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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 repercussions are swift and vast. God calls them to account. You can hear his footsteps in the garden. They are perhaps the footsteps of the pre-incarnate, uncreated Christ, seeking out his created siblings for their reckoning. The rest of Genesis 3 shows us that Adam and Eve are brought back out into the light to have their sin accounted for. Their sentence is pronounced, and it includes exile. They are cast out of the garden. We’ve been trying to get back in ever since.

One thing I do remember our preachers and Sunday school teachers telling us, however, is how much being a good person mattered. Your reputation, your integrity, your character—this was your currency. This warning was expressed in a variety of contexts and with a variety of applications. It was especially stressed during anxious election seasons, but it was a constant lesson from our elders, for whom personal integrity meant so, so much.

While it may not be possible to make clean demarcations between the moral law and the so-called ceremonial (or ritual) law—all God’s laws are moral laws, really—there appears to be a difference between regulations given to a particular people for a particular time and regulations given for all people in all times.

And then something happened. The rock-hard truth unchanging became circumstantial application. The pursuit of relevancy fully took over. The pursuit of influence, of power, became more naked. The same figures who denounced Bill Clinton on the grounds of his moral disqualification suddenly found moral relativism a workable strategy in defense of a Republican at least as unqualified. One Christian spokesperson was asked if there was anything the president could do that would endanger his support from evangelical leaders, and he replied flatly, “No.”3

Now that I’ve had a chance to make everyone angry, let me insist on something I hope we can all agree on: the real truth is not relative. It is not dependent on our desires or our feelings or even our intellectual grasp of it. Truth does not change based on who’s in office or on anything that strikes our fancy or convenience.

Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.6

Since God is holy and utterly good by nature, even His harshest commands are worth your obedience. Or to say it another way, if God is as good as He says He is, then every single command is good FOR you even if it doesn’t feel good to you.7

we are saved for obedience, not by it. See, again, Ephesians 2:10. Heed Augustine: “For grace is given not because we have done good works, but in order that we may have power to do them.

The primary way we reveal God’s glory in Christ is by saturating our preaching in the gospel of grace. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). If our sermons present people with the law alone or give them a list of to-dos or advice to follow, we will only exacerbate their sense of alienation when they fail to do everything we’ve told them to do to experience success as a Christian.

Don’t miss that statement by James Gilmore: “The only thing of value the church has to offer is the gospel.

I know, I know. Many of us come from traditional church backgrounds where doctrine was all that mattered and the people were cold or harsh or uncaring about their neighbors. That’s another way to be upside down and antigospel.

The church is called to reach the lost, and we must be faithful. The church is called to be evangelistically hospitable and welcoming in its culture and evangelistically adaptable in its preaching and teaching (I’ll say more on that in chapter 8). But the church’s primary worship service should be designed with the saved in mind, not the seeker.

The Holy Spirit does not always follow our formulas. “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). In preaching Acts 2:43 (“and awe came upon every soul”), my friend Ray Ortlund said, “That’s not something you can put in the worship bulletin: ‘10:00 a.m. worship in song. 10:30 a.m. awe comes down.

Let me play my hand, if you haven’t seen it already. My goal in this book is to convince you that your church and its slate of programs and ministries—no matter how successful they have been in attracting people—should be centered on the good news of the finished work of Jesus Christ. The attractional model cannot be the foundation for your methods and programs. It must give way to the gospel because the gospel is where the power of God is manifest. The gospel swallows up our pragmatic paradigms like a white dwarf swallows planets. Pragmatism has a place, but it’s not at the center. We must be gospel centered.

The word gospel, from the Greek word evangelion, means “good news.” The gospel refers to the good news that God sent his Son Jesus to live a sinless life, die a substitutionary death, and rise from the dead so that sinners who repent and trust in Jesus will be forgiven and have eternal life. We can expand this or shorten it, but this is a basic summation of the message we are called to share with others.

As my friend Joel Lindsey has written, “A gospel-centered church is so because the gospel is the engine that propels its mission. . . . The gospel is the primary lens through which to view the world and the people and things in it.”5 In other words, the gospel isn’t just a fad or style you lay over your philosophy of ministry—something traditional, something Baptist, something Reformed—as if “gospel-centrality” were an Instagram filter for your church.

So how do we extricate ourselves and our churches from the spirit of consumerism and pragmatism that has infected the church and reclaim the essence of biblical Christianity? What we need is to repent of decades of relying upon pragmatic methodology and materialist theology and to reclaim the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ as the power of salvation for anybody, anywhere, anytime. The United States, in particular, desperately needs churches to recommit to the countercultural supernaturalism of biblical Christianity. This entails a greater commitment to rely on the Spirit working through his prescribed mean, not ours.

Consider the words of G. K. Chesterton: Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.6

Black economist William J. Wilson is tired of hearing whites blamed for everything. “[T]alented and educated blacks are experiencing unprecedented job opportunities…” he writes, “opportunities that are at least comparable to those of whites with equivalent qualifications.”78 As George Lewis, a hardworking black man who is vice president and treasurer of Philip Morris, says, “If you can manage money effectively, people don’t care what color you are.”79 Reginald Lewis is a black lawyer and investment banker. In 1987 his company, TLC Group, raised $985 million to acquire BCI Holdings, an international food conglomerate with $2.5 billion in sales. Mr. Lewis, whose net worth is estimated to be $100 million, is not very concerned about race. “I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about that,” he says. “[T]he TLC Group is in a very competitive business and I really try not to divert too much of my energy to considering the kind of issues [race] … raised.

The truth is that your truth is relative. The truth is not.

The devil knows he doesn’t need the Church of Satan to get you. He just needs something shiny.

Your model is only as strong as your mentality. Of the gospel and gospel ministry, Martin Luther wrote in his commentary on Galatians, “Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.

allegedly abandoned identities as unbelievers. Today too many churches believe that we can reach the world with the message of Christ by appealing to people with the things of the world, with spectacle, showmanship, and production. Paul never thinks to do this. He never suggests that more of what you left behind is the best route to what lies ahead. You don’t win godly saints in worldly ways. You don’t turn sinners into saints with a worldly message.

Leader after leader, religious consumer after consumer, may come to you with a laundry list of reasons why you should abandon this post. “Shouldn’t you be more creative?” No, this is nonnegotiable. “You should talk more about politics.” No, this is nonnegotiable. “Why aren’t you being more applicational?” This is nonnegotiable. “Not every text is about Jesus.” No, the whole Bible is about Jesus. This is nonnegotiable.

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.

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

You’re just a worker. The church is God’s field, God’s building. The church belongs to him, and he will cultivate you, he will build you, he will sustain you, he will empower you, he will nourish you, he will transform you, and he will save you.

Gospel truth lovingly and consistently applied,” Ray Ortlund says, “creates a gospel culture.” Do not grow faint in this good endeavor. Don’t just overcommunicate the vision for gospel-centrality; overcommunicate the message of the gospel.

The Metrics of Grace (Ch. 3) 1. A growing esteem for Jesus Christ 2. A discernible spirit of repentance 3. A dogged devotion to the Word of God 4. An interest in theology and doctrine 5. An evident love for God and neighbor

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.

From simply hearing the words of the gospel, this man beheld the glory of Christ in a profound way. He didn’t just listen; he heard. He didn’t just see the preacher; he in some real way beheld the Lamb.

God is not only not giving you the silent treatment, he is practically yelling.

If they can work out the kinks, it could revolutionize space travel.” “‘Work out the kinks’?” Jared said. “I’m about to use this thing. Kinks are bad.” “The kink is that the drive is touchy about the mass of the object it’s attached to,” Wilson said. “Too much mass creates too much of a local warp on the time-space. Makes the Skip Drive do weird things.” “Like what?” Jared asked. “Like explode,” Wilson said. “That’s not encouraging,” Jared said. “Well, explode is not quite the accurate word,” Wilson said. “The physics for what really goes on are much weirder, I assure you.” “You can stop now,

YOU CANNOT GET POWER TO OBEY THE LAW FROM THE LAW ITSELF!!! POWER TO CHANGE CAN ONLY COME FROM THE GLORY OF CHRIST!!!

We are parched. We are starving. We are thirsty and hungry for the glory of Jesus.

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 situation for the children of Israel is parallel to the situation the church finds itself in today. That situation is called exile. Exile presupposes that we are in Babylon, not Jerusalem. So one of the major mistakes the church has made is expecting Babylon to act like Jerusalem, to be like Jerusalem, to recognize Jerusalem as an ideal. We see this in the way Christians keep trying to convince non-Christians that America is really a Christian nation and needs to start acting like it again. The church's missional posture has reflected this expectation. But the reality is that we should not expect Babylon to start acting like Jerusalem. The church should instead live like Jerusalem within Babylon (Matt. 5:14; John 17:14-19).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Only God can write a story that resonates not just in the power of the imagination or the heart or the mind, but in the very soul; only God can write a story that brings dead things to life.

Once upon a time, a king came to earth to tell stories, and the stories contained the mystery of eternal life.

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.

His job ruled his day. Cable television infomercials and YouTube searches ruled his nights.

Every agnostic has a minister, Mike. Otherwise, they's be atheists.

Within the pages and pages of crazed ruminations documented in large fonts, all caps, and eye-scorching neons, he found only a few articles of interest, mostly from skeptics. The true believers’ integrity was impugned by their incompetent design skills and lack of Internet savvy.

That was a time of innocence, a time when life was on hold. When life was carefree. The only expectation was to be a good boy. No grand ambitions. No long-range goals to mold your existence around. Not then.

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.