What If Jesus Was Serious? Quotes

“As long as a person appears devout, uses the right words, and participates in the right religious activities, we don’t look much deeper. They are often given a pass on their anger, greed, jealousy, bitterness, lust, or bigotry. Such a person might be acceptable in a church today, but Jesus said they are unfit for God’s kingdom.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“there are plenty of Christians who may claim persecution who are actually suffering due to their own foolish or unrighteous behavior.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“If we want the culture to take Jesus more seriously, maybe we should try it first.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes the same contrast between the myth of scarcity and the reality of abundance in God’s kingdom. If we live in constant fear of not having enough—like Pharaoh did—it will lead us to greed and injustice in the name of self-preservation. If, however, we believe Jesus and trust that with God there is always an abundance, then we can be set free from a self-centered posture and be empowered to truly love others.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“Very often, what gets Christians into trouble is not holding to God’s commands, but stridently holding to the assumptions we’ve inferred from God’s commands.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“Some suffer for righteousness. But frankly, some Christians suffer because they are insufferable.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“Like the Zealots, we can be tempted to use the world’s ways—coercion, power, and fear—to “take back the land” for God. Instead, Jesus calls us to put such things aside and discover the power of God available through meekness.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“On Sunday, contemporary Christians are eager to worship a crucified Savior who loved and forgave His enemies. But on Monday, we want permission to behave like the schoolyard bully who uses fear and anger to get ahead.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“I believe Jesus had another reason for commanding us to pray for our enemies. He understands that we cannot genuinely pray for another and continue to hate him. In prayer, our vision of the person is transformed as we see him in the light of God’s presence. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the reorienting power of prayer within Christian communities (where a great many of our enemies are often found): A Christian community either lives by the intercessory prayers of its members for one another, or the community will be destroyed. I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me. In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner. That is a blessed discovery for the Christian who is beginning to offer intercessory prayer for others. As far as we are concerned, there is no dislike, no personal tension, no disunity or strife that cannot be overcome by intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day.1 READ MORE Luke 23:33–34; 1 Peter 3:8–9”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“We may say that Jesus is our Lord, but that alone does not make it so. The true lord of our life is revealed by our actions not by our declarations. If we are to enter Jesus’ kingdom, He must actually be our King, and if we persistently live in a manner that denies His authority, no amount of verbal praise and exaltation will make Him so.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“maybe we are collectively in the second stage of grieving our loss of cultural significance as the church in North America. The first phase was denial, in which we rejected the evidence of declining church attendance and cultural marginalization—a few Pollyannas are still in this first phase of grief. Many of us have now moved to the second phase: anger.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“A miracle still occurred. From a human point of view, Moses’s ministry was effective, full of power, and praiseworthy. From God’s point of view, however, Moses failed and his ministry at the waters of Meribah was rejected. Could the same thing be happening to the false Christians Jesus describes in Matthew 7? Is it possible that because of His grace and care for His people, God chooses to sometimes display His power through ungodly leaders; to work in spite of them rather than because of them? We must not confuse being used by God with belonging to God.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“When determining how to respond to others, rather than asking W.W.J.D.? The Golden Rule instructs us to ask W.W.I.W.—“What would I want?” Rather than setting the bar inaccessibly high by saying we should act like Jesus, the Golden Rule puts obedience within our reach by making our own conscience the standard. In any given circumstance we are to treat others the way we want to be treated.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“When you feel the impulse to judge another, instead consider praying, “Lord, show me the plank in my own eye.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“As Fyodor Dostoevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“What if much of the culture’s judgment of Christians isn’t the result of obeying Jesus, but the result of Christians ignoring Him?”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore