Jen Wilkins Quotes

The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.

If we want to feel deeply about God, we must learn to think deeply about God.

We will not wake up ten years from now and find we have passively taken on the character of God.

You will never turn from a sin you don’t hate.

The Bible does tell us who we are and what we should do, but it does so through the lens of who God is. The knowledge of God and the knowledge of self always go hand in hand.

We must make a study of our God: what he loves, what he hates, how he speaks and acts. We cannot imitate a God whose features and habits we have never learned. We must make a study of him if we want to become like him. We must seek his face.

I believe that a woman who loses interest in her Bible has not been equipped to love it as she should. The God of the bible is too lovely to abandon for lesser pursuits.

We humans must confess, 'I am because he is.' Only God can say, 'I AM WHO I AM'.

finding greater pleasure in God will not result from pursuing more experiences of him, but from knowing him better. It will result from making a study of the Godhead.

We can't fully appreciate the sweetness of the New Testament without the savory of the Old Testament.

How do you move a mountain? One spoonful of dirt at a time. Chinese proverb

If I am fully known and not rejected by God, how much more ought I to extend grace to my neighbor, whom I know only in part?

A vision of God high and lifted up reveals to me my sin and increases my love for him. Grief and love lead to genuine repentance, and I begin to be conformed to the image of the One I behold.

Sanctification is the process of learning increasing dependence, not autonomy.

Psalm 139 is not a psalm about me, fearfully and wonderfully made. It is a psalm about my Maker, fearful and wonderful. It is a psalm to inspire awe.

For the believer wanting to know God’s will for her life, the first question to pose is not “What should I do?” but “Who should I be?

Every good endeavor should be done with purpose. Without a clear sense of purpose, our efforts to do a good thing well can flounder. But with a clear purpose, we are far more likely to persevere.

It is not coincidental that a lack of discernment and a neglected Bible are so often found in company.

Women teachers, let's shift the focus from 'you are a daughter of the King' to 'behold your King'.

Knowing who God is matters to us. It changes not only the way we think about him, but the way we think about ourselves. The knowledge of God and the knowledge of self always go hand in hand.

Just as my assurance of salvation rests in the fact that God cannot change, my hope of sanctification rests in the fact that I can

If we focus on our actions without addressing our hearts, we may end up merely as better behaved lovers of self.

Image-bearing means becoming fully human, not becoming divine. It means reflecting as a limited being the perfections of a limitless God.

Find freedom in knowing that your human creativity is an echo intended to inspire worship of your Creator. And then, create freely to your heart's delight.

For years I viewed my interaction with the Bible as a debit account: I had a need, so I went to the Bible to withdraw an answer. But we do much better to view our interaction with the Bible as a savings account: I stretch my understanding daily, I deposit what I glean, and I patiently wait for it to accumulate in value, knowing that one day I will need to draw on it.

Bible literacy matters because it protects us from falling into error. Both the false teacher and the secular humanist rely on biblical ignorance for their messages to take root, and the modern church has proven fertile ground for those messages. Because we do not know our Bibles, we crumble at the most basic challenges to our worldview. Disillusionment and apathy eat away at our ranks. Women, in particular, are leaving the church in unprecedented numbers.1

The Bible does not want to be neatly packaged into three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day increments. It does not want to be reduced to truisms and action points. It wants to introduce dissonance into your thinking, to stretch your understanding. It wants to reveal a mosaic of the majesty of God one passage at a time, one day at a time, across a lifetime.

It is not new truths we need; we need old truths recently forgotten.

Everything we say or do will either illuminate or obscure the character of God. Sanctification is the process of joyfully growing luminous.

Exegesis says, “Before you can hear it with your ears, hear it with theirs. Before you can understand it today, understand it back then.

In a sense, God has a closet filled with infinite secrets about himself, but it contains only priceless treasures, no skeletons.

Though Edison’s “Let there be light” may have ushered us into sleeplessness, the divine Creator who uttered “Let there be light” also benevolently and pointedly declares “Let there be rest.

If we want our lives to align with God’s will, we will need to ask a better question than “What should I do?” . . . God is always more concerned with the decision-maker than he is with the decision itself.

Our patterns of work and rest reveal what we believe to be true about God and ourselves. God alone requires no limits on his activity. To rest is to acknowledge that we humans are limited by design. We are created for rest just as surely as we are created for labor. An inability or unwillingness to cease from our labors is a confession of unbelief, an admission that we view ourselves as creator and sustainer of our own universes (pp. 64-65).

No longer can we parse our fellow humans into the categories of ‘lovable’ and ‘unlovable.’ If love is an act of the will — not motivated by need, not measuring worth, not requiring reciprocity — then there is no such category as ‘unlovable.

Busyness believes that the time God has given is not adequate. We must redeem the present by leaving time to observe the practice of stillness and the precept of Sabbath, taking on the trusting posture of one who sits at the feet of her Lord.

When we fear God rightly, we recognize him for who he truly is: a God of no limits, and therefore, utterly unlike anyone or anything we know.

If we want to feel a deeper love for God, we must learn to see him more clearly for who he is. If we want to feel deeply about God, we must learn to think deeply about God.

We must love God with our minds, allowing our intellect to inform our emotions, rather than the other way around.

It is God who speaks life into us. God is the One who resurrects the spiritually dead to life.

Why am I here? To be a megaphone for God's glory.

There is no true knowledge of self apart from the knowledge of God.

God is our origin. Knowing where you came from makes all the difference in seeing where it is you need to go.

Because he is infinitely good, the things that we do not know about God are only good things.

Are we called to be like Noah? Yes. Are we called to be like the Good Samaritan? Yes. But not simply because they are positive examples to inspire us to righteousness. These stories point us to Christ.

The second thing I got backwards in my approach to the Bible was the belief that my heart should guide my study. The heart, as it is spoken of in Scripture, is the seat of the will and emotions. It is our “feeler” and our “decision-maker.” Letting my heart guide my study meant that I looked for the Bible to make me feel a certain way when I read it. I wanted it to give me peace, comfort, or hope. I wanted it to make me feel closer to God.

Herein lies our forgetfulness. Rather than seeing the sin of lawlessness as the barrier to relationship with God, we have steadily grown to regard the law itself as the barrier. We have come to believe that rules prevent relationship.

Here is a remarkable truth: God is able to bring eternal results from our time-bound efforts. This is what Jesus intimates when he tells us to store up treasure in heaven rather than on earth. When we invest our time in what has eternal significance, we store up treasure in heaven. This side of heaven, the only investments with eternal significance are people. “Living this day well” means prioritizing relationships over material gain. We cannot take our stuff with us when we die, but, Lord willing, we may feed the hungry and clothe the needy in such a way that an eternal result is rendered. We may speak words that, by the favor of the Lord, transform into the very words of life. This is the calling of the missionary, the magnate, and the mother of small children: spend your time to impact people for eternity.

A well-rounded approach to Bible study recognizes that the Bible is always more concerned with the decision-maker than with the decision itself. Its aim is to change our hearts so that we desire what God desires, rather than to spoon-feed us answers to every decision in life.

When women grow increasingly lax in their pursuit of Bible literacy, everyone in their circle of influence is affected. Rather than acting as salt and light, we become bland contributions to the environment we inhabit and shape, indistinguishable from those who have never been changed by the gospel. Home, church, community, and country desperately need the influence of women who know why they believe what they believe, grounded in the Word of God. They desperately need the influence of women who love deeply and actively the God proclaimed in the Bible.

Your love for others is the overflow of your love for God. Your love for God will increase as you learn to know him better. But never lost sight that your influence will be noticed in how you use your heart, not your head. Bible literacy that does not transform is a chasing after the wind. Christians will be known by our love, not our knowledge. We will not be known by just any kind of love - we will be known for the kind of love the Father has shown to us and we in turn show to others.

Forgiving lavishly does not mean that we continue to place ourselves in harm's way. The Bible takes great pains to address the dangers of keeping company with those who perpetually harm others. Those who learn nothing from their past mistakes are termed fools. While we may forgive the fool for hurting us, we do not give the fool unlimited opportunity to hurt us again. To do so would be to act foolishly ourselves. When Jesus extends mercy in the Gospels, he always does so with an implicit or explicit, "Go and sin no more." When our offender persists in sinning against us, we are wise to put boundaries in place. Doing so is itself an act of mercy toward the offender. By limiting his opportunity to sin against us, we spare him further guilt before God. Mercy never requires submission to abuse, whether spiritual, verbal, emotional, or physical.

The Bible is a book that boldly and clearly reveals who God is on every page.

The Word is living and active. It will conform you by dividing you. And in the dividing, miracle of miracles, it will render you whole.

The fact that you are currently inhaling and exhaling at this very moment means that you are a recipient of mercy.

We become what we behold.

The key to enjoying wine isn’t just to guzzle a lot of expensive wine, it’s to learn about wine.

Study everything that makes God wonderful and mimic to your heart’s delight, as the joyful expression of your reciprocal love for him.

...sound Bible study transforms the heart by training the mind and it places God at the center of the story.

I have always liked the story in the Gospels in which Jesus awakens from a nap during a storm and tells nature to calm the heck down.

While legalism builds self-righteousness, lawfulness builds righteousness. Obedience to the law is the means of sanctification for the believer.

But our insecurities, fears, and doubts can never be banished by the knowledge of who we are. They can only be banished by the knowledge of “I AM.

We know there's more. We have a longing for eternity, and that longing is itself a longing for God who exists outside of time.

All human creativity is the vaguest whisper of the creativity of God.

We repeat what we most want remembered, what is most important, and what is most easily forgotten.

The God of the Bible is too lovely to abandon for lesser pursuits.

Build slowly if you must, but by all means, build. In pursuing an orderly process [of Bible study], you follow a pattern established by God himself. The God of the Bible is a God of order.

Over what do I have control? A few very important things. My thoughts, which I can take captive by the power of the Holy Spirit. And if I can control my thoughts, it follows that I can control my attitude—toward my body, my stuff, my relationships, and my circumstances. If my thoughts and attitude are in control, my words will be as well, and my actions. The redeemed obediently submit thought, word, and deed to their heavenly Ruler, trusting uncertainty to him who “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph 1:11). They step away from the throne, acknowledging that they are utterly unqualified to fill 

There is a vastness between what I am and what I ought to be, but it is a vastness able to be spanned by the mercy and grace of him whose face it is most needful for me to behold. In beholding God we become like him. So

We seek to be holy as God is holy as a joyful act of gratitude. We never seek holiness as a means to earn God’s favor or to avoid his displeasure. We have his favor, and his pleasure rests upon us. The motive of sanctification is joy. Joy is both our motive and our reward.

Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called ishah [woman] because she came from ish [man].” Don’t miss what Adam is saying. After the animal parade of one not-like-him after another, at last he sees Eve and rejoices that she is wonderfully, uniquely like-him. “Same of my same, same of my same. She shall be called like me because she came from me.

Someone asked me recently, after learning I was a Bible teacher, if I was a God-worshipper or a Bible-worshipper. ... My answer was simple: I want to be conformed to the image of God. How can I become conformed to an image that I never behold? I am not a Bible-worshipper, but I cannot truly be a God-worshipper without loving the Bible deeply and reverently. Otherwise, I worship an unknown god.

Until that time of faith becoming sight, we strive to look like Christ. If there is to be whittling, let it be the whittling away of our sins of commission. If there is to be carving, let it be the carving out of our sins of omission. The Ten Words show us how to live on earth as in heaven, conforming to the image of Christ as representatives of Yahweh. They are engraving tools. The more we obey them, the more we reflect his character, visibly, to a world that very much needs us to.

Come to the table in view of God’s mercy. Come once. Come again. How many times is the table of his body and blood spread before you? Forgive that many times. Forgive, and keep forgiving. He presented his body as a sacrifice. Now present yours, as your reasonable act of worship (Rom. 12:1). Mercy triumphs over justice. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the merciful, for they have received mercy. Blessed are the merciful, for the mercy they have received is without end.

In understanding the Scriptures: “Then [Jesus] said to [the disciples], ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” (Luke 24:44–45) In transforming us: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Rom. 12:2–3)

the One whom we most need to behold has made himself known. He has traced with a fine hand the lines and contours of his face. He has done so in his Word. We must search for that face, though babies continue to cry, bills continue to grow, bad news continues to arrive unannounced, though friendships wax and wane, though both ease and difficulty weaken our grip on godliness, though a thousand other faces crowd close for our affection, and a thousand other voices clamor for our attention. By fixing our gaze on that face, we trade mere human glory for holiness:

While we may forgive the fool for hurting us, we do not give the fool unlimited opportunity to hurt us again. To do so would be to act foolishly ourselves. When Jesus extends mercy in the Gospels, he always does so with an implicit or explicit “Go and sin no more.” When our offender persists in sinning against us, we are wise to put boundaries in place. Doing so is itself an act of mercy toward the offender. By limiting his opportunity to sin against us, we spare him further guilt before God. Mercy never requires submission to abuse, whether spiritual, verbal, emotional, or physical.

We fervently need God to stay the same—our great hope of salvation lies in his remaining exactly as who he says he is, doing exactly what he has said he will do. As long as his infinite sameness endures, he will not change his mind about setting his love on us. We cannot commit a future sin that will change his verdict, because his verdict was passed with every sin past, present, and future fixed in view. Whom God pronounces righteous will always be righteous. Nothing we could do can remove from us the seal of his promised redemption. Nothing can separate us from the unfailing, unchanging love of this great God, the Rock of our salvation upon which the house of our faith is built.

But sound Bible study is rooted in a celebration of delayed gratification. Gaining Bible literacy requires allowing our study to have a cumulative effect—across weeks, months, years—so that the interrelation of one part of Scripture to another reveals itself slowly and gracefully, like a dust cloth slipping inch by inch from the face of a masterpiece. The Bible does not want to be neatly packaged into three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day increments. It does not want to be reduced to truisms and action points. It wants to introduce dissonance into your thinking, to stretch your understanding. It wants to reveal a mosaic of the majesty of God one passage at a time, one day at a time, across a lifetime. By all means, bring eagerness to your study time. Yes, bring hunger. But certainly bring patience—come ready to study for the long term.

Scarcity has a way of revealing our true understanding of the Golden Rule. Here’s the bare truth: when there is one piece of pie, I don’t want to deny myself and bless someone else with it, and I don’t want to divide it equitably. I want the whole piece. And that’s precisely why I should give the whole piece to someone else—because in doing so, I fulfill the Golden Rule. Yes, at bare minimum I want to be treated fairly by others. But what I really want is to be treated preferentially. My love of preferential treatment displays itself in a thousand ways. I want the best concert seats, the best parking spot, the upgrade to first class, the most comfortable seat in the living room, the biggest serving of pie, the last serving of pie, all the pie all the time. Giving someone else the preferential treatment that I want requires humility. But God gives grace to the humble. Any time we dine on humble pie, we can be certain it will be accompanied by an oversized dollop of grace.

The squaw on the hippo? In his mind's eye, Darbishire pictured the wife of a red indian chief, resplendent in feathered head-dress, riding proudly on the tribal hippopotamus. But how could she be equal to the squaws on the other two sides of the animal? equal in weight? . . . In height? . . . in importance? He stared at the diagram wondering whether it was meant to represent a three sided hippopotamus, but it wasn't easy to imagine what such an animal would look like in real life, Determined to please Mr Wilkins, he tried again. perhaps the theorem meant she was equal in weight. Supposing you had a very fat squaw, weighing, say, fifteen stone; and two thinner squaws weighing, say, eight stone and seven stone respectively . . . What then? the scholar's eyes shone with inspiration. He'd got it! seven and eight made fifteen! So the squaw on one side of the hipppotamus would be equal in weight to the sum of the squaws on the other two sides. That meant that the animal would be properly balanced and wouldn't topple over.

The antidote for covetousness is always gratitude: We can combat a sinful love of the past by counting the gifts we have been given in the present.

No other attribute is joined to the name of God with greater frequency than holiness.

The Scriptures find the justice of God a virtue to be extolled, not a blemish to be concealed.

Idolatry takes hold of you and me when we depend on a human relationship, a circumstance, or a possession to never leave nor forsake us, to always remain. Idolatry takes hold of us when we believe that a difficult relationship or circumstance will never change, will always be hopeless, wounding, or sorrowful. But here is truth to topple idols: Every circumstance you encounter will change except the circumstance of your forgiveness. Every possession you own will pass away except the pearl of your salvation. Every relationship you enter into will waver except your adoption by your heavenly Father.

The raging of the nations can be navigated only by keeping a fixed point in view: the Lord God, seated on his throne. That fixed point has been my meditation this week for the sake of writing this book, and the effect it has had on my composure in the face of change and upheaval has taken me by surprise.

Our study of the Bible is only beneficial insofar as it increases our love for the God it proclaims!

He gives us daily bread, and often more than just that, though we are given to the habit of complaining for what we lack rather than contentment with what we possess. He gives us the joy of family and friends, though we are more prone to rage against him for the hard relationships than to thank him for the sweet ones. He grants us, on the whole, more days of joy than of sorrow, though our darkened hearts are more apt to curse him for the hard times than to bless him for the happy ones. Though he had every right to bar his goodness behind the flaming sword of the cherubim at Eden’s eastern exit, instead he allowed his goodness to follow Adam and Eve all the days of their life, even after their expulsion. And so he does for every son of Adam and daughter of Eve to this day.

The well-known proverb “Train up a child in the way that he should go; even when he is old, he will not depart from it” does not promise that Christian parenting will produce Christian children. Rather, it states the general, wise principle that a godly parent must train her children in the way of godliness.

But here is good news: the One Whom we most need to behold has made Himself known. He has traced with a find hand the line and contours of His face. He has dons so in His Word. We must search for that face... By fixing our gaze on that face, we trade mere human glory for holiness: "Beholding the glory of the Lord [we are] transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another." 2 Cor. 3: 18

The problem with using our desires as the litmus test for holiness is that sin feels more normal than righteousness.

God’s will for our lives is that we conform to the image of Christ, whose incarnation shows us humanity perfectly conformed to the image of God.

Those who do not cast themselves upon the perfect sacrifice of Christ will spend their lives attempting to make atonement by offering their own good works to a God of their own imagining. They will seek to justify themselves by whatever means they can. They will live lives of striving and futility.

Any study of the Bible that seeks to establish our identity without first proclaiming God’s identity will render partial and limited help.

What a mercy that God sees the end from the beginning. He engraves good boundaries for us even before we know we need them.

Our whole lives as Christ-followers are to be given over to the identification and celebration of the limits God has ordained for us. He lovingly teaches them to us through his Word, through trials, through discipline. He humbles us through these means to remind us that we are not him, nor is anyone or anything else we know.

Image-bearing means becoming fully human, not becoming divine. It means reflecting as a limited being the perfections of a limitless God.

Turned loose from the myth of human omniscience, we find we are free to mind our own business. The business of every believer is to strive to understand what God has revealed. What he has revealed is sufficient for salvation, needful for godliness, and supremely worth of meditation. It is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy. it becomes the filter through which we learn to choose wisely what additional knowledge is good for our souls. And in choosing well, we employ our minds in loving God as they ought.

As Moses would learn during the Exodus, who he was bore no impact on the outcome of his situation.

We can’t fully appreciate the sweetness of the New Testament without the savory of the Old Testament. We need historical narrative, poetry, wisdom literature, law, prophecy, and parables all showing us the character of God from different angles. And we need to see the gospel story from Genesis to Revelation. A well-rounded approach to Bible study challenges us to learn the full counsel of God’s Word. It helps us to build a collective understanding of how the Bible as a whole speaks of God.