A Practical Guide to Culture Quotes

“Addiction is the result of an emptiness in the soul, not of what’s put into the body. Spiritual harm is much more insidious and is the real reason empty selves turn to drugs and alcohol. In a culture of alienation and fragmentation, people search for something to save them from their pain. For many, drugs and alcohol become substitute saviors. However, these substances are an inadequate replacement for the real thing. Drugs and alcohol can only anesthetize people, dulling life for a few fleeting moments, but they cannot satisfy empty souls. Instead, they compound brokenness and multiply the devastation of sin. Real rescue can be found only in God’s Story.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“Moralistic therapeutic deists believe that God visits their world, not that they live in God’s world. They believe that God serves their agenda, helping them feel good about themselves along the way. God, in their view, demands nothing of them. Rather, He exists to help them in whatever way they wish. Moralistic therapeutic deism is not Christianity at all.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“Another challenge of the information age is who to trust.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“Our worldview, whether or not we’re consciously aware of it, informs our actions in the world and our interactions with others.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“the Bible is more than a book of morality and religion. Fundamentally, it’s a narrative. It tells the Story of the world, from the creation to the new creation.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“For the Christian, winning and losing isn’t determined in this cultural moment. We belong to a larger Story.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“There are consequences when life is lived this way. 10 First, we lose touch with our world. Especially through social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, we adopt an odd posture toward everyday life. Rather than enjoying the moment we’re in, making the most of an experience, and contemplating important lessons learned and memories made, we find ourselves thinking, How many likes and shares will my picture of this get?”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“When mature Christians engage the culture fully, deeply, and wisely, the culture won’t corrupt us. Just the opposite. We’ll be teachers of the culture. We’ll teach it what is good, true, and beautiful.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“We often think of compromise when it comes to beliefs and behaviors, but a particularly subtle temptation is to compromise in our methods. It’s tempting to run our businesses, grow our churches, and pursue wealth through an end-justifies-the-means way of thinking. It’s tempting to prize stuff over people and political power over righteousness. It’s tempting to define success by popularity rather than faithfulness and seek to be relevant to avoid self-sacrifice, conflict, or suffering. The simple truth is that Christian faithfulness involves not only our doctrine and lifestyle but also our habits, attitudes, and affections. It isn’t enough to sprinkle Christian truth on lives shaped more by the cultural moment than the gospel.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“As I heard Chuck Colson say often, “There’s no limit to the human capacity for self-rationalization.” Our own frailty, plus the subtle but powerful influences in our culture, makes us susceptible to drifting into compromise. Smaller compromises lead to bigger ones, and like Solomon, we may quickly find our hearts turned toward other gods (1 Kings 11).”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“The believer’s hope, secured through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, isn’t subject to fickle feelings shaped by the cultural moment.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“Still, safety is never the goal for the Christ follower. Faithfulness is.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“how humans and human life are understood, valued, and treated are critical indicators of a culture’s health.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“Instruction is necessary, of course, but discipleship happens not when we talk at our kids but when we walk with them through their struggles to a place of commitment. 18”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“Leaders are readers, and readers are leaders.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“You may not live what you profess, but you will live what you really believe.” 14”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“perfect people aren’t Christians; forgiven people are.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; knowledge of speech, but not of silence; knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? T. S. Eliot, The Rock”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“Christian families and churches must see what they do as more than offering wholesome youth programs and teaching moralistic therapeutic Sunday school lessons. Our agenda for the next generation must be whole-life formation, intentionally countering the dominant cultural vision of what life is about. We must make sure our kids understand Christian faith as more than a set of beliefs and behaviors. Instead, they need to know that a competing vision of life demands their deepest allegiance and grounds their identity.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“Only in the case of transgenderism are physical solutions offered for a psychological incongruence.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“We must never give our kids the impression that questioning is doubting or that doubting is sinning. If it is indeed wrong to question God, the book of Psalms needs to be removed from the Bible. How often in Israel’s hymnbook did David or another psalmist wonder aloud whether God was truly good—or even there at all?”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World

“culture’s greatest influence is in what it presents as being normal.”
― John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World