Top 250 N. T. Wright Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “True worship is open to God, adoring God, waiting for God, trusting God even in the dark.”

— N. T. Wright

2. “You become like what you worship.”

— N. T. Wright

3. “Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.”

— N. T. Wright

Featured in: Easter Quotes

4. “Tolerance is a cheap, low-grade parody of love. Tolerance is not a great virtue to aspire to. Love is much tougher and harder.”

— N. T. Wright

Featured in: Virtue Quotes

5. “The Bible is the book of my life. It’s the book I live with, the book I live by, the book I want to die by.”

— N. T. Wright

Featured in: Scripture Quotes, Faith Quotes, Book Quotes

6. “You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.”

— N. T. Wright

7. “Our culture is so fixated on dying and going to heaven when the whole Scripture is about heaven coming to earth.”

— N. T. Wright

8. “Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God’s new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.”

— N. T. Wright

9. “Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen.”

— N. T. Wright

10. “Worship is humble and glad, worship forgets itself in remembering God; worship celebrates the truth as God’s truth, not its own.”

— N. T. Wright

11. “The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.”

— N. T. Wright

12. “Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.”

— N. T. Wright

13. “The whole point of the kingdom of God is Jesus has come to bear witness to the true truth, which is nonviolent. When God wants to take charge of the world, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the poor and the meek.”

— N. T. Wright

14. “It is faith alone that justifies, but faith that justifies can never be alone, though one is justified by faith alone, the faith which justifies is never in fact alone.”

— N. T. Wright

Featured in: Quotes About Facts

15. “Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That, as we saw, is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage.”

— N. T. Wright

16. “Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don’t light a candle in a room that’s already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that’s so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are.”

— N. T. Wright

17. “Love is not just tolerance. It’s not just distant appreciation. It’s a warm sense of, ‘I am enjoying the fact that you are you.’”

— N. T. Wright

18. “Deism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent.”

— N. T. Wright

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

19. “True worship doesn’t put on a show or make a fuss; true worship isn’t forced, isn’t half-hearted, doesn’t keep looking at its watch, doesn’t worry what the person in the next pew is doing. True worship is open to God, adoring God, waiting for God, trusting God even in the dark.”

— N. T. Wright

20. “Wherever St. Paul went, there was a riot. Wherever I go, they serve tea.”

— N. T. Wright

21. “Without God’s Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God’s kingdom. Without God’s Spirit, the church simply can’t be the church.”

— N. T. Wright

22. “Heaven is important, but its not the end of the world.”

— N. T. Wright

23. “God is the Creator God, he doesn’t want to say, “Okay, creation was very good, but I’m scrapping it.” He wants to say, “Creation is so good that I’m going to rescue it.””

— N. T. Wright

24. “Learning to live as a Christian is learning to live as a renewed human being, anticipating the eventual new creation in and with a world which is still longing and groaning for that final redemption.”

— N. T. Wright

25. “It’s not great faith you need; it is faith in a great God.”

— N. T. Wright

26. “The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you’re now invited to belong to it.”

— N. T. Wright

27. “Blessed are the pure in heart; how will people believe that, unless we ourselves are worshipping the living God until our own hearts are set on fire and scorched through with his purity?”

— N. T. Wright

28. “Art is love creating the new world and justice is love rolling up its sleeves to heal the old one.”

— N. T. Wright

29. “Christ’s resurrection doesn’t mean escaping from the world; it means mission to the world based on Jesus’s lordship over the world.”

— N. T. Wright

30. “I believe we face the question: if not now, then when? And if we are grasped by this vision, we may also hear the question: If not us, then who? And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?”

— N. T. Wright

31. “The Bible is there to enable God’s people to be equipped to do God’s work in God’s world, not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly, knowing they possess all God’s truth.”

— N. T. Wright

32. “Easter is about Jesus: the Jesus who announced God’s saving, sovereign kingdom...”

— N. T. Wright

33. “The work of the kingdom, in fact, is summed up pretty well in those Beatitudes. When God wants to change the world, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the mourners, those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice, the peacemakers, and so on.”

— N. T. Wright

34. “The closer you get to the truth, the clearer becomes the beauty, and the more you will find worship welling up within you. That’s why theology and worship belong together.”

— N. T. Wright

35. “People often get upset when you teach them what is in the Bible rather than what they presume is in the Bible.”

— N. T. Wright

36. “Lent is a time for discipline, for confession, for honesty, not because God is mean or fault- finding or finger-pointing but because he wants us to know the joy of being cleaned out, ready for all the good things he now has in store.”

— N. T. Wright

37. “As we are set free by that love from our own pride and fear, our own greed and arrogance, so we are free in our turn to be agents of reconciliation and hope, or healing and love.”

— N. T. Wright

38. “I am convinced that when we bring our griefs and sorrows within the story of God’s own grief and sorrow, and allow them to be held there, God is able to bring healing to us ans new possibilities to our lives. That is, of course, what Good Friday and Easter are all about.”

— N. T. Wright

39. “It is faith that looks up at the creator God and knows him to be the God of love. And it is faith that looks out at the world with the longing to bring that love to bear in healing reconciliation, and hope.”

— N. T. Wright

40. “Worship is love on its knees before the beloved; just as mission is love on its feet to serve the beloved.”

— N. T. Wright

41. “Death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it overthrows it.”

— N. T. Wright

42. “The word “salvation” denotes rescue. Rescue? What from? Well, of course, ultimately death. And since it is sin that colludes with the forces of evil and decay, sin leads to death. So we are rescued from sin and death.”

— N. T. Wright

43. “The question of Heaven, the question of what happens after death, is one which a lot of people in our culture try to put off as long as they can, but sooner or later it suddenly swings round and looks them in the eye.”

— N. T. Wright

44. “When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves – that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.”

— N. T. Wright

45. “At the heart of Christian ethic is humility; at the heart of its parodies, pride. Different roads with different destinations, and the destinations color the character of those who travel by them.”

— N. T. Wright

46. “When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven’t yet really understood who he is or what he’s done.”

— N. T. Wright

47. “If you have never felt or known the sheer power and strength of God’s love, take another look at Jesus dying on the cross.”

— N. T. Wright

48. “The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights.”

— N. T. Wright

49. “One of the reasons we do history, in fact, is because it acts as a brake, a control, on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas.”

— N. T. Wright

50. “The point of 1 Corinthians 13 is that love is not our duty; it is our destiny. It is the language Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God’s new world, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now. It is the music God has written for all his creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his baton.”

— N. T. Wright