Gay Girl, Good God Quotes

“I don’t believe it is wise or truthful to the power of the gospel to identify oneself by the sins of one’s past or the temptations of one’s present but rather to only be defined by the Christ who’s overcome both for those He calls His own.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“Light has a way of welcoming in the truth and letting it put its feet up, which in turns means that everything not like it, though it may invite itself over, can’t get comfortable enough to stay.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“Yet, unbelief doesn't see God as the ultimate good. So it can't see sin as the ultimate evil. It instead sees sin as a good thing and thus God's commands as a stumbling block to joy. In believing the devil, I didn't need a pentagram pendant to wear, neither did I need to memorize a hex or two. All I had to do was trust myself more than God's Word. I had to believe that my thoughts, my affections, my rights, my wishes, were worthy of absolute obedience and that in laying prostrate before the flimsy throne I'd made for myself, that I'd be doing a good thing.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“..because a good God made the woman, then being a woman [is] a good thing”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“Our sexuality is not our soul, marriage is not heaven, and singleness is not hell.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“Could it be that God would not have me going about the rest of my life believing that these lesser forms of “love" were the real thing? Perhaps this love He, filled to the brim with, was pouring over into His dealings with me. And perhaps this love was compelling Him, on the basis of grace—an undeserved love—to help me see that every person, place or thing that I loved more than Him could not keep its promise to love me eternally.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“He is so much greater than the greatest thing and much more glorious than the most glorious glory the eyes could see. Knowing this, He becomes the aim of all our doing. Because, if God is bigger than we can imagine, we are wasting our time to chase after something or someone lesser than Him. And because we know that He is our all in all, in our temptations, our trials, and our victories, we must place our ultimate identity not in who we are, but in who we know God to be.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“Why hadn’t they ever mentioned the place happiness had within righteousness, or how the taking up of the cross would be a practice of obtaining delight? Delight in all that God is? Even their Savior had this kind of joy in mind as He endured His cross. So why hadn’t they set their focus on the same? In their defense, they were not to blame for my unbelief. I just wonder if they would’ve told me about the beauty of God just as much, if not more, than they told me about the horridness of hell, if I would’ve burned my idols at a faster pace.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“When salvation has taken place in the life of someone under the sovereign hand of God, they are set free from the penalty of sin and its power. In a body without the Spirit, sin is an unshakable king under whose dominion no man can flee. The entire body, with its members, affections, and mind all willfully submit themselves to sin’s rule. But when the Spirit of God takes back the body that He created for Himself, He sets it free from the pathetic master that once held it captive and releases it into the marvelous light of its Savior. It is then able to not only want God, but it is actually able to obey God. And isn’t that what freedom is supposed to be? The ability to not do as I please, but the power to do what is pleasing.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“My hands, head, face, legs, hips, hormones, private parts, voice, feet, fingers, feelings, were all made by Him and for Him. Apparently, this body was never mine to begin with - it was given to me from Somebody, for Somebody. Somebody who'd made it for glory and not shame. Until I got to know Him though, my identity would be made up of whatever dust that flew up from the devil's feet as he ran through the earth.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“To tell you about what God has done for my soul is to invite you into my worship.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“I don’t doubt that it’s easy to mistake the heterosexual gospel for the gospel of God because many have forgotten that the gospel is actually about God in the first place. When the Christian life has become a practice in doing everything else but making Jesus known, what would we expect of our gospel presentations? They will naturally result in the telling of something empty and void of power—more moral than anything and sufficient to make men and women believe that they can be saved by and for some other means than Jesus.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“Unbelief, just like Satan, will always take the easy way out. It will tell us to eat the fruit in exchange for knowledge, instead of fearing God to gain real wisdom. Unbelief will unravel our perceptions of both suffering and the blessedness of life and beckon us to skip self-denial at all costs with the faux promises of comfort that can’t extend beyond the grave.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“Jesus said there will be no marriage in the new creation. In that respect, we will be like the angels, neither marrying nor being given in marriage. We will have the reality, we will no longer need the signpost. By foregoing marriage now, singleness is a way of both anticipating this reality and testifying to its goodness. It's a way of saying this future reality is so certain, that we can live according to it now. If marriage shows us the shape of the gospel, singleness shows us its sufficiency. It's a way of declaring to a world obsessed with sexual and romantic intimacy these things are not ultimate, and that in Christ we possess what is.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“...to have a quiet and gentle spirit--a call given to women--would not mean I had to abandon all that I am, limp along in life, silence my personality in the name of obedience, but instead it meant that I could authentically be the woman God made me as, while anchored in the truth and controlled by the Spirit. When led by Him, when wanting to place my rights above His honor, humility would place its hand over my heart, keeping it still and settled with peace until what was worth being said or done happened in love. Out of a deep wanting for what belonged to God to be recognized and respected.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“Every single thing He has ever or will ever say is true. The simplicity of faith is this: taking God’s Word for it. And I might not have felt like it, but I had no choice but to believe Him.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“But I- unbeknownst to me- had been swayed by this same leaven. If only I could just be straight, and lay aside my homosexuality, God would accept me and call me His own, I used to think. This delusion was the belief that only one aspect of my life was worthy of judgment, while the rest deserved heaven. That my other voices were “not as bad.” They were just struggles that I had to work on instead of repenting.
There is a possibility that this kind of self-righteous thinking is why salvation has eluded many same-sex-attracted men and women… Because God did not take hold of their gay desires and replace them with straight desires, they have no other choice but to follow where their affections may lead. The error is this: they have come to God believing that only a fraction of themselves needs saving. They have therefore neglected to acknowledge the rest of them also needs to be made right.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“C. S. Lewis wrote: A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness—they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“It is the identity that we ascribe to God out of doubt or faith in His Scriptures that will determine the identity we will give ourselves and ultimately the life that we inevitably live. If He is the Creator, then we are created. If He is Master, then we are servants. If He is love, then we are loved. If He is omnipotent, then we are not as powerful as we think. If He is omniscient, then there is nowhere to hide. If He cannot lie, then His promises are all true.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“The same Bible that condemned me held in it the promises that could save me. I just had to believe it. “It” being what it said about Him: God. Jesus had the guilty in mind when He was hung high and stretched out wide. On it, He died in my place, for my sin. He, bare-bodied and face set on joy, became as a slaughtered lamb underneath the wrath of God. You would think His Father would have a better memory than that. Didn’t He know that that wrath was mine? It even had my name on it. But He knew. His justice wouldn’t allow Him to forget. His love is what He wanted me to know and remember, and I did.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“Trying to contain the small giggle welling up in her chest from the sincerity of my question, Santoria, full of confidence, responded while looking toward my direction, "Yes, Jackie.The gospel didn't just save you, it also keeps you.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“Vomit will always be vomit even if drizzled with chocolate, sliced almonds, and a cherry on top (2 Peter 2:21-22). When the temptation to see sin as what it is not arrives, the Scriptures are our light, our final truth, our escape out of the shadow moving toward our feet. The Word of God and not the word of the enemy is where we see the true identity of sin.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“Our sexuality is not our soul, marriage is not heaven, and singleness is not hell. So may we all preach the news that is good for a reason. For it proclaims to the world that Jesus has come so that all sinners, same-sex-attracted and opposite-sex-attracted, can be forgiven of their sins to love God and enjoy Him forever.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“The gay community is called that for a reason. It is a community. A collective of people with different names, social statuses, eating habits, upbringings and more but with one commonality shared among them that make them all more alike than not: their sexuality…… The difference between the gay community and the Christian community. Was not skill, intellect, comfort, humour, or beauty; it was that in one and not the other, God dwelled.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“Evangelism is a word that means to share the good news—more specifically, in this case, the good news of the gospel. And this evangelism is all about God because the gospel is all about God. It is God who created us. God who we all sinned against. It is God who loved us. God who sent His Son Christ to Earth. It is Christ who lived the life that we couldn’t. It is Christ who died that death that we deserve. It is Christ who appeased God’s wrath. It is Christ that rose from the dead. It is Christ who sent His promised Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that unveils our eyes to see the glory of Christ. It is the Holy Spirit who softens our hardened hearts so that we will repent. It is Christ who we are commanded to place our faith in. It is Christ who saves us and it is Christ that gives us eternal life.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“Nature as it was shown in my body called me “Woman.” But society called me manly. They’d made women out to be people who wear their legs out and men to be those that spoke as if everyone should listen. Neither versions were a sufficient mirror. I’d need someone smarter and not created to tell me who I was, for He would be the one who’d know best.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been

“If I could teach my daughter anything about herself, it would be that because a god God made the woman, then being a woman was a good thing.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“God was not calling me to be straight: He was calling me to himself. The choice to lay aside sin and take hold of holiness as not synonymous with heterosexuality.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“It's funny how, sometimes, the mind won't let the body remember what's been done to it. It chooses, at will, to take the abusive memory and bury it. As if to nurture away the pain by making us forget it's there. Not remembering trauma doesn't mean we're left without its effect. It still comes up and out, at a certain smell, sound, sight, touch, question, tone, location, person, people, personality. Waiting to be noticed and brought to the light. Letting it, and peeking into where it's from, is the path to making sense of ourselves and finding the particular healing we've been kept from having.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been

“Do you know why we have a hard time believing that a gay girl can become a completely different creature? Because, we have a hard time believing in God. ...”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been