Friendship with the Friend of Sinners Quotes

“used to jokingly say that the reason Ray is like this is because half of him exists in heaven already. He walks around in a bifurcated space, partially submerged in the spiritual plane. I have decided that this isn’t far off the mark. I realized at some point why Ray is the way Ray is: he actually knows Jesus.”
― Jared C. Wilson, Friendship with the Friend of Sinners: The Remarkable Possibility of Closeness with Christ

“You and I swim in a sea of accusation. It may not usually come from ex-friends who have turned on us. Normally it’s just the ambient temperature of living in a culture opposed to the way of God. You don’t have to do anything special—just be a Christian minding your own business, and you will learn that you are a bigot, a hypocrite, a narrow-minded believer in fairy tales.”
― Jared C. Wilson, Friendship with the Friend of Sinners: The Remarkable Possibility of Closeness with Christ

“I don’t think of myself as an overworker. I like to relax. A lot. I try to take time out of each day to do nothing. And I especially enjoy whole days of doing nothing. I think I naturally tend toward laziness. I procrastinate. It takes me a while even once I’ve started a task to focus on it.”
― Jared C. Wilson, Friendship with the Friend of Sinners: The Remarkable Possibility of Closeness with Christ

“Some will say it’s proof, for instance, that Jesus “likes to party,” that he is cool with people doing whatever they want to do, that he just likes to have fun. This is an asinine reading of the relevant biblical texts, not simply because it makes Jesus out to be careless about sin but because it misses the real scandal, which is that Jesus both hates sin and is willing to be identified with sin in order to destroy it.”
― Jared C. Wilson, Friendship with the Friend of Sinners: The Remarkable Possibility of Closeness with Christ

“This is what’s so weird about the performative nature of so much social media. We know more about each other than we ever cared (or ought) to, but we still don’t know each other. We know only the carefully curated versions of ourselves we present. Ironically, all our attempts at being “seen” are actually attempts to hide.”
― Jared C. Wilson, Friendship with the Friend of Sinners: The Remarkable Possibility of Closeness with Christ

“We see this in the increasing fundamentalist spirit of tribes both on the extreme left and extreme right of politics. If you’re familiar with the horseshoe theory, you know what I’m talking about. It basically goes like this: the further to the extreme left or right one’s views go, the closer they get to the extreme of the other side. Which is why we now face the increase of angry authoritarianism threatening us from opposite sides of the political aisle. Extreme leftists and rightists both want to ban books and qualify free speech. Both want to curtail (different aspects of) religious liberty. Both are in favor of (different kinds of) authoritarian government. And both have given rise to instances of political violence.”
― Jared C. Wilson, Friendship with the Friend of Sinners: The Remarkable Possibility of Closeness with Christ