Debra Hirsch > Quotes

“While we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” provide for us Christ’s example. Jesus didn’t wait for us to get our behaviors cleaned up before he embraced us; he embraced us first, with open arms.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“Love the sinner, hate your own sin. Tony Campolo”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“The truth is we all entertain a legion of little delusions.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“A woman’s heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her. Maya Angelou8”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“When we reduce Christianity to a negative system where fasting becomes more sacred than feasting, law wins out over grace, and correct theology becomes more important than divine encounter, we in effect become the modern-day Pharisees—whose ministry Jesus was set against.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“The reward of the search is to go on searching. The soul’s desire is fulfilled by the very fact of its remaining unsatisfied, for really to see God is never to have had one’s fill of desiring Him. Gregory of Nyssa”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“We must lead with our embrace, not our theology. When we lead with our theology, we tend to get all caught up in the “wrongness” of some people’s behavior, and the humanness of the person is easily lost.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“God gives each of us a free will that ought not be violated.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“Opening people up to redemptive forward principles will help them move closer to God way more than by telling them how far they fall short. Engaging with people wherever they find themselves or we find them, and then slowly and intentionally pointing them toward the ideals of the kingdom and therefore God, is wonderfully liberating.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“No matter who you are, where you are or what you are doing, God is in pursuit of you. He is the unrelenting evangelist.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“In him we are set free from striving, set free from being motivated by fear, guilt and shame. In him we can find rest.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck was convinced that buried in our explicit pursuit of sex is an implicit pursuit of God.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“When we are fearful as disciples or as a church, “we begin thinking primarily about what we want to prevent and avoid rather than what we want to encourage and develop.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“Creating a redemptive focus to our lives means that we love homosexual people as ourselves. It means that we treat them with the same kind of grace, respect, care and compassion with which we want to be treated. It means that we fight alongside of them against hateful action aimed at their community. It means all of the above, even if we do not agree with their sexual ethic.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“We should by now be clear about one thing: heterosexuality doesn’t give a person a direct ticket to heaven, a relationship with Jesus Christ does.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“Our sexuality is indeed a powerful force. It can lead us to something of an experience of either heaven or hell, depending on our ability to orient it toward God or not.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“When discipleship is narrowed down to jumping through behavioral hoops and ticking the right theological boxes, grace is squeezed out, and we come to see God as just plain impossible to please, like some nasty first-grade teacher or harsh, authoritarian parent. When we reduce Christianity to a negative system where fasting becomes more sacred than feasting, law wins out over grace, and correct theology becomes more important than divine encounter, we in effect become the modern-day Pharisees—whose ministry Jesus was set against.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“We must all realize that prejudice and resentment come more easily to man than insight and appreciation. Love is health, and truth is the only serum: yet truth is a product of learning, and love is scarce. Abraham Heschel”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“Christianity will regain its moral authority when it starts emphasizing social sin in equal measure with individual (read “body-based”) sin and weave them both into a seamless garment of love and truth.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“Perhaps we all need to develop what Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter calls a “generous spaciousness”: The point is not to call for a watered-down discipleship. The point is we all need generous spaciousness in our walk with Christ. We all need room to live in the tension of the call to virtue and the longing for happiness. And we all need to find safety and grace in our friendships and community so that we don’t have to try figure this out alone.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“How do we move from vitriolic polemics to the love that we are commanded to show to a love-starved world? How do we represent Jesus to a group of people who have largely written off the church? I remember reading a survey that was taken among members of the LGBT community in San Francisco. They were asked a series of questions about what the factors were that kept them actively involved in their community. The top two answers were acceptance and belonging”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality

“The body, in fact, and it alone . . . is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus to be a sign of it.”15 Think about that for a minute. Our bodies can be the very place where something of the mystery of God is revealed.”
― Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations About Sexuality and Spirituality