Ed Welch Quotes

Your neediness qualifies you to help others. Your neediness, offered well to someone else, can even be one of the great gifts you give to your church. You will inspire others to ask for help.

If I can trust the word of a friend, why do I question the word of the God of the universe? Go figure. Sin is truly bizarre." [Running Scared, p. 111]

Who we love above all else is who we worship, and who we worship controls us.

To establish a Scriptural counseling relationship, the speaker says we must know the person to the level that they feel like they are known and to the level that we are moved by the hardness of their experience.

We spend too much time concealing our neediness. We need to stop hiding. Being needy is our basic condition. There is no shame in it—it’s just the way it is. Understanding this, accepting it, and practicing it will make you a better helper.

Friends are the best helpers. They come prepackaged with compassion and love. All they need is wisdom, and that is available to everyone.

Confession is always a good place to start when we feel lost.

Speaker says psychology has commandeered "everything hard" and partitioned it from Scripture with the assumption that its causes are biological

The basic idea is that those who help best are the ones who both need help and give help. A healthy community is dependent on all of us being both.

Groom imagery in the Bible represents God in relation to his people. Describing reconciliation with God, Ed Welch writes: "The gospel is the story of God covering his naked enemies, bringing them to the wedding feast and then marrying them rather than crushing them.

When you wake up to kingdom realities, you find that you are tracing the steps of both the Israelites and Jesus himself into the wilderness. . . . The wilderness is the place where God meets his people, Satan attacks, and kingdom allegiances are revealed. [Ed Welch, Running Scared, 118]

Sanctification is more about the direction than the distance we have traveled.

On this side of the cross misery persists, but the scales are tipped in favor of joy.

Why would anyone entertain Satan’s questions about God’s goodness when everything is good? But a few bumps in the road, and our knowledge of God seems fragile, and that’s what Satan is counting on.

Our task is simple: ask for prayer and then let those who have prayed for us know what God has done. It is simple, but it is also a powerful intrusion of the Spirit in the everyday life of the church.

Speaker calls the Christian counselor to look at each person as soul embodied with unique challenges that move us. This is not, he says, the first step before we get on to important business but vital in and of itself.

If God used only experts and people of renown, some could boast in their own wisdom, but God’s way of doing things is not the same as our way. We ordinary people have been given power and wisdom through the Holy Spirit and are called to love others (John 13:34).

What is most important to us? What do we love? What is most dear to us?2 We shouldn’t be surprised that these questions get to the core of our being. They also point to where we are headed. All roads eventually lead to our relationship with God. Do we love what he loves? Is he most dear to us?

A child dies two days after birth. Her parents cried out for help, and hundreds of friends cried out too. Might there still have been deliverance? Consider that the parents had been delivered from death and the Evil One and that the child belonged to God and would be with him. Those deliverances might not lessen the parents’ and friends’ grief, but they do mean that the community can grieve with hope.

Sin is guerrilla warfare that is deadly. Just when you think you are in control, it seeks to devour you.

From Genesis on, nakedness, or the shame of being exposed to others, became one of the great curses in Hebrew culture. It was a profound curse because it symbolized the deeper, spiritual nakedness and shame that needed covering. It symbolized that apart from God's covering, we stand naked before him.

That's the paradox of self-esteem: Low self-esteem usually means that I think too highly of myself....When you are in the grips of low self-esteem, it's painful, and it certainly doesn't feel like pride. But I believe that this is the dark, quieter side of pride-thwarted pride.

For Peter, it was as if he was the first Adam. He felt the gaze of the holy and couldn't have felt more naked.

When suffering knocks on someone’s door, Satan too comes knocking. Life is a war zone, and Satan is the enemy strategist. He waits for those times when people are in the wilderness—vulnerable, desperate, and God seemingly far away or absent altogether. That’s when Satan’s questions about God’s character, which might seem silly during the good times, suddenly make sense. Why would anyone entertain Satan’s questions about God’s goodness when everything is good? But a few bumps in the road, and our knowledge of God seems fragile, and that’s what Satan is counting on.

Incline your ear, O LORD, and answer me, for I am poor and needy. (Ps. 86:1) O LORD, God of my salvation; I cry out day and night before you. Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry! (Ps. 88:1–2)

Emotional suffering needs spiritual encouragement.

So though it’s true that sin itself is not good, to see our sin is good. Whereas sin leads down a burden-filled path, Jesus says, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Confession is essential to that life.

Sometimes is ["God loves me more than I think"] still allows us and our need to be at the center of the world, and God becomes our psychic errand boy given the task of inflating our self esteem.

If we think we are usually good, then God is usually irrelevant.

Psychiatric diagnoses are considered to be technical and bounded; you are either in or out. In contrast, a biblical perspective puts many interpersonal differences on a continuum: people may have more or less of something. This is relevant to sins, spiritual gifts, weaknesses, and character qualities.

Ed Welch says that all counseling is a variation on a single theme: knowing and praying for the counselee. Of all the questions the counselor might ask, then, the central guiding question in the counselor's mind is, "How can I pray for you?

Ed Welch says: Fear in the biblical sense . . . includes being afraid of someone, but it extends to holding someone in awe, being controlled or mastered by people, worshipping other people, putting your trust in people, or needing people. . . . The fear of man can be summarized this way: We replace God with people. Instead of a biblically guided fear of the Lord, we fear others. . . . When we are in our teens, it is called “peer pressure.” When we are older, it is called “people-pleasing.” Recently, it has been called “codependency.”76

When many people hear the word humility, negative thoughts come to mind. Who wants to be humbled? But those with spiritual wisdom beg God to humble them. They know that most of God’s riches flow through the funnel of humility. God gives grace to the humble (James 4:6). What does this grace look like? How does it come to us? Here are some examples: intimacy with Christ (Isa. 57:15), favor with God (Prov. 3:34), exaltation by God (Ps. 147:6), salvation in the broadest sense (Matt. 5:3), and honor from God (Prov. 15:33). These are all manifestations of God’s grace to those growing in humility. “The good news of Jesus is not intended to make us feel good about ourselves,” notes Ed Welch. “Instead, the good news humbles us.”10

The contrast between earthly and spiritual is not a contrast between the tangible and the intangible; it is between the transitory and the eternal. Earthly is temporary, spiritual is everlasting. [Ed Welch, Running Scared, 127]

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works” — Ed Catmull.

Scripture exists because we need revelation. We can’t see reality clearly with the naked eye. Scripture is God’s technology that allows us to see everything we need to see.