Kelly Minter > Quotes

“When we live out of pride, we are left to tirelessly protect the single seed of life, but when we live with the posture of humility and die to ourselves, we allow God to turn our one life into an abundant harvest that reaches so far beyond ourselves we will scarcely believe what God can do with a single life that chooses to die in the soil of His hands.”
― Kelly Minter, The Fitting Room: Putting on the Character of Christ

“Too often we profess God but look to everything else to function as him. Even perfectly good things. Things that in and of themselves are pure and right and gifts from God but have become a problem simply because of the placement they have in our lives.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“It's much easier to blow our moral police horns on all those transgressors running around than it is to live penetrating lives of holiness.”
― Kelly Minter, The Fitting Room: Putting on the Character of Christ

“I think we would do much better as a whole if we focused more compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience than on how all the non-Christians are ruining society with their bad behavior and politics.”
― Kelly Minter, The Fitting Room: Putting on the Character of Christ

“We do not turn from our false gods to become God's children. We turn from them because we are.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other Gods

“Satan will often tell us what is true, but will never tell us the truth.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“Legalism is when we try to obtain the result of obedience by our own means and strength. It is self-righteousness, as opposed to God's righteousness covering us, and the two are as different as spirit and flesh.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other Gods

“What a person has is of no consequence, whether much or little, when it comes to the deep satisfaction of the soul. Apart from Christ, the rich and beautiful, and the poor and unlovely, will all end up in precisely the same misery.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other Gods

“We all claimed God as our God, but we had been serving lesser things.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other Gods

“The harsh reality is that my flesh must die not so much because of what it does, but because of what it is.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other Gods

“Sometimes I shield myself from finding out what's really going on with people for fear I'll be held responsible. Because with information often comes responsibility; if we know, we might be required to do something”
― Kelly Minter, Nehemiah: A Heart That Can Break - DVD Leader Kit

“If you are loved less, he is the Great Provider. If you are loved more but are still hungry, he is the only One who can suffice.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“Because discipline is not rejection, it is protection and affection, one of the most glorious things God can extend to us.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“After many stabs at this I found out—probably a hundred years after everyone else—that this is actually impossible when it comes to people or things. No matter how virtuous or overflowing with integrity and love a friend or spouse may be, no person can possibly always be there for you.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“We claimed the Bible as our source of truth, but were our real counselors coming from movie screens and magazines? Perhaps so many of our struggles—lack of freedom, loss of spiritual desire, slavery to image, perfectionism, confusion, and the list is infinite—had much to do with this idea of God and.… The people in 2 Kings were worshipping God, but they were also serving their idols.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“God Himself met my needs, which freed me up from looking for "life" from people. I was free to serve, pray, and give in my relationships.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other Gods

“So much of what draws us to our personal gods has to do with where our needs are, where we hurt, why we hurt, and how we desire that pain to be satiated.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“We can travel thirty-one hundred miles to Brazil or we can walk thirty-one feet to our neighbor.” Touché. The truth is both journeys need to be taken. It’s just that we often miss what’s right in front of us for the seemingly greater need across the ocean. It’s like the crowd that had “bigger” work to do with Jesus in Jericho, practically tripping over the guy who lay in the middle of their path. Compassion is not just for the missionary or slum worker over there. It’s not a virtue singled out exclusively for the pastor or AIDS worker. In Colossians 3:12, compassion is the virtue Paul tells every believer to clothe himself in, and he lists it first.”
― Kelly Minter, The Fitting Room: Putting On the Character of Christ

“Open-mindedness is celebrated as the ultimate virtue, though it’s imperative to note that the only time you can’t be open-minded is if you’re open to the possibility of there being only one God with one gospel. That”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“I wonder if Leah ever grasped within her lifetime that though Jacob had chosen Rachel, God had chosen her.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“But you look for life in lesser things than me all the time, every day.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“For so much of my life I worshipped God: showing up for church, singing hymns, helping in the nursery, reading my Bible, confessing my belief in him. Yet if you could have witnessed what I was controlled by, what motivated and moved me, you would have seen that in many cases it was not God at all, but my idols. Not carved images, but people, career paths, materialism, acceptance, and more. God was getting my worship on some level, but my gods were getting my service.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“Death to the self is never an 'ooh pick me! Pick me!!' kind of activity.”
― Kelly Minter, The Fitting Room: Putting on the Character of Christ

“The world is committed to its pleasures, desires, and beliefs. It will seek out and listen to its own teachers. Children of God must listen to the spirit of God.”
― Kelly Minter, What Love Is: The Letters of 1, 2, 3 John

“Trying to clothe ourselves in the virtues outside of the fitting room of being chosen, holy, and loved will prove a maddening endeavor of dress-up. We may look the part in the moment, but inevitably the tight collars of moralism and crooked hems of behavior management will eventually give us away. There is no need for such striving when words like “I have also loved you” have already been spoken. It’s this love of Christ that lets us out of the suffocating garments of do-goodism for approval, giving us the grace to obey God’s commands while we revel in His affection. Keeping His commands is not grievous; it’s a delightful expression of our love for God, because He has first loved us (1 John 4:19; 5:3).”
― Kelly Minter, The Fitting Room: Putting On the Character of Christ

“John Calvin put it similarly: “The evil in our desire typically does not lie in what we want, but that we want it too much.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols

“there is nothing worth clinging to more tightly than whatever God taps you on the shoulder for.”
― Kelly Minter, Wherever the River Runs: How a Forgotten People Renewed My Hope in the Gospel

“No matter how virtuous or overflowing with integrity and love a friend or spouse may be, no person can possibly always be there for you. This is a place reserved solely for God, a position that only he is capable of, though our experience of his presence is not nearly as consistent as the reality of it.”
― Kelly Minter, No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols