Jonathan Martin > Quotes

“Many times in the Old Testament, God refers to human beings as His beloved. But when God called Jesus His beloved, Jesus did something truly remarkable: He believed Him. And He lived every moment of His life fully convinced of His identity.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“It turns out that knowing how loved we are by God makes all the difference in the kind of people we will become.”
― Jonathan Martin

“Now do you understand why it's so important for you to grasp your belovedness? God won't change the world through angels or through ideas; He will change the world through His sons and daughters. If you don't know who you are, if you don’t know your true identity, you won't touch others on His behalf.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“God hadn't drawn me into the wilderness so I could attempt to prove myself to Him with religious activity (instead of the more secular activities I indulge in to prove myself to everyone else). He hadn't brought me away from the hustle and noise so I could demonstrate my spirituality to Him. He brought me out to allure me. He didn't want my performance, He wanted my attention.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“If the scandal of Jesus was that He was always touching the wrong people and inviting the wrong people to the table—how on earth can we think the Communion meal now is for the extra holy or the super spiritual? To say we need to be completely cleaned up before Communion is like saying we need to get well so we can take our medication.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“When we begin to live like Jesus, people will perceive our peace as an indictment on their violence; they will see our security as an indictment on their insecurity.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“IT is only when we are no longer in control--because of sickness, death, or our own bad choices--that we no longer cling. The path to salvation is the path of humiliation.”
― Jonathan Martin

“who are you really, behind the avatars you’ve created for yourself? What are you covering up? What are you afraid of? What are you hoping for? Where are you going?”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“I follow Jesus not because I don't have any doubts. I follow Jesus because in my doubt, He has always been tender with me.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“This fits the pattern of how God responds to human suffering: We come looking for answers; God sends a hot meal through a warm body. WE come looking for reasons for our hunger; God sends provision to feed us. We come looking for a sermon that will explain the complexity of the cosmos to us and satiate our desire for understanding; Christ responds with, "This is my body, given for you; this is my blood, shed for you."

People try to offer us an explanation; God offers us a Eucharist.”
― Jonathan Martin, How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is on the Way and Love Is Already Here

“Our scars reveal who we are. The fact that we have experienced profound suffering in life—the fact that we carry what may seem to be unsightly scars—does not disqualify us from following Jesus. It may be precisely what qualifies us.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“You can spot people who don't know Jesus very well because the world they see is always so ugly. Even if they use all sorts of religious language, don't be misled—people who get touched by Jesus don't ignore the hurt and pain in the world, and yet they see so much beauty in it.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“It's true that Thomas was a doubter, but he was not a cynic, and that's an important distinction. Cynics often look for reasons not to believe and won't be moved by something beautiful—just to make a point—even if it's staring them down. Thomas wasn't a cynic, he was a hopeful doubter; he'd believe if he could.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“The first discovery of the shipwreck is that we have a higher capacity for pain than we ever could have imagined before we lost, before we failed, before we suffered…The surprise on the other side of the shipwreck is that, while your capacity for pain improved far beyond our wildest reckoning, now you have a capacity to feel everything deeper. You are capable of a depth of empathy and compassion that would have been unthinkable before…And from this new-found capacity for pain, for sorrow, for torment, for agony, for endless waves of grief, comes the biggest surprise of them all—your new-found capacity for joy.”
― Jonathan Martin, How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is on the Way and Love Is Already Here

“It is possible to fail, and not have our faith fail us. It is possible to lose our lives, and not lose our souls.”
― Jonathan Martin, How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is On the Way and Love Is Already Here

“But it does not really matter how you got here or why; and it doesn’t really matter if it was God or the devil or yourself or some ancient chaos that spilled up from the bottom of the sea. What matters now is that you are drowning, and the world you loved before is not your world any longer. The questions of why and how are less pressing than the reality that is your lungs filling with water now. Philosophy and theology won’t help you much here, because what you believe existentially about storms or oceans or drowning won’t make you stop drowning. Religion won’t do you much good down here, because beliefs can’t keep you warm when you’re twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea.”
― Jonathan Martin, How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is On the Way and Love Is Already Here

“God is happening beneath everything. You may not see anything changing on the surface, but God is conspiring for you now, underneath it all.”
― Jonathan Martin

“What the world needs now are signposts of what's ahead, markers for the new world just around the corner. The world does not need heroes; the world does not need more messiah complexes. The world does not need Christians who want to ride in on a white horse to save the day. What the world needs are witnesses. Nothing more and nothing less. The earth needs people who can bear witness to the ways in which the world has already changed through the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“The cross of Jesus says to us there is nothing God won't do to bring us home--except force us to choose him. The cross is God laying down his great power so we might be compelled by the beauty of his heart. He will not coerce us, but only woo us.”
― Jonathan Martin, How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is on the Way and Love Is Already Here

“Increasingly, I'm coming to believe that fear is at the heart of all sin and disaffection. Fear that God will not be enough for us; fear that the identity we've been given is somehow incomplete.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“When we protect ourselves from what we fear, we also undermine our capacity for wonder.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“We've seen how beautiful it can be to follow Jesus into this new way of being human. But one of the things I love most about Jesus is how much He loves humanity in its brokenness. If He was surrounded by fractured people then, why would we expect it to be any different now? I actually think it is a larger mistake when we Christians attempt to pretend that our lives are more together than they really are in order to "manage our image" before the broader culture. Come look at our perfect church and our perfect family. And if you join us, maybe one day you, too, can have a perfect life! That kind of spin is a breeding ground for disappointment.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“Some fires that dwindle in our lives are meant to be rekindled. Other times”
― Jonathan Martin, How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is On the Way and Love Is Already Here

“His body would be crushed, but the words would still remain: You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. The trajectory of Jesus' life and (in a real sense) the fate of the world hung on those few words. They were not the words of a Father celebrating the good things His Son had done, because He hadn't really done anything yet. Even though Jesus was perfect, it wasn't His perfection that brought the Father such delight. It was His very existence.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“There is no walking into the kingdom of God, or into the grace of God. We can only be carried,”
― Jonathan Martin, How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is On the Way and Love Is Already Here

“wisdom is not having the right answers but having a proper sense of scale and perspective.”
― Jonathan Martin, How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is On the Way and Love Is Already Here

“If there is no other evidence in your life that God loves you, is there for you, or provides for you, consider the evidence of your own breath—each inhale and each exhale carrying with it the message that God is choosing you all over again, now, in this moment . . . in this breath.”
― Jonathan Martin, How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is On the Way and Love Is Already Here

“Us and them” religion is poison to the soul, and it often takes a lifetime of humiliation to detoxify us from it. In the Christian tradition, those who are”
― Jonathan Martin, How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is On the Way and Love Is Already Here

“I resented the feeling that God was constantly telling me to work on the foundation, because foundation building is very unsexy, underground work.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?

“It's why a song such as John Lennon's "Imagine" continues to resonate—it's lovely to daydream about a world no longer plagued by the threat of famine, violence, war, or death. As long as these visions exist as a distant utopian fantasy, a counterbalance to a good zombie yarn, they don't threaten us—but neither do they really inspire us.”
― Jonathan Martin, Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You're More Like Jesus Than You Think?