Chuck Ammons > Quotes

“But blessing and protecting someone because they abide by your rules or love you back isn’t agape love. It’s merely insurance protecting our own investments. And Jesus said even the pagans know how to do that. When it comes to the foundational way Jesus called us to follow through, we don’t get a safety net. Love costs us. And sometimes the cost of love is pain, grief, and heartbreak. Love means laying down our lives:”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“For all of those lamenting how bad the world is getting, may I suggest to you that our greatest hindrance to revival isn’t all of the sin they’ve been holding, but the love that we’ve been hoarding?”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“We fool ourselves into believing that pausing to share opinions about loving our neighbor as ourselves is the same thing as courageously emptying ourselves to do it. We signal virtue where love demands we sacrifice for it.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“The road of sin always ends in despair instead of delight and in anger in place of awe, because you and I make tremendous children, but terrible compasses! God alone is our anchor. It is only when His Name, His Word, His Promise, and His Presence are elevated as our treasure that we will ever experience hope. The system of sin is built to get us to shift our gaze and to lose our days playing the game of shame, or entitlement, or both. And our enemy doesn’t care which way we minimize the Cross. He will gladly take us focusing on the mirror to bury ourselves in shame and regret, or to spend our lives comparing to and blaming everyone else. As long as we remain on the throne of our lives, it doesn’t matter which way we flip the coin.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“The ditch of suspicion refers to the action of critically alienating an entire population based on preconceived conclusions or prior experiences with one or a few from that group. We walk in suspicion regarding race, class, nationality, and gender. I find that we especially do this with the generation coming before or behind us. We see it in the term “generation gap,” which should alarm us as our enemy is the divider who would love nothing more than to rob the transformative power of legacy God intended to pass down from one generation to the next.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“Jesus is saying the defining mark of His Church is that she will move to every place hell attempts to set up camp and when she arrives, the enemy will have no choice but to flee. The work of the Church is the continual eviction of the kingdom of darkness in her city.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“Love isn’t love until it actually does something about the brokenness in the place it resides.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“Childlike faith is opening our eyes to the wonder of seeing our God everywhere and wherever He shows us a new dimension, choosing to add that to our worldview. In doing this, our capacity increases and we grow up into His image. This kind of faith is okay with God’s revelation being a run on sentence that at times seems like a contradiction.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“It is a common occurrence to sit with a precious but struggling son or daughter of God who shares that while they have many friendly people in their life with whom they share a hobby, workspace, or the banter of small talk, they don’t feel they really have any core friends who regularly see and pursue them. They express restlessness at the lack of a place to belong. They are lonely. At the same time, these are almost always the same people who tell me they are “just too busy” to join a small group, ministry team, or even attend church regularly. Chalking their struggles up to God’s injustice, their brokenness, or a problem with the church, most don’t stop to consider a far more obvious truth. We’ve positioned our lives at a pace that is not conducive for building deep friendships. We spend 38 days a year staring at a screen in third person, but have lost the relational rhythms of building roots with actual people.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“Truth be told, there really isn’t any such thing as “Christian Art.” Just like “Beauty” and “Justice,” “Art” belongs fully to the Lord. It’s all his , meaning that, in the end, we can only speak of good art or bad art; art that is a worthy representation of God’s heart or some severely diluted or distorted misrepresentation of the Master Artist.”
― Chuck Ammons

“Shame lurks most often in the thoughts that silently condemn, while entitlement patriotically camouflages itself behind our “God-given rights.” Yet whether you flip the coin to the side of shame or to entitlement, both play the game by endorsing a broken view of humanity and worth. Shame and entitlement both owe their survival to a hierarchical view of the world.”
― Chuck Ammons

“In all of our ancient ancestor’s stories, notice the common thread: they didn’t abandon religion. They merely redefined and weaponized it, calling upon the name of God to baptize their own agendas.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“It is clear by many people’s resentment at God and others that many of us believe our status as a “good Christian” qualifies us to bypass the lines of misunderstandings, unanswered prayers, suffering, and waiting.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“Wherever it is hard to forgive, remember how much He has forgiven you. And He delights to do it! Forgiveness is not a feeling; it is simply releasing a debt from your hands (which are inadequate to judge) into God’s. It’s saying, “God, here’s what was stolen from me. You saw it. You know all about it, including all I don’t know. I lay down every self-righteous weapon I possess and ask You to return to my heart what was stolen, however and wherever You see fit. It isn’t my debt anymore. My God will supply all of my needs. I release their heart to You.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“There are no experts who hold all of the answers. But there is a conductor named Jesus and a global symphony of people of every age and life stage tuning up their instruments. If you stop right now, you can hear it. All it takes are kids willing to stop talking and listen.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace