Jen Wilkin > Quotes

“The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“If we want to feel deeply about God, we must learn to think deeply about God.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“We will not wake up ten years from now and find we have passively taken on the character of God.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“We must make a study of our God: what he loves, what he hates, how he speaks and acts. We cannot imitate a God whose features and habits we have never learned. We must make a study of him if we want to become like him. We must seek his face.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“You will never turn from a sin you don’t hate.”
― Jen Wilkin

“The Bible does tell us who we are and what we should do, but it does so through the lens of who God is. The knowledge of God and the knowledge of self always go hand in hand.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“I believe that a woman who loses interest in her Bible has not been equipped to love it as she should. The God of the bible is too lovely to abandon for lesser pursuits.”
― Jen Wilkin

“We humans must confess, 'I am because he is.' Only God can say, 'I AM WHO I AM'.”
― Jen Wilkin, None Like Him: 10 Ways God Is Different from Us

“We can't fully appreciate the sweetness of the New Testament without the savory of the Old Testament.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“finding greater pleasure in God will not result from pursuing more experiences of him, but from knowing him better. It will result from making a study of the Godhead.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“For years I viewed my interaction with the Bible as a debit account: I had a need, so I went to the Bible to withdraw an answer. But we do much better to view our interaction with the Bible as a savings account: I stretch my understanding daily, I deposit what I glean, and I patiently wait for it to accumulate in value, knowing that one day I will need to draw on it.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Bible literacy matters because it protects us from falling into error. Both the false teacher and the secular humanist rely on biblical ignorance for their messages to take root, and the modern church has proven fertile ground for those messages. Because we do not know our Bibles, we crumble at the most basic challenges to our worldview. Disillusionment and apathy eat away at our ranks. Women, in particular, are leaving the church in unprecedented numbers.1”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“How do you move a mountain? One spoonful of dirt at a time. Chinese proverb”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Our patterns of work and rest reveal what we believe to be true about God and ourselves. God alone requires no limits on his activity. To rest is to acknowledge that we humans are limited by design. We are created for rest just as surely as we are created for labor. An inability or unwillingness to cease from our labors is a confession of unbelief, an admission that we view ourselves as creator and sustainer of our own universes (pp. 64-65).”
― Jen Wilkin, Ten Words to Live By: Delighting in and Doing What God Commands

“If I am fully known and not rejected by God, how much more ought I to extend grace to my neighbor, whom I know only in part?”
― Jen Wilkin, None Like Him: 10 Ways God Is Different from Us

“A vision of God high and lifted up reveals to me my sin and increases my love for him. Grief and love lead to genuine repentance, and I begin to be conformed to the image of the One I behold.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Here is a remarkable truth: God is able to bring eternal results from our time-bound efforts. This is what Jesus intimates when he tells us to store up treasure in heaven rather than on earth. When we invest our time in what has eternal significance, we store up treasure in heaven. This side of heaven, the only investments with eternal significance are people. “Living this day well” means prioritizing relationships over material gain. We cannot take our stuff with us when we die, but, Lord willing, we may feed the hungry and clothe the needy in such a way that an eternal result is rendered. We may speak words that, by the favor of the Lord, transform into the very words of life. This is the calling of the missionary, the magnate, and the mother of small children: spend your time to impact people for eternity.”
― Jen Wilkin, None Like Him: 10 Ways God Is Different from Us

“Sanctification is the process of learning increasing dependence, not autonomy.”
― Jen Wilkin, None Like Him: 10 Ways God Is Different from Us

“For the believer wanting to know God’s will for her life, the first question to pose is not “What should I do?” but “Who should I be?”
― Jen Wilkin, In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character

“It is not coincidental that a lack of discernment and a neglected Bible are so often found in company.”
― Jen Wilkin, In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character

“Psalm 139 is not a psalm about me, fearfully and wonderfully made. It is a psalm about my Maker, fearful and wonderful. It is a psalm to inspire awe.”
― Jen Wilkin, None Like Him: 10 Ways God Is Different from Us

“The Bible does not want to be neatly packaged into three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day increments. It does not want to be reduced to truisms and action points. It wants to introduce dissonance into your thinking, to stretch your understanding. It wants to reveal a mosaic of the majesty of God one passage at a time, one day at a time, across a lifetime.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Forgiving lavishly does not mean that we continue to place ourselves in harm's way. The Bible takes great pains to address the dangers of keeping company with those who perpetually harm others. Those who learn nothing from their past mistakes are termed fools. While we may forgive the fool for hurting us, we do not give the fool unlimited opportunity to hurt us again. To do so would be to act foolishly ourselves. When Jesus extends mercy in the Gospels, he always does so with an implicit or explicit, "Go and sin no more." When our offender persists in sinning against us, we are wise to put boundaries in place. Doing so is itself an act of mercy toward the offender. By limiting his opportunity to sin against us, we spare him further guilt before God. Mercy never requires submission to abuse, whether spiritual, verbal, emotional, or physical.”
― Jen Wilkin, In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character

“Every good endeavor should be done with purpose. Without a clear sense of purpose, our efforts to do a good thing well can flounder. But with a clear purpose, we are far more likely to persevere.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Knowing who God is matters to us. It changes not only the way we think about him, but the way we think about ourselves. The knowledge of God and the knowledge of self always go hand in hand.”
― Jen Wilkin, None Like Him: 10 Ways God Is Different from Us

“Just as my assurance of salvation rests in the fact that God cannot change, my hope of sanctification rests in the fact that I can”
― Jen Wilkin, None Like Him: 10 Ways God Is Different from Us

“If we focus on our actions without addressing our hearts, we may end up merely as better behaved lovers of self.”
― Jen Wilkin, In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character

“When women grow increasingly lax in their pursuit of Bible literacy, everyone in their circle of influence is affected. Rather than acting as salt and light, we become bland contributions to the environment we inhabit and shape, indistinguishable from those who have never been changed by the gospel. Home, church, community, and country desperately need the influence of women who know why they believe what they believe, grounded in the Word of God. They desperately need the influence of women who love deeply and actively the God proclaimed in the Bible.”
― Jen Wilkin

“Women teachers, let's shift the focus from 'you are a daughter of the King' to 'behold your King'.”
― Jen Wilkin

“The second thing I got backwards in my approach to the Bible was the belief that my heart should guide my study. The heart, as it is spoken of in Scripture, is the seat of the will and emotions. It is our “feeler” and our “decision-maker.” Letting my heart guide my study meant that I looked for the Bible to make me feel a certain way when I read it. I wanted it to give me peace, comfort, or hope. I wanted it to make me feel closer to God.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds