Matt Chandler Quotes

My understanding from the Word of God is that I am supposed to preach for the maturation of the believer with a view that lost people are there.

Living a life worthy of the gospel does not mean pretending to be perfect. Instead, it means having the humility to think of others as better than ourselves (Phil. 2:3).

The gospel creates a new reality that deepens our understanding of the world and our place in it.

We are saved, sanctified, and sustained by what Jesus did for us on the cross and through the power of his resurrection. If you add to or subtract from the cross, even if it is to factor in biblically mandated religious practices like prayer and evangelism, you rob God of his glory and Christ of his sufficiency. Romans

Christ distributes courage through community. He dissipates doubt through fellowship. Max Lucado

Fearless faith results from holding on to Christ as our treasure. Gospel courage comes from gospel preciousness. If we truly believed that our reward in heaven far surpasses all the comfort and convenience and collections of the world, we, too, would be willing to consider them all as loss.

Because a God who is ultimately most focused on his own glory will be about the business of restoring us, who are all broken images of him. His glory demands it. So we should be thankful for a self-sufficient God whose self-regard is glorious.

We know that what we find physically attractive has been for the most part culturally informed, it is wise to acknowledge that God has hardwired us for the commitment of companionship over and above sexual attraction or physical pleasure. Companionship brings deeper joy and greater pleasure than the mere physical could ever bring by itself. If you have physical attraction and no companionship in your relationship, you'll eventually be miserable; but if you have deep companionship with each other, physical attraction isn't as important and becomes less and less so as time passes. In the movie Cast Away, we

I preach hard against that idea and plead with people to make war against sin. I tell them it's not going to be easy. Some people are meant to wrestle with their sin a long time before God brings them to freedom, but let's wrestle. Let's fight. Let's do something besides just complain.

One of the big lies with sin is that we are already waist-deep and might as well just plunge in.

Really, all frustration is birthed out of unmet expectations, and so is nearly every conflict.

I learned very early that people need to have a good grasp of God's goodness and God's sovereignty.

The Word, the Gospel, creates not just people individually but A people collectively

Worship shadows eternity and provides supernatural encouragement.

Community is only as strong as what it's built upon.

Sin is the native language in every ZIP code.

Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God. (Heb. 6:1)

Expositing. John 14, the speaker explains that the Holy Spirit making His home with us involves Him exposing other areas of our lives for repentance, regeneration, and renewal.

Relationships, sex, and intimacy are God's ideas, and even though our selfish rebellion fractured God's good design, God reconciled everything back to himself through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ. This includes sex and relationships! Our gracious God has not left us in the dark.

It is in my internal and external struggles, when it feels like someone is river-dancing on my last nerve, that the fruit of the Spirit is developed.

As men and women get older, they get crustier and not more fun.

When everything considered valuable in life is seen to be nothing in comparison to the glory of Christ, you learn rather well that Christ alone is worth living for.

Forming culture is not a one-time event.

Our lamenting of God's "silence" while our Bible goes undisturbed is actually quite revealing, because we want new revelation while at the same time we refuse to be obedient to what we already know.

You are being discipled by something.

The speaker says one of the blessings of the family of God is that the enthusiasm of children influences their elders while experience seasons the younger members.

Our churches must be fully centered on Jesus and His work, or else death and emptiness is certain, regardless of the worship style or sermon series. Without the gospel, everything in a church is meaningless. And dead.

If the gospel of Jesus Christ is not at the center of a wedding ceremony, it is likely not going to be at the center of the marriage. This would be a grave mistake, however, as marriage itself is designed to be a great reflector of that gospel.

When the people in a church dwell together in the unity of the gospel and together pursue the building up of one another in love, they are providing fertile soil for the roots of deep joy. But

Some people have been in church for so long, been doing the "be a good Christian" thing for so long, that the very idea that they were chosen and determined for blamelessness before they'd started earning credit is very offensive. In our flesh, we tend to think that our holiness is the result of our spiritual elbow grease. We intellectually may agree to the doctrine of sola gratia, but we tend to live and act like we're saved by what Don Whitney calls "sola boot-strappa." That, however, is not the testimony of Scripture.

The marker of those who understand the gospel of Jesus Christ is that, when they stumble and fall, when they screw up, they run to God and not from him, because they clearly understand that their acceptance before God is not predicated upon their behavior but on the righteous life of Jesus Christ and his sacrificial death.

Maturing men and women, when tempted to fall prey to anxiety, go to the Lord, humble themselves, and hand their anxieties over, trusting Him to answer however He sovereignly sees fit. In their minds, they constantly dwell on what is true, right, honorable, excellent, just, and lovely - mind and heart in sync, maturing unto the Lord.

You don't really need to make a vow to stick with someone in the best of times. The inclination to run doesn't exist then. It's the low times the covenant is made for.

When the early Church recited the Apostles Creed, it was simultaneously their greatest act of rebellion, and their greatest act of submission.

Sex is a gift from God. It is meant to nurture intimacy in a marriage and forge a bonding of souls.

Preach the Gospel with your life.

If the doctrine of a church is that people outside of Christ will face an eternity in hell, yet the culture is one that does not celebrate conversions or evangelistic witness, the culture of the church will contradict its doctrinal stance by continually focusing inward instead of outward.

When God saves you, he doesn't do it because you gave him permission. He did it because he's God.

Find the things that stir your affections for Christ and saturate your life in them. Find the things that rob you of that affection and walk away from them. That's the Christian life as easy as I can explain it for you.

If you struggle with being able to run hard after the Lord because you feel so unworthy, so unclean, so unsteady, listen up: "While [you] were still weak, at the right time," God came to your rescue. And still does. And still is.

Faith doesn't mean an absence of fear. It means facing fear and trusting that God's goodness is greater.

The miracles of Jesus are signs of the right order of things. Jesus was not so much turning things upside down as turning them rightside up or, at least, giving his followers glimpses of the rightside up. The miracles of healing, deliverance, provision, and resurrection all reveal that God, through Jesus, is making all things new, that he is restoring what once was unbroken.

The more a church is tapped into the gospel, the more transformative power will be present by the Holy Spirit in that church. But the more that church gets away from the centrality of the gospel, the more a church will run on fumes, seeing people conformed to a pattern of religion rather than transformed by the Spirit of God.

For instance, if He wants your life, what are you going to do, eat spinach and go to pilates?

But God brings the rebirth. He restores what can't be restored. He takes what is brittle and broken and beyond all hope, and infuses His own life into dead spaces. Not just once, but again and again. Ever renewing. Ever revitalizing.

People don't like love, they like that flittery flirty feeling. They don't love love - love is sacrificial, love is ferocious, it's not emotive. Our culture doesn't love love, it loves the idea of love. It wants the emotion without paying anything for it.

We see in the backstory of Acts 16 the beautiful reconciliation that the gospel achieves, not just of unholy individuals to a holy God but superficially incompatible people to each other! Jesus takes strangers and makes them a family.

I have always deeply desired to be an honest man who said it when I struggled, stumbled and worried. I longed to be a man with real friends - friends who knew me at my worst and loved me.

Proverbs 31:30: Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.

While the good news of the gospel may not appeal to everyone, the bad news of the gospel still applies to everyone.

You will find, if you seriously study Scripture, that outside of the idea of hell, there is no more terrifying idea in the Bible than God setting you free to run in the imagination of your heart.

The drug of choice in the modern age is levity. We want everything to be light and bubbly. We just want to feel good.

Here is my question: Why don't we? Why are we so easily satisfied? Why is this sense of lustful, soul-deep angst so uncommon? Romans 8 tells us that it's not just creation, but we ourselves who groan in this way. But I don't see a lot of groaning in myself. I find myself far too easily satisfied with my relationship with the

The conviction that's underneath a lot of other statements is, I don't trust Gjod.

Religion is usually the tool the self-righteous man uses to exalt himself.

So what does it look like to live a life worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ? It looks like walking with, loving with, and doing life with those who are different from you. What binds you together is Christ. It looks like striving together to make Christ known. What motivates you is Christ. And it looks like standing with courage against all oppressors, natural or supernatural. What secures you is Christ.

What drives me mad in evangelical circles, including some young Reformed circles, is that there is often a sit-on-the-couch-and-wait-for-God-to-do-something mentality that is unbiblical and wicked. It's probably been true of every generation, but I can see it most clearly in the younger crowd. There seems to be so little war when it comes to sin.

Proverbs 12:15 says, "The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice." The

The great mercy of God was that while I was purposefully preparing God's people, He was purposefully preparing me.

Discipline will never bring about love for God, but love for God will bring about discipline.

There is a greater day coming, a greater reward coming, a greater life coming, and the purpose of life while we are alive is to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel, which holds the promise of life everlasting.

Every single person, whether religious or irreligious, actively worships. They have identified something bigger than themselves that they believe is worthy of their money, time, and the meditations of their hearts.

Without a heart transformed by the grace of Christ, we just continue to manage external and internal darkness.

When I think about sanctification, a couple things immediately pop into my head. One is how slow it actually is. I think everybody wants the silver-bullet, the thing that makes sanctification move like a superhighway rather than the dirt path that it is. The other is that, by in large, the greatest single asset in ongoing sanctification is a serious pursuit of joy in the face of Jesus Christ.

Guilt is more about what you do. Shame is more about who you are.

When sin becomes bitter, then Christ becomes sweet. Thomas Merton

He has broken the bonds that held us back. He has set us free. He has given us life. He has given us the empowering Spirit. So run! Make a break for it. Pursue Him and Him alone, with force, oomph, and passion. Why? To know Him. What stirs your affections for Jesus? What robs you of those affections for Christ? Answering those two questions is serious business, and there is joy to be had once you answer them!

God is not just intensely personal. He is infinitely powerful.

As we continue to look for "developmental deficiencies" in our maturation in Christ, how are you doing in the area of contentment? How quick is your impulse to find satisfaction in Christ, to go to the joy of the gospel in times of stress, frustration, disappointment, and trouble?

God is not in love with some future version of you. It's not you tomorrow that He loves and delights in. It's not you when you get your act together ... If you believe that Christ's love for you is a future love for you, then you dismiss the cross of Christ.

It is this spiritual stability, born of a gospel-focused heart, that gives Paul peace and contentment - and yes, joy - no matter where he finds himself.

Grace-driven effort wants to get to the bottom of behavior, not just manage behavior. If you're simply managing behavior but not removing the roots of that behavior, then the weeds simply sprout up in another place. You may mow it down for a season of time only to see it sprout up again.

When we heed God's Word, we are rejecting how the world tries to disciple us.

Comfort is the god of our generation, so suffering is seen as a problem to be solved, and not a providence from God.

So where's the rationale for Christian pride and presumption, seeing as that's all the hand you ever played in your salvation? Where does all this woof-woofing come from, like you're scaring off the bad guys, swaggering out into the octagon cage? Get over yourself. You were saved by grace alone through faith alone. Therefore, God gets all the glory alone. And when you understand this one basic issue, you'll stop going into you and start going into the Lord - just

The Imperfect Pastor by Zack Eswine might be the most helpful and profound book I've read in years. If you're in pastoral ministry grab a copy.

All ministry that is faithful & eventually fruitful finds its roots in the life, death, & resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Although my justification was secured in a moment, the process of my understanding and acceptance took place over a year-long time of some guys being patient with me and loving me and walking with me. They invited me to church gatherings and spiritual events, and they even allowed me to mock those things. They just patiently explained them to me more fully. I asked a lot of questions that I now know won't be answered this side of heaven, but they let me ask them anyway, and they tried to answer. Sometimes they'd give me books to read. Through that whole year, God began to gather kindling around my life.

Augustine in City of God pictures a resurrection in which the bodily systems we no longer need to protect ourselves can use energy to praise God.

Grace does not make sin safe

When we learn to respond to each other rather than react, we will move much more quickly in our conflict toward resolution and reconciliation. Reactions only stoke the fires of conflict; responses, particularly godly ones, help us snuff out the conflict.

Because marriage is meant to reflect the great sacrificial and sanctifying love Christ has for his church, it makes sense to connect your married life to a local Christian congregation.

Shame is deeply rooted in identity. And the "self-ideal" we create for ourselves can often incorporate a lot of expectations that simply aren't included in God's ideal for us.

Ladies, if you're single there is nothing wrong, sinful or wicked about desiring a husband, nothing. Anyone who would say otherwise is absolutely lying to you. God wired you for it, He built you for it. Men, there is nothing wrong, wicked, or evil about wanting a wife. I don't know when that happened, I don't, now listen I do think that you need to be content where you are today, alright, but listen I'm content with what Christ is doing in me today but I don't want to be who I am today, I'm hoping Christ will complete what He began. It's okay, it's alright, who made it so complicated? it's okay, it's okay to want a wife, it's okay to want a husband, those are good things, they're really good things. It's okay, it's okay to want.

There are few things more ungodly than fake joy when you should be mourning.

If we don't understand the bad news, we will never grasp the good news.

"Being a good steward" and "placing your hope in" is not the same thing.

Love says: I've seen the ugly parts of you, and I'm staying.

From what we know of Paul, he's a pretty tough guy. A man's man, perhaps. But he is moved

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Peter Drucker

A lot of times, the reason we struggle to feel and receive the love of God - to see ourselves as His beloved, adopted children - is because we're not pursuing in our everyday lives those things His Word describes as being valuable and significant.

We've been given the covenant community because we need each other, and together we'll be more mature, experience more life, and know more joy than we ever would apart from one another.

The foundation, the motivation of a life of humility, is the example of Jesus Christ's humble life and sacrificial death on the cross.

Children are perceptive, and if they see leaders and parents talk with boredom and apathy about faith yet become overtly passionate about sports teams or shopping malls, they will think the sport or the mall is more attractive than Jesus.

In 10,000 years you will not regret anything you didn't have or do in this life.

If the gospel is reduced because of our preferences or misunderstandings, we leave ourselves open to heresies and to attacking our brothers-in-arms.

Pick your poison. It's all the same desire.

On the transformation of His brother James after Christ's Resurrection: What would it take to convince your family that you are God?

My prayer, then, is, "Lord, help me rejoice in You in this moment. Because I know You are in control. I know You love me; I know You love my family. And I don't understand what You're doing, and I don't know how things are going to work out. But help me to acknowledge that if I have You, I have everything.

Your approval before God is woven into the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, not what other men and women think about you.