Rachel Jankovic > Quotes

“It is easy to think you have a heart for orphans on the other side of the world, but to resent the demands of the children in your living room. You cannot have a heart for the gospel and fussiness about your life at the same time.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Mom Enough: The Fearless Mother's Heart and Hope

“Prioritizing obedience in the face of stress is a wonderful way to disarm it.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Obedience to God always, always, beautifies. It always adds dimension and fullness, which are the results of living how we were meant to live. Our greatest potential will be found in our greatest obedience.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal With It

“So realize that your body is a testimony to the world of God's design. Carry the extra weight joyfully until you can lose it joyfully. Carry the scars joyfully as you carry the fruit of them. Do not resent the damages that your children left on your body. Just like a guitar mellows and sounds better with age and scratches, so your body can more fully praise God having been used for His purposes. So don't resent it, enjoy it.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Loving the Little Years

“When all my life is oriented around glorifying God, I see the value and glory and joy in the little. I see the Creator of all things in the details of my life. His presence there makes nothing little.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“But our opportunities to bless our children are often most present when we least feel like it. This is why we cannot depend on our emotions to dictate our actions. We need to discipline our own emotions to fall in line with obedience. We are to love our children. We are to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. That means all the time. You”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Faithfulness does not feel like what it is accomplishing. We have gotten so consumed with feelings needing to be pleasant that we have discarded the generally unpleasant feelings of faithfulness. It doesn’t feel good, so it cannot be good. But discarding the feelings of faithfulness discards the fruits of it.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“But God did not save us because we were so valuable. We have value because He saved us.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“If our children’s lives are the sea floor, we need to leave the gold all over it, everywhere, in little bits. We can’t do it one big nugget. We can’t even do it in a bunch of medium chunks. We have to leave gold through their lives in a fine dust that’s spread all over everything. At the end of our children’s lives, we hope we hope it is worth a fortune. But at any given moment it is the little things that contain the gold. The gold is quick forgiveness. It is quick repentance. It is cheerful smiles and tender hugs. It is teasing and laughing. It is loving. It is Daddy throwing yet another wrestle party all over the house. It is dinner. Regular. Predictable. It is having physical needs looked after. It is being disciplined. It is being challenged. It is being educated. Being made to do something you didn’t want to. It is not being the boss. It is not getting away with lying. It is knowing who to talk to. It is knowing you will feel better when you do. It is security. It is joy. It is every day. It is life. It is knowing your faith, and knowing that it is your parents’ too. It is knowing your people and being known by them.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“None of these is the biblical approach. Here’s the good news: the way we can know that we are doing what we are supposed to be doing is actually very simple. Are you obeying God? Are you honoring Him? Are you being content and rejoicing in your lot? Congratulations! You have tremendous purpose and clarity and calling.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“Do you want to be conformed to the image of Christ? Let the Word do it to you. Do you want to overcome the world the flesh and the devil? Let the Word of God and the faithful worship of Him equip you. Do you want to be equipped for every good work? The Word of God will do that for you; the preaching of the Word will strengthen you. Do you want to overcome fear? The Word of God will do that in you.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“Jesus Christ came to this earth, struggled, suffered, and died so that you might die. Let that sink in. It was not His death that gave you life—His death gave you death in Him. But what happened after His death? His victory over death. The resurrection. Jesus Christ died so that you might die, and He lives so that you might live. Your life in Christ is what happens after your death in Him.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“The more you discipline yourself to overcome discouragement with obedience, the less discouragement there will be to overcome.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Gratitude is like that. It transforms. It is such a force that it cannot coexist with selfishness, with discouragement, with discontent.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Some incredibly fast years of my life were made up of the longest days in history.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Your spiritual life is always a key point in a battle, and this is no time to be dumb.”
― Rachel Jankovic, No Time to be Dumb: Letters to Teenage Girls

“When you are a mother and a homemaker, you are your own boss. The days are what you make of them. The tasks that need to get done are put on a list at your discretion. This means that you must be leadership material.

At the same time, what you get done is up to you, too. You also have to be a hardworking employee. The part of you that decides where to go must work with the part of you that needs to go there. Making a list that you cannot accomplish does not make you a better housewife, it makes you a bad leader.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“We are naturally full of instincts and desires that are contrary to what God wants us doing. That means that those things are something to obey with, not something to obey around.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“We Christians need to stop thinking of our feelings as insights.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“When Christians who know their value in Christ and their place in this one great narrative face such things, they can still see the glory in it. The humbling in your little story connects directly to the humbling of Christ for your salvation. Your small victories declare His great ones - your victory over fussiness at your children connects to His victory over death. Your death, when it comes, will only be the beginning of eternal life. Your death could come in your prime, or before your prime, and you would be no less you in Christ. Your story would be no smaller, your value unaffected. You could die in infancy and be no less important. You will still live eternally in Christ and need have no fear of the grave.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal With It

“The command to be constantly glorifying our God is essentially a command to be living in constant joy, with constant clarity of purpose and constant pleasures forevermore.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“Treat sins that your children struggle with like basic math. Practice, Practice, and you'll get it.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Loving the Little Years: Motherhood in the Trenches

“We could get so into health food that our husband doesn't feel welcome at his own table. In other words, we could get so consumed with the healthy food that we are no longer healthy people. We could, in pursuit of health, break fellowship with our husbands as well as Jesus”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“having a hard time. Imagine it crying to itself, saying, “I don’t know what to do anymore! I don’t feel useful. I don’t feel beautiful. I just sit here in the darkness all the time with no purpose, no goals, no identity. I feel useless, adrift. No one cares about me or wants me to be anything special.” What if someone could say to the moon, “Look to the sun! Just do what you were made for! Reflect the glory! Look to the sun while you go on your journey and your face will be bright! You are beautiful when you are oriented to the sun. You are purposeful when you are oriented to the sun. You are needed when you are oriented to the sun. You were made to be oriented to the sun!” Now imagine the moon saying something like, “Oh, that? That seems sort of unrelated. Why would that help me? What does that have to do with anything? I mean, I know it is there, but it has always been there. It doesn’t have anything to do with the way I am feeling right now. It just seems like pointless platitudes. It doesn’t really feel like you are listening to me.” On a fundamental level, we were”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“When you believe to your core that you are forgiven and loved, one of the first things that happens is you start doing things. Fruit is intimately connected with forgiveness. When we are forgiven, we do not gallop out into a life of ambiguity and indifference. We do not become great negotiators of whether or not it matters that we aren’t doing things. We become filled with gratitude, love, joy, and peace. And then, having a firm foundation of another’s righteousness, we are free to go out and do.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“But there is no need for the enemy to be winning in your daily life, because he has lost your eternal life.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“Jesus Christ came to this earth, struggled, suffered, and died so that you might die. Let that sink in. It was not His death that gave you life—His death gave you death in Him. But what happened after His death? His victory over death. The resurrection. Jesus Christ died so that you might die, and He lives so that you might live. Your life in Christ is what happens after your death in Him. There will be no resolution to these struggles in your life if you do not willingly give your self-fashioned identity to Christ that it might die. It will die anyway, so let it be in Him. And when you live, it will be in Him, too. Friends, there is no hope for you that is not Jesus. There is nothing interesting about you if it is not resurrected in Him. There is nothing defining about you that cannot live in Christ. Your selfishness is dead. Your lust is dead. Your need to be unique is dead. Your envy, greed, obsessions, guilts—they are all dead. Dead and gone in Christ. Stop trying to tidy them up and make them mean something, because they never will. Total submission to Christ is total life in Christ. This is because without dying in Him you cannot live in Him. When you submit your life to Him fully, you can live in Him, fully. There is no going halfsies with death for Christians. You can’t try to keep living the life that should have died in Christ. You can’t arrange all your little ideas about yourself in some compatible way with your idea of Christ. Let Him have it all—what remains after that death is only life. You are no longer the author of your own identities, but rather you live in the Author and He lives in you.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“Real life is messy because it is going somewhere. Things constantly need to be done because people are constantly growing.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Sin is a fact of life. It is the way we deal with it that changes ours.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Loving the Little Years: Motherhood in the Trenches

“…I am responsible to see them individually, even when they are presenting themselves to me en masse.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Loving the Little Years: Motherhood in the Trenches