Jackie Hill Perry Quotes

Light has a way of welcoming in the truth and letting it put its feet up, which in turns means that everything not like it, though it may invite itself over, can’t get comfortable enough to stay.

I don’t believe it is wise or truthful to the power of the gospel to identify oneself by the sins of one’s past or the temptations of one’s present but rather to only be defined by the Christ who’s overcome both for those He calls His own.

If God is holy, then He can’t sin. If God can’t sin, then He can’t sin against me. If He can’t sin against me, shouldn’t that make Him the most trustworthy being there is?

..because a good God made the woman, then being a woman [is] a good thing

If I love God, I must love people. I don’t have the choice to choose when.

Our sexuality is not our soul, marriage is not heaven, and singleness is not hell.

To tell you about what God has done for my soul is to invite you into my worship.

Yet, unbelief doesn't see God as the ultimate good. So it can't see sin as the ultimate evil. It instead sees sin as a good thing and thus God's commands as a stumbling block to joy. In believing the devil, I didn't need a pentagram pendant to wear, neither did I need to memorize a hex or two. All I had to do was trust myself more than God's Word. I had to believe that my thoughts, my affections, my rights, my wishes, were worthy of absolute obedience and that in laying prostrate before the flimsy throne I'd made for myself, that I'd be doing a good thing.

The soil from which all sin grows is unbelief.

Could it be that God would not have me going about the rest of my life believing that these lesser forms of “love" were the real thing? Perhaps this love He, filled to the brim with, was pouring over into His dealings with me. And perhaps this love was compelling Him, on the basis of grace—an undeserved love—to help me see that every person, place or thing that I loved more than Him could not keep its promise to love me eternally.

Every single thing He has ever or will ever say is true. The simplicity of faith is this: taking God’s Word for it. And I might not have felt like it, but I had no choice but to believe Him.

Unbelief, just like Satan, will always take the easy way out. It will tell us to eat the fruit in exchange for knowledge, instead of fearing God to gain real wisdom. Unbelief will unravel our perceptions of both suffering and the blessedness of life and beckon us to skip self-denial at all costs with the faux promises of comfort that can’t extend beyond the grave.

My hands, head, face, legs, hips, hormones, private parts, voice, feet, fingers, feelings, were all made by Him and for Him. Apparently, this body was never mine to begin with - it was given to me from Somebody, for Somebody. Somebody who'd made it for glory and not shame. Until I got to know Him though, my identity would be made up of whatever dust that flew up from the devil's feet as he ran through the earth.

He is so much greater than the greatest thing and much more glorious than the most glorious glory the eyes could see. Knowing this, He becomes the aim of all our doing. Because, if God is bigger than we can imagine, we are wasting our time to chase after something or someone lesser than Him. And because we know that He is our all in all, in our temptations, our trials, and our victories, we must place our ultimate identity not in who we are, but in who we know God to be.

When salvation has taken place in the life of someone under the sovereign hand of God, they are set free from the penalty of sin and its power. In a body without the Spirit, sin is an unshakable king under whose dominion no man can flee. The entire body, with its members, affections, and mind all willfully submit themselves to sin’s rule. But when the Spirit of God takes back the body that He created for Himself, He sets it free from the pathetic master that once held it captive and releases it into the marvelous light of its Savior. It is then able to not only want God, but it is actually able to obey God. And isn’t that what freedom is supposed to be? The ability to not do as I please, but the power to do what is pleasing.

Why hadn’t they ever mentioned the place happiness had within righteousness, or how the taking up of the cross would be a practice of obtaining delight? Delight in all that God is? Even their Savior had this kind of joy in mind as He endured His cross. So why hadn’t they set their focus on the same? In their defense, they were not to blame for my unbelief. I just wonder if they would’ve told me about the beauty of God just as much, if not more, than they told me about the horridness of hell, if I would’ve burned my idols at a faster pace.

Trying to contain the small giggle welling up in her chest from the sincerity of my question, Santoria, full of confidence, responded while looking toward my direction, "Yes, Jackie.The gospel didn't just save you, it also keeps you.

I don’t doubt that it’s easy to mistake the heterosexual gospel for the gospel of God because many have forgotten that the gospel is actually about God in the first place. When the Christian life has become a practice in doing everything else but making Jesus known, what would we expect of our gospel presentations? They will naturally result in the telling of something empty and void of power—more moral than anything and sufficient to make men and women believe that they can be saved by and for some other means than Jesus.

Our sexuality is not our soul, marriage is not heaven, and singleness is not hell. So may we all preach the news that is good for a reason. For it proclaims to the world that Jesus has come so that all sinners, same-sex-attracted and opposite-sex-attracted, can be forgiven of their sins to love God and enjoy Him forever.

Vomit will always be vomit even if drizzled with chocolate, sliced almonds, and a cherry on top (2 Peter 2:21-22). When the temptation to see sin as what it is not arrives, the Scriptures are our light, our final truth, our escape out of the shadow moving toward our feet. The Word of God and not the word of the enemy is where we see the true identity of sin.

I couldn’t let fear hold my hand. Even though it was a familiar palm, a consistent one even, I knew it would only work to separate what God was going to join together.

Sin at its core is selfish. Holiness at its core is self-giving.

Holiness is what makes real love possible. Without it, love is purely sentimental, easily misplaced, and unconditionally conditional.

Can you see that just like the young ruler, what we believe about God will determine how we behave?

No one worthy of our entire selves, and I believe that as you see Him as He is, you’ll want to be just like Him too.

There is a level of reasoning within us when we decide which golden calf we’ll love on any given day.

However, holiness is not an aspect of God; holy is who He is through and through.

The serpent still incentivizes unbelief by promising that it will make us “like God,” but our motive has never been to be like God in terms of righteousness but of rights.

Do you know why we have a hard time believing that a gay girl can become a completely different creature? Because, we have a hard time believing in God. ...

Joy has never been the problem. It was our hearts that bent us away from finding our ultimate enjoyment in Who’d made us, which crippled how, what, and who we got joy from.

...to have a quiet and gentle spirit--a call given to women--would not mean I had to abandon all that I am, limp along in life, silence my personality in the name of obedience, but instead it meant that I could authentically be the woman God made me as, while anchored in the truth and controlled by the Spirit. When led by Him, when wanting to place my rights above His honor, humility would place its hand over my heart, keeping it still and settled with peace until what was worth being said or done happened in love. Out of a deep wanting for what belonged to God to be recognized and respected.

If that is the case, I suspect that many of the methods and messages related to holiness may actually be encouraging the opposite, leading to an earth-grown morality rather than a heaven-sent righteousness.

We have supposed that the way to help people be holy is to just tell them to “stop sinning,” when in fact, lasting transformation is a spiritual consequence of “beholding the glory of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18). That’s why we’re here: to behold. To set our sights on a higher love. To see who Adam hid from, who the psalmist sang to, who the prophets spoke for, who the disciples walked with, and who Jesus made known.

It is the identity that we ascribe to God out of doubt or faith in His Scriptures that will determine the identity we will give ourselves and ultimately the life that we inevitably live. If He is the Creator, then we are created. If He is Master, then we are servants. If He is love, then we are loved. If He is omnipotent, then we are not as powerful as we think. If He is omniscient, then there is nowhere to hide. If He cannot lie, then His promises are all true.

Sin, when in the body, cannot not stay put. It’s not a guest that stays in one room, making sure not to disturb the others. It is a tenant that lives in everything and goes everywhere. It can bleed into every part, choking out anything holy.

C. S. Lewis wrote: A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness—they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.

We have supposed that the way to help people be holy is to just tell them to “stop sinning,” when in fact, lasting transformation is a spiritual consequence of “beholding the glory of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18). That’s why we’re here: to behold. To set our sights on a higher love.

When Jesus died and rose, He gave you the power to defeat sin. Literally. Like you don't have to give in. Every single time you are tempted to sin, just remember the reality that Jesus defeated it already. You're not a slave. You are free. You just have to believe that and walk in it.

The same Bible that condemned me held in it the promises that could save me. I just had to believe it. “It” being what it said about Him: God. Jesus had the guilty in mind when He was hung high and stretched out wide. On it, He died in my place, for my sin. He, bare-bodied and face set on joy, became as a slaughtered lamb underneath the wrath of God. You would think His Father would have a better memory than that. Didn’t He know that that wrath was mine? It even had my name on it. But He knew. His justice wouldn’t allow Him to forget. His love is what He wanted me to know and remember, and I did.

Holiness (and goodness) should never be determined by the whims, wishes, and standards of a created thing or even a whole culture. Especially when that culture’s ideas are so easily influenced by deceitful hearts within it, as well as overall mutability, taking different shapes in conformity to its era.

From this faith in God, fruit grows. Holiness shows up in us, making us trustworthy, honest, self-controlled, gentle, wise, pure, and more. As obvious as it seems, our own efforts at sanctification are not always framed in this way—that faith in Christ and who He has revealed God to be precedes holiness.

Jesus said there will be no marriage in the new creation. In that respect, we will be like the angels, neither marrying nor being given in marriage. We will have the reality, we will no longer need the signpost. By foregoing marriage now, singleness is a way of both anticipating this reality and testifying to its goodness. It's a way of saying this future reality is so certain, that we can live according to it now. If marriage shows us the shape of the gospel, singleness shows us its sufficiency. It's a way of declaring to a world obsessed with sexual and romantic intimacy these things are not ultimate, and that in Christ we possess what is.

The soil from which all sin grows is unbelief. We sin because it is our nature to do so, but it’s not as if we always sin unintentionally, like depraved robots without the ability to behave according to reason. We are thoughtful with our rebellion. There is a level of reasoning within us when we decide which golden calf we’ll love on any given day.

When God tells you that your life will be lost if and when you try to save it, but losing it for His sake is where you will find it, believe Him. Christ will not allow you to find life any other way because there is no other way. Devils will tell you that it’s possible to live without God, but reality as Christ told us is that there is no life outside of Him.

Christ did not die to redeem us in part. Neither did He rise so that we might have life in portions. But with us having a body made for Him, as well as the mind, will, personality, and emotions that it contains, we must understand that God is after us becoming victorious over any and all sin that would hinder the whole person from serving God fully and freely.

When, as a new Christian, I was introduced to the typical nature in which some Christians speak of their lives in the loveliest terms, I refused to give in to the convenient misery of being ambiguous about the truth. If the truth is what sets us free, then why not walk in it at all times? With wisdom and love, of course, but also with the reality that truth is where freedom begins.

The Lord is holy beyond comparison, for His holiness is not derivative of of some other source. His holiness is intrinsic to His nature as God. It’s as essential to Him as creaturely dependence is to us. Of all the songs to sing to one another, of all the divine attributes worth praising God for, Isaiah saw the seraphim make melody around the supreme holiness of God. (Holier Than Thou, pg. 20)

Evangelism is a word that means to share the good news—more specifically, in this case, the good news of the gospel. And this evangelism is all about God because the gospel is all about God. It is God who created us. God who we all sinned against. It is God who loved us. God who sent His Son Christ to Earth. It is Christ who lived the life that we couldn’t. It is Christ who died that death that we deserve. It is Christ who appeased God’s wrath. It is Christ that rose from the dead. It is Christ who sent His promised Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that unveils our eyes to see the glory of Christ. It is the Holy Spirit who softens our hardened hearts so that we will repent. It is Christ who we are commanded to place our faith in. It is Christ who saves us and it is Christ that gives us eternal life.

After seeing the holy God, Isaiah then saw himself. What he knew instantly was that between him and God, only one was truly holy. In the presence of the Lord, his guilt was obvious, his sins were bright, uncovered, exposed, broadcasted without a screen. Loud without a button to mute them or a finger to shush the noise. He confessed the defilement of his tongue which communicated the pollution native to his nature.

What if asking God questions is one way to cultivate intimacy with God? What if your questions became a door by which you could be vulnerable with Him? What if your questions opened up your mind to read the Scriptures with Spirit-empowered expectation instead of apathetic drudgery? If, in fact, Jesus is the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24), what if, by asking questions, you discover God; and by finding God, you find your answers?

...her life was full of power in ways that I never knew possible. How when unbelief came near, she faithfully turned Scripture loose to capture and strangle it into submission to a higher will than her own. A gifted woman she was but ungodly she was not. I had known many a person with glorious gifts and satanic lives, but this woman showed me that knowing God was more than knowing about Him and doing things for Him but knowing Him.

The gay community is called that for a reason. It is a community. A collective of people with different names, social statuses, eating habits, upbringings and more but with one commonality shared among them that make them all more alike than not: their sexuality…… The difference between the gay community and the Christian community. Was not skill, intellect, comfort, humour, or beauty; it was that in one and not the other, God dwelled.

But I- unbeknownst to me- had been swayed by this same leaven. If only I could just be straight, and lay aside my homosexuality, God would accept me and call me His own, I used to think. This delusion was the belief that only one aspect of my life was worthy of judgment, while the rest deserved heaven. That my other voices were “not as bad.” They were just struggles that I had to work on instead of repenting. There is a possibility that this kind of self-righteous thinking is why salvation has eluded many same-sex-attracted men and women… Because God did not take hold of their gay desires and replace them with straight desires, they have no other choice but to follow where their affections may lead. The error is this: they have come to God believing that only a fraction of themselves needs saving. They have therefore neglected to acknowledge the rest of them also needs to be made right.

He is Lord because He is King and Creator. From Him came all things, the heavens and the earth of course. The world is His, with it are the hills, on it are the cattle that know Him as maker: “For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the hills, and all that moves in the field is mine” (Ps. 50:10–11). God is Lord over the heavens, the earth that holds us, and Lord of the body to which we try our hardest to keep to ourselves.

For what other reason do we choose anything over God if isn’t because we think it and not Him can give us what we need? How often have we looked to the creature and called it Savior, without words, but by faith? For every empty bottle of wine, drunk to the dredges without self-control’s restraint, there is the proof of a soul wanting to find peace in something that doesn’t have it to give. Even social media thrives most on our neediness and the way it makes us discontent in being known and loved by God and God alone.

Our relationship to the law isn’t worth celebrating fourteen days into February. However we learned about it, whether through counsel or conscience, we responded by resisting all of the goodness it had to offer, proving something deep and dark about ourselves. Mainly that we don’t like to be like God. That’s not to say that our sinfulness isn’t a parody and a rather silly way of deifying ourselves. The serpent still incentivizes unbelief by promising that it will make us “like God,” but our motive has never been to be like God in terms of righteousness but of rights.

It's funny how, sometimes, the mind won't let the body remember what's been done to it. It chooses, at will, to take the abusive memory and bury it. As if to nurture away the pain by making us forget it's there. Not remembering trauma doesn't mean we're left without its effect. It still comes up and out, at a certain smell, sound, sight, touch, question, tone, location, person, people, personality. Waiting to be noticed and brought to the light. Letting it, and peeking into where it's from, is the path to making sense of ourselves and finding the particular healing we've been kept from having.

Isn’t it interesting how simply being in proximity to God creates a moral self-awareness in Isaiah and others?7 That there is something about God that is so pure, even if unspoken, that when near Him, it becomes so plain that nothing is like Him, especially in terms of righteousness. It is not as though God did anything for Isaiah to be so terrified. God didn’t even tell Isaiah He was holy at all; the seraphim did. God didn’t move, come near, rise up or down; He simply sat, and that was enough for Isaiah to see his own wickedness. Just by being close, Isaiah’s heart and its ways were impossibly noticeable.

Now, compare God to everything and tell me what you see. What I hope you noticed is that everything that exists has a beginning, is a derivative, is contingent upon something else for its life. Paul describes our lot as creatures, pointing to how it’s only in God that we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Can the same be said about God? Of course not. This is what is referred to as God’s transcendence. It means that God is totally unique from everything there is. God doesn’t exist and cannot exist in the same way as we do or anything for that matter; setting Him apart from all creation as a being that is distinct from it: holy. So, in this, we see that God’s holiness is about moral purity, yes, and it’s also about transcendent, self-existing otherness. It’s about being totally right and eternally existent. Which, of course, only God is.

Jesus had the guilty in mind when He hung high and stretched out wide.... He, bare-bodied and face set on joy, became as a slaughtered lamb underneath the wrath of God... Didn't He know that wrath was mine? It even had my name on it. But He knew... Without asking my permission, a good God had come to my rescue.

From the outside looking in, it could be assumed that Preston's and my relationship was God's proof of turning a "gay girl good." But really, He'd already done that the moment He'd set me free from sin.

If when the time was coming for Him to experience the full vengeance of God instead of the sweet love in which He’d always abided, He approached it with indifference, we could only conclude that He didn’t care that much about having His intimacy with the Father disrupted.

Yet, unbelief doesn’t see God as the ultimate good. So it can’t see sin as the ultimate evil. It instead sees sin as a good thing and thus God’s commands as a stumbling block to joy. In believing the devil, I didn’t need a pentagram pendant to wear, neither did I need to memorize a hex or two. All I had to do was trust myself more than God’s Word. I had to believe that my thoughts, my affections, my rights, my wishes, were worthy of absolute obedience and that in laying prostrate before the flimsy throne I’d made for myself, that I’d be doing a good thing.

It can be a habit of some to not only have a compartmentalized view of themselves in light of the gospel but to also have a compartmentalized concept of discipleship. Where the entire goal of discipleship in our church communities starts to only be about teaching men and women how to walk free from the loud shouts of their broken sexuality but forgets to teach them how to quiet all of the other noise that the flesh makes. Christ did not die to redeem us in part. Neither did He rise so that we might have life in portions. But with us having a body made for Him, as well as the mind, will, personality, and emotions that it contains, we must understand that God is after us becoming victorious over any and all sin that would hinder the whole person from serving God fully and freely.

Before writing [the book], I lived out the words. A gay girl once? Yes. Now? I am what God's goodness will do to a soul once grace gets to it. In saying that, I know I've already offended someone... There are many who, while reading, won't understand gayness as something possible of being in the past tense... Gayness.. can be an immovable identity only when the heart is unwilling to bow [to God].

Being smarter than that, he stuck to asking only questions first.

And isn’t that what freedom is supposed to be? The ability to not do as I please, but the power to do what is pleasing.

When the sentences are a garden with an inch of dirt, what kind of flowers do we expect to grow from such shallow soil?

We are far too easily pleased,” as C. S. Lewis said.1 We can read six sentences, chew the crackers, sip the cup, swallow the piece, and believe ourselves to be full. But surely, if God is the Bread of Life, there is always more.

Once the cover is closed, it’s your turn to dig. To open the Scriptures, using my observations of them as a resource, not a conclusion. My heart for you is that by seeing Him, then and only then will you discover yourself. Primarily, that you need Him. It’s the insufficiency of everything, including devotionals, that signals our need for more than what we’ve been satisfied with.

This work cannot become the measure of your maturity in which you read only to feel good enough. Or study only to prove your godliness. You are capable of so much more, and you know it. God made you and redeemed you so that you may know Him. That’s the point of everything.

Your stomach is being made ready for more. Be reminded that the bread isn’t in this book. It’s in the One this book is pointing toward. Close the page, return the book to its place because dinner is ready. The Scriptures are the meal and Christ is its bread. Go to Him and be filled.

Monday through Sunday we are largely controlled by our stomachs and if anything is in it. So much so that its contents determine if we will be a Monster or a Mercy.

But the Lord’s Table has been set, so sit. Revive yourself in His life. Fill yourself in His love. Scrape the plate and wipe it clean. We need the Bread of heaven because truly no other food will do.

God’s Word and God’s nature must inform your emotions

As utilitarian as they might be however, they become a danger to us and the world whenever they are detached from God’s Word.

Feeling what he felt, he forgot the kingdom. When emotions are given underserved supremacy, they can lead us to respond to ourselves, others, and our circumstances in ways that reflect the emotion more than it does their Creator.

At this point, by singling out the negative influence emotions can have, one might see emotions as an enemy of faith. That too would be an irrational, or even emotional, way of seeing things. Emotions are good, for not only did our Lord make them, but He also has them. The issue then is not simply what or how we feel but how what we’ve inherited from Adam leads us to respond to said feelings. To say it another way, emotions aren’t the problem; the flesh is. So then, in becoming more holy, doing away with emotions won’t serve us. What will is that God-breathed Word, both written and living—written in every narrative, epistle, prophet, and psalm, and living in the enfleshed God of heaven. Who, after ascending to that glorious right hand, together with His Father, sent their

These people will feel all kinds of ways all of the time, but they can and they must reflect God’s nature when they do.

So a part of embracing the fact that you are needed, in whatever space you have been called, is identifying your own need for compassion. Once you receive it, then you can give it.

If we are as complex as He’s made us to be, then surely we are much more sinful than we can imagine. And for that reason, when God comes to restore, He must do it entirely.

Surely, no man who has made God small in his own life will have the Godward focus to make Him big in their ministry to others.

Looking to Jesus, the eternal God, wrapped in flesh, crucified for sin, raised to life, and seated at the right hand of God must have our fear and our focus. As long as He does, every cost will be worth it.

There is a cost for the faithful ones. But do you know what makes one embrace it? Do you know what helped these saints keep going? Every single one of them didn’t allow the cost of their obedience to distract them from the God they were obeying. Noah obeyed because he feared God (Heb. 11:7). And Moses endured by seeing the invisible God (11:27). And in the way of wisdom, we must do the same.

It’s no wonder that when it’s time to pray, the length and consistency of the prayer suffers under the weight of a mind that’s completely uncomfortable with boredom.

Think of boredom during silent prayer as an act of purification,” one pastor recommends. “In this uneventful moment, God purifies us of the false god of good feelings.

Not only that, there is so much joy to be had on Earth because there is more glory in God than we can imagine. He is so much greater than the greatest thing and much more glorious than the most glorious glory the eyes could see. Knowing this, He becomes the aim of all of our doing. Because, if God is bigger than we can imagine, we are wasting our time to chase after something or someone lesser than Him. And because we know that He is our all in all, in our temptations, our trials, and our victories, we must place our ultimate identity not in who we are, but in who we know God to be.

But it will feel more true than it is, for sin can never deliver on its promise to make us happy. Vomit will always be vomit even if drizzled with chocolate, sliced almonds, and a cherry on top (2 Peter 2:21–22). When the temptation to see sin as what it is not arrives, the Scriptures are our light, our final truth, our escape out of the shadow moving toward our feet. The Word of God and not the word of the enemy is where we see the true identity of sin.

The root of all sin is unbelief in God.

I’d met so many disciples who preached more of sin than joy, whose eyes were stuck in a constant state of solemnity, clenched teeth and an endless fascination with holiness. Why hadn’t they ever mentioned the place happiness had within righteousness, or how the taking up of the cross would be a practice of obtaining delight? Delight in all that God is? Even their Savior had this kind of joy in mind as He endured His cross. So why hadn’t they set their focus on the same? In their defense, they were not to blame for my unbelief. I just wonder if they would’ve told me about the beauty of God just as much, if not more, than they told me about the horridness of hell, if I would’ve burned my idols at a faster pace.

God was not calling me to be straight; He was calling me to Himself. The choice to lay aside sin and take hold of holiness was not synonymous with heterosexuality.

If I could teach my daughter anything about herself, it would be that because a god God made the woman, then being a woman was a good thing.

The only constant in this world is God.

Nothing was clear except God's loud voice saying, "Come.

He loved me because he loved God more.

God was not calling me to be straight: He was calling me to himself. The choice to lay aside sin and take hold of holiness as not synonymous with heterosexuality.

The difference between the gay community and the Christian community was not skill, intellect, comfort, humor, or beauty: it was that in one nd not the other, God dwelled.

truth is where freedom begins.

To me, the devil made more sense than God sometimes.

Without asking my permission, a good God had come to my rescue.