Sifted Quotes

“God never uses duct tape to fix things—He will take your flesh and blood if you offer it to Him and use it like Play-Doh: “Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it?” (Isa. 43:19 NKJV). I did know it, in the calm after my storm.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“The best use of our energies is not to try harder to be like Jesus, but to stay more closely connected to Him—the branch embedded in the Vine. That means we pay better attention to what He says and does and how others react to Him, simply to get to know Him more deeply. And in knowing Him we see Him better, and in seeing Him better we trust in Him more deeply, and in trusting Him more deeply we align ourselves with Him, and in aligning ourselves with Him we live our lives in a magnetic atmosphere of faith. And that faith, like Peter’s, “will not fail.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“And the Enemy, the Destroyer, senses the surface truth that this Jesus is a threat, so he targets Him for destruction. Lucifer shows up in the desert to tempt a weakened Jesus using a trusted strategy—he will appeal to the same primal lust for power and control that bulldozed Adam and Eve into an unthinkable betrayal. But Jesus is having none of that. The Enemy is banished from His presence, where he stays until he sniffs an opportunity to launch a second assault in a lonely garden. In Mel Gibson’s brilliant portrayal of this tipping-point confrontation in The Passion of the Christ, the weight of the assault is palpable. Jesus is alone and tormented to the point of death on the eve of His crucifixion. The serpent moves through the Gethsemane garden toward the exposed feet of Jesus—now perilously within striking range. Everything hangs in the moment. And then, in a shocking burst of violence, Jesus stomps on the serpent’s head.3 It is sudden and brutal and … revelatory. It turns out that Jesus—sweating blood, abandoned, and apparently beaten—is no shrinking violet. The Great Surprise is that He cannot be leveraged and that He is no victim of circumstances. In this, He is not at all the way most Americans describe Him.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“Pharisees angrily labeled Jesus a “blasphemer” for claiming He was no garden-variety prophet, but the very Son of God, they were not telling the truth, but their experience of His words was “accurate” within their frame of reference. In the same way, it’s accurate for us to label how God sometimes behaves as “brutal,” but it’s not true. Five years or so ago I was slowly realizing that I’d compartmentalized God for most of my life—I did not (could not?) understand the stories about Him, or His dealings with me, in an integrated way. No one had been more tender or kind to me in my life—there’s a greatness to God’s love for me that is palpable and … fundamental. There are tears I need to cry that release only when I’m alone in His presence. There are raw places in my heart that only He knows how to access and nurture. There are secrets about my soul that only He can speak to. But He has a fearsome and nearly inexplicable side—revealed in Joshua 10 and 11 and everywhere else in the Bible—that I didn’t know what to do with. It’s as if I was offered a five-course meal of God and told the waiter to take the beet-and-brussels-sprout salad back to the kitchen; I’d rejected the parts of God that made me feel sick to my stomach. And here’s something that served only to deepen my dissonance: I’d experienced a deeper love than I’ve ever known from Him during times of great brutality in my life.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“Finally, the dark tension that immersed my soul because of these apparently dichotomous experiences of God was resolved, at least a little, when I turned my focus away from Him directly and onto the world He created. In Romans 1:18–20 Paul explains: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (NIV). Paul is revealing a reality that my own curiosity and experience undergird: The whole world is a parable (a metaphoric treatise) describing God’s character and personality. His “invisible qualities” and “eternal power” and “divine nature” are clearly seen and understood by “what has been made.” Paul is saying that all created things are inherently a living biography of God—they tell God’s story, the makeup of His character and His kingdom, for those who will pay attention.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“William Paul Young, author of The Shack, was asked by a LifeTree Café interviewer: What is God’s role in suffering? Young responded: [The question is,] how can there be a good God who has the power to stop evil and doesn’t[?] [T]here [are] a lot of ways to come at that question. One of the ways that has helped me the most is to realize that God respects His creation way more than we do, that God doesn’t just step in and say, “I’m sorry, you’ve crossed the line, you’re not allowed to think that, you’re not allowed to do that.”… God has not promised that He’s … going to stop it, but He’ll show up in the middle of it, and there is nothing so dead that He can’t grow something out of it. There’s nothing so broken that He can’t heal it. And there’s not anything so lost He can’t find it. So, this idea of His respect for the creation is a little bit of a shock to us because … we want God to mete … out [justice for us].… The question is, at what point does He stop our ability to choose evil? … [T]o love, you have to have the ability to choose. And at what point does He just stop that?”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“Dare 2 Share founder Greg Stier says: “Satan is not a fatalist—he does not easily give in to ‘the facts on the ground.’ He retains his intelligence, but he’s growing more and more insane, like Hitler toward the end of his life.”12 That insanity is on display in Satan’s encounter with Jesus, when he demands (the Greek word is exaiteo, which means “to ask for with emphasis and with implication of having a right to do so”) the permission to “sift” Peter and the disciples. Embedded in the request is an oxymoron—the “demand” comes from someone who’s reduced to asking permission.”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“HAS ASKED …” (Jesus in Conversation with the Enemy) Take heed to yourselves because the tempter will make his first and sharpest assault on you. If you will be leaders against him, he will not spare you. He bears the greatest malice against the man who is engaged in working the greatest damage against him. —Richard Baxter, seventeenth-century English Puritan church leader, poet, hymn writer, and theologian”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“When I was growing up, the “name it and claim it” theology was all the rage—it thrived because it perfectly fit the unique narcissism of an American culture that treats prayer like a bank robber’s note to the teller. “Name it and claim it” has now largely been scorned to death—but not in the kingdom of heaven, where the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are delightedly working around the clock to name and claim all who will rejoin their family. The last lines in Chapman’s song “God Is in Control,” as he grieves over a great sadness that is not as it “should be” or “could be,” offer an exclamation point on how it “will be”, when… We finally will see We’ll see with our own eyes He was always in control And we’ll sing holy, holy, holy is our God And we will finally really understand what it means11”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand

“JUST A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (A Kind of Preamble) We would very soon become contemptuous of a god whom we could figure out like a puzzle or learn to use like a tool. No, if God is worth our attention at all, he must be a God we can look up to—a God we must look up to. —Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction”
― Rick Lawrence, Sifted: God's Scandalous Response to Satan's Outrageous Demand