Home > Work > Interrupted: An Adventure in Relearning the Essentials of Faith
41 " Hey, here’s something crazy: In the Word, poverty, widows, hunger—these are not metaphors. There are billions of lambs that literally need to be fed. With food. "
― Jen Hatmaker , Interrupted: An Adventure in Relearning the Essentials of Faith
42 " If we took Jesus’ famous teachings away and just focused on the way He lived, He would still be radical. "
43 " Jesus didn’t, and we shouldn’t. He doesn’t need us to stick up for him; he needs us to represent him, to be like him, to look like him and to talk like him, to be with people that he would be with, and to take the side of the “ignorant” instead of those in the “know.”[91] "
44 " In all our efforts, if we are not about people, our labors aren’t really about Jesus but about us. "
45 " path of descent becomes our own liberation. We are freed from the exhausting stance of defense. We are no longer compelled to be right and are thus relieved from the burden of maintaining some reputation. We are released from the idols of greed, control, and status. The pressure to protect the house of cards is alleviated when we take the lowest place. "
46 " One decent sermon cannot influence a disoriented person in the same way your consistent presence in her life can. "
47 " It’s about building bridges with those who won’t come to us on Sunday, not as a project but because Jesus loves them and told us to. It’s a dangerous journey that requires honesty and vulnerability. "
48 " Leaving is hard, even when a great adventure awaits you. "
49 " Once we belong to Him, we know where to look for sweet communion, "
50 " I am being lured back to the way of Jesus. I am finding it - sorry for this - spiritual. I'd kind of forgotten how compelling the Spirit is. He is the fresh wind everyone is looking for. He reminds me I am a member of a grand assembly that inspires and stirs and empowers. On bad days, when I secretly whisper, "Is this all there is?" the Spirit urges me to join Him at the bottom, where the best grassroots movements have always begun. "
51 " Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament. "
52 " It’s fitting that slave is from a group of words meaning “bonded,” which is the same root word used in Titus 2:3 about women “addicted to much wine.” In other words, as slaves to our neighbors, our cities, the people of the nations, we are addicted to them. We cannot get enough of them in our homes, in our lives. The more we love them, the more we want to love them. We are addicts for mission, bonded to people for the dream of the gospel in their lives. "
53 " mail-outs. As missionaries have always understood, the key is to study the culture you are passionate about reaching and submerge into that space with respect and love. "
54 " We launch public shame grenades with abandon and claim to “love the sinner but hate the sin,” which translates to “we are enormous pompous jerks. "
55 " I prayed a one-line prayer simply because my Christian labor had failed me and I had no idea what else to do (and I strongly advise against this prayer unless you are quite ready for God to take you seriously and wreck your life): “God, raise up in me a holy passion. "
56 " There was one Judas, but eleven disciples who were forever transformed by Jesus’ broken body. The risk of encountering a few weeds is not sufficient reason to avoid the whole field of human suffering, because I assure you, identifying with the wheat but not the weeds is a gross overestimation of our own station. The correct character to identify with here is the weed shown mercy, not the Savior capable of discerning the human heart. Our holy Savior advised us well: humans must treat the wheat and weeds the same. We are only qualified to administer mercy, not judgment, because we will pull up many a beautiful stalk of wheat, imagining him a weed. "
57 " Claiborne wrote, “There is a movement bubbling up that goes beyond cynicism and celebrates a new way of living, a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of.”[85] "
58 " This is my high calling: to live on mission as an adopted daughter of Jesus. If people around me aren’t moved by my Christ or my church, then I must be doing a miserable job of representing them both. "
59 " For the first time in our lives, we weren’t trying to create our own opportunities; we were simply trying to respond to the Spirit’s leading. "
60 " There is a movement bubbling up that goes beyond cynicism and celebrates a new way of living, a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of.”[85] "