The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning QUOTES

1 " God has given a spiritual gift to the church in you, and you dare not keep it to yourself. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

2 " Wright finished with these words: What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether….They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.3 "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

3 " I learned that Jesus was inviting us not primarily into correct beliefs, an eternal destination, or behavior modification but rather into participation in a living, eternally present reality. Through Christ, we get to join the redemption and restoration of all things. God has not given up on the world. Instead, God invites every one of us—in the way of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit—into the divine conspiracy of overcoming evil with good. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

4 " If you’re like me (and pretty much everyone else on earth), you’ve had an imperfect experience of church. Legendary pastor and author Eugene Peterson has observed, “Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. As if that weren’t bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors.”1 Or as the saying goes, “If you ever find a perfect church, please don’t join it because you’ll wreck it.” Many people of faith have become disillusioned by even the idea of church. I feel that tension as well. Eugene Peterson has also made this painfully honest observation: “There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church.”2 "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

5 " the kingdom of God. I learned that Jesus was inviting us not primarily into correct beliefs, an eternal destination, or behavior modification but rather into participation in a living, eternally present reality. Through Christ, we get to join the redemption and restoration of all things. God has not given up on the world. Instead, God invites every one of us—in the way of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit—into the divine conspiracy of overcoming evil with good. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

6 " Father Richard Rohr has built on this idea in his brilliant book Everything Belongs. My starting point is that we’re already there. We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness. Little do we realize that God is maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. As we take another it means that God is choosing us now and now and now.5 "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

7 " And if we are unclear about Jesus’s central invitation, we will struggle to follow him. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

8 " One of the greatest gifts of being a Christian is learning from those who swim differently than we do. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

9 " The path of change involves redirecting our love toward a different object, not filling our heads with ideas. This redirection primarily happens through participating in certain formative practices. Rather than approaching our church gatherings as a classroom (to fill our minds with information) or a concert hall (to move our hearts with emotion), we long to create a spiritual gymnasium, which can form our whole selves. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

10 " According to Ephesians 4, the church exists to equip the people for ministry (see verses 11–12). A Sunday service is not the main event but rather a training ground to help all of us become people who can live the way Jesus would if he were in our place.4 "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

11 " The calendar provides us a rhythm through which we can practice the full human experience through the redemptive lens of grace. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

12 " Instead of teaching us to be curious, they taught us to critique. Instead of teaching us to learn from other people of faith, they taught us to protect ourselves from being led astray. Instead of helping us discern and sift the wheat from the chaff, they trained us to defend ourselves against anything that fell outside our circle. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

13 " the church is not political, it is irrelevant to the world that God so loves. But if the church is partisan, it becomes a tool of the power structures. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

14 " If the church is not political, it is irrelevant to the world that God so loves. But if the church is partisan, it becomes a tool of the power structures. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

15 " A life of faith is a communal journey. If we are merely a group of individuals on parallel personal journeys, it won’t work. It can’t. God created us not to be independent, self-contained individuals but rather to be interdependent members of a whole. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

16 " For the next three to six months, what concrete practices will help me close the gap between my deep longing and my lived reality in terms of my relationships with God, myself, my community, and the world? "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

17 " Friends, this is the entire story. The invitation of Christ is so compelling—such truly good news—that seeing it creates great joy. If your faith feels like a heavy burden, then it’s not the way of Jesus, who proclaims freedom, sight, favor, faith, hope, and love. Catching a clear vision of the treasure of this grace-soaked kingdom, if only for a moment, will unleash a spring of joy inside us that wants to gush out. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

18 " I am grateful that this godly priest admitted he could get bored in prayer. Me too. His humble honesty created space and grace for my relentlessly spinning mind. He met me where I was—rather than where I should be—and reminded me that I was neither alone nor hopeless. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

19 " Nathan Foster, author and son of spiritual disciplines teacher Richard J. Foster, told me, “When you boil it all down, each spiritual discipline is simply a slightly different way to offer our bodies to God as a living sacrifice.” It really is that simple…and life changing. "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning

20 " Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. (10:24–25) "

― Aaron Niequist , The Eternal Current: How a Practice-Based Faith Can Save Us from Drowning