Jefferson Bethke Quotes

We love God by loving his people.

The biggest difference between between religious people and gospel-loving people is that religious people see certain people as the enemies, when Jesus-followers see sin as the enemy.

The problem with wearing masks is even when we receive love, it's really the mask that is receiving the love, not us. Whatever gets thrown at us will always hit the mask and can't penetrate our souls. So it is with God's grace. Every second of every day he pursues us and offers grace, but until we take off our masks, we will never be able to accept it.

We know that sometimes the best place to see the stars in all their glory is the wilderness.

Self-righteousness is exactly that - thinking that your righteousness (your standing before God and others) relies only on yourself. You think you can earn it. You think it's about what you do or don't do. Because of this you are driven to act only in ways that continue to prop up how awesome you think you are. It produces a very prideful I-have-all-the-answers-and-you-are-all-idiots type of arrogance.

And so the beautiful truth is that since we were created by a community, we were created for community. If we are made in God's image and God is a community, then that means we are rejecting our humanness when we live isolated and alone. That's fundamental to what it means to be human. That is intimacy.

He came not to save people but to save his entire creation, which we are a part of.

No one is more religious than the Christian who gives grace to everyone except the religious older-brother types. God gives grace to the younger and the older. No one is past redemption. No one is past grace. All God wants is for both the religious and the rebellious to come into the party. We can wallow in self-righteousness, or we can enjoy all that is our Father's.

A crooked stick can still draw a straight line, and a messed-up dude like me can still write about an awesome God.

I'd thought that when I started to follow Jesus, things were supposed to get better. If that was true, why was it getting worse? Why did it hurt more instead of less? Maybe it's because when we're dead, we can't feel anything. But once we're alive, that means our senses are too. Can a dead person feel chaos?

God should get a lot more glory for things than we give him.

I think thanksgiving is the secret to a healthy Christian life.

There is something so tough about grace, though, that some people refuse to accept it. Other world religions or worldviews make ladders we need to climb to get to heaven, when the real Christian faith can only be lived by army crawling to get it. We have to get low. We have to humble ourselves. And I promise joy is on the other side.

God gets glory for everything, and everyone eventually will glorify God, be it his grace or his justice.

His face, and his face alone, needs to be the driving force of our lives. If it's not, we are worshiping something else, and sooner or later that idol will be taken from us by a trial, circumstance, or death.

God's grace is so much more powerful of a motivator than fear. Love is the deepest motivator. Only love can produce not only willing obedience but also lasting obedience. If you are being motivated by fear, rules, anger, or some other emotion, it usually only lasts while that emotion is there. Love, being a state of the heart, lasts even past the initial emotion.

When you concentrate on God, you can actually enjoy his gifts in a meaningful way. But when you pursue just the gifts themselves, they become the product of despair rather than joy.

Grace always wins.

In a postmodern world where all religious activity is seen as what we do for God, we need to proclaim Christianity is about what God has done for us.

New Testament Christians were most known by their love for their neighbors, but today we are most known for our segregation of the lowly.

As God's children, we are to use our lives knowing they reflect back to him and bear his image. Too often, instead of acting like mirrors pointing back to Jesus, we try to act like billboards, advertising ourselves.

The reality is that it's harder for religious people to come to Christ than anyone else because they think they are already good to go.

What if we can't be anything we want to be? What if the goal isn't to hustle but to be faithful? What if the magic of life is found in the mundane, and it comes when we're faithful?

But Jesus isn't rocking a cardigan, and he doesn't talk softly through his nose. He's a roaring lion.

Because the truth is, no matter how ugly or how deep the scars, there is always hope.

Many people had been sold religion with a nice Jesus sticker slapped on it. Many people had been burned by so-called Christians. Many people had been abused, hurt, mistreated, and maligned all in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But what their souls were craving was the true Jesus. The One who heals. The One who redeems. The One who gives life.

Both fear and love might cause obedience, but only love causes joy.

Without the rain there is no beauty in the summer. Rain gives depth, it gives beauty, and it gives roots. If a plant is only exposed to sun and no rain, it becomes dry, flimsy, and dead. Too many times we curse the rain in our lives-suffering, trials, hardships-but the truth is without rain nothing grows.

God is faithful.

Our lives on earth aren't just placeholders until we go to heaven. We are to create, cultivate, and redeem while we're here. The misconception, I've realized, has come from a lack of knowledge of why we were created.

And frankly the people who seem to best understand that we are creatures of love and desire, not thoughts, are the current giant tech companies of the world. Think about how Apple exists with a temple-like space (tell me their retail stores don't feel so "set apart" from the ordinary retail design that it doesn't immediately conjure up sacred feelings) where you go to sacrifice (enormously large portions of your money) to obtain that which you are looking for - connection, meaning and depth. People stand in line all night, some even camping out on the sidewalk, for the latest device that offers those implicitly understood benefits. This phone can, and will, be more than a phone. I think it's even fair to say that Apple is a religion with Steve Jobs as a priest (who has become a venerated secular saint after his death), mediating between man and God to give us what we want. Connection. Power. God-like knowledge of good and evil. And we take the phone, and we crouch and bend over. Usually with heads bowed. Laser focused on something. Blocking out all around us. We are silent and solemn. Tending not to speak. And then we perform a certain behaviour over and over and over again. Sound familiar? Swipe.

Only when we truly know rest and celebration can we know how to work and enjoy it. We work from rest, not to get rest.

Having joy in God not because of circumstances but despite circumstances is what makes God look great - and it's a true joy that comes from within.

Relationships are not efficient; they are messy, time-consuming, and unpredictable.

When I think of whisper, I think of tenderness, gentleness, beauty. And that was God's voice. The hard part with whispers, though, is we have to be listening for them. They are just loud enough that only the people listening will hear and those who are distracted won't.

The minute you think you have gotten on God's good side by your own behavior, you are naturally prone to demonize those who haven't.

Sometimes how we dialogue in today's culture is just as important as why we dialogue.

Most of the time we're persecuted not because we love Jesus, but because we're prideful, arrogant jerks who don't love the real Jesus. We're often judgmental, hypocritical, and legalistic while claiming to follow a Jesus who is forgiving, authentic, and loving. Sometimes people will hate us because we preach the same gospel Jesus preached, and sometimes people will hate us because we're jerks. Let's not do the second one and blame it on the first.

One of the most dangerous things about the Bible is that it is big enough to say whatever we want it to say if we are willing to remove the context.

Loving an enemy means loving "them.

The problem with fear-based Christianity is we only obey when the fear is there. If you only want to obey God when you feel threatened by his commands, it's not God you worship, but your fear.

In a weird way it seems the only qualification for us to be justified is to be ungodly. It's like God is saying the only way to qualify is to admit you don't qualify.

We often miss that our "righteous acts" are "filthy" before God. Not just our bad days, but our extremely good days too!

Religious people see "them" as the problem; Jesus-followers see "us" as the problem.

You can bring God glory wherever he has already placed you. You don't need to feel guilty that you're a chef. You don't need to feel guilty that you only paint, but your dad wants you to be a pastor. Too many times Christians want to go into ministry because of outside pressures by their parents or pastors, not realizing where they already are is their mission field.

Are you a Genesis 1 Christian or a Genesis 3 Christian? Do you start your story with shalom or with sin? Shalom is the Hebrew word for "peace." For rhythm. For everything lining up exactly how it was meant to line up. Shalom is happening in those moments when you are at the dinner table for hours with good friends, good food, and good wine. Shalom is when you hear or see something and can't quite explain it, but you know it's calling and stirring something deep inside of you. Shalom is a sunset, that sense of exhaustion yet satisfaction from a hard day's work, creating art that is bigger than itself. Shalom is enemies being reconciled by love.

Trying to live without community is like trying to live without oxygen. We weren't created to do it.

You can worship God by cleaning up baby puke with a thankful heart just as much as if you were to be writing a Bible study for thousands of people. This is because the way you train that child, the way you teach him the ways of Jesus, and the way you display grace and truth firsthand is God displaying his ministry of reconciliation through you.

I hear a lot of people say that the fear of death and the fear of public speaking are two of the main fears in my generation, but I disagree. I think it's the fear of silence. We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phones, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence, because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are. We fear silence like it's an invisible monster, gnawing at us, ripping us open, and showing us our dissatisfaction. Silence is terrifying.

Many Christians don't really care about God; they just want to use him to get what they truly want - status, a nice job, a car, forgiveness - you name it.

There is an ancient call in us that taps the spigot of our desires until the ritual becomes worshipful and mundane

God uniquely highlights marriage as one of the main ways we know who he is and how he relates to us.

Grace just flows. It's a one-way type of love that runs the conduit directly from God's heart to ours.

We have branded Jesus beyond recognition. Church has become a business. Jesus is our marketing scheme. We create bookstores, T-shirts, bracelets, bumper stickers, and board games all in the name of Jesus.

It's only when we understand that in Jesus we are cleansed, washed, and renewed that we see our sin fall by the wayside.

One of my favorite things about following Jesus is I get to drop the act, admit I'm not good enough, walk in freedom-and that's good news.

God is most glorified in our lives when we show him to be most glorious regardless of what is thrown our way.

As I've heard said, "Of 100 unsaved men, one might read the Bible, but the other 99 will read the Christian."1 Ouch.

Love others so radically they wonder why.

As Christians, God doesn't promise us an easy life, but he does promise to be with us in whatever we go through. He will never leave us or forsake us.

We can exhaust money. We can exhaust sex. We can exhaust our jobs. But we can't exhaust God. He gives us the one thing that will never run out, never get old, and never fail: himself!

Don't buy the lie that a full schedule means productivity or holiness or achievement.

I didn't know it then, but God broke me to fix me because he loved me.

My "Christianity" was once again just the American religion of work hard, do good, feel good, and maybe God will say, "We good.

I was just lying there, swimming in my own shame and guilt, when this still small voice whispered into the depths of my soul: I love you. I desire you. I delight in you. I saw you were going to that before I went to the cross, and I still went.

People don't flaunt their brokenness when trying to prove themselves.

The problem with trying to be relevant is it makes us copy what culture is already doing. To be relevant, you have to copy what is cool. So we put our mouths on the tailpipe of secular culture in hopes we can recycle some of it and use it for ourselves. The problem with this is that it automatically puts us ten to fifteen years behind culture because rather than setting the precedent, we are copying their systems. This is where we get a huge section of Christian apparel and coffee mugs that simply copy secular logos. My favorite is the shirt with the words "Holy Spirit" printed in the same font and logo as Sprite. Or the one with "A bread crumb and a fish" instead of Abercrombie and Fitch. We call it redeeming, but it's actually stealing. Making bad art is bad in and of itself, but if we are Christians, this takes on a whole other level of weight. Because we are called to mirror and reflect God, everything we do should give people a proper picture of who he is.

The most dangerous thing about the human heart is that we want to reverse the roles by making God the responder and us the initiators.

Thinking you can earn eternal life by just reading the Bible a lot is like staring at the windshield while driving, hoping you'll get where you want to go. The windshield isn't there to be looked at; it is designed to be looked through.

Heaven isn't a place for people who are scared of hell; it's for people who love Jesus.

Let me be straight with you: I'm not really qualified to write this book. I don't have a Bible or seminary degree. I'm not a pastor or a counselor. I don't know biblical languages and don't know how to do exegesis - whatever that even is. Again, I'm just a messed-up twenty-three-year-old guy. But I know that God has quite the sense of humor. It only takes a quick peek into Christian history to realize I'm almost the exact type of person he is looking for. A wise man two thousand years ago put it this way: "But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong."1 Paul tells us that God loves using people who are useless by worldly standards - because then he gets all the credit. A crooked stick can still draw a straight line, and a messed-up dude like me can still write about an awesome God. I've tasted grace and can't help but tell others about it.

We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phone, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence, because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are.

The more I read, the more I felt the Bible looked a lot more like the movie 300 than the movie Pleasantville.

We've lost the real Jesus - or at least exchanged him for a newer, safer, sanitized, ineffectual one. We've created a Christian subculture that comes with its own set of customs, rules, rituals, paradigms, and products that are nowhere near the rugged, revolutionary faith of biblical Christianity. In our subculture Jesus would have never been crucified - he's too nice.

Even though there are few to no credible passages - properly interpreted - in Scripture that call things such as alcohol and tattoos utterly sinful, some fundamentalists insist they are.

The Bible rarely tells me to fight against someone who doesn't believe what I believe, but it frequently tells me to fight against my sin and the disease in me that's drawing me away from Jesus.

Thankfulness is the quickest path to joy.

Isn't that the story for many of us in America? Christianity is our default setting.

Even beautiful things such as forgiveness, clear conscience, joy in life, and adoption into the family of God are all benefits of being a Christian, but not the ultimate goal.

When Jesus and his righteousness are ultimate, then you actually see evil as the source of evil,

The word worship is defined by glory and thanksgiving. We are worshiping when we give glory to something. Whatever we give glory to, we sacrifice for.

If getting more girls and drinking more beer meant I'd be 'cool,' then why not? But I soon discovered that lifestyle was like drinking saltwater. If you are extremely thirsty, you'll settle for it, but it just makes you thirstier.

if you care more about flaunting your Christian freedom than promoting Christian unity, you're probably not free. You are actually a slave to your so-called freedom.

One of the best barometers of a true Christian's heart is to see what kind of people he attracts and what kind of people he repels.

I don't know where you are or where you're coming from, but I know Jesus has a better plan for your life than you do. He is a better king of your life than you are. No one has caused me more hurt, shame, guilt, and pain than me. He knows, and he rescues me. He can do the same for you. Just come as you are.

God is constant. Always forgiving. Always loving. Never changing.