Jared Wilson Quotes

Because He lives, I can face yesterday.

The frightening thing is that, to enter hell, all one has to do is nothing.

The Devil is like a rat in a jar that is filling with ether. We should expect that as his death gets ever-nearer, he will beat his claws more furiously against the glass.

Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and resurrection out of the grave are big enough, grand enough, effective enough, and eternal enough to cover your shoddy Christian life,

We are no more secure in Christ with a strong faith than with a small faith, so long as that small faith is true faith.

if there is a God of the universe (and there is), and this God of the universe loved you and wanted to be in relationship with you (and he does), wouldn’t it be stupid not to talk to him?

Some days taking up your cross feels like putting up with an annoying coworker or a flat tire. And some days taking up your cross feels like what it is—death.

God razes us before he raises us.

Where we always look for and request deliverance from suffering, the testimony of Scripture is mostly about what God wants to do for us in our suffering.

We will always prefer lesser satisfactions to the satisfaction of Christ, because the lesser ones appeal to the god of self—a ravenous, insatiable, fickle idol indeed—while satisfaction in Christ requires that we assassinate that god. We won’t know what it really means for the joy of the Lord to be our strength until we’ve had intravenous idolatry yanked out and all other crutches kicked away. For many of us, Jesus won’t be our absolute treasure until we are out of options.

The gospel is a family meal. It is meant to be enjoyed regularly and intentionally in the presence of others and for the benefit of others.

Let's stop trying to conjure up God (by which, let's be honest, we're often just trying to conjure up our emotions), and let us marvel and enjoy that he cannot be conjured.

Sometimes when God closes a door, it’s because he wants us inside when the building collapses.

Therefore, a biblical understanding of the nature of the kingdom of God keeps in tension the reality that the kingdom is both “already” and “not yet.

Lay aside such numberings of the people, such idle pretense of certifying in half a minute that which will need the testing of a lifetime.3

I had been feeling that it was more important for me to understand how much Jesus loved me than it was for me to figure out how to love Him.

The worst ministry work assumes that the old ways of doing things are the best ways simply because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” You

The cross is proof that God loves sinners.

gospel wakefulness means treasuring Christ more greatly and savoring his power more sweetly.

Leaders must lead, not push. Leaders must serve, not domineer.

When we really see Christ as our saving security, the loss of all else seems a worthy risk.

A good soldier ponders the Word of God; he mulls it over, chews on it, and eats it so that he will bleed it when cut.

In short, I am a riddle to myself; a heap of inconsistence. John Newton1 My

A church that emphasizes evangelism over discipleship has not entirely understood the purpose of the church.

You introduce the truth of Romans 8 to every corner of the room, every dark place in your heart, as often as you can, as much as you can, as fiercely as you can.

There is more security, in fact, with Christ in the middle of a stormy sea than without Christ in the warm stillness of our bathtub.

Money becomes a tool. Money is a tool. It’s a tool like rope. With money, you can pull a man out of the ditch or you can hang yourself.

He is no fool who believes the man who knows everything.

Kids have faith. Adults have the facts that make faith seem like kid's stuff.

The way the church wins its people shapes its people. So the most effective way to turn your church into a collection of consumers and customers is to treat them like that’s what they are.

I once led a church largely made up of young adults—twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, mostly. Many lamented that we weren’t more multigenerational (you know, like the church), but at the same time the married young people wanted to be in a separate small group from the single young people because they didn’t have anything in common with the singles. “You mean, besides Jesus?” I asked.

The beauty of Christ and his gospel continues to captivate millions of believers all over the world and drive them to passionate worship while it simultaneously disgusts, angers, or bores millions of others.

The way some people read the parables reminds me of Aesop's Fables. And the way others read them reminds me of the way some discern clue after perplexing clue in their Beatle albums as evidence for a cover-up of Paul's having died in a car accident.

Brothers, there are aspects of professionalism that make sense in our modern ministry contexts, but when all is said and done, we are not managers of spiritual enterprises; we are shepherds. And shepherds feed their sheep (Ezek. 34:2–3; John 21:15–17).

Pastor, take your people into the throne room. Rather, show them that the door is open to them because of Jesus’s work. Don’t create an obstacle course of the Law for them to complete first. Proclaim that belief in the gospel procures the all-access path to God’s glory.

As with most things, context is everything. And in a religious context in which sin is rarely if ever mentioned (much less rebuked), the cross of Christ seems more a bug than a feature. The prevailing message is “live your best life now,” “become a better you,” and “think better, live better,” but the answer is no: God’s greatest pleasure isn’t our happiness. The Osteens and a handful of other prosperity gospel preachers have made this message their stock and trade. It is self-actualization masquerading as Christianity, and it resembles the spirituality of the New Age more than the spirituality of the Bible.

The cross is an offense, a scandal (1 Cor. 1:18; Gal. 5:11). We should beware any view of the cross that seeks to make it more palatable to “more enlightened” sensibilities. We should be on guard against any theory of the atonement that promises fulfillment, beauty, and enlightenment apart from the blood of Jesus.

I am plum tuckered on Monday morning. I face ample temptation to wallow. But Jesus promises rest. I may be a shell of a pastor at this time each week, but God is no less God. His might is no less mighty. His gospel is no less power. His reach is no less infinite. His grace is no less everlasting. His lovingkindness is no less enduring.

If anything, we should be astounded they let us into the community. Given what we know of ourselves, given that we are the worst sinners we know, it is a staggeringly arrogant thing to begrudge any other repentant follower of Jesus a place at the dance. If the bar was low enough to allow our entry, what advantage is there to raising it?

Jesus wasn’t blowing smoke. His major contribution to the world was not a set of aphorisms. He was born in a turdy barn, grew up in a dirty world, got baptized in a muddy river. He put his hands on the oozing wounds of lepers, he let whores brush his hair and soldiers pull it out. He went to dinner with dirtbags, both religious and irreligious. His closest friends were a collection of crude fishermen and cultural traitors. He felt the spittle of the Pharisees on his face and the metal hooks of the jailer’s whip in the flesh of his back. He got sweaty and dirty and bloody—and he took all of the sin and mess of the world onto himself, onto the cross to which he was nailed naked.

The religious climate of Jesus’s day was evidence of what happens when no one stops the counterfeit. The Spirit of God had gone silent after Malachi, but that did not stop the spiritual authorities from trying to keep the whole mechanism turning under the power of their own self-righteousness. Can you imagine what it might be like to have been faking spiritual power for hundreds of years when suddenly the real thing shows up?

Today, churches large and small (the small imitating the large) have unthinkingly adopted a marketing mentality that, it turns out, subverts rather than promotes the gospel. We inadvertently imply that the church benefits as much from the spiritual transaction as does the recipient. Marketing, by its very nature, contradicts the essence of the gospel lifestyle of Jesus, who came not to be served, but to expend his life for others—no exchange implied or expected.4

The god of the prosperity gospelists is a pathetic doormat, a genie. The god of the cutesy coffee mugs and Joel Osteen tweets is a milquetoast doofus like the guys in the Austen novels you hope the girls don’t end up with, holding their hats limply in hand and minding their manners to follow your lead like a butler—or the doormat he stands on. The god of the American Dream is Santa Claus. The god of the open theists is not sovereignly omniscient, declaring the end from the beginning, but just a really good guesser playing the odds. The god of our therapeutic culture is ourselves, we, the “forgivers” of ourselves, navel-haloed morons with “baggage” but not sin. None of these pathetic gods could provoke fear and trembling. But the God of the Scriptures is a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24). “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). He stirs up the oceans with the tip of his finger, and they sizzle rolling clouds of steam into the sky. He shoots lightning from his fists. This is the God who leads his children by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. This is the God who makes war, sends plagues, and sits enthroned in majesty and glory in his heavens, doing what he pleases. This is the God who, in the flesh, turned tables over in the temple as if he owned the place. This Lord God Jesus Christ was pushed to the edge of the cliff and declared, “This is not happening today,” and walked right back through the crowd like a boss. This Lord says, “No one takes my life; I give it willingly,” as if to say, “You couldn’t kill me unless I let you.” This Lord calms the storms, casts out demons, binds and looses, and has the authority to grant us the ability to do the same. The Devil is this God’s lapdog. And it is this God who has summoned us, apprehended us, saved us. It is this God who has come humbly, meekly, lowly, pouring out his blood in infinite conquest to set the captives free, cancel the record of debt against us, conquer sin and Satan, and swallow up death forever. Let us, then, advance the gospel of the kingdom out into the perimeter of our hearts and lives with affectionate meekness and humble submission. Let us repent of our nonchalance. Let us embrace the wonder of Christ.

It is the reality of the kingdom of God—and the gospel purpose in it to glorify Christ—that should comfort Christians today, not the rising and falling of popular opinion or the ways of the Supreme Court or the majority votes in the Congress or the moral sanity of the president. All those people are sinners. We can root for them and persuade them and pray for them and hope for them—but we cannot hope in them, because none of them is not a sinner. Only Jesus Christ’s kingdom comes with perfect grace and peace and justice. And only Jesus Christ’s kingdom will remain.

The gradual dawn of gospel wakefulness is occurring for you as the Spirit brings your sin to mind, pours more grace upon you, and bears more fruit of good character and good works in you. To this end, then, you should read the gospel, listen to the gospel, sing the gospel, write the gospel, share the gospel, and preach the gospel, all the while asking God to administer its power more and more to your life. Situate yourself constantly in the crosshairs of the gospel. You cannot “Behold!” it if you aren’t looking. As my friend Ray Ortlund has been known to say, “Stare at the glory of God until you see it.”7

God wants us broken so that any power in us can be undeniably attributed to him. If self-reliance could reliably and ultimately contribute to our success and fulfillment, God’s glory would be diminished, having to share precious space with our lesser glory. But we are not glorious, even in our self-made victories. For God to get all the glory, he requires our brokenness, while promising his wholeness. He gets the glory when we trust him in difficult times. Murray Brett writes, “The price of God’s glory shining in our lives is brokenness.”1 The cost is high, but so is the benefit. And aside from that, there is no alternative.

We cannot worship the god of our preference, or the god of our pleasing. We must worship God for who he really is, not for who we’d like him to be. This means that when we come and worship, we’re not just worshiping the God who is touchy-feely and lovey-dovey and “would have died for us if we’d been the only one”; we’re also worshiping the God who commands storms, hangs planets, explodes galaxies, and sends people to hell. We’re worshiping the God who controls the universe. We’re worshiping the God who has the power and authority of all eternity. This is not your own personal Jesus. That God is manageable. No, we worship the God who is the Great I AM, the God who was and is and is to come. The God who created the universe out of nothing. The God who gives life and takes it away. The God who sends rain on barren lands and the God who is a consuming fire.

The gospel of Jesus Christ solves the innate problem we have of “glory greed.” We are, every one of us from birth, incompetent thieves of the glory that belongs only to God. We know in our insidest insides that we fall short of his glory, and so we are constantly clawing and scratching to make up that difference in some way. This is how all sin is fundamentally idolatry and how all accumulations of worldly treasures—be they material goods or religious merit—are fundamentally acts of self-worship. Then in the gospel of Christ, God forgives our petty theft, sets us free from the bondage of our idols, and unites us Spiritually, irrevocably, and satisfyingly to himself. Now the glory we tried to steal is shared with us freely, and it is real glory this time, not these pathetic knockoffs we think will do the trick.

Dallas Willard explains: The world has succeeded in opposing intelligence to goodness. . . . And today any attempt to combine spirituality or moral purity with great intelligence causes widespread pangs of “cognitive dissonance.” [As with Jesus,] Mother Teresa . . . is thought of as . . . nice, of course, but not really smart. “Smart” means good at managing how life “really” is.

There is virtually no part of Jesus’s life and ministry that isn’t vastly misunderstood.

Many, many people—including many church people—have this asinine idea that Jesus showed up on earth two thousand years ago and loosened everything up. You know, like everything was so boring and traditional and legalistic or whatever, and then God sent Jesus Christ to “Keep Jerusalem Weird” or something, like he’s formed some hippie commune for people with “Coexist” bumper stickers on their cars.

In September 1919, Woodrow Wilson suffered a series of debilitating strokes that should have led to his resignation. For over a month, the president was so sick that he received no visitors and his wife, Edith Galt, and physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, essentially took over the affairs of state.

American Christians don’t want to experience community. Or, at least, they want other things more.

The reality is that Jesus knows exactly how things really are, and in fact he knows how things really are better than anyone else. We may look over the ethos of the Sermon on the Mount and find the whole thing utterly impractical toward getting ahead in the world, but one of the underlying points of the Sermon is that getting ahead in the world is a losing gambit to begin with. We come to Jesus’s teaching looking for tips on playing checkers, when all along he is playing

(I say to my leadership, if you give me credit for the increase, you will give me blame for the decrease, so how about we just credit God?) Pastor,

Christian social justice gives witness to the right-side-upness of God’s kingdom.

Sin is fundamentally stupid. Oh, it has that logic of immediacy to it, the appealing apparent sensibility of pleasure—of fulfillment, beauty, and enlightenment—but it always bids us make the most of time by wasting it.

Happiness is dependent upon our circumstances. Joy is dependent upon our Savior. This is why, though sad times are promised to believers (John 16:33), we are also promised the gift of joy (John 15:11; Gal. 5:22).

Jesus comes as an emissary of kindness to us. As Love embodied, he is the very portrait of mercy and gentleness and self-control. He is a lion for us but a lamb to us. He does not lord our failings over us or remind us of our sins. He is our Prince of Peace.

You will not get to gospel enjoyment without personal brokenness. Thomas Watson says, “Christ is never sweet till sin is felt to be bitter.

The work is done. This is the great message of the good news: he has done it! We can hope in our suffering, then, that the finished work of Christ, when believed with our hearts, is the catalyst to the refining work begun in us. The gospel tells us that we are forgiven from sin, that we stand under grace, that we have the blessed hope of Christ’s return, that we will be resurrected as he was, and that we stand to receive the inheritance of Christ’s rich presence in the new heavens and the new earth.

In comfort and convenience we are less inclined to trust God. But in the pain of life we are ever conscious of our reliance on him. C. S. Lewis calls pain “God’s megaphone” for this reason.3 In times of ease, God whispers. In times of pain, he is shouting to us, rousing us to turn our attention to him.

God is not an antidote to the rogue element of pain.

When we are shackled to pain, the Spirit speaks the truth of God’s Word to us as our daily bread throughout the duration of our sentence.

The Christian cannot be stopped, even if you kill him.

To honestly proclaim the greatness of Christ requires honestly confessing the bankruptcy of our own souls.

Things break, plans fail, storms come, and people sin, people get sick, people die. We need not attribute the pain of life to personal sin. God is certainly free to do whatever he’d like with any of us.

There are no coach seats on the journey to Christ when he calls his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to another.

People who know the gospel’s power will share it powerfully.

Where we always look for and request deliverance from suffering, the testimony of Scripture is mostly about what God

If you have to explain your illustration—to decode it, as it were—it’s not a very good illustration.

the miracles in the Bible never appear to serve God proving himself so much as God showing himself. The Lord consistently refuses to be put on the defensive, as if he must prove his existence to the jury of mortal disbelief in order to save his life. Instead, he simply and majestically shows off.

the way the Bible talks about the kingdom’s coming seems somewhat cataclysmic. This place is broken, but because we have become so accustomed to living with the brokenness, the very restoration of the place can seem like a breaking.

convened) against domestic Violence. ARTICLE V The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of it's equal Suffrage in the Senate. ARTICLE VI All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation. This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. ARTICLE VII The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same. Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth. In Witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names, Go. WASHINGTON— Presid. and deputy from Virginia New Hampshire John Langdon Nicholas Gilman Massachusetts Nathaniel Gorham Rufus King Connecticut Wm. Saml. Johnson Roger Sherman New York Alexander Hamilton New Jersey Wil: Livingston David Brearley Wm. Paterson Jona: Dayton Pennsylvania B Franklin Thomas Mifflin Robt Morris Geo. Clymer Thos FitzSimons Jared Ingersoll James Wilson Gouv Morris Delaware Geo: Read Gunning Bedford jun John Dickinson Richard Bassett Jaco: Broom Maryland James Mchenry

Or as my friend Ray Ortlund has been known to say, “In Acts, they preached and awe came down. You can’t put that in your worship order. 10 a.m.: awe comes down.

Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived.

Nobody stumbles into godliness. Ever.

The kingdom is the manifest presence of God’s reign.

We forget that the kingdom does not come through political plotting but through the proclamation of the gospel. We stretch our branches to the wrong king.

We can all look at life and agree that there are some parts that have no purpose - like neckties or cats.

Kingdom prayer is prayer that is preoccupied with God’s glory.

The more we pray, the more we are surrendering thoughts of our own glory and the more we are unbusying ourselves with the enterprise of our own glory.

Once upon a time in our not-so-distant past, experts predicted that with the rapidly increasing advances in technology, Americans would have a shorter workweek and so much time on their hands for recreation that they wouldn’t know how to fill it. Well, we figured it out. We filled it up with more work and more busyness. The microwave doesn’t create free time. It frees up time for us to fill with other things, and that’s just what we’ve done.

I’ve concluded that God is as much, if not more, interested in doing a great work in us as he is in doing a great work through us.

The well-known evangelist D. L. Moody is reported to have said that he had more trouble with D. L. Moody than with any other person he met!

For believers in Christ, affliction often has a softening effect on the heart. This is why cancer patients are posting uplifting thoughts in my Facebook newsfeed and teenagers are complaining about their phones not working right. Suffering is when life gets real. Our interests are narrowed. Our attention is grabbed. What really matters? The

It’s possible to do “Jesusy” stuff without knowing Jesus. It’s possible to do good as part of some religious self-salvation project and not out of the joy of being saved.

Venturing into the depths of the gospel—seeing Christ’s accomplishment (the gospel’s content) and what is accomplished by his accomplishment (the gospel’s implications)—is vital to better knowing and loving God. When we miss the depths of the gospel, we hinder our worship.

This is what’s so weird about the performative nature of so much social media. We know more about each other than we ever cared (or ought) to, but we still don’t know each other. We know only the carefully curated versions of ourselves we present. Ironically, all our attempts at being “seen” are actually attempts to hide.

Some will say it’s proof, for instance, that Jesus “likes to party,” that he is cool with people doing whatever they want to do, that he just likes to have fun. This is an asinine reading of the relevant biblical texts, not simply because it makes Jesus out to be careless about sin but because it misses the real scandal, which is that Jesus both hates sin and is willing to be identified with sin in order to destroy it.

I don’t think of myself as an overworker. I like to relax. A lot. I try to take time out of each day to do nothing. And I especially enjoy whole days of doing nothing. I think I naturally tend toward laziness. I procrastinate. It takes me a while even once I’ve started a task to focus on it.

You and I swim in a sea of accusation. It may not usually come from ex-friends who have turned on us. Normally it’s just the ambient temperature of living in a culture opposed to the way of God. You don’t have to do anything special—just be a Christian minding your own business, and you will learn that you are a bigot, a hypocrite, a narrow-minded believer in fairy tales.

We see this in the increasing fundamentalist spirit of tribes both on the extreme left and extreme right of politics. If you’re familiar with the horseshoe theory, you know what I’m talking about. It basically goes like this: the further to the extreme left or right one’s views go, the closer they get to the extreme of the other side. Which is why we now face the increase of angry authoritarianism threatening us from opposite sides of the political aisle. Extreme leftists and rightists both want to ban books and qualify free speech. Both want to curtail (different aspects of) religious liberty. Both are in favor of (different kinds of) authoritarian government. And both have given rise to instances of political violence.

The Bible has a metanarrative, a grand story of God’s redeeming purpose and Spiritual mission in the earth. We often miss this grand story in our preaching and teaching.

One way I have learned to work against handling conflict sinfully is to advocate in my mind for my critics. What if their problem isn’t with you but with change? Maybe they’re taking out frustrations on you, but it’s not really about you. What if they’re just uncomfortable? Or confused? Or unaccustomed to managing their feelings in productive ways? Or going through a difficult personal problem that is bubbling over?

Don’t forget what you are: a servant. A waiter. A busser. But it’s not enough to remember what you are.

Deep down, most people just want to be understood. A lot of us, of course, just want to be agreed with! But I think most of us just want to be heard. Heard and understood.

But there are at least two errors embedded in this reasoning, no matter how sincere it might be. The first is mistaking what the worship service is for. The second is mistaking what changes people.

The power for salvation and the sanctification that follows comes only from the gospel, not the law. In other words, the power for to-dos comes not from to-dos, but from the “was-done” of Jesus Christ.

If your idea of God, if your idea of the salvation offered in Christ, is vague or remote, your idea of worship will be fuzzy and ill-formed. 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. The one isn’t just a head-trip; the other isn’t just emotion.4