Jethani Quotes

Silence is the beginning of all worship.

God does not judge our effectiveness. He judges our faithfulness.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, than Christians have become pop culture’s most devoted admirers.

As much as we might want to control God, history has proven that he is notoriously uncooperative.

Jesus says God isn’t like a gumball machine; he’s more like the wind: unpredictable, uncontrollable, no more containable than wind in a bottle.

By placing all our focus on receiving God's blessings and gifts, we behave just like the arrogant young man in the story [Parable of the Prodigal Son] - we value what God can do for us but not God himself. We seek a relationship with God as a utilitarian means to an end. And although we may praise him with our words, our hearts are set on what we hope to get from him. We become jerks cloaked in religiosity.

as my friend Skye Jethani says, “Boredom is a prerequisite to spiritual growth.

This philosophy of spiritual formation through the consumption of external experiences creates worship junkies — Christians who leap from one mountaintop to another, one spiritual high to another, in search of a glory that does not fade.

But surrender is only possible if we have total assurance that we are safe. We must be convinced that if we let go we will be caught. This assurance only comes when we trust that our heavenly Father desires to be with us and will not let us fall.

How can a prisoner plot his escape if he doesn’t believe a world exists outside the prison walls?

there are plenty of Christians who may claim persecution who are actually suffering due to their own foolish or unrighteous behavior.

Some suffer for righteousness. But frankly, some Christians suffer because they are insufferable.

Very often, what gets Christians into trouble is not holding to God’s commands, but stridently holding to the assumptions we’ve inferred from God’s commands.

If we want the culture to take Jesus more seriously, maybe we should try it first.

it is not our circumstances or behaviors or radical decisions that give our lives meaning and hope, but our unity with God himself.

If we are with God, then our eternal life begins now and will continue forever.

We ascribe value to him (the literal meaning of the word “worship”) based not on who he is, but on what he can do for us.

God has not abandoned his creation to sin and evil. He is not a Creator who rejects and replaces; he reconciles and redeems.

Christian researcher George Barna concludes, “American Christianity has largely failed since the middle of the twentieth century because Jesus’ modern-day disciples do not act like Jesus.

The truly radical Christian is not the one whose life appears extraordinary, but the one whose unseen communion with God is extraordinary. Living radically is about prayer, not prominence.

Richard Halverson, former chaplain of the United States Senate, is said to have observed that: In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centered on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.

On Sunday, contemporary Christians are eager to worship a crucified Savior who loved and forgave His enemies. But on Monday, we want permission to behave like the schoolyard bully who uses fear and anger to get ahead.

Like the Zealots, we can be tempted to use the world’s ways—coercion, power, and fear—to “take back the land” for God. Instead, Jesus calls us to put such things aside and discover the power of God available through meekness.

But the only thing of value the church has to offer is the gospel. I believe that one result of the emerging Experience Economy will be a longing for authenticity. To the extent that the church stages worldly experiences, it will lose its effectiveness.

A great many of us have come to believe that hope and significance is an external construct—something contingent on our circumstances. As a result, we fail to believe that the Christian life, at least in its fullest and most abundant form, can be lived anywhere.

What if the underlying malady afflicting Christians today isn't that we take Jesus too seriously, but that we've failed to take Him seriously enough? What if much of the culture's judgement of Christians isn't the result of obeying Jesus, but the result of Christians ignoring Him?

As long as a person appears devout, uses the right words, and participates in the right religious activities, we don’t look much deeper. They are often given a pass on their anger, greed, jealousy, bitterness, lust, or bigotry. Such a person might be acceptable in a church today, but Jesus said they are unfit for God’s kingdom.

Today, according to the New York Times, each person is exposed to thirty-five hundred desire-inducing advertisements every day. Rodney Clapp wrote, “The consumer is schooled in insatiability. He or she is never to be satisfied—at least not for long. The consumer is tutored that people basically consist of unmet needs that can be appeased by commodified goods and experiences.

Remember, God’s original intent for us was a mission. He called humanity to rule over the earth, to fill and subdue it, and to extend his creative order and beauty far beyond the confines of the garden of Eden. This work was to be accomplished in perpetual communion with God, and it was to be motivated not by a fear of insignificance, but by the assurance of God’s love for us.

Without silence and solitude with God, said Nouwen, we remain unconvinced of our worth. Instead we will live each day striving for affirmation, praise, and success. Rather than being set free to love others, we will be endlessly seeking to prove our own value. We will labor to water our gardens by drawing buckets from the world’s empty wells. In the end this leads not to love, but to a dry and weary existence.

The LIFE FROM GOD posture is so appealing because it doesn’t ask us to change. What we desire, what we seek, what we do, and how we live—all shaped by consumerism—are not disrupted. Our values and way of life are simply projected onto God and incorporated into a religious system in which we receive divine assistance to meet our desires. In this way LIFE FROM GOD is nothing more than consumerism with a Jesus sticker slapped on the bumper.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes the same contrast between the myth of scarcity and the reality of abundance in God’s kingdom. If we live in constant fear of not having enough—like Pharaoh did—it will lead us to greed and injustice in the name of self-preservation. If, however, we believe Jesus and trust that with God there is always an abundance, then we can be set free from a self-centered posture and be empowered to truly love others.

In secular societies, adherence to God’s commands has become a matter of individual conscience, but this has put followers of traditional religions in a quandary. They believe God’s blessings or curses are dictated by obedience to his commands, but they are no longer empowered to impose their religious convictions on the entire community. Instead they must pursue cultural crusades using channels in politics and popular culture to impress their values on the masses.

And to mitigate our fears, we all seek control over our world. If we can harness and control unpredictable forces, subdue our environment, and rule over our circumstances, then we can alleviate our fears—or so we believe. Fear and control are the basis for all human religions. From this common beginning the paths diverge dramatically, splinter, multiply, and finally terminate in different places. But each one is an attempt to overcome suffering, fear, and death by exerting control over natural, and sometimes supernatural, forces.

Faith is the opposite of seeking control. It is surrendering control. It embraces the truth that control is an illusion—we never had it and we never will. Rather than trying to overcome our fears by seeking more control, the solution offered by LIFE WITH GOD is precisely the opposite—we overcome fear by surrendering control. But surrender is only possible if we have total assurance that we are safe. We must be convinced that if we let go we will be caught. This assurance only comes when we trust that our heavenly Father desires to be with us and will not let us fall.

Similarly, there is an eerie correlation between meanness and how absolutely certain a person is about their beliefs. I’m not advocating agnosticism, but humility is in short supply among those seeking to perfectly demarcate truth and error, righteousness and wickedness, as they pursue a life under God. Those who pride themselves on their reverent submission to God’s truth are strangely reluctant to submit to anyone else. The resulting conflict and animosity within Christian communities is difficult to reconcile with Jesus, who declared that the world would know we are his people by our love.4

Here's the core problem we have with the Sermon on the Mount: it isn't that Jesus' teachings are absurd; it's that we don't see the world that Jesus sees. We see a world of injustice and anger and hatred and violence--a world where everything good is in short supply and life itself is fragile. But Jesus saw a world in which his father was in control, in which justice was guaranteed, in which goodness was breaking forth, and in which life itself is without end. And if you see that world through the lens of the gospel, then what Jesus tells us to do and how he informs us to live makes perfect sense.

My concern is that we are inoculating an entire generation to the Christian faith. Many come with a holy desire to know God, to experience his presence in their lives, to be cared for like sheep entrusted to a meek and gentle shepherd. But this is not what they see or experience. In fact, they may leave the church without ever seeing a beautiful and enthralling vision of LIFE WITH GOD. The lights are never turned on to reveal the beauty that is present just behind the shadows. Instead they are offered a substitute form of Christianity, one that cannot break through the shadows and that never really satisfies the deepest longings of their souls. When their experience of faith leaves them disappointed, they may falsely conclude that Christianity has failed. In reality, to quote G. K. Chesterton, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”2 Or perhaps it might be more accurately said of our time that Christianity has not been presented and therefore has been left untried. The result is a generation disaffected and inoculated to the true Christian message.

I believe Jesus had another reason for commanding us to pray for our enemies. He understands that we cannot genuinely pray for another and continue to hate him. In prayer, our vision of the person is transformed as we see him in the light of God’s presence. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the reorienting power of prayer within Christian communities (where a great many of our enemies are often found): A Christian community either lives by the intercessory prayers of its members for one another, or the community will be destroyed. I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me. In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner. That is a blessed discovery for the Christian who is beginning to offer intercessory prayer for others. As far as we are concerned, there is no dislike, no personal tension, no disunity or strife that cannot be overcome by intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day.1 READ MORE Luke 23:33–34; 1 Peter 3:8–9

We may not use the sword to advance the church's mission anymore, but the sword is no longer the predominant instrument of cultural power and influence. Today the church emulates the methods of corporations and business, and many of us never pause to ask whether such tactics are consistent with the ways of Christ.

The original rebellion of humanity in Eden was an attempt to cut God out of the picture and take control for ourselves. And this same tendency is represented throughout the Scriptures. Sometimes the desire to live over God is fueled by arrogant pride, but just as often it is birthed out of fear.

The reason, simply put, is that seeking control is not the solution to the human condition but is part of the problem.

The reason why we look so crazy as Christians is because we see a world that the rest don't see. We see a God-bathed world in which we are perfectly safe. So safe, so set free from fear that we can even love our enemies without thought of the consequences.

Jesus is not laying out another law for us to obey. He's illustrating for us what a truly rehabilitated heart looks like.

Laws may be good, laws may be just. Laws may give us a sense of what's right and wrong, a sense of morality. Laws can put barriers, hedges, gates around how far evil is allowed to go. But what law cannot do is truly rehabilitate us. It cannot restore to us the dignity that God wants us to have as the creatures made in his image. What law cannot do is truly take the evil, the anger, the hatred out of our hearts.

More than a century of marinating in this stew of products, ads, and desire has transformed the way people see themselves and the world. Although lack of self-control has always plagued humanity, for the first time in history, an economic system has been created that relies on it. If people began suppressing their desires and consuming only what they needed, our economy would collapse. To prevent this, satisfying personal desires has become sacrosanct.

It is entirely possible to walk the paths of Exodus or Exile without God, but you cannot walk their paths without a devil.

A miracle still occurred. From a human point of view, Moses’s ministry was effective, full of power, and praiseworthy. From God’s point of view, however, Moses failed and his ministry at the waters of Meribah was rejected. Could the same thing be happening to the false Christians Jesus describes in Matthew 7? Is it possible that because of His grace and care for His people, God chooses to sometimes display His power through ungodly leaders; to work in spite of them rather than because of them? We must not confuse being used by God with belonging to God.

As Fyodor Dostoevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.

What if much of the culture’s judgment of Christians isn’t the result of obeying Jesus, but the result of Christians ignoring Him?

Your vote should not be cast in fear. A fearful vote will lead to harm in two ways. First, it will ensure that your vote is made selfishly; from a desire to protect yourself and your interests rather than a desire to serve and bless others. Second, a fearful vote is usually won by a candidate that employed fear to gain support. Where the fires of fear are stoked, the warm glow of Christian love will not long endure. Those who think making people afraid will result in flourishing are deluded. They are not on a path paved by Christ that leads toward his kingdom, no matter how many Bibles they display or Christian endorsements they secure. A fearful vote is a vote for demagoguery not divinity.

Exodus and Exile are motivated by fear, as we’ve already established. Their paths require you to clearly identify the enemy your are fleeing or fighting. In fact, those who’ve dedicated themselves to one of those paths will often fixate far more on their cultural enemies than on Jesus Christ. They will define themselves and their communities by what or who they are against. That is why I say they must have a devil, but the presence of God on their paths is entirely optional and often ignored.

You can complain and lament your culture as Exodus and Exile advise, or you can learn to choose it. You can accept this time and this place as what God has assigned to you for a reason. You can embrace the heavy beam of your culture and under its weight find a blessing you did not expect. True joy comes when we learn to choose what we did not choose.

LIFE WITH GOD is different because its goal is not to use God, its goal is God.

The call to live in continual communion with God means that every person’s life, no matter how mundane, is elevated to sacred heights.

Rather than a vehicle for knowing God and fostering our communion with him, we search the Scriptures for applicable principles that we may employ to control our world and life. This is not Christianity; this is Christian deism.

When you feel the impulse to judge another, instead consider praying, “Lord, show me the plank in my own eye.

When determining how to respond to others, rather than asking W.W.J.D.? The Golden Rule instructs us to ask W.W.I.W.—“What would I want?” Rather than setting the bar inaccessibly high by saying we should act like Jesus, the Golden Rule puts obedience within our reach by making our own conscience the standard. In any given circumstance we are to treat others the way we want to be treated.

What both sides of the culture war forget is that when we label another person or group as the “enemy” because they oppose our vision of the future, we also reduce their value. We diminish, at least in our eyes, some of their God-given worth by viewing them as objects to be removed rather than people to be loved. Whenever we diminish the value of people created in God’s image, we cannot be moving closer to shalom;

He understood that his calling (to be a messenger to the Gentiles) was not the same as his treasure (to be united with Christ). His communion with Christ rooted and preceded his work for him.

Making God’s mission into an idol is a common and serious fault of the LIFE FOR GOD posture because it perpetuates the rebellion of Eden; it is a more subtle way of dethroning God and replacing him with something we can control.

This is the first failure of LIFE FOR GOD—it puts God’s mission ahead of God himself.

After the rebellion and the breaking of our union with God, humanity retained a sense of mission, a desire to achieve and subdue the earth. But when this work is pursued without God and not empowered by his presence and love, what was intended to be good and life giving becomes twisted and destructive.

Missionalism starts slowly and gains a foothold in the leader’s attitude. Before long the mission controls almost everything: time, relationships, health, spiritual depth, ethics, and convictions. In advanced stages, missionalism means doing whatever it takes to solve the problem. In its worst iteration, the end always justifies the means. The family goes; health is sacrificed; integrity is jeopardized; Godconnection is limited.

This way of prayer, this simple relationship to your Lord, is so suited for everyone; it is just as suited for the dull and the ignorant as it is for the well-educated. This prayer, this experience which begins so simply, has as its end a totally abandoned love to the Lord. Only one thing is required—Love.

Jesus saw prayer as the intimate connection between a dependent child and a loving parent.

In common upward prayer, we lift our desires, concerns, needs, and confessions to God. Downward prayer, which is much less common but shouldn’t be, means calling upon the resources available to us in the heavens. If that idea sounds strange to you, it may be because we teach about Jesus’ death and resurrection but often ignore His ascension.

It isn’t enough to pray in desperation. We must also pray in faith—and very often the faith of a child is more than enough.

control is an illusion. No amount of control will ever be enough to ensure our safety, and no amount of control will ever remove our fears.

True death is separation from the living God, the creator and sustainer of all life, just as union with him is true life.

The Unabridged Webster’s International Dictionary says it comes from the Latin root habilis. The definition is “to invest again with dignity.” Do you consider that part of your job, Harvey, to give a man back the dignity he once had? Your only interest is in how he behaves. You told me that once a long time ago and I’ll never forget it. “You’ll conform to our ideas of how you should behave.” And you haven’t retreated from that stand one inch in thirty-five years. You want your prisoners to dance out the gates like puppets on a string with rubber-stamp values impressed by you. With your sense of conformity. Your sense of behavior. Even your sense of morality. That’s why you’re a failure, Harvey. Because you rob prisoners of the most important thing in their lives—their individuality.15

But as we have already seen, there are two problems with seeking hope and significance through external constructs. First, no matter how well we orchestrate our lives, we cannot prevent the raging sea, the unpredictable chaos of our world, from rushing in. Eventually what has given our lives definition and meaning will be washed away and our hope with it. And second, turning to institutional forms of religion—the kinds promoted by LIFE UNDER, FROM, and FOR GOD—for a sense of order and meaning may work for some people some of the time, but it also threatens to rob us of our dignity when we fail to conform to expectations.

And while Jesus’ disciples wanted to learn how to pray above all else, our priorities are precisely the opposite. A nationwide survey asked pastors to identify their highest ministry priorities. Among the top results were evangelism and outreach (46%) and preaching (35%). Prayer ranked dead last (3%).1

Unlike other rabbis and teachers who saw prayers almost like magical incantations—formulaic words designed to control and compel a reluctant God to act—Jesus saw prayer as the intimate connection between a dependent child and a loving parent.

maybe we are collectively in the second stage of grieving our loss of cultural significance as the church in North America. The first phase was denial, in which we rejected the evidence of declining church attendance and cultural marginalization—a few Pollyannas are still in this first phase of grief. Many of us have now moved to the second phase: anger.

We may say that Jesus is our Lord, but that alone does not make it so. The true lord of our life is revealed by our actions not by our declarations. If we are to enter Jesus’ kingdom, He must actually be our King, and if we persistently live in a manner that denies His authority, no amount of verbal praise and exaltation will make Him so.

The community of the church is supposed to be a sign to the world of the new reality that has begun—one in which ethnic and social divisions are mended, hatred is undone by love, and evil is overcome by good.

At its core, Sabbath is about freedom from bondage, not merely rest from activity.

Worship, however, is the opposite of war. It is an act of creation rather than destruction, of order rather than chaos, and beauty rather than ugliness.

Desolation—the sense of God’s absence When, today, did I sense being drawn away from God? When did I feel most dissatisfied and restricted today? Was there any time today when I felt discouraged? What was the most draining part of my day? Was there time today when I felt guilty, ashamed, or lonely? Consolation—the sense of God’s presence When, today, did I feel closest to the presence of God? What events, relationships, or thoughts of the day drew me nearer to God? When did I feel most free? What was the most life-giving part of my day? What was most joyful about my day?

there may have been no practical reason for Jesus to turn water into wine at a wedding, or for God to put “every beautiful tree” in the garden for Adam and Eve to enjoy, or for Him to adopt us into His family and lavish His love upon us. Maybe these were all simply expressions of His nonsensical love. And maybe that’s what worship is. It’s what happens when God’s delight in us inspires our delight in Him, sparking an endless loop of joy between Creator and creature, between Lover and beloved.

Worship is an impractical and beautiful act of adoration that flows from a heart transfixed by the beauty of God. That is why Jesus celebrates the woman in Mark 14 and the disciples rebuked her. She was worshiping beautifully, but they could only think of worship transactionally.

The great danger of practical, transactional worship is that it shapes us to see God as a mere device, a disposable product. And the way we see God invariably determines how we see those created in His image. If the church’s worship communicates, directly or indirectly, that the Creator exists to be used, we shouldn’t be surprised to find an indifference among Christians toward people we have determined aren’t useful either.

In war, we see the ultimate expression of ungodly utilitarianism. War is supremely practical. It is the willingness to sacrifice literally everything to achieve a goal…Worship, however, is the opposite of war. It is an act of creation rather than destruction, of order rather than chaos, and beauty rather than ugliness...Art is more than a luxury, and beauty is more than an extravagance. When we create art and music, or when we gather to worship with expressions of splendor and adoration...we are performing an act of defiance. We are creating an oasis of beauty amid the dehumanizing ugliness of our world. We are declaring our refusal to succumb to the brutal practicality of the world, which crushes people in its pursuit of power, wealth, or fame.

Other organizations…are founded on some shared purpose - to sell a product, to make money, to elect a candidate, or to change a community. When the church copies their values, we can’t help but make our mission foundational as well, and in a subtle twist of idolatry, the work of Jesus comes to replace the person of Jesus in our lives and in our churches. In the process, we cease to be a true temple of God and instead become just another organization with a product to sell.

Consider how you've been taught to engage the Bible. Do you see it primarily as a book of answers--a guide to the way to live your best life now? Or, do you engage the Bible as a window through which you see and know God? If the Bible is primarily a manual you'll find its value in prayer to be minimal. If you approach it as a window, however, it may be the most important way you learn to pray.

Fear and control are the basis for all human religions. From this common beginning the paths diverge dramatically, splinter, multiply, and finally terminate in different places. But each one is an attempt to overcome suffering, fear, and death by exerting control over natural, and sometimes supernatural, forces.

Faith is the opposite of seeking control. It is surrendering control. It embraces the truth that control is an illusion—we never had it and we never will. Rather than trying to overcome our fears by seeking more control, the solution offered by LIFE WITH GOD is precisely the opposite—we overcome fear by surrendering control.

Horrors like slavery, sex-trafficking, abortion, euthanasia, and genocide are only possible when people are seen as commodities—measured by their usefulness and not by their inherent worth.

In reality, to quote G. K. Chesterton, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”2 Or perhaps it might be more accurately said of our time that Christianity has not been presented and therefore has been left untried.

Rather than removing our fears and pains, consumerism tries to distract us from them. Commodified goods and experiences are used to keep us amused—anesthetizing us from the unpleasant realities of our existence.

Celebrities are valued merely because they are seen by millions, while unborn babies are unvalued because they haven’t yet been seen by anyone. Our culture has embraced the cliché that out of sight really is out of mind.

We have adopted a vision of tomorrow that cannot affirm a Christian’s work in the world outside the church. Instead, the message of the church being absorbed by many young people, both explicitly and implicitly, is that ministry is the only labor that really matters in light of eternity. It is a vision that tells young people most of their interests, occupations, and pursuits do not matter to God. It is a vision that says real significance can only be found by contributing time and treasure to the institutional church’s work. Young people are not buying it anymore. The fault is not to be found in a generation that won’t commit to the church, but in a church that cannot affirm this generation’s commitments because of its vision of the future.

Investing our lives in treasure that will not be destroyed means determining what we believe to be eternal, what will endure. Again, our vision of the future shapes our actions in the present.

A great many of us have come to believe that hope and significance is an external construct-something contingent on our circumstances. As a result, we fail to believe that the Christian life, at least in its fullest and most abundant form, can be lived anywhere.

We cannot win converts with a self-centered message and then be appalled when they became self-centered Christians.

through the incarnation God took on flesh and entered into the wilderness of the world, and there he started to cultivate order, beauty, and abundance that could be experienced in the present.