The Familiar Stranger Quotes

“Are you eager for manifestations of the Spirit? Are you longing for signs and wonders? For supernatural physical healing and deep inner healing? For the ground-shaking word of prophecy and the still small whisper to the soul? For the fiery power of intercession and the society-altering justice that follows? Then channel all your energy into loving those in your local church who you find are the hardest to love.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“God has never cared much for the qualified, but he’s shaped history through the available. This isn’t about being qualified. It’s not about being skilled, practiced, or trained. Are you available?”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“The scandal of the Holy Spirit isn't power. If there's a Creator to be known, power has to be part of the equation. The scandal is the power of God dwelling in and operating through wounded, ordinary people. It's not your gifting that makes you an excellent candidate to be a river of life flowing into the dead places; it's your wounds.
It's not the gifting or qualifications of today's church that makes us excellent candidates to reshape history and rewrite the stories of our cities through love; it's our wounds and our ordinariness.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“My point is that even on the pages of the Bible, God’s native language is a whisper, and a whisper is hard to hear and easy to ignore. What if God is speaking to you far more than you realize? What if the majority of divine instructions or encounters in your life to date are missed connections—magic moments that could have been, but the Lord passed right by you? We tend to miss God in our midst, not because he’s too extraordinary but because he’s too ordinary. We tend to look for God in the wind, earthquake, and fire rather than the whisper. We climb our own Mount Horebs with expectation—when that preacher speaks, when I attend this conference or worship experience, when I go on my upcoming silent retreat—pigeonholing God’s voice into special times and places. But all the while, he’s “about to pass by.” What if you could know him not just at the table in the evening but all the way along the road to Emmaus? What if you could hear him not just on top of Mount Horeb but in the valley of suffering? Pete Greig writes, “If we are ever to feel fully safe and truly loved by the Lord of all the earth, we must eventually—like Elijah on Horeb and that couple on the Emmaus road—learn to listen for his voice in the anticlimax of life’s nonevents.”10”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“Most people miss the voice of God not because it’s too strange but because it’s too familiar. I’ve heard it said that God’s voice is like the touch of a feather on your skin, meaning it’s light enough that you can ignore it if you want but just clear enough that you can engage and respond if you choose. Pressed to describe hearing God speak, I’d say, “It feels like a thought entering your imagination from the outside, rather than from the inside. It’s a normal thought, like any other, but it originates somewhere slightly unfamiliar.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“Spirit’s whisper is directed at the soul’s depths, while the deceiver’s lies appeal to the shallow waters of the ego.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“aim of my pursuit of the Holy Spirit to replicate a supernatural experience or live a more radically formed life?”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“But there are spiritual dangers to our transient culture. And if I am not aware of them, I import the values of our society into the church—exalting the individual over the group, potentially stalling my maturity by bouncing from church to church, and holding my spiritual journey as more important than our spiritual journey.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“The American church, often captured by the values of broader culture, has become a platform for individual performance more than an academy for discipleship to Jesus. And it doesn’t take a social scientist to see that when the church becomes a stage on which a leader performs for an adoring crowd, it destroys both those in the pews and the performer on the stage. The church, stripped of the robust value of formation in community, is leaking its lifeblood.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“Our transient culture resists formation in community. And how convenient it would be to stop there, but we can’t. Because the church is not, in this respect, a distinct counter-culture telling an alternative story but a reflection of the same.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“Community is an essential and irreplaceable part of our spiritual formation, but “rootedness” is out of style—in the culture and in the church—limiting the power of the collective to shape us.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“Times of comfort lead us into distraction, to a place where we gradually put our greatest treasures on the back burner. But suffering, endured thoughtfully, accurately weighs life’s priorities and instills gratitude for the things that truly matter.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“Suffering is the scale that reveals what’s real and counterfeit in our lives. A diagnosis or world-altering phone call can reveal that life’s lesser worries aren’t the heavy burdens we thought they were.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“I’m saying that living outside of Eden has consequences. Death and sin have infected the very world we live in, and all suffering is a symptom of sin (the world we chose) not God (the good world he created).”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“The Holy Spirit fills us with resurrection power to live in the “already” Kingdom right now. And the same Holy Spirit fills us with redemptive patience to bear with the suffering of the “not yet” Kingdom we still await.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“As Cistercian monk Thomas Keating wrote, “In the dark nights . . . the rituals and practices that previously supported our faith and devotion, fail us. Faith becomes simply belief in God’s goodness without any test of it. It is trusting in God without knowing whom we are trusting, because the relationship we thought we had with God has disappeared.”1”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“In the wise words of Pete Greig, “Anyone who says that it is easy to follow Jesus is a liar. He Himself said that the way is narrow.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“They weren’t a holy huddle in a sacred building. They were a river flowing east—overwhelming dead places with unstoppable life.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“What started in Acts doesn’t end there. The main character holding the plot together—the Holy Spirit—hasn’t gone anywhere. The divine breath in the lungs of the early church is alive in us. If you are a follower of Jesus you have been filled with the Holy Spirit, who pours the teachings of Jesus directly into your heart and enlivens you with co-creative power for the sake of the world.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“Teresa of Avila: “Christ has no body now on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassionately on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.”12”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“It certainly seems to me that God was putting his heart in Elijah before he poured his power through Elijah. By the brook God taught him dependence and trust. At the house, God taught him compassion for the widow and the fatherless.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

“One of the breakthrough insights of famed Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was his definition of psychological health. To paraphrase, Jung observed that everyone—every last one of us—has a gap between our perceived self and our actual self. There’s a gap between my perception of myself (who I think I am, how I think I come across, how I think others see me), and reality (who I really am, how I really come across, and how others actually see me). Psychological health, according to Jung, is narrowing the gap between my perceived self and my actual self as much as possible.2 That’s true for me. And it’s true for you. Kinda scary, huh? Of course, this gap between perceived and actual self is much easier to see in others. We are all painfully aware of the varying degrees of self-delusion our coworkers, friends, and family members carry within them. But even though that same delusion is present within us, we find it difficult to see. I’d argue spiritual health is a lot like that. Spiritual health is closing the gap between biblical rumor and actual life as narrowly as possible. Spiritual maturity is narrowing the gap between Kingdom promise and daily grind; between what I believe in my head and what I know in my heart, my emotions, and my bones; between the core beliefs I recite in creeds and sing in worship anthems and the core beliefs I live day in and day out. Spiritual health means that inevitable gap between the story on the page and the story of my life narrows and narrows like a door creaking shut on a dark room until there’s barely a blade of light left. The Holy Spirit is the experiential agent of the Trinitarian God, narrowing the gap between biblical promise and everyday experience and leading to greater spiritual health and maturity. Quiet crisis, loud crisis, or a combination of the two—everyone who attempts to follow Jesus without a deep, rich understanding of and relationship with the indwelling person, presence, and power of the Holy Spirit will one day be confronted by the gap—maybe the troublingly wide gap—between biblical rumor and actual life.”
― Tyler Staton, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality