Craig T. Owens

I really loved this book by Pastor Mike Glenn. Check out my review here. These are 10 quotes I loved from this book:

“Following Jesus is much more than being careful not to do wrong. …Defining your life by what you oppose makes your life small….”

“For too many of us, Christianity has been narrowed down to sin management. Sure, we all want to go to Heaven. But under the sin-management paradigm, getting to Heaven is no longer about Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf and His invitation to follow Him in a new life. The focus on sin makes getting to Heaven a matter of keeping score. You get points for doing good things and lose points for doing bad things. Being a Christian becomes a spiritual frequent-flier program. If you work at it hard enough and accumulate enough points, you can fly for free.”

“As long as our first thought is What do I need to avoid?, the guiding influence in our lives is sin, not Christ. To be sure, we are working hard to avoid things that God disapproves of, but we are missing God in the process. The hard work of avoiding a mistake or misstep looms so large that God gets blocked from our view. If all we think about is sin, even when we’re thinking of ways to avoid it, we increase our chance of failure. This is the irony of sin-management Christianity.”

“No matter how much [your circumstances] look like ‘no,’ God does everything possible to turn then into a ‘yes.’”

“God said ‘no’ to sin because it violates His holiness, but wanting us not to break His laws is not His number-one reason for opposing sin. He hates sin because it destroys the people He loves. Jesus took into Himself the ‘no’ of our sin and died in God’s mercy so we might find our ‘yes.’” 

“Christianity is not an escape from the past but redemption of the past.”

“Why do we think that we alone committed a sin so horrible it exceeds Jesus’ ability to forgive? This kind of thinking is the ultimate heresy. What we are saying is the death of Jesus was payment enough for everyone else’s sin, but our sin is so monstrous that His death isn’t enough to cover it.”

“The gospel message isn’t ‘Do these ten things, and you can get to God.’ The gospel message is ‘The Shepherd is still looking for lost sheep.’”

“The Christian teaching is that people are extremely valuable indeed. But our value is not based on the promise of exceptional achievement or a positive feeling about ourselves. It is grounded in the reality of Who God is and what He has done for us in Christ.”

“What unifies us as believers is our shared relationship with Jesus Christ, not the protocol of a particular discipleship process.”