Toby J. Sumpter > Quotes

“Churches divide over trivial matters because they are too cowardly to actually deal with the serious problems raging under the surface.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“Jesus and the apostles and prophets were men of courage. God sent them and us out into the world to open our mouths and make a holy ruckus for all evil and every kind of darkness. But this is not an easy, carefree existence, and there are temptations at every point to compromise, to ease up, to settle down. Nobody announces that they are going to compromise. It all begins very subtly. And the terrifying thing is that it frequently begins with a Bible verse used to defend it. The Devil prowls about as an angel of light. We begin reading the Bible selectively, which is to say, we begin to limit what we will let God say. We begin to limit God’s authority. It’s much easier and more convenient to skim piously while underlining and highlighting the passages that make us feel happy and warm inside, or apply only to other people out there, because it’s scary to do anything else. When we substitute faithfulness with this sort of cowardice, we do so telling ourselves that we’re actually doing the right thing. In reality we have substituted the living God for an idol, but our idols are trimmed out in our pet theological frills. We call our compromise boldness, but it is actually fear. Idols are fear incarnate.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“But we’re just trading idols: we’re just moving the mold to a different room in the house. This is salvation by carving a piece of creation (job, beauty, money, etc.). We may be failures, we may be guilty, we may be foolish, we may make mistakes, we may be overweight, we may be ugly—but at least we have friends! at least we wear the right clothes! at least we have a membership at the gym! at least we celebrate our oddity, our perversion, our dysfunction, by hanging out with other people who have the same problem! In other words, this is authenticity by self-justification, by the justice of man. But everybody still ends up buried in the ground. And none of those friends can keep your heart beating. None of the smiles can keep your skin from wrinkling. None of those clubs can prevent cancer or Alzheimer’s. We need a better source of authenticity. This is why the answer to all insecurity and all failure is Jesus. Jesus is your righteousness.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“we don’t need some kind of cheap spray-on revival. We don’t need some kind of dress-up, some kind of toupee of holiness. The Church is already full of enough clowns and cowards. We need the Holy Spirit to come and raise us from the dead. We need Jesus to breathe His life into us.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“This is why the answer to all insecurity and all failure is Jesus. Jesus is your righteousness. If you’re worried about sin you committed—Jesus bled and died for that sin. If you’re worried about sin committed against you—Jesus suffered in agony for that sin. You don’t have to be bitter. If you’re worried about being a loser, left out, lonely, never getting married, never having children—Jesus was rejected, ignored, hated, despised, spat upon, and became a profane joke because of His love for you. If your identity is in Jesus, then you are not missing anything.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“Sacrifice points to the way God is determined to receive us by His grace as we are but also how He refuses to leave us the way we are.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“Too often we read our Bibles like they are fairy tales and comic books, with all the good guys and bad guys clearly labeled, missing the complexities in the story—the complexities that would actually require us to grow up into wisdom.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“As soon as you think you know what you’re doing, you run the risk of thinking that you know what you’re doing. But the answer to that danger is not doubting or putting on a faux-humility. The answer is gratitude.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“When we don’t preach and teach the full offense of this gospel tearing the pride of man all the way down to the ground, what we are actually doing is leaving him unprotected. We are leaving his most insidious idolatry fully functioning. In the name of being nice, in the name of being polite, in the name of not offending, we leave his pride intact, which is his Achilles’ heel. It is the very thing that must die in order for him to truly live. And this is because Jesus only calls the dead to life. He raises the dead by the powerful working of the Holy Spirit.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“(2 Tim. 1:8–9). Paul knows that even Timothy would be tempted to be ashamed of the gospel and the sufferings that attend it, but the power of God for resisting that shame flows out of a deep recognition of God’s grace. Ironically, the shame actually flows out of a focus on our own works, but the power of God flows out of focusing on God’s works. In other words, the real antidote to this will-worship and autonomy, the way God destroys the idol of self, is through the stunning reality of His goodness.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“That’s our glimpse of the future: the Kingdom of Jesus will be proclaimed throughout the earth until every knee bows and every tongue confesses allegiance to the name of Jesus, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:10–11). In other words, the history of the world will be the rebirth of the world as surely as Jesus rose from the dead. The universe will be raised up from the curse of sin, the shadows will be driven away, light and life will reign forever.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“In the Reformed tradition, a good deal of our stoicism and apathy rides like a parasite on the back of the doctrine of God’s sovereignty and providence.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, A Son for Glory: Job Through New Eyes

“the Eternal Son died and rose again, and has left His Spirit here, making us kings and priests to our God. We must not take ourselves too seriously, but we have been given the authority of the Author Himself.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“All of this serves to underline the fact that many Christians are trying to follow Jesus without actually dying—but the message of the gospel is that they’re already dead.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“Sin makes everything go wobbly. Nothing stays still. Nothing holds down. Everything begins to fall apart when you’re hiding sin and resisting Jesus. And this is because you’re not walking in the light. You’re trying to maneuver in the dark. Or to change the image: Jesus said that people who don’t listen to His word are like the man who tries to build his house on the sand (Mt. 7:26). The storms come and the house collapses. This was true of Israel as a whole, and it is still true of nations, churches, families, and individuals.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“You shall not fear. You shall not fear. The implication is clear: idolatry begins with fear. When people fear the other gods instead of the true God, they begin to bow down to them and serve them. But why are people tempted to fear other gods? Because they are the gods of the people in power. They are the gods of the celebrities, the gods of the rich, the gods of mighty, the gods of popular opinion.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“But if we are to follow the example of the prophets, then we must insist that when godly men and women get worked up, there is a way to do it in a godly way. This means they do not lose perspective, they do not lose sight of Jesus, they do not lose sight of the goals set before them.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“We may not go through the motions. We insist that our own foul stench fill our nostrils, our own rebellion kick us in the gut, because only when people see that they are actually dead can they begin to live, only when they come to grips with their rebellion can they understand forgiveness, only when they realize that they are not worthy to be called sons will they feel their Father’s embrace. The only way to live is to die. The only way to find life is to lose it.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“And then on top of all of that, we are also entrusted with making new people, more immortals. We are bringing them into existence through biological conception, but the project hardly ends there. All day long, we are in varying degrees helping to form the kind of person who is aiming for everlasting glory or everlasting disgust.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, No Mere Mortals: Marriage for People Who Will Live Forever

“So one way of harmonizing what Jesus says is by noticing that the kind of peacemaking Jesus and His followers are pursuing always infuriates certain kinds of people.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“We must insist on real gospel power, and that power comes straight from God’s grace dealing with our sin.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“And inevitably, a neutered “Jesus” gives us piles of little neutered Christians. But what God has in mind is the complete renovation of the world. Jesus didn’t send His apostles out to start a social club, a special interest group, or a new “religion” that could be filed in the yellow pages, right there between Cats and Creeps. Jesus didn’t send His apostles out to make deals, to compromise, and offer alternative lifestyles. Jesus claimed all authority in heaven and on earth. He claimed all of it, and sent His apostles to announce that claim in the words of the gospel and to enact it with water, bread, and wine, with His full authority.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“When we attack sin, we are either attacking idols outside the church and calling sinners to repentance, or attacking idols inside the church and calling sinners to repentance. While there is a crucial difference between talking to a corpse and talking to a resurrected corpse, the sin is still sin. And the sin is always a crutch or a cover: an attempt at finding safety, security, comfort, peace, meaning in something or someone other than Christ. And almost always, those crutches were snatched up from family, friends, television, celebrities, etc., grasping for what looks safe or what looks cool.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“We must be careful. We must beware. We have not been sent out to destroy men’s lives, but that they might have life. But let there be no mistake: If we open our mouths and speak with the authority of the King of Kings, if we actually apply the Word of God to all of life, if we dare speak on behalf of God, we will be questioned. We will be misinterpreted. We will be misunderstood. But we have been sent not to be served, but to serve and to give our lives gladly for the healing and salvation of many.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“Jesus was God, and you’re not Jesus. Right. Agreed. But this Jesus is our Master, our Teacher, and we must imitate Him, or we will imitate an idol. In Him is life, and we will have nothing else. It is no longer we who live but rather Christ who lives in us. We must not be wrathful, divisive men; we must not be blustering, foolish men. But we must have Jesus. We must have this Jesus, the real Jesus, or we will die. Wisdom demands that we stand on this precipice, that we feel this danger, that we take this risk. We must learn this Jesus or else we will continue to find ourselves retreating on every cultural battlefield. If we don’t understand in our bones the difference between Christ-like troublemaking and fleshly pride and bluster, then we will only be left with cowards and fools.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“Jesus didn’t send His apostles out to start a social club, a special interest group, or a new “religion” that could be filed in the yellow pages, right there between Cats and Creeps. Jesus didn’t send His apostles out to make deals, to compromise, and offer alternative lifestyles. Jesus claimed all authority in heaven and on earth. He claimed all of it, and sent His apostles to announce that claim in the words of the gospel and to enact it with water, bread, and wine, with His full authority.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“When people know the real Jesus they become real men and real women—really human—and that makes them bold, creative, fearless, compassionate, and glad. When people know Jesus, they know they have nothing to lose, nothing to fear, and the world is before them. And Jesus sends them out with His blessing to discover, invent, create, rule, bless, heal, explore, and die with smiles on their faces, because they know the Man who is truly Alive, and now they can’t stay dead anymore.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“There is an anger that is not wrathful bluster. There is a peace that causes division. There is a righteousness that incites lies and mockery and upheaval and doesn’t care. World, meet the real Jesus.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“People who know Jesus, who have been taken up into the Storm of His Spirit, are driven people, confident people, the most courageous people in the whole world. People who have been conquered by the grace of Jesus have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The world belongs to their King, and they cannot rest until they see it conquered. Conquered people are a conquering people.”
― Toby J. Sumpter, Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

“Job tears his robe and falls to the ground and worships God, blessing him as the one who gives and takes away”
― Toby J. Sumpter, A Son for Glory: Job Through New Eyes