Kevin DeYoung Quotes

There is no positive case for homosexual practice in the Bible and no historical background that will allow us to set aside what has been the plain reading of Scripture for twenty centuries. The only way to think the Bible is talking about every other kind of homosexuality except the kind we want to affirm is to be less than honest with the texts or less than honest with ourselves.

To paraphrase Titus 3:3, we live as slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in chaos and envy, hassled by others and hassling one another. We are all very busy, but not with what matters

But when interpreted correctly - paying attention to the original context, considering the literary genre, thinking through authorial intent - the Bible is never wrong in what it affirms and must never be marginalized as anything less than the last word on everything it teaches.

Some of us live a Christian life as if we're always under the stern, watchful eye of our Father and he is very impossible to please ... No, God delights even in our heartfelt attempts at obedience.

Here's good news: God is even more committed to your change, your growth, and your transformation than you are.

Nowhere do Jesus or the apostles ever treat the Old Testament as human reflections on the divine. It is instead the voice of the Holy Spirit (Acts 4:25; Heb. 3:7) and God's own breath (2 Tim. 3:16).

Christianity is so much more than getting your doctrine right, but it is not less.

God is still here, God is still real, and God has not gone anywhere, even if you have.

The person who never sets priorities is the person who does not believe in his own finitude.

My fear is that as we rightly celebrate, and in some quarters rediscover, all that Christ has saved us from, we are giving little thought and making little effort concerning all that Christ has saved us to.

If we had done something - almost anything, really - faithfully and humbly for God's glory for all that time, we could have made quite an impact. But if we do nothing, because we are always trying to figure out the perfect something, when it comes time to show what we did for the Lord, we will not have anything.

Legalism is a problem in the church, but so is anti-nomianism. Granted, I don't hear anyone saying, 'Let's continue in sin that grace may abound'. That's the worse form of antinomianism. But strictly speaking, antinomianism simply means no-law, and some Christians have very little place for the law in their pursuit of holiness.

Through faith we are joined to Christ and have union with him. That bond is unbreakable. Our union with Christ is an established fact, guaranteed for all eternity by the indwelling of the Spirit. When we sin, our union with Christ is not in jeopardy. But our communion is. It is possible for believers to have more or less of God's favor.

The work of the Holy Spirit is to bring glory to Christ by taking what is his - his teaching, the truth about his death and resurrection - and making it known. The Spirit does not work indiscriminately without the revelation of Christ in view. Arguably, the Holy Spirit's most important work is to glorify Christ, and he does not do this apart from shining the spotlight on Christ for the elect to see and savor.

You'll never be a mature Christian until you understand that God remembers his promises and forgets your sins.

God does expect us to say no to a whole lot of good things so that we can be freed up to say yes to the most important things he has for us.

The world stands for everything that opposes the will of God.

We don't get to pick the age we will live in, and we don't get to choose all the struggles we will face. Faithfulness is ours to choose; the shape of faithfulness is God to determine.

I can turn every "is" into "ought ".

Justification is God's declaration that we, though guilty sinners, are righteous in God's eyes.

No one who truly delights in God's word will be indifferent to the disregarding of it.

Let us shout of our God from the rooftops, that the whole world would stand in silence before him.

Wristband). The gospel is not a message about what we need to do for God, but about what God has done for us. So get them with the good news about who God is and what he has done for us.

Christians often equate holiness with activism and spiritual disciplines. And while it's true that activism is often the outgrowth of holiness and spiritual disciplines are necessary for the cultivation of holiness, the pattern of piety in the Scripture is more explicitly about our character. We put off sin and put on righteousness. We put to death the deeds of the flesh and put on Christ. To use the older language, we pursue mortification of the old man and the vivification of the new.

I try to keep in my mind the simple question: Am I trying to do good or make myself look good? Too many of our responsibilities get added to our plate when we are trying to please people, impress people, prove ourselves, acquire power, increase our prestige. All those motivations are about looking good more than doing good.

Some Christians need encouragement to think before they act. Others need encouragement to act after they think.

Here's the problem: when every sin is seen as the same, we are less likely to fight any sins at all. Why should I stop sleeping with my girlfriend when there will still be lust in my heart? Why pursue holiness when even one sin in my life means I'm Osama bin Hitler in God's eyes? Again, it seems humble to act as if no sin is worse than another, but we lose the impetus for striving and the ability to hold each other accountable when we tumble down the slip-n-slide of moral equivalence. All of a sudden the elder who battles the temptation to take a second look at the racy section of the Lands End catalog shouldn't dare exercise church discipline ont he young man fornicating with reckless abandon. When we can no longer see the different gradations among sins and sinners and sinful nations, we have not succeeded in respecting our own badness; we've cheapened God's goodness.

Worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange.

As a pastor, I addressed the sorts of issues I see people struggling with most and the issues talked about most directly and most frequently in the New Testament. That leads us to recurring concerns with sexual immorality, relational sins, and vices associated with the breaking of the Ten Commandments.

The antidote to busyness of soul is not sloth and indifference. The antidote is rest, rhythm, death to pride, acceptance of our own finitude, and trust in the providence of God.

I think the church is often a culprit in the busyness, especially in the evangelical church. Again, it's part of being Americans. Part of being evangelicals too is that we're highly activist. We are always diving in, willing to solve problems, and again there's a lot good there. But we also need the theological balance that the Kingdom is not ours to bring or ours to create.

One of the central motivations for holiness in the New Testament is to be who you are, to understand your identity and your union in Christ and to live that way.

We do not truly know what love is unless we know Christ.

Sanctification is not by surrender, but by divinely enabled toil and effort.

Decide" comes from the Latin word decidere, meaning "to cut off," which explains why decisions are so hard these days. We can't stand the thought of cutting off any of our options. If we choose A, we feel the sting of not having B and C and D. As a result, every choice feels worse than no choice at all.

You will not find what you want in the world, only in the Father.

Perhaps God brought you into this mess so that he can bring you out of it for his glory.

To affirm the sufficiency of Scripture is not to suggest that the Bible tells us everything we want to know about everything, but it does tell us everything we need to know about what matters most.

we think of our children as amazingly fragile and entirely moldable. Both assumptions are mistaken. It's harder to ruin our kids than we think and harder to stamp them for success than we'd like.

Christianity loses its scriptural fidelity and internal power when it no longer affirms both sola fide and the necessity of obedience.

One of the signs that you are walking in the light is that you are honest about having walked in the darkness.

The church needs lifers and those who can be counted on for the long haul.

The Luddite impulse is strong among Christians, and our first reaction is to rage against the machine.

The mystery of the Christian life is that Christ expects us to flee sin and the devil, but does not expect us to rid ourselves of either on this side of glory. Repentance is a way of life, and so is the pursuit of godliness. I wish every Christian could be reminded of these two things.

One of the most resilient and cherished myths of parenting is that parenting creates the child.

Worry and anxiety reflect our hearts' distrust in the goodness and sovereignty of God. Worry is a spiritual issue and must be fought with faith.

Your tolerance is not love. It is unfaithfulness.

And we need Christians who don't make others feel guilty (and don't feel guilty themselves) when one of us follows a different passion than another. I read and write a lot. That's what I do well. But that doesn't mean anyone should feel guilty for not reading and writing as much as I do. You have your own gifts and calling. We have to be okay with other Christians doing certain good things better and more often than we do.

We need the bible if we are to be competent Christians. The Bible will build us up so that we can endure suffering. It will give us discernment for difficult choices. It will make us strong enough to be patient with others and patient enough to respond with kindness when others hurt us. The Bible will get us up to bring meals to new moms and pray for people on their hospital beds. The bible equips us to be truth lovers and truth tellers. It sens us out to care for the poor and welcome the stranger. There is no limit on what the Bible can do for us, to us and through us.

Think of (the Kingdom) like the sun. As it peeks through on a cloudy day, we do not say the sun has grown. We say, 'The sun has broken through.' Our view of the sun has changed, or obstacles to the sun have been removed, but we have not changed the sun.

There is no righteousness that makes us right with God except for the righteousness of Christ. But for those who have been made right with God by grace alone through faith alone and therefore have been adopted into God's family, many of our righteous deeds are not only not filthy in God's eyes, they are exceedingly sweet, precious, and pleasing to him.

Try this New Year's resolution: I won't check my phone, my tablet, or my computer until I've first read a chapter in my Bible.

Jesus submitted his will to the Scriptures, committed his brain to studying the Scriptures, and humbled his heart to obey the Scriptures. The Lord Jesus, God's Son and our Savior, believed his Bible was the word of God down to the sentences, to the phrases, to the words, to the smallest letter, to the tiniest specks - and that nothing in all those specks and in all those books in his Holy Bible could ever be broken.

There is no way to work your way to God. There is no way to climb up to heaven. There is only one way, and that is through Christ.

No secondary, man-made text can replace or be allowed to subvert our allegiance to and knowledge of the Bible.

They've willingly embraced Christian freedom but without an equal pursuit of Christian virtue. Among

Nothing in the Bible encourages us to give sex the exalted status it has in our culture, as if finding our purpose, our identity, and our fulfillment all rest with what we can or cannot do with our private parts.

Christ justifies no one whom he does not also sanctify.

Some Christians make the mistake of pitting love against law, as if the two were mutually exclusive. You either have a religion of love or a religion of law. But such an equation is profoundly unbiblical.

Busyness does not mean you are a faithful or fruitful Christian. It only means you are busy, just like everyone else. And like everyone else, your joy, your heart and your soul are in danger.

God, don't let anything unpleasant happen to anyone. Make everything in the world nice for everyone." And when we aren't praying this kind of prayer, we are praying for God to tell us that everything will turn out fine. That's often what we are asking for when we pray to know the will of God. We aren't asking for holiness, or righteousness, or an awareness of sin. We want God to tell us what to do so everything will turn out pleasant for us.

Sometimes Christians live in a terror of universal obligation: AIDS over here, people to be saved over here, a crushing sense of low-level guilt every day of our lives. Question to ask: Where has God put me right now? I need to say no to a whole bunch of other things because if I don't say no I can't say yes to others.

The Christian's comfort: I am not my own. I do not make my own rules or create my own identity. There is one who made me and can save me.

I tell my congregation at times, "You don't have to feel conviction for every sermon. Some of you are actually obedient and faithful in this area." Not perfectly, of course, but truly and sincerely.

There is no other book like the Bible. It reveals a different kind of wisdom, comes from a different source, and tells of a different love.

It's true that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1), but this does not mean God will condone all our thoughts and behaviors. Though in Christ he overlooks our sins in a judicial sense, he is not blind to them.

When was the last time we took a verse like, "Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving" (Eph. 5:4) and even began to try to apply this to our conversation, our movies, our YouTube clips, our television and commercial intake? What does it mean that there must not be even a hint of immorality among the saints (v. 3)? It must mean something. In our sex-saturated culture, I would be surprised if there were not at least a few hints of immorality in our texts and tweets and inside jokes. And what about our clothes, our music, our flirting, and the way we talk about people who aren't in the room?

Jesus understood his mission. He was not driven by the needs of others, though he often stopped to help hurting people. He was not driven by the approval of others, though he cared deeply for the lost and the broken. Ultimately, Jesus was driven by the Spirit. He was driven by his God-given mission. He knew his priorities and did not let the many temptations of a busy life deter him from his task.

Am I trying to do good or to make myself look good?

We are busy because we try to do too many things. We do too many things because we say yes to too many people. We say yes to all these people because we want them to like us and we fear their disapproval.

The less we expect to suffer, the more devastating suffering is to bear.

Busyness kills more Christians than bullets.

Some opponents of the word of God come by their objections honestly, but others have never stopped to search the Scriptures for themselves. They've already decided the Bible is antiscience, antiwoman, and antigay, without bothering to define those terms or investigate the Bible with calm reason and an open mind.

We usually think of law leading us to gospel. And this is true- we see God's standards, see our sin, and then see our need for a Savior. But it's just as true that gospel leads to law ... the good news of the gospel leads to gracious instructions for obeying God.

Walking in the light means we pursue obedience and are honest about our remaining darkness.

Jesus knew the difference between urgent and important. He understood that all the good things he could do were not necessarily the things he ought to do.

The Church acts as a sort of embassy for the government of the King. It is an outpost of the Kingdom of God surrounded by the kingdom of darkness. Just as an embassy is meant to showcase the life of a nation to the surrounding people, so the Church is meant to manifest the life of the Kingdom of God to the people around it.

Any gospel which says only what you must do and never announces what Christ has done is no gospel at all.

Fueling all of our conflict against Satan is prayer: we are to pray "at all times in the Spirit" for the promotion and success of the gospel (Eph. 6:18). We need to pray, as 1 Thessalonians 5:17 also teaches, "without ceasing.

Keep sharing the good news; we have not yet exhausted the number of God's elect.

Fourth, Jesus himself reinforces the normativity of the Genesis account.

The central plotline of the story of Scripture was set in motion: a holy God making a way to dwell in the midst of an unholy people.

We have been stuffed full of praise for mediocrity and had our foibles diagnosed away with hyphenated jargon and pop psychology.

Battling busyness is a community response.

As Christians, we worship a victimized Lord. We should expect to suffer and should have particular compassion on those who hurt emotionally and physically. But we do not resemble the Suffering Servant when we take pains to show off our suffering.

God gets glory when his strength shines in our weakness.

The world' is not another way of saying 'the people around us'. The world is everything that opposes the will of God. To put it another way, worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal, and righteousness look strange. In every society there is a principle of Babylon that makes war agains the children of God.

When we use old confessions and catechisms, we help teach our people that their faith is an old faith, shared by millions over many centuries. We also help them realize that other Christians have asked the same questions.

All our sins are offensive to God and require forgiveness. But over and over the Bible teaches that some sins are worse than others.

You will never see the preciousness of a Savior, if you do not see the reality of your sin.

If we aren't prepared to be counter-cultural we aren't ready to be Christians.

You can exaggerate your authority in handling the Scriptures, but you cannot exaggerate the Scriptures' authority to handle you. You can use the word of God to come to wrong conclusions, but you cannot find any wrong conclusions in the word of God.

The only chains God wants us to wear are the chains of righteousness
not the chains of hopeless subjectivism, not the shackles of risk-free living, not the fetters of horoscope decision making
just the chains befitting a bond servant of Christ Jesus. Die to self. Live for Christ. And then do what you want, and go where you want, for God's glory.

Don't just ask God for what we want. Let him teach us what we should want.

When "everything is awesome" we may miss what (and Who) is truly deserving of awe.

He calls us to run hard after Him, His commands, and His glory. The decision to be in God's will is not the choice between Memphis or Fargo or engineering or art; it's the daily decision we face to seek God's kingdom or ours, submit to His lordship or not, live according to His rules or our own.

It used to be, as far as I can tell, that Christian parents basically tried to feed their kids, clothe them, teach them about Jesus, and keep them away from explosives. Now our kids have to sleep on their backs (no, wait, their tummies; no, never mind, their backs), while listening to Baby Mozart and surrounded by scenes of Starry, Starry Night.

Our feelings matter. Our stories matter. Our friends matter. But ultimately we must search the Scriptures to see what matters most.

Taking a strange book seriously, Leviticus 18, 20

You cannot be in Christ and be indifferent to the sin in your life.