Skye Jethani > Quotes

“Silence is the beginning of all worship.”
― Skye Jethani, The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity

“God does not judge our effectiveness. He judges our faithfulness.”
― Skye Jethani, Immeasurable: Reflections on the Soul of Ministry in the Age of Church, Inc.

“If imitation is the highest form of flattery, than Christians have become pop culture’s most devoted admirers.”
― Skye Jethani, The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“As much as we might want to control God, history has proven that he is notoriously uncooperative.”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“If we want the culture to take Jesus more seriously, maybe we should try it first.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“there are plenty of Christians who may claim persecution who are actually suffering due to their own foolish or unrighteous behavior.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“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.”
― Skye Jethani

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, The Road We Must Travel: A Personal Guide for Your Journey

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“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”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity

“How can a prisoner plot his escape if he doesn’t believe a world exists outside the prison walls?”
― Skye Jethani, The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“Some suffer for righteousness. But frankly, some Christians suffer because they are insufferable.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“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”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

“God has not abandoned his creation to sin and evil. He is not a Creator who rejects and replaces; he reconciles and redeems.”
― Skye Jethani, Futureville: Discover Your Purpose for Today by Reimagining Tomorrow

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity

“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.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore