The first fundamental principle of financial intelligence is to see God as the sole provider — personally and as a church congregation. John Finkelde

What’s in your heart will flow to those you care for. You cannot stop this organic flow of life and truth. John Finkelde

People with poor financial habits — who are sloppy or stingy with their money, who spend with minimal self-control and mismanage their own finances — usually don’t succeed over time in leading a church into fruitfulness. John Finkelde

As elsewhere, you can’t fit Jesus’ resurrection into anyone else’s world view. That isn’t surprising; the resurrection inaugurates God’s new creation. It transforms the old world, but it can’t fit into the categories of the old world. Tom Wright

But the dark powers have ways of striking back; and when they do, they don’t play fair. Remind yourself of this, any pastors reading this, Tom Wright

The Judeans who had believed in Jesus and had found a new joy and hope in his presence and love couldn’t resist telling their non-Judean friends and neighbours, and some of them came to believe in Jesus too. Tom Wright

The unity of the church across traditional lines of class, culture, ethnicity, gender, whatever: that, and only that, is the God-given sign that the new creation has been launched. Anything else looks like simply shuffling the cards of the old one. Tom Wright

At the heart of this is holiness: if the church is the new Temple, with God really in the midst, that means fear and trembling, not playing fast and loose. That applies in many areas, not just – though not least – with money. If we really are doing business with the Creator God, this isn’t just a strange religious game. It is claiming, riskily, to be part of the ongoing life-giving project of the God who made heaven and earth. Tom Wright

If we take on this vocation, the principalities and powers – of whatever sort – will tell us to concentrate on heaven while they run the earth. Or they will warn us not to shove our religion down their throats, while they (of course) continue to shove their secular materialism and rampant hedonism down ours. We must not lose our nerve. Tom Wright

Acts is not written, then, to describe examples of a ‘normal process’ of the spiritual development of individual believers. It is written to describe the one-off inauguration of a quite new reality. Pentecost, along with Good Friday, Easter and Ascension, constitutes the great turning point in the history of Israel and the world. Tom Wright