Disruptive Witness Quotes

“Why does our avoidance of slow, careful introspection matter? The gospel is cognitively costly. It upsets our innate and cultivated assumptions about power and guilt and existential validation. It presses down on our values and hopes. It decenters our perception of the world. Life ceases to be our story and is revealed to be his redemptive story of glory and love. It convicts us of our sins. It reveals our disordered desires and reforms them into Christ’s image. Paul urges his readers to “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2), and that renewal is the proper work of the Spirit through the gospel. The kind of work the gospel does in our lives tasks our minds with unsettling assumptions and habits.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“The challenge facing us today is not so much the temptation to be relevant to the point that we lose the gospel, but the tendency to unknowingly accept a secular understanding of our faith while believing that we are boldly declaring the gospel.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“The gospel is not a preference. It’s not another piece of flair we add to our vest. It’s something far more beautiful and disturbing. The gospel is the power to raise the dead, to proclaim the greatness of God in a fallen and confused world.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“The self-glorification that he needed in his innermost nature he now looked for in the love partner. The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual. Spirituality, which once referred to another dimension of things, is now brought down to this earth and given form in another individual human being.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“In other words, being raised from childhood into belief in Christ is suspicious, somehow less genuine, and certainly more susceptible to a falling away because the alternatives have not been considered. Rather than seeing faithfulness from birth to death as a blessing from God (which is certainly the model of the Old Testament), we harbor doubts about such believers’ sincerity.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“Sometimes self-reflection ends in asking God to either bring revelation to a feeling or to help us bear the burden of it until it passes.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“Her pure excitement overwhelms my wife and me—we can’t help but cheer her on, even though her jumping is, technically speaking, pretty sad. In these moments the praise we give is not feigned praise for her jumping; we praise her for taking delight in the goodness of being.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“Our frenetic and flattened culture is not conducive to wrestling with thick ideas, ideas with depth, complexity, and personal implications. It is a culture of immediacy, simple emotions, snap judgments, optics, and identity formation. In such a world, is it any wonder that Christians so often speak past their listeners?”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“A natural consequence of being mentally engaged all the time is, first, that it is easy for us to live with internal conflicts and contradictions with little cognitive dissonance. When confronted with a deficiency in our ethical code, it takes no real effort to ignore it.”
― Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age