Jason Scott > Jason's Quotes

“This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.”
― Martin Luther

“The fact that Jesus came to earth where he suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus, God gives us an up-close and personal look at his response to human suffering. All our questions about God and suffering should, in fact, be filtered through what we know about Jesus.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“As we rely on God, and trust his Spirit to mold us in his image, true hope takes shape within us, “a hope that does not disappoint.”We can literally become better persons because of suffering. Pain, however meaningless it may seem at the time, can be transformed. Where is God when it hurts? He is in us—not in the things that hurt—helping to transform bad into good.We can safely say that God can bring good out of evil; we cannot say that God brings about the evil in hopes of producing good.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“We feel pain as an outrage; Jesus did too, which is why he performed miracles of healing. In Gethsemane, he did not pray, “Thank you for this opportunity to suffer,” but rather pled desperately for an escape. And yet he was willing to undergo suffering in service of a higher goal. In the end he left the hard questions (“if there be any other way . . .”) to the will of the Father, and trusted that God could use even the outrage of his death for good.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“Well and good if all things change, O Lord God, provided I am rooted in You.”
― St. John of the Cross

“Faith is a dark night for man, but in this very way it gives him light.”
― St. John of the Cross

“Becoming obsessed with what people think is the quickest way to forget about what God thinks.”
― Craig Groeschel

“The reality is that the Lord never calls the qualified; He qualifies the called.”
― Henry Blackaby

“Stand up and wash away this shame from the face of Christ! They are spitting in His face.”
― Sabina Wurmbrand

“The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say. It is an impatient, inattentive listening, that despises the brother and is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of the other person. This is no fulfillment of our obligation, and it is certain that here too our attitude toward our brother only reflects our relationship to God. It is little wonder that we are no longer capable of the greatest service of listening that God has committed to us, that of hearing our brother's confession, if we refuse to give ear to our brother on lesser subjects. Secular education today is aware that often a person can be helped merely by having someone who will listen to him seriously, and upon this insight it has constructed its own soul therapy, which has attracted great numbers of people, including Christians. But Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“The first service one owes to others in a community involves listening to them. Just as our love for God begins with listening to God’s Word, the beginning of love for others is learning to listen to them. God’s love for us is shown by the fact that God not only gives God’s Word, but also lends us God’s ear.

We do God’s work for our brothers and sisters when we learn to listen to them.

So often Christians, especially preachers, think that their only service is always to have to ‘offer’ something when they are together with other people.

They forget that listening can be a greater service…Christians who can no longer listen to one another will soon no longer be listening to God either.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“Jesus’s command to follow him is a command to align our loves and longings with his—to want what God wants, to desire what God desires, to hunger and thirst after God and crave a world where he is all in all—a vision encapsulated by the shorthand “the kingdom of God.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry captures this well: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
― Deitrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship