great thoughts by NT Wright

...He doesn’t give us the Holy Spirit in order to make us infallible – blind and dumb servants who merely sit there and
let the stuff flow through us. So, he doesn’t simply give us a rule book so that we could just
thumb through and look it up. He doesn’t create a church where you become automatically
sinless on entry. Because, as the goal and end of his work is redemption, so the means is
redemptive also: judgment and mercy, nature and grace. God does not, then, want to put
people into little boxes and keep them safe and sound. It is, after all, possible to be so sound
that you’re sound asleep. I am not in favor of unsoundness; but soundness means health, and
health means growth, and growth means life and vigor and new directions. The little boxes
in which you put people and keep them under control are called coffins.
...Because, again and again, we find, as we submit to scripture, as we wrestle with the
bits that don’t make sense, and as we burst through to a new sense that we haven’t thought of
or seen before, God breathes into our nostrils his own breath – the breath of life. And we
become living beings – a church recreated in his image, more fully human, thinking, alive
beings.