Rick Lawrence > Quotes

“God never uses duct tape to fix things—He will take your flesh and blood if you offer it to Him and use it like Play-Doh: “Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it?” (Isa. 43:19 NKJV). I did know it, in the calm after my storm.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“The question is not so much what is going on in the room, but what is happening to me because of it? What”
― Rick Lawrence, Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus

“Dr. Rachel Remen, founder of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness, writes: “Real stories take time. We stopped telling stories when we started to lose that sort of time, pausing time, reflecting time, wondering time. Life rushes us along and few people are strong enough to stop on their own. Most often, something unforeseen stops us and it is only then we have the time to take a seat.”
― Rick Lawrence, Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus

“And the Enemy, the Destroyer, senses the surface truth that this Jesus is a threat, so he targets Him for destruction. Lucifer shows up in the desert to tempt a weakened Jesus using a trusted strategy—he will appeal to the same primal lust for power and control that bulldozed Adam and Eve into an unthinkable betrayal. But Jesus is having none of that. The Enemy is banished from His presence, where he stays until he sniffs an opportunity to launch a second assault in a lonely garden. In Mel Gibson’s brilliant portrayal of this tipping-point confrontation in The Passion of the Christ, the weight of the assault is palpable. Jesus is alone and tormented to the point of death on the eve of His crucifixion. The serpent moves through the Gethsemane garden toward the exposed feet of Jesus—now perilously within striking range. Everything hangs in the moment. And then, in a shocking burst of violence, Jesus stomps on the serpent’s head.3 It is sudden and brutal and … revelatory. It turns out that Jesus—sweating blood, abandoned, and apparently beaten—is no shrinking violet. The Great Surprise is that He cannot be leveraged and that He is no victim of circumstances. In this, He is not at all the way most Americans describe Him.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“The best use of our energies is not to try harder to be like Jesus, but to stay more closely connected to Him—the branch embedded in the Vine. That means we pay better attention to what He says and does and how others react to Him, simply to get to know Him more deeply. And in knowing Him we see Him better, and in seeing Him better we trust in Him more deeply, and in trusting Him more deeply we align ourselves with Him, and in aligning ourselves with Him we live our lives in a magnetic atmosphere of faith. And that faith, like Peter’s, “will not fail.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is poverty. Ignorance is devastation. Ignorance is tragedy. And ignorance is illness. It all stems from ignorance. —Jim Rohn A”
― Rick Lawrence, Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus

“Our impact for the kingdom of God is directly tied to the way we embrace—or don’t embrace—Jesus’ changing expectations of us as we move closer to Him. He will scare the snot out of us, then ask if He can sit with us in our boat, and finally take us to our destination once it is no longer the focus.”
― Rick Lawrence, Skin in the Game: Living an Epic Jesus-Centered Life

“Dare 2 Share founder Greg Stier says: “Satan is not a fatalist—he does not easily give in to ‘the facts on the ground.’ He retains his intelligence, but he’s growing more and more insane, like Hitler toward the end of his life.”12 That insanity is on display in Satan’s encounter with Jesus, when he demands (the Greek word is exaiteo, which means “to ask for with emphasis and with implication of having a right to do so”) the permission to “sift” Peter and the disciples. Embedded in the request is an oxymoron—the “demand” comes from someone who’s reduced to asking permission.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“Shrewd is a way of dealing with people—it means understanding their motives and understanding my own motives, and then discovering how I can reconcile the two.”
― Rick Lawrence, Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus

“When we face the bitter reality of our own insolvency and stop pretending we’re bigger and better than we really are, then we are freed to give our everything without worrying about whether it’s enough. Jesus makes it enough.”
― Rick Lawrence, Skin in the Game: Living an Epic Jesus-Centered Life

“shrewdness can operate like a powerful lever, knocking us off our guard and opening us to our desperate need for Jesus.”
― Rick Lawrence, Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus

“The only people who can say, “It is well with my soul,” are those who’ve been driven into desperate dependence on Jesus—those for whom the truth of His redemption, mercy, and love are not just “biblical principles” but water to a dying man in the desert.”
― Rick Lawrence, Skin in the Game: Living an Epic Jesus-Centered Life

“The fact that American Christianity is steeply declining is no longer debated. It is declining because it has been infected by a host of destructive pathogens—materialism, politics, consumerism, apathy, legalism, celebrity worship, and culture warring—to name just a few. As Rick Lawrence so eloquently argues, we are losing the “authentic Jesus” and replacing Him with an “edited Jesus”—a Jesus designed to conform to our desires, our culture, our lifestyles, and our political ideologies. And this “edited Jesus” comes with a false gospel that is no longer appealing to our neighbors.”
― Rick Lawrence, Editing Jesus: Confronting the Distorted Faith of the American Church

“Jesus was always studying how things worked, then applying the right force in the right place at the right time to advance the kingdom of God on earth.”
― Rick Lawrence, Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus

“Awareness puts us into contact with the universe. It”
― Rick Lawrence, Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus

“JUST A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (A Kind of Preamble) We would very soon become contemptuous of a god whom we could figure out like a puzzle or learn to use like a tool. No, if God is worth our attention at all, he must be a God we can look up to—a God we must look up to. —Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“William Paul Young, author of The Shack, was asked by a LifeTree Café interviewer: What is God’s role in suffering? Young responded: [The question is,] how can there be a good God who has the power to stop evil and doesn’t[?] [T]here [are] a lot of ways to come at that question. One of the ways that has helped me the most is to realize that God respects His creation way more than we do, that God doesn’t just step in and say, “I’m sorry, you’ve crossed the line, you’re not allowed to think that, you’re not allowed to do that.”… God has not promised that He’s … going to stop it, but He’ll show up in the middle of it, and there is nothing so dead that He can’t grow something out of it. There’s nothing so broken that He can’t heal it. And there’s not anything so lost He can’t find it. So, this idea of His respect for the creation is a little bit of a shock to us because … we want God to mete … out [justice for us].… The question is, at what point does He stop our ability to choose evil? … [T]o love, you have to have the ability to choose. And at what point does He just stop that?”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“Our choice of roads does “make all the difference”—Jesus delivers a blunt truth when He says there are “many” who walk through the “wide” gate and travel the “broad” way that “leads to destruction” (Matt. 7:13).”
― Rick Lawrence, Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. —G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man A”
― Rick Lawrence, Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus

“When I was growing up, the “name it and claim it” theology was all the rage—it thrived because it perfectly fit the unique narcissism of an American culture that treats prayer like a bank robber’s note to the teller. “Name it and claim it” has now largely been scorned to death—but not in the kingdom of heaven, where the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are delightedly working around the clock to name and claim all who will rejoin their family. The last lines in Chapman’s song “God Is in Control,” as he grieves over a great sadness that is not as it “should be” or “could be,” offer an exclamation point on how it “will be”, when… We finally will see We’ll see with our own eyes He was always in control And we’ll sing holy, holy, holy is our God And we will finally really understand what it means11”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“True disciples are captured and carried away by Jesus. They are so “stuck” on him that the natural outcome of their attachment to him is a perpetual willingness to give over their life to him.”
― Rick Lawrence, Jesus Centered Youth Ministry: Moving from Jesus-Plus to Jesus-Only

“Finally, the dark tension that immersed my soul because of these apparently dichotomous experiences of God was resolved, at least a little, when I turned my focus away from Him directly and onto the world He created. In Romans 1:18–20 Paul explains: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (NIV). Paul is revealing a reality that my own curiosity and experience undergird: The whole world is a parable (a metaphoric treatise) describing God’s character and personality. His “invisible qualities” and “eternal power” and “divine nature” are clearly seen and understood by “what has been made.” Paul is saying that all created things are inherently a living biography of God—they tell God’s story, the makeup of His character and His kingdom, for those who will pay attention.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“You’re not following a script or a linear set of Bible truths. You’re following the nudges of a Person. And only a Person can guide us through the brambles of our chaotic and insensible lives, helping us emerge into the clearing of our calling.”
― Rick Lawrence, Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus

“HAS ASKED …” (Jesus in Conversation with the Enemy) Take heed to yourselves because the tempter will make his first and sharpest assault on you. If you will be leaders against him, he will not spare you. He bears the greatest malice against the man who is engaged in working the greatest damage against him. —Richard Baxter, seventeenth-century English Puritan church leader, poet, hymn writer, and theologian”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“For thousands of years Satan has been reading one book, and that book is the heart of man. —James Ryle”
― Rick Lawrence, Shrewd: Daring to Live the Startling Command of Jesus

“Pharisees angrily labeled Jesus a “blasphemer” for claiming He was no garden-variety prophet, but the very Son of God, they were not telling the truth, but their experience of His words was “accurate” within their frame of reference. In the same way, it’s accurate for us to label how God sometimes behaves as “brutal,” but it’s not true. Five years or so ago I was slowly realizing that I’d compartmentalized God for most of my life—I did not (could not?) understand the stories about Him, or His dealings with me, in an integrated way. No one had been more tender or kind to me in my life—there’s a greatness to God’s love for me that is palpable and … fundamental. There are tears I need to cry that release only when I’m alone in His presence. There are raw places in my heart that only He knows how to access and nurture. There are secrets about my soul that only He can speak to. But He has a fearsome and nearly inexplicable side—revealed in Joshua 10 and 11 and everywhere else in the Bible—that I didn’t know what to do with. It’s as if I was offered a five-course meal of God and told the waiter to take the beet-and-brussels-sprout salad back to the kitchen; I’d rejected the parts of God that made me feel sick to my stomach. And here’s something that served only to deepen my dissonance: I’d experienced a deeper love than I’ve ever known from Him during times of great brutality in my life.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand