Redemption Quotes

“Here's what surprising about making sense of our lives in the context of the
BIG Picture - ulimately, God's story: The story is not about you - it's about Him.
He is both the author and the main character, and he has written you into
His story to say something about Him. Yet, if we are honest, we tend to
script our lives with ourselves as the protagonists and God in some supporting
(or antagonistic) role...
Rather than trying to write God into our stories, we would be wiser to sit
patiently with our Father and let Him tell us His. We would surely find
ourselves in His story and learn that we are not defined by our hurts and
sins, as we may have believed. As He tells us His story, we must be will to
let go of the stories we've told to make sense of our lives. We must let His
story rewrite ours and sweep us up into something much greater than ourselves.”
― Mike Wilkerson, Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry

“Jesus was made like us in all the frailty of humanity (Heb. 2:10, 17–18). He endured the hostility of sinners (Heb. 12:3). He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows who has borne our grief: he was wounded, crushed, spit upon, and oppressed (Isa. 53:3–6). He knows the agony of betrayal from those closest to him, his own disciples. He knows the chill of abandonment (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46).”
― Mike Wilkerson, Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry

“Trusting in Jesus requires that you surrender every competing hope. For the Israelites, it was the call to abandon the worship of any other god and entrust their lives to the one true God (see Ex. 20:3). For the disciples Peter, James, and John, it meant surrendering their livelihoods as fishermen the moment after pulling in their most profitable catch ever and following Jesus (Luke 5:11). For each of us, it means trusting his promise of forgiveness and not working to try to pay off our own debt. It means trusting his cleansing and not hiding in shame (1 John 1:9). It means clinging to God’s steadfast love, his grace upon grace to us in Jesus Christ, as our only hope, the only true remedy against idolatry.40”
― Mike Wilkerson, Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry

“I knew a guy once who loved to read big theology books, and the bigger the book, the better to hide his secret sin. He justified himself by having better theology than others and wouldn’t let anyone speak into his life if they didn’t have the same level of theological sophistication. In the process, he traded an orthodox knowledge of God for relationship with God. He was able to appear spiritual to others according to his Christian orthodoxy while maintaining the lie of living in unrepentant sin.21”
― Mike Wilkerson, Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry