Women of the Word Quotes

“The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“If we want to feel deeply about God, we must learn to think deeply about God.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“We will not wake up ten years from now and find we have passively taken on the character of God.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“We must make a study of our God: what he loves, what he hates, how he speaks and acts. We cannot imitate a God whose features and habits we have never learned. We must make a study of him if we want to become like him. We must seek his face.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“The Bible does tell us who we are and what we should do, but it does so through the lens of who God is. The knowledge of God and the knowledge of self always go hand in hand.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“finding greater pleasure in God will not result from pursuing more experiences of him, but from knowing him better. It will result from making a study of the Godhead.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“We can't fully appreciate the sweetness of the New Testament without the savory of the Old Testament.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“For years I viewed my interaction with the Bible as a debit account: I had a need, so I went to the Bible to withdraw an answer. But we do much better to view our interaction with the Bible as a savings account: I stretch my understanding daily, I deposit what I glean, and I patiently wait for it to accumulate in value, knowing that one day I will need to draw on it.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Bible literacy matters because it protects us from falling into error. Both the false teacher and the secular humanist rely on biblical ignorance for their messages to take root, and the modern church has proven fertile ground for those messages. Because we do not know our Bibles, we crumble at the most basic challenges to our worldview. Disillusionment and apathy eat away at our ranks. Women, in particular, are leaving the church in unprecedented numbers.1”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“A vision of God high and lifted up reveals to me my sin and increases my love for him. Grief and love lead to genuine repentance, and I begin to be conformed to the image of the One I behold.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“How do you move a mountain? One spoonful of dirt at a time. Chinese proverb”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“The Bible does not want to be neatly packaged into three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day increments. It does not want to be reduced to truisms and action points. It wants to introduce dissonance into your thinking, to stretch your understanding. It wants to reveal a mosaic of the majesty of God one passage at a time, one day at a time, across a lifetime.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Every good endeavor should be done with purpose. Without a clear sense of purpose, our efforts to do a good thing well can flounder. But with a clear purpose, we are far more likely to persevere.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“The second thing I got backwards in my approach to the Bible was the belief that my heart should guide my study. The heart, as it is spoken of in Scripture, is the seat of the will and emotions. It is our “feeler” and our “decision-maker.” Letting my heart guide my study meant that I looked for the Bible to make me feel a certain way when I read it. I wanted it to give me peace, comfort, or hope. I wanted it to make me feel closer to God.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Your love for others is the overflow of your love for God. Your love for God will increase as you learn to know him better. But never lost sight that your influence will be noticed in how you use your heart, not your head. Bible literacy that does not transform is a chasing after the wind. Christians will be known by our love, not our knowledge. We will not be known by just any kind of love - we will be known for the kind of love the Father has shown to us and we in turn show to others.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Exegesis says, “Before you can hear it with your ears, hear it with theirs. Before you can understand it today, understand it back then.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Someone asked me recently, after learning I was a Bible teacher, if I was a God-worshipper or a Bible-worshipper. ... My answer was simple: I want to be conformed to the image of God. How can I become conformed to an image that I never behold? I am not a Bible-worshipper, but I cannot truly be a God-worshipper without loving the Bible deeply and reverently. Otherwise, I worship an unknown god.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Are we called to be like Noah? Yes. Are we called to be like the Good Samaritan? Yes. But not simply because they are positive examples to inspire us to righteousness. These stories point us to Christ.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“A well-rounded approach to Bible study recognizes that the Bible is always more concerned with the decision-maker than with the decision itself. Its aim is to change our hearts so that we desire what God desires, rather than to spoon-feed us answers to every decision in life.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“We must love God with our minds, allowing our intellect to inform our emotions, rather than the other way around.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“If we want to feel a deeper love for God, we must learn to see him more clearly for who he is. If we want to feel deeply about God, we must learn to think deeply about God.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“But sound Bible study is rooted in a celebration of delayed gratification. Gaining Bible literacy requires allowing our study to have a cumulative effect—across weeks, months, years—so that the interrelation of one part of Scripture to another reveals itself slowly and gracefully, like a dust cloth slipping inch by inch from the face of a masterpiece. The Bible does not want to be neatly packaged into three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day increments. It does not want to be reduced to truisms and action points. It wants to introduce dissonance into your thinking, to stretch your understanding. It wants to reveal a mosaic of the majesty of God one passage at a time, one day at a time, across a lifetime. By all means, bring eagerness to your study time. Yes, bring hunger. But certainly bring patience—come ready to study for the long term.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“The God of the Bible is too lovely to abandon for lesser pursuits.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“The Word is living and active. It will conform you by dividing you. And in the dividing, miracle of miracles, it will render you whole.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“The Bible is a book that boldly and clearly reveals who God is on every page.”
― jen wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“But our insecurities, fears, and doubts can never be banished by the knowledge of who we are. They can only be banished by the knowledge of “I AM.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“In understanding the Scriptures: “Then [Jesus] said to [the disciples], ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” (Luke 24:44–45) In transforming us: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Rom. 12:2–3)”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Study everything that makes God wonderful and mimic to your heart’s delight, as the joyful expression of your reciprocal love for him.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“There is a vastness between what I am and what I ought to be, but it is a vastness able to be spanned by the mercy and grace of him whose face it is most needful for me to behold. In beholding God we become like him. So”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Build slowly if you must, but by all means, build. In pursuing an orderly process [of Bible study], you follow a pattern established by God himself. The God of the Bible is a God of order.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds