Openness Unhindered Quotes

“God wants us to hear his voice through the Word of God, the discernment of the Holy Spirit, and the comfort of our redeemed life through the blood of Christ. For example, musical pitch is black and white. It is accurate, sharp, or flat. It cannot be both accurate and flat. It is exclusive in its claims. While a chorus can sing in harmony or cacophony (dissonance), a solo voice can only be accurate, sharp, or flat. So too is Scripture.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“I prayed that the Lord would help me to see my life from his point of view. It was then that I noticed it: as I looked around my house, I had dozens of PRIDE posters, T-shirts, coffee mugs. The flag that waved in the breeze at my porch was a PRIDE flag. Pride had become my best friend. In the LGBT world, we defined pride as a healthy self-esteem. But something started to crack a little and I dared to just ask the question: was I domesticating a tiger?”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“If this was a book written by men who were inspired by the Holy Spirit, then its admonitions about sin were not applied cultural phobia.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“the doctrine of Original Sin is the most democratizing idea in all of human history.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“Real conversion gives you Christ’s company as you walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Indeed, the fall made everything—including my deepest desires—fall. And this happened under God’s providential eye, not behind his back.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“We violate those we love when we try to supplant Christ by trying to fill his role, or by removing ourselves from this lavish outpouring of love by refusing to take God’s point of view on the matter of sin—its nature, origin, and consequences. Christ loves his people best. We cannot love as he did. We cannot suffer as he did. We cannot redeem our lives, our worlds, or our relationships.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“Because of our fallen natures, we expect that we will be repenting of sin until glory. But repentance is not simply proof of failure. It is, more importantly, a sign of God’s hand upon us. It is a conversion proof, as only a saved person can repent of sin.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“Here was the shattering of the second wall: I had read the Bible many times through, and I saw for myself that it had a holy Author; I saw for myself that it was a canonized collection of sixty-six books with a unified biblical revelation. I heard for myself that when the words “this is mine” came out of my mouth in congregational singing, I was attesting to this one, simple truth: that the line of communication that God ordained for his people required this wrestling with Scripture, and that I truly wanted both to hear God’s voice breathed in my life, and I wanted God to hear my pleas. The fog burned away. The whole Bible, each jot and tittle, was my open highway to a holy God.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“It is almost incredible how much ground the devil takes when he has once made sin a matter of controversy: some are of one mind, and some of another; you are of one opinion, and I am of another. If it were ever a controversy whether drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, swearing, stealing, or any villainy were a sin or not, it would be committed more commonly and with much less regret of conscience. By this means, good men themselves are dangerously disabled to resist sin, and are more prepared to commit it. Take heed lest the devil cast you into this sleep of carnal security.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“My testimony is like iodine on starch. There is nothing neutral about it, about me, or about my life in Jesus Christ.             Of”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“God holds up the same mirror for us all, and none of us reflects the image of God in righteousness, holiness, and knowledge apart from Christ. Homophobia—the”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“Repentance is the threshold to God. When heat meets ice, the solid substance liquefies completely. Repentance liquefies the will of the flesh. Repentance is our daily fruit, our hourly washing, our minute- by-minute wakeup call, our reminder of God’s creation, Jesus’ blood, and the Holy Spirit’s comfort. Repentance is the only no-shame solution to a renewed Christian conscience because it proves the obvious: that God was right all along.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“In the LGBT community, the opposite of pride is self- hatred. But in the Bible, the opposite of pride is faith. Was pride keeping me from faith, or was pride keeping me from self-hatred?”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“Christ’s virgin birth represents, in spite of all the hoopla around Christmas, his humiliation, not his exaltation. Original”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“When God covers our sin, we are given deliverance. When we cover our sin through denial or excuse- making, God’s hand is heavy upon us. And God’s heavy hand is a blessing! It is a sign of his love that he does not leave us in deception: “For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me” (v. 4). When we admit or toy with our sin, God’s hand is heavy. When we confess our sin, God’s hand moves to bear us up: “I said, ‘I will confess my transgression to the Lord,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin” (v. 5, ESV).”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“John Owen brings helpful detail to our discussion about sin and temptation. According to Owen, temptation is “any thing, state, way, or condition that, upon any account whatsoever, has a force or efficacy to seduce, to draw the mind and heart of a man from its obedience, which God requires of him, into any sin, in any degree of it whatsoever.”20 Note that any temptation can lead a person into any sin. It is a force. And forces must be reckoned with, not passively accepted.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“is, in the words of The Westminster Shorter Catechism, “any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God” (Q. 14).6 Sin is mutiny, either by its omission (“want of conformity to”) or its commission (“transgression of the law of God”).”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“Just like a dancer’s body finds its points and an equestrian incorporates her body weight into the movement of the horse, the Christian learns how to melt her will into God’s.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“My friends knew that I was reading the Bible. First, the dean of the chapel took me out to lunch and shared his belief that the Old Testament was dispensable and, with it, any prohibition about sexuality and immorality. But I had been reading and studying the three different narratives of the Old Testament, and it seemed to me that you couldn’t dispense with it in its entirety without violating a foundational rule about canonicity: no creating canons within canons. In fact, I had just gone over this in my graduate seminar in Queer Theory and it made me wonder if the chapel dean ought not sit in on my class. His position seemed like a hermeneutic of convenience, tailoring the text to fit my experience, and not a hermeneutic of integrity, where the text gets the chance to fulfill its internal mission.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“It is not the absence of sin that makes you a believer.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ

“Why is sexual sin so hard to deal with? Because often sexual sin becomes a sin of identity. One goal of this book is to help you face your sin in Christ, know your status in Christ if you have committed your life to him, and reject any identity that Christ has not prepared for you.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ