Jefferson Bethke Quotes

We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phone, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence, because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are.

The Bible isn't a rule book. It's a love letter. I'm not an employee. I'm a child. It's not about my performance. It's about Jesus' performance for me. Grace isn't there for some future me but for the real me. The me who struggled. The me who was messy. ..... He loves me in my mess; he was not waiting until I cleaned myself up.

When I was trying to earn Jesus by being good, I missed the real Jesus who wants us to love him and serve him not for what he gives but for who he is—dangerous, unpredictable, radical, and amazing.

Without the rain there is no beauty in the summer. Rain gives depth, it gives beauty, and it gives roots. If a plant is only exposed to sun and no rain, it becomes dry, flimsy, and dead. Too many times we curse the rain in our lives-suffering, trials, hardships-but the truth is without rain nothing grows.

One of my favorite things about following Jesus is I get to drop the act, admit I'm not good enough, walk in freedom-and that's good news.

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their mouths and walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle.

I was just lying there, swimming in my own shame and guilt, when this still small voice whispered into the depths of my soul: I love you. I desire you. I delight in you. I saw you were going to that before I went to the cross, and I still went.

In a weird way it seems the only qualification for us to be justified is to be ungodly. It's like God is saying the only way to qualify is to admit you don't qualify.

Trying to live without community is like trying to live without oxygen. We weren't created to do it.

Love others so radically they wonder why.

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep lowing concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

How stupid would it look if when someone broke a hand, the foot started criticizing the hand? That what we look like when Christians begin to criticize the church. One part of the body should lead itself to the healing process of another hurting member. That's love. That's the gospel. And that is Jesus.

Heaven isn’t a place for people who are scared of hell; it’s for people who love Jesus.

So what do we do then? What do you do when the only thing you want to do is yell at God and tell him how awful it is? You do exactly that. Cry. Yell. Scream. Be honest. Be transparent. And be vulnerable. For the first nineteen years of my life, I wanted God to give me an answer, but now I've found it is better when I get him. An answer isn't going to bring that spouse back. An answer won't ease that pain. But what will is God's Grace in the depths of our souls.

I realized we had created a Jesus who's safe for the whole family. But if we were honest, we'd ask, how is a homeless dude who was murdered on a cross for saying he was God safe for the whole family? Not to mention that Paul told us if we choose to follow his example as a follower of Jesus, we will be treated the way that he was.

We all come in with baggage. We all come in trying to find our way. We all come in with broken edges.

Don't buy the lie that a full schedule means productivity or holiness or achievement.

The more I read, the more I felt the Bible looked a lot more like the movie 300 than the movie Pleasantville.

God’s grace is so much more powerful of a motivator than fear. Love is the deepest motivator. Only love can produce not only willing obedience but also lasting obedience. If you are being motivated by fear, rules, anger, or some other emotion, it usually only lasts while that emotion is there. Love, being a state of the heart, lasts even past the initial emotion.

But I always wonder why we Christians are the ones who get slapped with the too-narrow-and-exclusive card when everyone's point of view is the same. Think about it: Every worldview is exclusive to itself. Even by that classmate saying I was arrogant for thinking my was right, she was doing the same thing-saying I was wrong, and she was right. How arrogant of her-not really, but according to her own logic. yes.

The biggest difference between religious people and gospel-loving people is that religious people see certain people as the enemies, when Jesus-followers see sin as the enemy.

Only when we truly know rest and celebration can we know how to work and enjoy it. We work from rest, not to get rest.

What if we can't be anything we want to be? What if the goal isn't to hustle but to be faithful? What if the magic of life is found in the mundane, and it comes when we're faithful?

We’ve lost the real Jesus—or at least exchanged him for a newer, safer, sanitized, ineffectual one. We’ve created a Christian subculture that comes with its own set of customs, rules, rituals, paradigms, and products that are nowhere near the rugged, revolutionary faith of biblical Christianity. In our subculture Jesus would have never been crucified—he’s too nice.

The goal of following Jesus isn’t to do a bunch of things. It’s to become a type of person.

What if God doesn't want me to be big things for Him? Like, at all? What if He just wants me to talk to Him and know Him and live an ordinary live where I love Him and my neighbours well?

...God broke me to fix me because he loved me. Author C.S. Lewis said, 'God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

I hear a lot of people say that the fear of death and the fear of public speaking are two of the main fears in my generation, but I disagree. I think it’s the fear of silence. We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phones, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence, because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are. We fear silence like it’s an invisible monster, gnawing at us, ripping us open, and showing us our dissatisfaction. Silence is terrifying.

when I say I “hate” religion, I am not saying I hate the church. I’m not saying I hate commandments, traditions, or laws. I’m not saying I hate organizations or institutions. But what I am saying is that I hate any system that upholds moral effort or good behavior as the way in which we can have a proper relationship with God.

Jesus is Lord; we are not. Jesus is King; we are not. Jesus is Savior; we are not. The best part is that this is good new. Only when we humbly call on God to speak into our lives-knowing if he doesn't, we won't succeed-are we actually in a safe place.

As Christians, God doesn’t promise us an easy life, but he does promise to be with us in whatever we go through. He will never leave us or forsake us.

In the Scriptures, Jesus isn’t safe. No one knew what to do with him. The liberals called him too conservative, and the conservatives called him too liberal.

My "Christianity" was once again just the American religion of work hard, do good, feel good, and maybe God will say, "We good.

The bottom line is, we can’t research or think ourselves to a better version of ourselves

I’ll even say it a little more plainly for those in the back: we as humans are the summation of our repeated practices and rituals. Humans aren’t made. We are formed.

To follow Jesus we need to not just follow his teaching, but also follow his way. His process. His cadence. His demeanor. His spirit. His very essence.

Solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born.”8

Silence and solitude are like a graveyard for all the worst in you and your false self.

I think thanksgiving is the secret to a healthy Christian life.

Our job as Christians is to stick so close to Jesus that when people are around us, they sense him.

Most of the time we’re persecuted not because we love Jesus, but because we’re prideful, arrogant jerks who don’t love the real Jesus. We’re often judgmental, hypocritical, and legalistic while claiming to follow a Jesus who is forgiving, authentic, and loving. Sometimes people will hate us because we preach the same gospel Jesus preached, and sometimes people will hate us because we’re jerks. Let’s not do the second one and blame it on the first.

Even though there are few to no credible passages—properly interpreted—in Scripture that call things such as alcohol and tattoos utterly sinful, some fundamentalists insist they are.

The big difference between chaos and shalom is rhythm. Chaos is unpredictable and unrhythmic. It has no set cadence. But shalom is more like a dance that depends on the rhythm in music.

We have branded Jesus beyond recognition. Church has become a business. Jesus is our marketing scheme. We create bookstores, T-shirts, bracelets, bumper stickers, and board games all in the name of Jesus.

Work jumped from being a means of “material production” to being much more about “identity production.”3 In other words, work used to be about making things. Then all of a sudden, work was about making us.

What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion? What if I told you getting you to vote Republican really wasn’t his mission? What if I told you religious right doesn’t automatically mean Christian? And just because you call some people blind, doesn’t automatically give you vision. I mean, if religion is so great, why has it started so many wars? Why does it build huge churches, but fail to feed the poor? Tell single moms God doesn’t love them, if they’ve ever had a divorce? Yet God in the Old Testament actually calls the religious people whores.

When I think of whisper, I think of tenderness, gentleness, beauty. And that was God's voice. The hard part with whispers, though, is we have to be listening for them. They are just loud enough that only the people listening will hear and those who are distracted won't.

My identity, my worth, and my purpose in life were wrapped up in my behavior and earning others’ approval. Because of this I sacrificed my life trying to make others think I was a good person. Who cares if I actually was? I just wanted others to think I was. All my energy was devoted to keeping people’s perceptions of me in good standing. I wonder how many others behave this way. As long as others think we are good, we really don’t care what our lives actually look like. Outside reputation is more valuable than personal transformation.

Shalom is the Hebrew word for “peace.” For rhythm. For everything lining up exactly how it was meant to line up. Shalom is happening in those moments when you are at the dinner table for hours with good friends, good food, and good wine. Shalom is when you hear or see something and can’t quite explain it, but you know it’s calling and stirring something deep inside of you. Shalom is a sunset, that sense of exhaustion yet satisfaction from a hard day’s work, creating art that is bigger than itself. Shalom is enemies being reconciled by love. Shalom is when you are dancing to the rhythm of God’s voice.

We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phones, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence, because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are. We fear silence like it's an invisible monster, gnawing at us, ripping us open, and showing us our dissatisfaction. Silence is terrifying.

All the other religions essentially say, “This is what you have to do to be in right standing with God.” Jesus comes to earth and says, “This is what I’ve freely done for you to put you in right standing with God.” Religion says do. Jesus says done. Religion is man searching for God. Jesus is God searching for man. Religion is pursuing God by our moral efforts. Jesus is God pursuing us despite our moral efforts. Religious people kill for what they believe. Jesus followers die for what they believe.

Isn't that the story for many of us in America? Christianity is our default setting.

A grace economy is backward to most of us—those who think they qualify, don’t; and those who admit they don’t qualify, do.

Many Christians don’t really care about God; they just want to use him to get what they truly want—status, a nice job, a car, forgiveness—you name it.

I think too many times as Christians, we confuse benefits with essence. We pursue the benefits of a relationship rather than the essence of that relationship.

God uniquely highlights marriage as one of the main ways we know who he is and how he relates to us.

Grace always wins.

Because the truth is, no matter how ugly or how deep the scars, there is always hope.

Grace just flows. It’s a one-way type of love that runs the conduit directly from God’s heart to ours.

The minute you think you have gotten on God’s good side by your own behavior, you are naturally prone to demonize those who haven’t.

God gets glory for everything, and everyone eventually will glorify God, be it his grace or his justice.

In a postmodern world where all religious activity is seen as what we do for God, we need to proclaim Christianity is about what God has done for us.

Not unlike Jesus in Luke: “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16). Jesus voluntarily withdrew to the lonely places. On purpose.

There is an ancient call in us that taps the spigot of our desires until the ritual becomes worshipful and mundane

Hurry is violence on the soul.

Thankfulness is the quickest path to joy.

we know that sometimes the best place to see the stars in all their glory is the wilderness.

God is faithful.

Most

What if we can’t be anything we want to be? What if the goal isn’t to hustle but to be faithful? What if the magic of life is found in the mundane, and it comes when we’re faithful?

We can exhaust money. We can exhaust sex. We can exhaust our jobs. But we can’t exhaust God. He gives us the one thing that will never run out, never get old, and never fail: himself!

The biggest difference between between religious people and gospel-loving people is that religious people see certain people as the enemies, when Jesus-followers see sin as the enemy.

What if God doesn't want me to do big things for Him? Like, at all? What if He just wants me to talk to Him and know Him and live an ordinary live where I love Him and my neighbours well?

Be honest about your weakness, be honest that you’re scared, and be honest about the fact that it’s Jesus who defeats the sins that trip you up, not you. God cast us as Israel, not the hero.

The Bible rarely tells me to fight against someone who doesn’t believe what I believe, but it frequently tells me to fight against my sin and the disease in me that’s drawing me away from Jesus.

When we expose ourselves and are completely vulnerable, we lose control but gain joy and freedom. No matter what your sin is, nothing is outside of grace. No sin is too powerful for God to forgive.

My generation is the most fatherless and insecure generation that's ever lived, and we are willing to sacrifice everything if we just can be told we are loved. If only we knew just how loved we really are.

The author Brennan Manning famously said, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their mouths and walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle.

His face, and his face alone, needs to be the driving force of our lives. If it’s not, we are worshiping something else, and sooner or later that idol will be taken from us by a trial, circumstance, or death.

God doesn’t give us a nice tidy answer on why suffering and evil exist, but he does blatantly and explicitly show us what the reason isn’t. Knowing what Jesus did on the cross, his love is too potent and too obvious for us to say he must not care. A God who hates suffering and evil just as much as we do was willing to subject himself to it in order to reconcile us to him. He got involved in our mess. He got involved in our hurt. He got involved in our pain.

True freedom is being able to give up all your rights for another out of love. Just ask Jesus. He willingly came to earth. Willingly lived life for thirty-three years. Willingly let himself be beaten, scourged, and crucified. All for others. All for us.

Our current hustle culture is no different; it’s all about exceeding limits. It’s about striving for that false freedom to do this. Eat that. Work this way. Just. Work. Harder. Network more. Just buy my masterclass and you, too, can be a millionaire by age nineteen.

God doesn’t hide sin. In fact, he put it on display two thousand years ago in a splintered T-shaped piece of wood. Jesus came down to earth, lived the perfect life we never could have, and died the death we should have. And every drop of blood that poured from him was another drop of love falling on us.

And so the beautiful truth is that since we were created by a community, we were created for community. If we are made in God’s image and God is a community, then that means we are rejecting our humanness when we live isolated and alone. That’s fundamental to what it means to be human. That is intimacy.

I'd thought that when I started to follow Jesus, things were supposed to get better. If that was true, why was it getting worse? Why did it hurt more instead of less? Maybe it's because when we're dead, we can't feel anything. But once we're alive, that means our senses are too. Can a dead person feel chaos?

We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phone, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence, because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are. We fear silence like it's an invisible monster, gnawing at us, ripping us open, and showing us our dissatisfaction. Silence is terrifying.

Are you a Genesis 1 Christian or a Genesis 3 Christian? Do you start your story with shalom or with sin? Shalom is the Hebrew word for “peace.” For rhythm. For everything lining up exactly how it was meant to line up. Shalom is happening in those moments when you are at the dinner table for hours with good friends, good food, and good wine. Shalom is when you hear or see something and can’t quite explain it, but you know it’s calling and stirring something deep inside of you. Shalom is a sunset, that sense of exhaustion yet satisfaction from a hard day’s work, creating art that is bigger than itself. Shalom is enemies being reconciled by love.

spiritually thin and malnourished. Henri Nouwen, one of my favorite spiritual thinkers, said about his experience with silence and solitude: “Solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born.”8 It’s not a therapeutic place. It’s where you go to die.

The problem with wearing masks is even when we receive love, it’s really the mask that is receiving the love, not us. Whatever gets thrown at us will always hit the mask and can’t penetrate our souls. So it is with God’s grace. Every second of every day he pursues us and offers grace, but until we take off our masks, we will never be able to accept it.

What if we are attempting to exchange wisdom for shortcuts? One requires years of life experiences, while the other simply requires a Google search. Today, we face a huge gap between who we are and who we want to be simply because we can actually see that gap better than ever before. By just opening Instagram or reading Facebook posts, we see a different, perhaps ideal, self we wish we were.

While we might not all be able to take a year off work, the question that haunts me is, do I trust God enough to do it? Do I think he’d actually take care of me if I did it? Isn’t that what most of our activity and busyness is about anyway? Trying to hedge our bets, saying we are Christians with our lips, but living as spiritual orphans who need to claw and grasp for every last crumb of provision. Do we actually believe God will provide? That he can be trusted?

heard a story awhile back about some friends who went swimming in a river. It was spring, and the glacier runoff had made the river pretty dangerous. Nonetheless one of the guys jumped in, got caught in the current, and was taken to the dangerous part of the rapids. One of his friends on the shore was a lifeguard, and all the other friends looked at him to do something. He just stood there, though, not moving, just staring at his friend. The others began to panic and yell at him and tell him to go save his friend! Still nothing. They looked out into the river and saw their friend struggling desperately. In an instant, though, the struggle stopped. He could no longer fight and began to drown. When that happened, the lifeguard jumped in and with a few swift strokes rescued the friend and brought him to shore. With the adrenaline wearing off, the group yelled at the lifeguard, “Why didn’t you jump in earlier? He could’ve died!” He calmly looked at them and said, “I had to wait until he fully gave up. Unless he stopped fighting, he would have dragged me under and drowned me with him. But the minute he gave up, I could save him.

If you put a frog in water that is already boiling, it will jump right out from the sheer pain and collision of senses. But if you put a frog in water at room temperature, then steadily raise the heat one degree at a time until it is boiling, the frog will slowly but eventually die. Our culture–us–we’re that frog right now, thinking, This is nice and cozy, but the heat has been climbing. This book is me saying, Wait a minute. It’s starting to get a little warm in here. The values and pace of our culture, the speed at which it is moving, the demands and pressure we all collectively feel, the ethos of hustle injected into us all at birth–it’s boiling us alive. But we don’t notice it because it has happened steadily over the last century or so.

He actually does the opposite. He says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.”1 If Jesus wanted to grow a church, didn’t he know telling people they need to daily pick up an instrument of torture, death, and shame wasn’t the way to do it? Jesus opposed the pharisaical legalism of his time, but he also opposed the watered-down, flimsy, cultural religion. He was essentially saying, “I know my miracles are awesome. I know I have immense power. But don’t follow me for the wrong reason. The cost is high. The road to follow me is tough, it’s painful, it hurts, and you might even face death, but I promise there is joy on the other side. Do you want in?

And frankly the people who seem to best understand that we are creatures of love and desire, not thoughts, are the current giant tech companies of the world. Think about how Apple exists with a temple-like space (tell me their retail stores don't feel so "set apart" from the ordinary retail design that it doesn't immediately conjure up sacred feelings) where you go to sacrifice (enormously large portions of your money) to obtain that which you are looking for - connection, meaning and depth. People stand in line all night, some even camping out on the sidewalk, for the latest device that offers those implicitly understood benefits. This phone can, and will, be more than a phone. I think it's even fair to say that Apple is a religion with Steve Jobs as a priest (who has become a venerated secular saint after his death), mediating between man and God to give us what we want. Connection. Power. God-like knowledge of good and evil. And we take the phone, and we crouch and bend over. Usually with heads bowed. Laser focused on something. Blocking out all around us. We are silent and solemn. Tending not to speak. And then we perform a certain behaviour over and over and over again. Sound familiar? Swipe.

Echad is first mentioned in the garden. It says a man and a woman, when they join together, become echad, or “one.” But that word echad is more explosive with meaning than just one flesh. It can literally mean to fuse together at the deepest part of our beings. Two becoming one, completely glued together, completely meshing. I still remember one of the hardest conversations I have had with Alyssa. We were just starting to date again, and were sitting in the car after a wonderful date night. We knew marriage was a possibility on the horizon, and I felt like I finally had to share things in my past that would affect her if we got married. I was incredibly nervous, as well as terrified of rejection or hurt, but I realized that if intimacy were to grow, I had to get vulnerable. For marriage to be what it truly is—two people becoming one in mind, body, soul, and spirit—I had to be honest. I remember sharing with her many things, but specifically some details of my sexual past. My teenage years were littered with me almost worshiping sexual fulfillment in pornography, partying, and girls. And I say worship, because that was where I got my worth, value, and purpose as well as what I most lived for (which is what the definition of worship is). I had to apologize and ask forgiveness from Alyssa for things I had done before I even knew her because of echad—one form of complete and utter intimacy. Because of that beauty, mystery, and power, God created it to function best in a man and a woman coming together for life and constantly echading or fusing together. I needed forgiveness because I had betrayed echad. I had betrayed oneness. I had betrayed intimacy. And if I wasn’t honest about it, it’d be a little part of my life or heart that Alyssa didn’t know—thus blocking echad. But something really peculiar happened in that moment. With the grace and forgiveness of Jesus, Alyssa forgave me. She heard all that I was and am, and still wanted to walk this journey with me. I still remember the tenderness in her voice as she spoke truth and forgiveness over me. In that moment I was exposed and known, and yet because of Alyssa’s grace, I was at the same time loved. And that is where intimacy is found—to be fully loved and to be fully known. To be fully loved, but not fully known will always allow us to buy the lie that “if they only knew the real me, they wouldn’t want me anymore.” And to be fully known but not fully loved feels sharp, painful, at a level of rejection that hurts so bad. But to be fully known and at the same time fully loved, now that is intimacy. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Intimacy is certainly romantic in some aspects, but at its deepest level, it’s much more than that. It can be experienced with friends and family, not just spouses and loved ones.

We children of God have been acting the same since the beginning of time toward our Father God. Yet he invites us to enjoy him and all that is his. Like both the older and younger brothers, we must learn that the joy of our lives is not in what we get from the Father but how we get to be with him as his children. He’s throwing a party, and we are all invited.

Our lives on earth aren’t just placeholders until we go to heaven. We are to create, cultivate, and redeem while we’re here. The misconception, I’ve realized, has come from a lack of knowledge of why we were created.

remember

The blessing and the prosperity of God are invisible and spiritual, not financial or physical.