Matt Chandler Quotes

Love says: I’ve seen the ugly parts of you, and I’m staying.

Without a heart transformed by the grace of Christ, we just continue to manage external and internal darkness.

If you’re a church person and not a Jesus person, my heart hurts for you. It’s like being engaged and never getting married. It’s miserable.

God does not regret saving you. There is no sin which you commit which is beyond the cross of Christ.

Trying to figure out God is like trying to catch a fish in the Pacific Ocean with an inch of dental floss.

The marker of those who understand the gospel of Jesus Christ is that, when they stumble and fall, when they screw up, they run to God and not from him, because they clearly understand that their acceptance before God is not predicated upon their behavior but on the righteous life of Jesus Christ and his sacrificial death.

The idolatry the exists in a man's heart always wants to lead him away from his Savior and back to self-reliance no matter how pitiful that self-reliance is or how many times it has betrayed him.

Your approval before God is woven into the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, not what other men and women think about you.

People don’t like love, they like that flittery flirty feeling. They don’t love love - love is sacrificial, love is ferocious, it’s not emotive. Our culture doesn’t love love, it loves the idea of love. It wants the emotion without paying anything for it.

God is more interested in declaring than explaining.

He can heal me. I believe He will. I believe I'm going to be an old surely Baptist preacher. And even if He doesn't...that's the thing: I've read Philippians 1. I know what Paul says. I'm here let's work, if I go home? That's better. I understand that.

More often than not, we want him to have fairy wings and spread fairy dust and shine like a precious little star, dispensing nothing but good times on everyone, like some kind of hybrid of Tinker Bell and Aladdin’s Genie. But the God of the Bible, this God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, is a pillar of fire and a column of smoke.

The universe shudders in horror that we have this infinitely valuable, infinitely deep, infinitely rich, infinitely wise, infinitely loving God, and instead of pursuing him with steadfast passion and enthralled fury — instead of loving him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; instead of attributing to him glory and honor and praise and power and wisdom and strength — we just try to take his toys and run. It is still idolatry to want God for his benefits but not for himself.

But there is a beauty even in loving without response because that kind of love is truly selfless. When we love with no expectation or promise of reciprocity, we know what it means to sacrifice and deny ourselves in ways we wouldn’t otherwise.

I was used to being the smartest guy in the room, and then God dropped me in a place that was well beyond me. It was painfully awesome.

Grace does not make sin safe. Grace does make sinners safe.

Truly, God's plan of redemption is about more than me and you and our neighbor down the street. It's about men and women from every tribe, tongue, and nation on earth becoming a part of His covenant community.

God doesn't NEED raw material. He MAKES material.

A schoolmate of Matt Chandler's with the locker next to his: "I need to tell you about Jesus. When do you want to do that?

You are not the point. Your ministry is not the point and God has not pushed all his chips in on you, He has not put the kingdom in your hands as though all His hope relies in your ability to perform.

God ultimately raises up leaders for one primary reason: His glory. He shows His power in our weakness. He demonstrates His wisdom in our folly. We are all like a turtle on a fence post. If you walk by a fence post and see a turtle on top of it, then you know someone came by and put it there. In the same way, God gives leadership according to His good pleasure.

The worst thing you can do with fear and anxiety is to pretend you’re too strong to have them. The best thing you can do is just to let Him be in charge of them. Because He’s in charge anyway. And in Him, you’re in His peace.

Living a life worthy of the gospel does not mean pretending to be perfect. Instead, it means having the humility to think of others as better than ourselves (Phil. 2:3).

Heaven is not for people who just want to skip hell. Heaven is reserved for those who love Jesus, who have been rescued by Him and who long to praise Him.

Despite what I said about staying the way we were, I changed. I, who have always believed in speaking my mind and made it my mission to uncover the truth, have found myself keeping secrets. Sometimes life is more complicated than the simple rules we make for it.

Never be satisfied with where you are in the area of spiritual growth. Cultivate an insatiability for more of God by examining your weaknesses, beholding the perfection of Christ, and finding good examples of strengths you want to develop.

As you consider selecting songs for your worship services, consider them in light of the truth of the gospel. Imagine the songs as teachers--because they are! If your people could understand your doctrine only through the music you sing, what would they know about God and His pursuit of us? If your people could understand your church's beliefs only through the music, what would they know?

The longing in a single person’s heart for a wife or a husband finds its root in God’s glory.

Choosing one thing over another doesn't necessarily mean we love the thing we choose. If given the choice to eat spinach or broccoli, you may choose broccoli. It may only mean you don't want to eat spinach. Heaven is not for people who just want to skip Hell. Heaven is reserved for those who love Jesus, who have been rescued by Him and who long to praise Him. If someone doesn't have much use for praising Him now, it's foolish to think they're ready for Heaven.

The reality is that all God has to do is reveal himself to you,and you'll gladly join the mission in service to his kingdom. He doesn't force the issue; he just has to reveal himself as is: mighty,wondrous, gracious, loving, and radically saving. No man goes back to saltine crackers when he's had fillet mignon.

Ladies, if you’re single there is nothing wrong, sinful or wicked about desiring a husband, nothing. Anyone who would say otherwise is absolutely lying to you. God wired you for it, He built you for it. Men, there is nothing wrong, wicked, or evil about wanting a wife. I don’t know when that happened, I don’t, now listen I do think that you need to be content where you are today, alright, but listen I’m content with what Christ is doing in me today but I don’t want to be who I am today, I’m hoping Christ will complete what He began. It’s okay, it’s alright, who made it so complicated? it’s okay, it’s okay to want a wife, it’s okay to want a husband, those are good things, they’re really good things. It’s okay, it’s okay to want.

Grace does not make sin safe

The Kingdom of God wasn't born on the Fourth of July.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired and success achieved.” The

You and I are stymied in our own creativity. We can only create as sub-creators, and even then our best work is only sub-creation.

Men, let me plead with you: The greatest fight of your life is not lust. You may think it is, but it isn’t. The greatest fight of your life will be rejecting the passivity that has infected your heart since the fall. Your natural default, especially as it pertains to sacrificial leadership of your wife, will be to mutely witness.

Most people are pleasant when the world is going the way they want. But a person’s character can be seen most clearly when the brokenness of the world has invaded his or her peace, when the way he or she thinks things ought to be is interrupted, disrupted, and dismantled.

We spend so much time trying to put send to death that we don't spend enough time striving to know God deeply, trying to gaze upon the wonder of Jesus Christ and have that transform our affections to the point where our love and hope are steadfastly on Christ.

So what does it look like to live a life worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ? It looks like walking with, loving with, and doing life with those who are different from you. What binds you together is Christ. It looks like striving together to make Christ known. What motivates you is Christ. And it looks like standing with courage against all oppressors, natural or supernatural. What secures you is Christ.

Sex is a gift from God. It is meant to nurture intimacy in a marriage and forge a bonding of souls.

Really, all frustration is birthed out of unmet expectations, and so is nearly every conflict.

So quit looking for 'the one'. You have a better chance of finding an Oompa Loompa riding a unicorn, fighting Bigfoot.

When we commit to a spouse for life, we are agreeing to enter a sacred union between two sinners and Jesus, and when you’ve got two sinners walking together over the years, you will see just how sinful he or she—and you—can be.

The great preacher Dwight Moody once quipped, “Some day you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody, of East Northfield, is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now.”1

When everything considered valuable in life is seen to be nothing in comparison to the glory of Christ, you learn rather well that Christ alone is worth living for.

The best of our best, without Jesus, looks like a pile of crap compared to Him.

In too many marriage conflicts, we work too hard at winning the argument and too little at winning the heart.

As we gaze on Christ, the mind is informed, and the heart is inflamed, and the body begins to line up.

You don’t really need to make a vow to stick with someone in the best of times. The inclination to run doesn’t exist then. It’s the low times the covenant is made for.

It's so much more than a child's story. - Matt Chandler on LIFE Today.

We have to feel the weight of God’s severity, because without feeling the weight of his severity, we won’t know the weight of his kindness, and we won’t be able to worship him and him alone. Worship of him is why we were created.

Worship gatherings are not always spectacular, but they are always supernatural. And if a church looks for or works for the spectacular, she may miss the supernatural. If a person enters a gathering to be wowed with something impressive, with a style that fits him just right, with an order of service and song selection designed just the right way, that person may miss the supernatural presence of God. Worship is supernatural whenever people come hungry to respond, react, and receive from God for who He is and what He has done. A church worshipping as a Creature of the Word doesn't show up to perform or be entertained; she comes desperate and needy, thirsty for grace, receiving from the Lord and the body of Christ, and then gratefully receiving what she needs as she offers her praise-the only proper response to the God who saves us.

What made me love Christ wasn’t that all of a sudden I figured out how to do life. What made me love Christ is that when I was at my worst, when I was at my lowest point, when I absolutely could not clean myself up and there was nothing anybody could do with me, right at that moment, Christ said, “I’ll take that one. That’s the one I want.

if you struggle with being able to run hard after the Lord because you feel so unworthy, so unclean, so unsteady, listen up: “While [you] were still weak, at the right time,” God came to your rescue. And still does. And still is.

Get over yourself. You were saved by grace alone through faith alone. Therefore, God gets all the glory alone. And when you understand this one basic issue, you’ll stop going into you and start going into the Lord—just laying out all the smelly, rotten groceries, shaking all the stuff out of your pockets, bringing it all out into the open, and saying, “Here, would You please get rid of this for me?

We are supernaturalists first, not naturalists. The only reason we feel compelled to accommodate science is that science says we ought to. But it is science that should accommodate revelation. Revelation has been around much longer.

We think to question God when bridges fall but not to wonder at his grace that every bridge does not. Every fit of laughter, every delectable morsel of food, and every single smile is the result of his mercy and grace; he owes us none of it. Now let me tell you why this is so terrifying. If

Children are perceptive, and if they see leaders and parents talk with boredom and apathy about faith yet become overtly passionate about sports teams or shopping malls, they will think the sport or the mall is more attractive than Jesus.

For instance, if He wants your life, what are you going to do, eat spinach and go to pilates?

We don’t want a life-sized salvation; rather, we want an eternity-sized salvation.

The conflict you’re having is not primarily about them; God is working in this conflict to reveal something about you.

The power to walk by faith in obedience is sourced in the grace of the gospel.

In order for good news to be good—like the gospel is good (literally means “good news”)—it must invade bad spaces.

To obey the commands of Scripture can finally become a delight when we see that the reasons almost always center around God's love and provision for us in Christ.

We can never grasp the extent of our depravity until we recognize the excellencies of our created dignity.

The theme of the Bible is not that the world's not messy but that God's at work in the mess.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is worth living for, yes, and it is worth dying for, of course, but we show it is supremely valuable to us when we deny ourselves and take up our crosses to be a blessing to the people who the gospel is calling us to.

You have no shot at experiencing real change in life if you’re habitually protecting your image, hyping your spiritual brand, and putting out the vibe that you’re a lot more unfazed by temptation than the reality you know and live would suggest.

We’ve been given the covenant community because we need each other, and together we’ll be more mature, experience more life, and know more joy than we ever would apart from one another.

You can’t take Philippians 4:13 and make it mean you can do anything you want. That’s not what Paul is saying. In context, he is saying, “I’ve learned to be content when I received everything I want; I learned to be content when I got nothing I wanted. I can do either one by the power of Christ.” When Paul says, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain,” he means it. If you want to kill me, I will be more than fine: I will get to be with Jesus. My death will be filled with Christ. And if you want to let me live, I will press on in mission. My life will be filled with Christ. If you want to torture me or imprison me or mock me, I will trust in God. My suffering will make me like Christ. I will see it as a sharing of His own suffering.

Nobody stumbles into godliness, ever. It simply doesn’t happen. There is no autopilot mode for the Christian life. We never see people in the Bible growing in godliness by coasting along.

I want every one of our members to grow into maturity more quickly than they seem to, but the Lord has taught me to shepherd people, call them to repentance and let Matthew 18:12­–14 play out.

What does it look like to live life in a manner worthy of the gospel? It looks like dying with Christ to one’s self and being raised in Christ to walk in the newness of life with our brothers and sisters. It means living grace-filled lives that grant patience and mercy and gentleness for the spiritual journeys of others and a respect for the differences and idiosyncrasies we all bring to the Lord’s table.

Megan, I love you,. I will always love you." I swallowed hard. "Scared?" He asked. "Yeah. How about you?" "Even more than the first time," He said. "I know what it feels like to lose you." Then he bent his head and kissed me.

Press on, then, in the exercise of introspection. It is important to know yourself really well. It will not help you a bit if you lie when it comes to yourself. In other words, don’t lie to yourself about you. Know where you’re weak. Know your thoughts. Know the places in your heart that you don’t want to give to the Lord. You must build time into your life to become aware of what’s really going on in your heart, in your mind, and deep inside of you. Constantly ask yourself good diagnostic questions about areas of doubt and disbelief.

In too many marital conflicts, we work too hard at winning the argument and too little at winning the heart. You can express your feelings and thoughts, even share criticisms and complaints, but the end goal of marital conflict should be care for your spouse’s soul, not trying to rack up the most points. Seeking to win is not love.

When we learn to respond to each other rather than react, we will move much more quickly in our conflict toward resolution and reconciliation. Reactions only stoke the fires of conflict; responses, particularly godly ones, help us snuff out the conflict.

The spiritual power in the gospel is denied when we augment or adjusting gospel into no gospel at all. When we doubt the message alone is the power of God for salvation we start adding or subtracting, trusting our own powers of persuasion or presentation.

Always remember the gospel, so you won’t forget that God will not expect something of you that He won’t both empower you to obey and forgive you for not obeying.

And so creation itself is eagerly watching the sons and daughters of the King, waiting for the last one to come into the kingdom so that the rocks and trees can be set free.

Holy discontentment produces a lot of restless energy that seeks rest in Christ and His gospel.

Proverbs 31:30: “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.

We must help men and women see the epic in the ordinary details of life.

Forgiveness is the ultimate expression of God's unique beauty.

It is an EVIL thing to be an expert in the weaknesses of our brothers and sisters. We need to be experts in the strengths of our brothers and sisters.

God has seen our unloveliness—the deep brokenness and rebellion in our hearts—and instead of withdrawing, he pursues us to the beautiful end. He made an eternal commitment to sinners because of his great love for us. And because grace is true, you can face the world with all of its dangers and troubles, knowing you have been established forever as blameless by the holy groom, Jesus Christ.

You can’t take Philippians 4:13 and make it mean you can do anything you want. That’s not what Paul is saying. In context, he is saying, “I’ve learned to be content when I received everything I want; I learned to be content when I got nothing I wanted. I can do either one by the power of Christ.

Our lamenting of God’s “silence” while our Bible goes undisturbed is actually quite revealing, because we want new revelation while at the same time we refuse to be obedient to what we already know.

But isn’t the whole idea of sanctification the fact that we’re not really there yet? That we’re still growing and becoming? Still learning how to live the gospel out? Then why this obsession with pretending to be something for other people, who are pretending to be something for us? It’s madness. You see that, don’t you? The cross of Jesus, while definitely meant to include us in the family of God, is also designed to out us as people who desperately need what its forgiveness and power provide. The

Relationships, sex, and intimacy are God’s ideas, and even though our selfish rebellion fractured God’s good design, God reconciled everything back to himself through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ. This includes sex and relationships! Our gracious God has not left us in the dark.

This is why the Word of God is so essential in the daily, ongoing life of a believer. Because from the minute you close your Bible in the morning, you’re entering a world that’s fighting every truth and teaching it represents. At every turn. And if God’s message is not deep inside you, where you can meditate on it, return to it, and frequently call it back to mind, you won’t be able to discern what’s really true from what may be really intriguing, really alluring, really convincing, but really false. And really defeating.

But either way, the fruit of turning to God—before we sin, after we’ve sinned, even right there in the middle of our sin—is where Christians go to experience the flavors of God-fearing honor, gratitude, dependence, worship, confidence, trust, freedom, revival. Even those sins from our past that have been the most regrettable, the most difficult to move beyond—the ones we’d give anything if we could go back and do over again—Christ is able to redeem and rewrite even those into masterful sequels and come-from-behind victories. He takes what’s given us fits for so long and gives us instead a reason to celebrate what He’s done. To celebrate our redemption. To celebrate our Redeemer.

nobody told me the second I gave my life to him, he would start tilling up the very deep places of my heart, revealing the darkest, nastiest things. Nor was I told about the stuff that would come to the surface so that I could deal with it and find my way to joy, through the cross. No one really preached that message.

God has made provision for our sin in Christ. So when we struggle to believe and obey, we should run to Him, not from Him--the opposite of our pattern, in contradiction to our feelings? Why? Because He already knows! See the gospel just keeps changing everything. The cross should continually testify to us that God fully knew we would need to be justified. Therefore, unconfessed sin is actually the foolish decision to run away from our healing and growth rather than toward it. We hang on to things we believe will satisfy us, thinking we need those more than what God offers to provide. But how can we rejoice in and worship the majesty of a loving and forgiving God if in practice we don't believe He loves and forgives, if in practice we don't believe the gospel? How can our churches rejoice and worship corporately when our collective energy is expended carrying around the saddle of unconfessed sin and shame? When people walk in honesty about their fears, shortcomings, and needs--not in thoughtless disobedience but in grace-based freedom and forgiveness--they reveal a deep understanding of the gospel. To confess our sins to one another is to violently pursue our own joy and the glory of God...and to exponentially increase our rejoicing and worship, both individually and corporately.

When history as the world knows it no longer exists, and there are no longer any great kings or great wars or great political machinations; when there are no histories of countries left to cherish, no more dollars; when it’s no longer the strong versus the weak, and all that’s left is the story of the great God and King, and all has been righted, and the heroes are now the missionaries and the ministers of grace—of which every believer can be—and our eyes behold Him as He truly is … words fail. That is where our heart ought to be.

The Place of God’s Justifiable Wrath How horrible is this echo? Let’s take a look at Matthew 18:8–9: And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. This passage, by the way, doesn’t just give us the comparative negative of hell, but it translates really well into a theology of suffering. With these words of Jesus in mind, I can now know that it is better never to hold my children, it is better never to run my fingers through my wife’s hair, it is better not to be able to brush my own teeth, it is better never to be able to drive a car, it is better to be paralyzed and never feel anything from the neck down, and it is better to have stage III anaplastic oligodendroglioma than to find myself outside the kingdom of God. It is better never to see the sunset or the sunrise, never see the stars in the sky, never to see my daughter in her little dress-up clothes, never to see my son throw a ball—it is better never to have seen those things than to have seen those things and yet end up outside the kingdom of God.

The next sound you hear in the Garden of Eden is the heaving, lurching, ear-splitting shatter of shalom, of God’s peace, screeching violently out of phase with the pitch-perfect rhythm and harmony of His original creation. Outright rebellion had been declared against the King of glory. And suddenly, these experiences we know all too well now ourselves—guilt, regret, panic, disbelief, nervousness, blame, self-hatred, hypocrisy—all came shuddering through Adam and Eve’s bloodstreams for the first time in their lives. Like ice water. And both of them ran. And hid. And hoped to God they’d somehow gotten away with it.

And even though they fail us every bit as readily as we fail ourselves, even though they prove just as incapable of fulfilling us as all the other people do in our lives, we still keep pushing that gimme button like blasted morons, fully expecting that the next time we snag whatever comes out of it will be the time when the satisfaction finally takes hold, when the good feelings finally stick around and stay. And so like clockwork, we go down in flames again and again to our alcohol abuse or our sexual lust or our sweet tooth or our credit line—whatever particular desire is so powerful and predictable at deceiving us. We grab for things that have never failed to disappoint us in the past, thinking that what we must need more than anything is more of it . . . more of the same thing that’s never been able to satisfy us before. That’s the call of the world for you. And it’s madness.

I think that church membership is a huge consideration, precisely because there is no such thing as a perfect church, and in our day and age in the West, we have so many options to choose from. Churches are full of sinners, so there will always be some messiness in a church. Churches are like families that way. So when a person stays in a church for a long period of time, there is evidence that she has been able to see that everything’s not perfect, but she nevertheless said, “I’m going to stay. I’m going to try to make this work. My commitment is more important than my desire to run away.

The gospel gives it all. Justification for our guilt. Sanctification for deconstructing our false ideals. Adoption for the red face of our secret shame. And suddenly, in place of the raw emotions that continually joined forces against us, knocking us around like a nickel in a clothes dryer, the sun can now rise in the morning on a truly perfect storm, as God’s grace feeds in us a new passion for Him, and passion responds by feeding us even more grace—a revitalizing shower where the only water seeping into our hearts is from the fountain of living waters, replenishing our once-guilty, once-shameful hearts with sheer joy, acceptance, and freedom. Let it rain.