Craig T. Owens

Check out my review of Discipleship In Crisis by Frank Viola by clicking here. Below are a few quotes which I found especially highlighter worthy.

“The presupposition that sits underneath virtually every sermon heralded today and most of the Christian books that fill bookstores is that we can live the Christian life if we just try hard enough. If we study our Bible more, pray more, witness more, tithe more, hear more sermons… then we can be like Jesus. But that’s not the gospel. The gospel teaches that just as Jesus couldn’t do anything of Himself, we can’t do anything of ourselves. Listen to the Lord again: ‘Without Me you can do nothing.’ The Christian life is impossible. It’s only Him-possible.” 

“The goal of the gospel is not to get you out of hell and into Heaven, but to get God out of Heaven and into you.”

“A person who is living by the tree of life doesn’t sit back and say, ‘Let me try to do good and avoid evil.’ Instead, he allows the life of God to flow with in and through him. He yields to the instincts, promptings, and energy of that God-life. … You see, ‘good’ is a form of life. And only God is good. Here are the two choices before you today: (1) The choice to intellectually know good from evil and to try to do good = the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; (2) Living by the life of God, which is goodness itself = the tree of life.”

“The only way you and I can truly imitate Jesus’ external lifestyle is to imitate His internal relationship with His Father.”

“What history teaches us is that men have never learned anything from it.” —G.W.F. Hegel

“In a word, you cannot raise the bar on discipleship without raising the bar on the ekklesia—the living experience of the body of Christ—the native habitat in which true disciple-making and transformation take place.”

“The New Testament talks about spiritual seeing, spiritual touching, spiritual tasting, spiritual handling, and spiritual healing. These are the faculties of your Spirit-regenerated human spirit. Jesus was very much in touch with His spiritual instincts, and hence, He ‘perceived’ things ‘in His spirit’ that were outside natural means. He did this as a man anointed by the Holy Spirit, not because He was God.”