Leonard Sweet > Quotes

“What is the difference between a living thing and a dead thing? In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don't change, you die. It's that simple. It's that scary.”
― Leonard Sweet

“The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.”
― Leonard I. Sweet

“Can you imagine doing ministry the last five hundred years and getting away with ‘Sorry, I don’t do books’? Can you imagine doing ministry in the next five years and getting away with ‘Sorry, I don’t do Facebook’?”
― Leonard Sweet, Viral: How Social Networking Is Poised to Ignite Revival

“We bless others naturally through our strengths. But we bless others supernaturally through our weaknesses.”
― Leonard Sweet, I Am a Follower: The Way, Truth, and Life of Following Jesus

“The greater the amount of knowledge you accumulate, the bigger your island gets, but the greater the shoreline of the unknown becomes. In short, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.”
― Leonard Sweet, Jesus: A Theography

“God does not ask if we are able. God asks if we are available.” And the weakness we offer him, he turns into a strength.”
― Leonard Sweet, I Am a Follower: The Way, Truth, and Life of Following Jesus

“At the table, where food and stories are passed from one person to another and one generation to another, is where each of us learns who we are, where we come from, what we can be, to whom we belong, and to what we are called.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“Reading seeks for the sweetness of a blessed life, meditation perceives it, prayer asks for it, contemplation tastes it.”
― Leonard Sweet, I Am a Follower: The Way, Truth, and Life of Following Jesus

“We don’t preach the Scriptures; we let the Scriptures preach through us as they point to Christ.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“Scholar George Myerson has recently written a study of happiness. After 250 pages tracking moments of joy throughout history, he concludes that humans are happiest hanging with friends, gathered around tables with good food and conversation and laughter. If you can get that table out of doors, so the sun can kiss the skin—if as you dine together you can also provide help for others—then, according to Myerson, you’ve won the lottery of life.[36]”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“Jesus Christ is the rest of God. He is, as N. T. Wright has put it, “the fulfillment of the sabbath.”114 By taking Christ as our rest, we cease from our labors just as God did from His.115 Christianity, therefore, begins not with a do, but with a done—“It is finished!”116 We enter into God’s rest, and we labor from there.”
― Leonard Sweet, Jesus: A Theography

“If you aren’t smelling awful smells sometimes, then you’re not where Jesus is.”
― Leonard Sweet, Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who's Already There

“Authentic evangelism is lifting up the veil of what God is up to and manifesting the image of God in the world we are in.”
― Leonard Sweet, So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church

“If we could shrink the Earth’s 5.7 billion population to a village of one hundred people, the resulting profile would look like this:        Sixty Asians, fourteen Africans, twelve Europeans, eight Latin Americans, five from the United States and Canada, and one from New Zealand or Australia.        Eighty-two would be nonwhite.        Sixty-seven would be non-Christian.        Thirty-two percent of the entire world’s wealth would be in the hands of five people.        All five people would be citizens of the United States.        Sixty-seven would be unable to read.        Fifty would suffer from malnutrition. Thirty-three would be without access to a safe water supply.        Eighty would live in substandard housing. Thirty-nine would lack access to improved sanitation. Twenty-four would not have electricity.        Only one would have a college education.30”
― Leonard Sweet, AquaChurch 2.0: Piloting Your Church in Today's Fluid Culture

“Disciples of Jesus do not mimic Jesus; we manifest him. We are personators of Christ, not impersonators. Christ’s presence in our lives is more “thereness” than “likeness,” more “withness” than “whatness.” Jesus made our creation in the imago Dei more “spit” than “image” (as in “spit ‘n’ image”).”
― Leonard Sweet, The Well-Played Life: Why Pleasing God Doesn't Have to Be Such Hard Work

“Put another way, Jesus is God’s perfect pitch—the divine tuning fork to the eternal. Every tuning fork needs to be struck to be heard. The striking of the eternal, unchanging tuning fork of heaven took place when a young virgin gave birth to God’s only Son in an obscure village in first-century Israel. It struck again on a never-forgotten Friday, with the pounding of six-inch nails. The fork struck a third time—on the third day—when a meek and lowly Nazarene split a tomb wide open and came forth in resurrection life. Heaven’s”
― Leonard Sweet, Jesus Manifesto

“The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is sovereign. At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving. Martin Luther was right. Theology is table talk.[38] Jesus didn’t sell the food of his Father. He issued invitations to the table. In fact, Jesus’ favorite image for the kingdom of God is a banquet where everyone is sitting around a table.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“The end product of biblical Christianity is a person—not a book, not a building, not a set of principles or a system of ethics—but one person in two natures (divine/human) with four ministries (prophet/priest/king/sage) and four biographies (the Gospels). But those four biographies don’t tell the whole story. Every bit of Scripture is part of the same great story of that one person and that one story’s plotline of creation, revelation, redemption, and consummation.”
― Leonard Sweet, Jesus: A Theography

“Christians have become passive spectators in worship rather than active participants. By and large, we come to church to “watch the show” rather than to engage and participate.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“If you’ve never bled, you have no material for preaching. If when you’re finished preaching you’re not finished, spent, wiped out — if you haven’t “given blood” — you haven’t really preached.9”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“You are what you pay attention to. No attention, no life. Everything comes to life when you pay attention to”
― Leonard Sweet, Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who's Already There

“The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is sovereign. At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“Jesus called his disciples to “follow me,” but he didn’t tell them where they were going.”
― Leonard Sweet, I Am a Follower: The Way, Truth, and Life of Following Jesus

“I have no idea where I am going. . . . But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.”
― Leonard Sweet, I Am a Follower: The Way, Truth, and Life of Following Jesus

“To come to the table is to learn to be our real selves—not some construct conceived by someone else, but who God made us to be.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“I understand God’s patience with the wicked, but I do wonder how He can be so patient with the pious. —GEORGE MACDONALD”
― Leonard Sweet, Jesus: A Theography

“We don’t need to travel to find Christ. Christ has already traveled to find us. God is not the one whose back is turned. It is we who, for whatever reason, get our backs up or don’t turn back to God.”
― Leonard Sweet, The Well-Played Life: Why Pleasing God Doesn't Have to Be Such Hard Work

“The essential element of Christian truth is that the risen Christ is not something you mimic but someone you manifest.”
― Leonard Sweet, I Am a Follower: The Way, Truth, and Life of Following Jesus

“Twenty-first-century people hear and learn differently than most churches communicate.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“For Jesus the home is not what defines the table; the table is what defines the home.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed