Timothy Paul Jones > Quotes

“There’s a vital truth to be learned from the fall of Anakin Skywalker. It’s simply this: You were not fashioned to live in fear. That’s why worry and stress cause such chaos in your life. Your Creator crafted your soul to flourish in faith, not to drown in fear.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Finding God in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Spiritual Exploration of the Star Wars Saga

“Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day.
Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.”
― Timothy Jones

“The shadow is our unconscious self, all the parts of ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge or are shamed by. The more we try to flee from or ignore the shadow, the more it grows and the more power it gains over us. To master the shadow, we need to stop running, turn, and face it.2 JODY G. BOWER”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Finding God in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Spiritual Exploration of the Star Wars Saga

“Godly leadership—whether in the church or in the marketplace—is followership exercised with biblical wisdom for the good and the guidance of a community for which God has given us responsibility.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, The God Who Goes before You: Pastoral Leadership as Christ-Centered Followership

“Other leaders center on those who are far, designing their programs to bypass parents and reach children whose families are fractured and fragmented. The problem is this focus on reaching children directly can become so thoroughgoing that the church never explicitly expects any parents— even Christian parents—to disciple their children.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“The fairy-tale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul.7”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Finding God in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Spiritual Exploration of the Star Wars Saga

“The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards specialism and professionalism. We tend to have trained soldiers because they fight better, trained singers because they sing better, trained dancers because they dance better, specially instructed laughers because they laugh better, and so on and so on. . . . [Yet] our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.15”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Perspectives on Family Ministry: Three Views

“One of Gregory's most familiar legacies flowed from his concern for the church's music. Remembering his concern for the music of the church, one form of Roman plainsong—the “Gregorian chant”—was named after Gregory after his death.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Christian History Made Easy: A Quick and Colorful Guide to Understanding the Key Events and People that Every Christian Should Know

“When I sit at that table with my daughter, building on a week of family devotions and father-daughter discussions, I am at war. This is not war with my daughter; it is war for my child’s soul. Even as I train Hannah to take up her cross and root her identity in Jesus Christ, the surrounding culture calls her to celebrate immaturity, smirk at sin, and center her passions on pleasures that will slip away. This”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“The overwhelming majority of Christian parents are not actively engaged in any sort of battle for their children’s souls. When it comes to the process of discipling their progeny, most Christian parents—especially fathers—have abandoned the field.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“its simplest definition, family-equipping ministry simply means coordinating every aspect of your present ministry so that parents are acknowledged, equipped, and held accountable as primary disciple-makers in their children’s lives. Family-equipping”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“am not suggesting that successes in academics, athletics, or vocation somehow stand outside God’s good plan. Learning and play are joys that God himself wove into the very fabric of creation. Although cursed in the fall, work was also part of God’s good design before the fall (Gen. 2:15; 3:17–23). And yet, whenever any activity, however good it may be, becomes amplified to the point that no time remains for family members to disciple one another, a divinely designed joy has been distorted into a hell-spawned idol. God”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“Prominent postmillennialists include: ] Famous preacher Jonathan Edwards as well as theologians such as B.B. Warfield, Augustus H. Strong, Charles Hodge, R.L. Dabney, Loraine Boettner, and R.C. Sproul.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Four Views of the End Times

“This faulty model places the professional minister at the center and makes gaining and retaining students the goal. In the case of student ministry, it turns youth group into a holding pattern for the church’s future instead of calling students to live as servants of the gospel in their community of faith here and now.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“The principle is simply this: What you accomplish for God beyond your home will typically never be greater than what you practice with God within your home.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“Are there areas of your life and leadership in which you act as if God’s plan depends on your competence? Meditate on God’s message to Moses. Ask God to reveal and to remove the pride that presumes his plan depends on you.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, The God Who Goes before You: Pastoral Leadership as Christ-Centered Followership

“In the book Why Men Hate Going to Church, David Murrow notes that when a mother comes to faith in Christ, the rest of her family follows 17 percent of the time; however, when the father comes to faith, the family joins him 93 percent of the time. In other words, as men go, so goes the church.5 The family-integrated church calls men to become full participants in the mission of leading their homes.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Perspectives on Family Ministry: Three Views