The Pastor's Wife Quotes

“God promises to strongly support us when we are weak, so there is no better place for us to be than right smack-dab in the middle of whatever weakness we are beset with, if we are in the middle of it in Christ.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“But Jesus -- he delivers us from false gods. Tasting and seeing Jesus is the expulsive, new affection that drives out our love affair with idols. Jesus must be more fascinating to us than any new ways of living. Jesus must be more compelling to us than any temporary circumstance. Jesus must be more valuable to us than any trinket or toy. Jesus must be more real to us than any fleeting self-image or narcissistic self-actualization. Jesus Christ liberates us; he is the one who breaks the power that idols have in our lives.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“Did you think that loving God was your own idea, based on your own initiative? Is your ongoing relationship with the Lord sustained by your interest in his Word, or your passion for prayer, or your inclination toward holiness? None of these things are our own doing—they are gifts. If God always makes the first move and finishes what he starts, would he then leave the middle up to us? Grace carries us all the way through. The green pastures, the still waters, the rod and staff, the oil—all these things are provided by our Shepherd. Let the truth of his deliberate grace comfort you.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“Only the strengthening grace of Jesus empowers us to love as Jesus loves. Ministry will ask so much from your husband, from you, and from your family. Circumstances, incidents, situations, and the people involved in them may ask for things you do not have and cannot give, which is to be expected. And the Lord of glory would have it no other way. There is no amount of God-honoring selflessness that you can muster apart from Jesus.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“In the face of criticism from people we thought were friends, in the middle of a 24-7 schedule of lots of work left undone, on the hard road of suffering or obscurity or misunderstandings or uncertainty in decisions, we want Christ’s strength. We want to boast in our weaknesses so that Christ gets the glory for all our grace-driven efforts to love others (2 Cor. 12:9).”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“We have nothing eloquent or wise or caring to advise someone spiritually outside of God’s Word. The fountain of living water is Christ himself, and he has purchased for us every spiritual blessing (Eph. 1:3).”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“But we are not to focus on the gifts themselves in our service; our focus is to be on Christ. When our focus is on the one who empowers us, enables us, and provides opportunities in which we may usefully serve him, we can even see the strategic way that God chooses to leverage our weaknesses to give him glory.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“There is no creative ministry that can compare to the Spirit’s ministry of creating a people for God by his Word. Our truthful words are arrayed in corresponding and beautiful adorning acts of love and compassion as we suffer in various ways to advance the gospel (Matt. 5:16; Gal. 6:10). These light and momentary sufferings range from giving our time when it is inconvenient to giving our lives when the world deems they are not yet spent. So in view of God’s mercy, we present our body as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship (Rom. 12:1). This is no haphazard, reckless thing to do, because of the bulwark of certainty we are promised in that God has claimed for himself people from every tribe and nation, and these sheep will hear his voice (John 10:16; Acts 18:10; Rev. 5:9).”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“How does a ministry wife participate in this kind of community? We do it in view of who God is. We serve unto the Lord in the same manner in which other members participate: by grace through faith, walking in the good works God has prepared for us (Eph. 2:8–10).”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“Yes! Tell me how. I mean, I feel like I’m barely surviving. I can’t even imagine your life. There’s the kids, ministry, marriage, and showering. Do you even get to shower anymore?” I figured she was a prime candidate to answer my burning how question because she was the mother of nine children, pregnant with her tenth, and married to a busy minister. They were traveling through our city as they investigated ministries in our region of the world, and I knew I had a brief window in which to get the holy-grail answer I had been looking for My newborn squirmed in my arms for effect as I leaned in to hear my new friend’s wise words. “We both live and serve by God’s grace. God gives you grace for what he’s given you to do. I look at your life, and I can’t even imagine. God is the one who gives.” It was as if the wise King Solomon was sitting at my dining table. I was astonished at how profoundly true her words were. God is the giver of not only the gifts we use to serve but also the service opportunities themselves. Those are wise words from a woman who has been there (and remains in the middle of it). Grace turns our obsession with our abilities into a God-centered vision for ministry in which we see that “from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36). We look to God for direction and strength in serving his church: “For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Cor. 4:7).”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“We can gladly accept all the gifts, opportunities, weaknesses, and circumstances as from the Lord’s hand, trusting that he is the one who will reveal their true worth in the last day.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“we are privileged to help our husbands, serve our family, love the church, and practice all the one anothers with the people around us by God’s grace. We are all called—we are called to love, respect, and obey our husbands as they lead with servant-leader, Christlike humility. If we have children, we are called to love them and make a home for them. We are called to love the lost, make disciples, and serve the suffering.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“Our self-oriented ideas of gifting and calling are seen in a new light when we consider how the triune Godhead is working to display God’s glory in the cosmos. “To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen” (1 Pet. 4:11b).”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“We receive gifts from God and use them to serve “in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” Honest service gives credit where it is due. Gifts are given by God and empowered by God to glorify God.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“Do you see that even in using the gifts God has given us, we need the grace of God that he freely gives? Good stewardship starts and ends with a biblical perspective on our gifts (individually and corporately) and on the giver of those gifts.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“God never experiences giver’s remorse over the way he has gifted us as individuals and as a corporate body. We must remember that the gifts he gives are for a corporate reason, expression, and usefulness, since we are a people, the body, Christ’s bride.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“We dare not minimize the opportunity we have to serve others in and outside the body of Christ, even as we may feel preoccupied with helping to equip our husbands for their public ministry. “We need to remember that each ministry is unique and each marriage is unique, and God has uniquely gifted us for the position and role we are in.”17”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Heb. 10:24–25) We are created—finite and helpless without God—yet he enjoins us to strengthen one another. It must be that we do this through him, for there is no other way. We’ve seen that being a member of Christ’s body, the church, is a defining aspect of who we are. Lest we adopt an overinflated or a diminutive view of who we were saved to be, the Bible describes a believer as a brick in a building, a sheep in a flock, a priest in a priesthood, and a member of a family and of Christ’s body. Remembering the context of our faith as part of a community and a cloud of witnesses does a number on our prideful independence, doesn’t it?”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“In our happy worship of God we recognize that we haven’t given him more glory than he had at the first, as though we add to him, but, rather, we receive (always receiving!) from him as we recognize that he is indeed all-glorious.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“On days when my husband’s work in pastoring or my role in helping him does not seem very meaningful, I remember Christ’s explicit goals for his church. Those goals are why we are still here and not in heaven. The privilege of participating in Christ’s fullness, filling all in all as more and more people across the globe worship him as the one true God, is why you are here. This is true whether you are in Iowa City, Bangalore, Abu Dhabi, or Juarez. Even on a mundane Monday morning our hearts can be thrilled with the prospect that included among the gifts Jesus gave to his church are your pastor-husband to serve and you to help him serve—for the building up of his body. It throws everything into perspective of the big picture when we remember that Jesus ordained that this body building has a massive, Christ-centered goal: that the church would attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of him, to mature manhood, and to the measure of the stature of his fullness.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“Sister, even in the hard-to-reach places of this world where the loneliness is not imagined but very real, we can still take heart because of the gospel.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“The reality check we need cannot be gained through “listening to our hearts” and telling ourselves who we are. Through God’s Word we gain an eternal perspective through which we can evaluate every heart twinge, relationship, and circumstance. Do you know a timeless, familiar Bible verse that speaks to this? “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps. 119:105). What mercy from God that he would give us his illuminating Word and that it is always shining, regardless of whether we perceive it.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“Lest we come to believe that the gospel and the resulting ministry of the gospel are about us, we need to behold our God. When we’re being tugged in a navel-gazing direction, we need to behold our God. When we’re anxious about the vision we had for our lives, we need to behold our God. When we’re content with how life is going and feel little urgency about anything, much less spiritual matters, we need to behold our God! We need to have the eyes of our hearts enlightened so we may know the hope to which he’s called us, our glorious inheritance, and the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us (Eph. 1:17–19).”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“When you hear of the expectations that others have of you, you are free to consider them in light of God’s truth. There is ultimately no threat to your personhood, dignity, or worth, because the God who created all things, including you, does not have debatable opinions. Who you are in Christ never changes and is not threatened.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“This forgiveness and righteous standing have absolutely nothing to do with how high we can pull ourselves up by our moral bootstraps. The bootstraps of self-righteousness are chains. This righteousness of God apart from the law is a gift of grace. It is only through trusting in the work of Christ’s sacrificial death that we can be “justified by his grace as a gift” (Rom. 3:24).”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“We like to think of ourselves in terms of what we consume, produce, or possess, or how we behave. But being a Christian is neither a label nor an area of interest nor a matter of personal opinion. Being a Christian means that the most basic and fundamental thing about you has changed forever. No longer your own, you are now defined by whose you are. You were dead in your sins, and now you are alive to God.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“my primary identity is defined by God’s uniting me to Jesus through his death and resurrection.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“Our identity at the most basic and fundamental level is that we are “in Christ.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“why would we want to wade around in shallow puddles of man-made ideals when there is the incomprehensible ocean of the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge for us to dive into (Eph. 3:18–19)?”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love

“wives of ministers need encouragement and refreshment in the Lord, and we find that hope and help in the gospel.”
― Gloria Furman, The Pastor's Wife: Strengthened by Grace for a Life of Love