrive at a point where we shall have experienced everything the new world has to offer and will become bored. In contrast, I believe that the God we know in Jesus is the God of utterly generous, outflowing love, I believe that there will be no end to the new creation of this God, and that within the new age itself there will always be more to hope for, more to work for, more to celebrate. Learning to hope in the present time is learning not just to hope for a better place than we currently find ourselves in, but learning to trust the God who is and will remain the God of the future.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Know yourself�� is as good advice now as ever it was. The question, though, of what to do with that knowledge once you’ve acquired it is far more difficult. What if the self I discover, through the deepest introspection of which I am capable, is a self that longs to murder, or steal, or molest children? How can we tell which of our “hidden depths�� are to be acknowledged in order then to be neutralized or (if possible) killed off, and which are to be brought out into the light, celebrated, and acted upon? The fact that they are deep within us provides, in itself, no answer. Things get still more confused, finally, if we bring in another highly contested notion, the appeal to “freedom.�� Saying, as many do today, “Surely we’re meant to be free?”—meaning by that, “Surely you’re not going to say I can’t do what I want?”—simply begs the question. It isn’t just that the freedom of my fist stops where the freedom of your nose begins. It’s that everything any of us does creates new situations which may, themselves, be a severe curtailment of freedom in all directions. If I do actually punch you on the nose, we are neither of us free, thereafter, to be the people we might otherwise have been with one another (and perhaps with others, too).”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Transformation! Now there’s an interesting idea. But is it appropriate to think like that? Are Christians supposed to regard their lives in that way? Isn’t that suggesting that there’s a way across from the present to the future, across that wide river called The Rest of My Life—a bridge put up in the old days when people thought you could use your own moral effort to make yourself good enough for God? But if moral effort doesn’t count for anything, what is then the point of being a Christian—other than to go to heaven one day, and perhaps to persuade a few others to go with you? Is there any reason for doing anything much, after you believe, except to keep your nose reasonably clean until the time comes to die and go to be with Jesus forever? Some people who ponder this also face another concern. Jesus himself, followed by the writers of the New Testament, seems to have made some pretty stringent moral demands on the early disciples. Where does all that fit in? If we are already saved, why does what we do matter? And are the demands realistic in our day and age?”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“The dreams we have that refuse to die—dreams of freedom and beauty, of order and love, dreams that we can make a real difference in the world—come into their own when we put them within a framework of belief in a God who made the world and is going to sort it out once and for all, and wants to involve human beings in that process.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“have suggested throughout this book that the New Testament itself answers the first half of each of these prayers in terms, primarily, of a clear list of character traits whose radical novelty is generated from within the life, vision, achievement, death, and resurrection of Jesus himself. These events, taken together, constitute Jesus’s followers as the true, image-bearing human beings, the royal priesthood. I have proposed, further, that according to the New Testament the way God the Holy Spirit answers the second half of the prayer is by renewing the individual heart and mind so that we can freely and consciously choose to practice those habits of behavior which, awkward and clumsy at first, will gradually become “second nature.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“We applaud patience but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Human" is a kind of midway creature, reflecting God into the world, and reflecting the world back to God.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“The Western world has supposed, for two hundred years and more, that splitting off questions of social justice from questions of God and faith would give us a more just society. The revolutions, totalitarianisms, and all-out wars of that period have proved us wrong. But to put God and human justice back together again will require a sustained effort, not only by individuals but by the church as a whole, developing the corporate virtues of justice-work that will become habits of the church’s heart and will appeal to the conscience of the wider world.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“These four strengths of character—courage, restraint, cool judgment, and determination to do the right thing for others—are, in fact, precisely the four qualities which the greatest ancient philosopher who wrote about such matters identified as”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters