Matt chandler quotes

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.

Stop going to church everywhere and start belonging to church somewhere.

He can heal me. I believe He will. I believe I'm going to be an old surely Baptist preacher. And even if He doesn't...that's the thing: I've read Philippians 1. I know what Paul says. I'm here let's work, if I go home? That's better. I understand that.

The cross of Christ exists because mankind-loved by God, created by God, set in motion by God-betrayed God and prefers his stuff to him.

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.

Grace does not make sin safe. But grace does make sinners safe.

The more you make this world about you, the more miserable you will be.

In too many marriage conflicts, we work too hard at winning the argument and too little at winning the heart.

Every missionary I know is extraordinarily ordinary. Everything they do, they do by the grace of God.

Church of Jesus, let us please be men and women who understand the difference between moralism and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let’s be careful to preach the dos and don’ts of Scripture in the shadow of the cross’s ‘Done!’

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.

Choosing one thing over another doesn't necessarily mean we love the thing we choose. If given the choice to eat spinach or broccoli, you may choose broccoli. It may only mean you don't want to eat spinach. Heaven is not for people who just want to skip Hell. Heaven is reserved for those who love Jesus, who have been rescued by Him and who long to praise Him. If someone doesn't have much use for praising Him now, it's foolish to think they're ready for Heaven.

Godliness is sexy in a way that physical attraction can never be.

If you're a beast in the pulpit but a coward in your neighborhood, something has gone wrong.

Intellectual ascent to correct doctrine is not salvation

I was used to being the smartest guy in the room, and then God dropped me in a place that was well beyond me. It was painfully awesome.

Prayer does two things. It shows the complete sufficiency of God and the complete helplessness of man. It shows that God is not lacking, that He is in need of no thing, that He is infinitely and gloriously wealthy, that He can give to, He can bless and He can answer without the need of help from anyone or anything else. And it also shows that we are in desperate need of that kind of sufficiency.

Until Christ is our treasure, any other motivation we have to suffer for him is a fool’s errand.

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

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.

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.

More often than not, we want him to have fairy wings and spread fairy dust and shine like a precious little star, dispensing nothing but good times on everyone, like some kind of hybrid of Tinker Bell and Aladdin’s Genie. But the God of the Bible, this God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, is a pillar of fire and a column of smoke.

So relational evangelism? Go for it, as long as it turns into real evangelism. You hanging out having a beer with your buddy so he can see that Christians are cool is not what we’re called to do. You’re eventually going to have to open up your mouth and share the gospel. When the pure gospel is shared, people respond.

The commands of God are given, not to rob me of joy, but lead me into the fullness of joy.

Have you read your Bible or has the Bible read you?

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.

I'm wise to be a good steward, but I'll never be my own rescuer. The worth thing you can do with fear and anxiety is to pretend you're too strong to have them. The best thing you can do is just to let Him be in charge of them

This avoidance of the difficult things of Scripture — of sinfulness and hell and God’s notable severity — is idolatrous and cowardly. If a man or a woman who teaches the Scriptures is afraid to explain to you the severity of God, they have betrayed you, and they love their ego more than they love you.

The best of our best, without Jesus, looks like a pile of crap compared to Him.

Truth is never our enemy, ever. So we should never freak out about people who claim to have discovered truth. If it's true truth, God owns it and has already accounted for it, and while nothing that is true ever contradicts God's revealed word in the Bible, discovered truth sometimes contradicts the words of Christians. We shouldn't be afraid of this, because God knew it before anybody else and its discovery is dependent on his sovereignty anyway. The truth is that the truth is ours - all truth is our truth because we are of Christ and Christ is of the sovereign God.

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 cross of Christ is the response of God to men for belittling His name.

If you’re a church person and not a Jesus person, my heart hurts for you. It’s like being engaged and never getting married. It’s miserable.

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.

The work of God in the cross of Christ strikes us as awe-inspiring only after we have first been awed by the glory of God.

We spend so much time trying to put send to death that we don't spend enough time striving to know God deeply, trying to gaze upon the wonder of Jesus Christ and have that transform our affections to the point where our love and hope are steadfastly on Christ.

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

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

We are supernaturalists first, not naturalists. The only reason we feel compelled to accommodate science is that science says we ought to. But it is science that should accommodate revelation. Revelation has been around much longer.

Apart from worshiping God, everything becomes superficial. But when you understand the driving force behind everything, all of a sudden there's an eternal amount of joy at our disposal, because everything we do is enlightened and enlivened by the endless glory of the eternal God.

Jesus doesn't avoid those who mess up. Jesus runs to those who mess up.

The context of the gospel message is not our benefit or our salvation; the context of the gospel is the supremacy of Christ and the glory of God.

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.

Lots of neat Christian boys, not a lot of Godly men. And we are working our tails off for you to try to develop some into that. But do not settle, because it's better that you be lonely now than you be married and lonely later. Are you tracking me? It is better that you be lonely now than for you to get married to a man that will teach your kids everything but the way of Jesus.

Our senses are never more awakened to our need for His love than when our need is most exposed.

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.

Heaven is not a place for those who are afraid of hell; it’s a place for those who love God. You can scare people into coming to your church, you can scare people into trying to be good, you can scare people into giving money, you can even scare them into walking down an aisle and praying a certain prayer, but you cannot scare people into loving God. You just can’t do it.

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.

When we join God in his plan for his global glory, we get to be a part of the cosmic take-your-kid-t o-work day.

When you blow it, God still celebrates His Son in you. The litmus test of whether or not you understand the gospel is what you do when you fail. Do you run from Him and go clean yourself up a little bit before you come back into the throne room? Or do you approach the throne of grace with confidence? If you don't approach the throne of grace with confidence, you don't understand the gospel.

Heaven is not a place for those who are afraid of hell; it’s a place for those who love God.

There isn’t a violent soul on the planet that God might not save and transform for himself.

There's a strong victim mentality in my generation. I think it's spiritual laziness. They will agree that God is sovereign over all, but then they will say, "Well, I wish he would sovereignly take away my lust issue." There's just not a lot of fortitude, not a lot of fight in them.

The single most loving act we can do is share the good news of Jesus Christ, that God saves sinners.

Truth is to be used as a scalpel, not a club.

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.

I've discovered most Christians don't know what to do with difficult situations because they have bought into the lie that God owes us (for our good behaviour). The reality of life is that if you live long enough you are going to bleed, cry and hurt. AND God is still God IN that.

God doesn't need to have emergency meetings. He's never gathered the Trinity and asked 'What happened there'.

The spiritual power in the gospel is denied when we augment or adjusting gospel into no gospel at all. When we doubt the message alone is the power of God for salvation we start adding or subtracting, trusting our own powers of persuasion or presentation.

God doesn't NEED raw material. He MAKES material.

Thanksgiving is worry's kryptonite.

If you're not confident in the authority of the Scriptures, you will be a slave to what sounds right.

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

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

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

We carry an insidious prosperity gospel around in our dark, little, entitled hearts.

No change of job, no increased income, no new home, no new electronic device, or no new spouse is going to make things better inside of you.

Don't create theology about God so that you can feel better about Him.

It's OK to not be OK - just don't stay there.

Love says: I've seen the ugly parts of you, and I'm staying. Our culture doesn't love love; It loves the idea of love. It wants the emotion without the sacrifice.

Preach the Gospel with your life.

God ultimately raises up leaders for one primary reason: His glory. He shows His power in our weakness. He demonstrates His wisdom in our folly. We are all like a turtle on a fence post. If you walk by a fence post and see a turtle on top of it, then you know someone came by and put it there. In the same way, God gives leadership according to His good pleasure.

Why do we try so hard to make Jesus cool?! He doesn’t need a makeover.

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

Men of God are those who walk in the fear of the Lord.

The general confusion is that our moral behavior is what justifies us before God. Most of us would never say that with our mouths but we feel that lie in our heart and believe it in our minds. You can be morally upright and not be a worshipper of Christ at all.

Church is missing transcendence. My generation was raised on a religion of moral control. Do this. Don't do that. And a lot of self-help religion. Feel better. Get out of debt. Six ways to overcome your fears. Seven ways not to lust. Ultimately that message didn't work. It was empty. There was no transcendence. The omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful God of the universe wasn't the focus.

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.

A Church worshipping as a Creature of the Word doesn't show up to perform or be entertained; she comes desperate and needy, thirsty for grace, receiving from The Lord and the body of Christ, and then gratefully receiving what she needs as she offers her praise- the only proper response to the God who saves us.

The heart of our problem is the problem of our hearts.

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

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

God is at work in the mess. That's the message of the Bible. That's why the Bible is not pretty. That's why it's grimy, because God is working in the mess. He's working in the tears.

Truly, God's plan of redemption is about more than me and you and our neighbor down the street. It's about men and women from every tribe, tongue, and nation on earth becoming a part of His covenant community.

God is more interested in declaring than explaining.

No matter what our job is, we view it not as our purpose in life but rather as where God has sovereignly placed us for the purpose of making Christ known and his name great. If you are a teacher, if you are a politician, if you are a businessman, if you are in agriculture, if you are in construction, if you are in technology, if you are in the arts, then you should not be saying, ‘I need to find my life’s purpose in this work,’ but rather, ‘I need to bring God’s purpose to this work.’

I believe the sovereign God of the universe justifies us freely, and then we are called to run with him in sanctification.

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.

Where your delight is, the rest of your world is going to follow.

You're exhausted in the faith because you're looking at you. The more you look at yourself and the less you look at God, the more you get frustrated at yourself.

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

He created the flavors! He created the colors. He created it all, and he did it all out of the overflow of his perfections. It’s not like he was thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got some fajita flavoring over here. I know: let’s put it on the cow and the chicken.’ He created the avocado to have a certain flavor; he created the skirt steak, the fillet, and the tenderloin to have certain flavors. That was God’s doing. So every aspect of creation, from the largest galaxy to the tiniest burst of flavor in food or drink or seasoning, radiates the goodness of God.

Every one of us loves Pauline theology, but few of us want Pauline pain.

If someone doesn't have much use for praising Him now, it's foolish to think they're ready for heaven.

Trying to make the Gospel relevant is like trying to make water wet.

While we lament the apparent injustice of pain and suffering, how often do we forget that every good thing in a fallen world is wholly a gift of God's mercy and grace.

The Christian views trials as a pathway to maturity.

The idolatry the exists in a man's heart always wants to lead him away from his Savior and back to self-reliance no matter how pitiful that self-reliance is or how many times it has betrayed him.

My sin in the past: forgiven. My current struggles: covered. My future failures: paid in full all by the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace found in the atoning work of the cross of Jesus Christ.

The reality is that all God has to do is reveal himself to you,and you'll gladly join the mission in service to his kingdom. He doesn't force the issue; he just has to reveal himself as is: mighty,wondrous, gracious, loving, and radically saving. No man goes back to saltine crackers when he's had fillet mignon.

God does not regret saving you. There is no sin which you commit which is beyond the cross of Christ.

The universe shudders in horror that we have this infinitely valuable, infinitely deep, infinitely rich, infinitely wise, infinitely loving God, and instead of pursuing him with steadfast passion and enthralled fury — instead of loving him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; instead of attributing to him glory and honor and praise and power and wisdom and strength — we just try to take his toys and run. It is still idolatry to want God for his benefits but not for himself.

Some people are so moral they feel like they have no need for Jesus. True worshippers know they are in deep need of Jesus Christ and are transformed morally by "beholding Jesus" and seeing their lives transformed by the Spirit's power from the inside out rather than conformed to a pattern of religion from the outside in.

The depth, width, ferocity, and immensity of God is seen most spectacularly in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Our goal is transformed hearts that lead to transformed lives. Transformed lives do not lead to transformed hearts. Are you trackin' with that?

The great message that we call the gospel begins, then, not with us, or our need, or even the meeting of that need, but with the writer of the news and the sender of its heralds: God himself.

When we see the bankruptcy, slavery, and vanity of everything else, we can finally say, ‘To die is gain.’

God is awesome; he doesn’t need you to be awesome. He wants you to be obedient.

Progress stems from education, culture, freedom and equality. Without these fundamentals, mankind will flounder.

Everybody knows something's broken in the world. But illogically, foolishly, we are looking for fixes from broken people with broken ideas in broken places.

Jesus doesn't need you to make him palatable...he needs you to be faithful.

Could it not be, that God loves me too deeply, by having people challenge me so that I know I'm not perfect.

Trying to figure out God is like trying to catch a fish in the Pacific Ocean with an inch of dental floss.

Many of the things that stifle growth are morally neutral. They're not bad things. Facebook is not bad. Television and movies are not bad. I enjoy TV, but it doesn't take long for me to begin to find humorous on TV what the Lord finds heartbreaking.

If you want to grow in true wisdom, grow in a knowledge of the God of the Bible.

In essence, we are reconciled to reconcile.

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

We can never grasp the extent of our depravity until we recognize the excellencies of our created dignity

If you are in Christ, you are fully and completely forgiven for all your sin-past, present and future.

As you consider selecting songs for your worship services, consider them in light of the truth of the gospel. Imagine the songs as teachers--because they are! If your people could understand your doctrine only through the music you sing, what would they know about God and His pursuit of us? If your people could understand your church's beliefs only through the music, what would they know?

The glory of God is that you can't outs in His grace.

No one can out-sin the cross of Christ.

We’ve got to get past this idea that God is most glorified when we’re rich, healthy and wealthy and we go, “Isn’t God grand? Look at all He gave me.” Because if anybody joins us in that and says, “Oh, if you love Jesus, you get a house and health and cars? Then I love Jesus too.” Because then all of a sudden you’ve got a different religion. You have the religion of cars and houses, not God.

Worship is the way of life for those entranced by and passionate for the glory of God.

There is no error, no addiction with more power than the Cross of Christ.