Christopher Ash > Quotes

“There is always more we can do in ministry, but God is not asking 'Can you do more?'. He is asking 'Do you love me?' Some of those extras are not always as vital as we think them to be.”
― Christopher Ash, Zeal without Burnout

“It is a tremendous encouragement to our pastors when we thank them for their preaching, their teaching or their personal words of Bible exhortation or comfort. Whether they have preached to us in the main weekly meeting of church or spoken Bible words to us in a small group or just one to one, it is good to learn the habit of thanking them. Not thanking them particularly for their eloquence (if they were eloquent), for their entertainment (if they were entertaining), or even for their manner (if it was winsome), but for the Bible content of what they have taught us.”
― Christopher Ash, The Book Your Pastor Wishes You Would Read

“When you and I surrendered to Jesus as Lord, we did not offer Him the services of a divine, or even semi-divine creature to strengthen His kingdom; we offer Him the fragile, temporary, mortal, frail life that He has first given to us. That is all we have to offer.

'For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust' (Ps. 103:14)”
― Christopher Ash, Zeal without Burnout

“the book ultimately makes no sense without the obedience of Jesus Christ, his obedience to death on a cross. Job is not everyman; he is not even every believer. There is something desperately extreme about Job. He foreshadows one man whose greatness exceeded even Job’s, whose sufferings took him deeper than Job, and whose perfect obedience to his Father was only anticipated in faint outline by Job. The universe needed one man who would lovingly and perfectly obey his heavenly Father in the entirety of his life and death, by whose obedience the many would be made righteous (Romans 5:19).”
― Christopher Ash, Job: The Wisdom of the Cross

“Marriage and family can easily become just a respectable form of selfishness. If we marry mainly to meet our own needs, then our marriages will be just that: good-looking masks for selfishness.”
― Christopher Ash, Married for God: Making Your Marriage the Best It Can Be

“There is a terrible divine necessity about redemptive suffering. God is doing something so ultimately wonderful that unanswered prayer is the necessary price of achieving it, and Job begins to experience this. His prayers will be answered, but only when his sufferings have achieved that for which God purposes them. In a deeper way it was the same for Jesus Christ. In a similar way it is yet the same for Christian people today; when God remains silent in answer to our urgent cries, it is not that he does not hear, but rather that it is somehow necessary for us to cry in vain and wait in hope until he achieves in us, and in his world, what he wills to achieve.”
― Christopher Ash, Job: The Wisdom of the Cross

“those who ought to know better—or ought to know that they do not know what they think they know.”
― Christopher Ash, Job: The Wisdom of the Cross

“As someone who has spent the last decade training young men and women for Christian service, I have been keen to help them see that the best kinds of ministry are, more often than not, long term and low key. I have tried to prepare them for a marathon, not a short, energetic sprint. In other words, to help them have a lifetime of sustainable sacrifice, rather than an energetic but brief ministry that quickly fades in exhaustion.”
― Christopher Ash, Zeal without Burnout

“We must not allow ourselves to slip into a false spirituality that treats our bodily existence as if it can be separated from our so-called "spiritual" life -- as if our spiritual life carries on quite independently from what is happening to our bodies.”
― Christopher Ash, Zeal without Burnout

“But we do not gather just in order to hear; we gather because gathering is important. Gathering is what Jesus does. The time when the whole local church gathers is a foretaste of the time when all redeemed humanity will gather. We could scrap Bible study groups and still be a church (an impoverished church, perhaps, but still a church); but if we fail to gather together in our main meetings under the preached word of God, we cease to be a church.”
― Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching

“When we approach marriage expecting our needs to be met, we have not understood the real nature of love, and we are sowing the seeds of destruction in our marriages.”
― Christopher Ash, Married for God: Making Your Marriage the Best It Can Be

“Preaching that makes a church Christ-like under grace takes a double miracle: the sinful preacher must be shaped by grace to preach; and sinful listeners must be awakened by grace to listen together week by week in humble expectancy. Only God can do this. So praying before the sermon is not a formality. Unless God works, the whole thing will be a waste of time.”
― Christopher Ash, Listen Up

“I am — and will never, this side of the resurrection, be more than — a creature of dust. I will rest content in my creaturely weakness; I will use the means God has given me to keep going in this life while I can; I will allow myself time to sleep; I will trust him enough to take a day off each week; I will invest in friendships and not be a proud loner; I will take with gladness the inward refreshment he offers me. I will serve the Lord Jesus with a glad and restful zeal, with all the energy that he works within me; but not with anxious toil, selfish ambition, the desire for the praise of people, and all the other ugly motivations that will destroy my soul. So help me God.”
― Christopher Ash, Zeal without Burnout: Seven keys to a lifelong ministry of sustainable sacrifice

“I am a nobody, she sings; I deserve nothing; and yet God has raised me up and blessed me with this son; for the rest of human history people will remember how God has blessed me. But then she goes on (v 50-53): God will do for every man and woman who fears him what he has done for me.”
― Christopher Ash, Repeat the Sounding Joy: A daily Advent devotional on Luke 1–2

“none of us thinks we are on the path to burnout until we are nearly burnt out; it is precisely those of us who are sure we are safe, who are most in danger.”
― Christopher Ash, Zeal without Burnout: Seven keys to a lifelong ministry of sustainable sacrifice

“says Ryle, Men forget that gifts without grace save no one’s soul, and are the characteristic of Satan himself. Grace, on the contrary, is an everlasting inheritance, and, lowly and despised as its possessor may be, will land him safe in glory. So let us strive to keep grace as the main thing.”
― Christopher Ash, Zeal without Burnout: Seven keys to a lifelong ministry of sustainable sacrifice

“Supposedly Christian responses to marriage breakdown may have majored too much on trying to help people build and sustain relationships without giving them the outward-looking focus of serving God. In so doing we are buying unwittingly into the spirit of the age; we appear to accept much of the implicit relational primacy of our culture and just try to show our readers how to do it better than the world outside. Instead the whole paradigm needs to be challenged.”
― Christopher Ash, Marriage: Sex in the Service of God

“If I never preach another sermon, never lead another church meeting, never give another talk, never have another one-to-one spiritual conversation with anyone, never use my gifts ever again in ministry, my name is still written in heaven. And in that I will rejoice.”
― Christopher Ash, Zeal without Burnout: Seven keys to a lifelong ministry of sustainable sacrifice

“So how is the world to be reassembled? Not by technology. Not by force. Not by natural human affection. Not by religion. But only by grace. Only the preached word of Christ, the word of grace preached again and again and again, pressed home with passion and engagement, only that word will create God's assembly to rebuild a broken world.”
― Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching

“Surprisingly, the key to a good marriage is not to pursue a good marriage, but to pursue the honor of God. We need to replace this selfish model of marriage with one in which we work side by side in God’s “garden” (that is, God’s world), rather than gaze forever into each other’s eyes.”
― Christopher Ash, Married for God: Making Your Marriage the Best It Can Be

“Try as he might to enthuse us with the sonorous beauties of the King James Bible, as declaimed by middle-class, middle-aged men in dresses, it was far too late. We had already been claimed by the split infinitives of Star Trek, were already preparing to boldly go into a world where ethics so far from inhering in the very structure of the cosmos, was a matter of personal taste akin to a designer label, sewn into the inside lining of conscience.”
― Christopher Ash, Marriage: Sex in the Service of God

“We ought to want what God wants in marriage.”
― Christopher Ash, Married for God: Making Your Marriage the Best It Can Be

“I write also for the many keen Christian men and women who, in addition to “normal” life — busy jobs, parenthood, and so on — labour sacrificially to serve in their local churches.”
― Christopher Ash, Zeal without Burnout: Seven keys to a lifelong ministry of sustainable sacrifice

“If we buy into the church culture of celebrity, we drift away from following Jesus faithfully.”
― Christopher Ash, Zeal without Burnout