Secondhand Jesus Quotes

“tempted to make the same mistake. Every flaw or shortcoming is really someone else’s fault. We would have been all right if not for what they did to us or said to us or didn’t do or didn’t say. At our core we believe that we are good, and that given the right environment, resources, and support, we can make it. But the road to freedom, for addicts and for the rest of us who sin in a less obviously compulsive way, begins with the same admission: I am powerless. I cannot change myself. I cannot make myself better. I can’t starve my cravings enough to kill them. I can’t please God on my own.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“It’s not so much about the new things I’m doing, though there are some new habits I’m trying to form. It is more about a privilege I’m not ignoring, an invitation I’m not declining. God wants contact with me. And I can no longer forfeit that joy.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“Yet we are not too different from the Levites of David’s day. We all too often abdicate our role as priest and defer to the more efficient, more progressive approach of using carts. A cart is anything we use to “carry God” for us; it is the shortcuts we attempt and the God experts we prefer, the people, places, conferences, events, songs, styles, churches—fill in the blank—that we rely on to bring God to us in a quick, easy, but devastatingly impersonal way. What’s worse than our reliance on them is our belief that God actually prefers them. This is the fourth and last rumor about God: God prefers specialists.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“We must let Him have His way, totally and completely. Let Him expose our pride, our selfishness. Let Him unearth our motives. Let Him show us when we are doing things—even or especially good, noble, godly things like caring for the sick or feeding the poor and homeless—because we want to be noticed or praised or admired. Remember that the same Jesus who healed and told the cured to keep it a secret, the same Jesus who at the peak of His popularity gave His most offensive and enigmatic sermon, the same Jesus who urged us to give in secret—this Jesus is at work in our hearts. He won’t let us get away with simply the right behavior; He wants innocent hearts, full of love and humility. There can be no other gods of fame and influence that we keep paying homage to, hoping to gain immortality.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“David Goetz, a former editor for Christianity Today, takes it a step further, warning that even pastors are not exempt: For clergy, it’s the three-thousand-member mega-church. I wrote and edited for a clergy publication for several years. I often sat in the studies of both small-church pastors and mega-church pastors, listening to their stories, their hopes, their plans for significance.… Religious professionals went into ministry for the significance, to make an impact, called by God to make a difference with their lives. But when you’re fifty-three and serving a congregation of 250, you know, finally, you’ll never achieve the large-church immortality symbol.2 Goetz”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“The desire for fame and success isn’t gone; it’s just christened as the goal of “reaching more people for Christ.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure. (James 4:1–3 NLT)”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“We have nice words that cloak our pursuits, making us believe they are godly. Influence. Platform. The opportunity to reach more people. These seem noble and Christian, sanctioned—nay, commissioned—by God. But beneath the veneer are the same ugly demons that drive us all: a thirst for success and fame.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“Disappointment is an agent of the cross. But it is also a means of resurrection.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“In our thickheadedness, we so easily and often choose the lesser blessings, often even at the expense of the greater ones.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“Seeking just might be God’s love language.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“There is a way that God designed us to encounter Him: firsthand. God has always preferred and invited firsthand communication. He desires to show Himself to us, speak to us, draw us to Himself. It is we humans, the objects of His affection, who have repeatedly declined.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“Far too often, rumors about God originate in church. We hear a preacher say something about God with confident certainty, and we take it as truth. What we don’t know is that he heard another preacher say it, and that preacher heard another preacher say it, and that preacher read it somewhere, and that author heard his momma say it, and so on. We could blame them. But we would do better to blame ourselves for turning down God’s invitation, for closing our ears and our eyes when He has tried to show Himself to us. No technological advancement, no access to information, no invention of convenience has been able to change the strange human impulse to shun God, to cover up and hide, the way the first man and woman did.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“At Mount Sinai, before He gave Moses the commandments, God invited the people He had just rescued from captivity in Egypt to come near. They refused in fear. Moses, you go for us. God was trying to communicate that the rules He was about to give them were a sign of covenant, of relationship with them. He would be their God and they would be His people. But they preferred a less direct approach, someone else to mediate, someone else to relay God’s wishes.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“The disappointment that comes from an unexpected trouble, an unplanned difficulty, can help us die to ourselves, to our attempts at control, to our plans for the perfect life. Disappointment is an agent of the cross.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“Every time I sin, I am spitting in God’s face, insulting Him by my insistence on living apart from Him. I am saying He is not enough—not good enough, not powerful enough, not worthy enough—to have my devotion, dependence, and obedience. When I sin, I am in essence saying that God is not God. And if God is to be God, He cannot tolerate such mutiny and insult. It is an affront to His character. And I am the offender.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“tragedy is the great equalizer.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“We all experience a measure of suffering, and every experience can be redeemed. C. S. Lewis wrote, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”4”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus