Stop Taking Sides Quotes

“We're a tragic mix of imago dei and total depravity. Holding this tension rescues you from utopianism and hedonism, nihilism and cynicism. If you want to treat humans well, you must understand what we humans are. And what we are all, right now, is a mashup of these twin natures. The best person you know is a seat of depravity. The worst person you know is an image-bearer of our Creator.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Incomprehension is a prerequisite of passionate praise.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“From time to time God lets us in, explaining certain parts of his plan. But his explanations are not given that we might understand him but that we might adore him.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“The best person you know is a seat of depravity. The worst person you know is an image-bearer of our Creator.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“When human depravity looms large in your view, remember imago dei, and that through Christ goodness will one day win. Never place your hope in a program to fix humanity.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“A hallmark of truth is its power to explain. Truth corresponds with the world as it is, not merely as we think it should be. This produces a virtue called prudence—seeing yourself and the world rightly.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“This is the Gordian knot of human nature—you and me. Simultaneously, we bear the image of our Creator and the curse of our rebellion. Capable of great wonders and great woes, this is who we are. But it is not who we will always be.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“We’re made in God’s image to think in the way he thinks. Yet sin corrupts our minds to such deep degrees that our reason is tainted by the irrationality of sin.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Now we’re not good or evil; we’re good and evil. Nothing we do erases God’s image in us, and nothing we do is untouched by our sinfulness. We each now live in the tension of imago dei and total depravity—a tension that every other origin-story misses, yet one which explains the data of human history.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Your thoughts on you are the foundation of your sense of self-worth, morality, parenting, politics, and almost everything else.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Comprehension is not a pre-requisite for wonder. So, in any circumstance, worship him passionately. His goodness is never in doubt, only our ability to comprehend his good plans.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Worship Passionately Incomprehension is a prerequisite of passionate praise.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Accept Responsibility God’s sovereignty doesn’t get rid of human responsibility; it grounds it.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“I know that what God’s doing is good, but I don’t know how right now” is usually wisdom. Guessing at anything deeper is often folly—”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Admit Ignorance Where Scripture is clear, we should be too. But where it’s not, we venture mere guesses.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“getting your doctrine right is not the same as growing as a disciple. When God confronts me with his sovereignty and my responsibility, I have a choice: resolve the tension by bringing doctrine down to the lowest common denominator of my comprehensibility, or grow in the virtue of humility.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“The Bible invites us to know God but not to comprehend everything about him.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Contort Scripture to obliterate human agency and the line between God and evil disappears, making God’s word lie when it teaches that he bears no blame for evil (1 John 1 v 5), and making “he made me do it” a defense for every evil act. Twist it to exalt human agency and God is just a passive observer, frantically responding to whatever crazy choices we humans make.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“With God, it’s never senseless. Yet it’s also never not evil. The author’s aim wasn’t to make systematic theology easier so we could “understand,” but to set before us a tension so that we could be formed. His aim is to form us to be those who might humbly look for evidences of grace even in the greatest evil to form us—into those who humbly trust him even (and precisely) when we don’t see how he is bringing about his good purposes. Holding the tension—difficult as it may be—will incubate humility.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Joseph neither undermined his brothers’ responsibility nor downplayed the immorality of their actions. “You meant evil against me.” What they did was what they did, and what they did was evil. And yet… God’s intentionality was all over their actions. The warm rays of God’s sovereignty shone even through and in the darkness of their evil actions. God “meant it” for good. God didn’t just use it for good, redeem it for good or allow it for good. God’s intentions were at work within their evil choice.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“the Christian life is found within this tension, not in running to the false security of your preferred side.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Tensions, on the other hand, are ideas that feel as though they cannot be true at the same time, but are.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Logic is built on the bedrock of the law of non-contradiction, teaching us that a thing cannot be itself and its negation at the same time, under the same circumstances.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“if we care more about being right about Jesus than following the way of Jesus, it won’t matter that we’re right about Jesus.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“The Bible teaches that God is in control and that our decisions matter. His will will be done, and he will hold us responsible for ours. God chooses his people, and we are responsible for trusting God.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Anyone who increases in knowledge risks arrogance—a risk multiplied when the subject is God.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“Clarity, argumentation, listening, and mystery—these are the tools that will enable us to stop taking sides, embrace tensions, and for God’s sake be free from constant fear, proud tribalism, and sprawling anxiety.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“if you’re more judging, then you like your lines nice and neat, and your doctrine all sewn up—so you’ll need to consciously, willingly embrace paradox and mystery. For, while God knows all things, you don’t, and you can’t. You must learn to trust him, not your ability to understand him.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“If you’re closed, listening is going to be necessary—especially listening to the more open among us or those who aren’t already saying what you want to hear, remembering that they often have a point and a helpful perspective.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage

“For the feeling-based intuiters, the challenge is to stop only thinking with your feelings, and let logic and sound arguments speak to you. I don’t mean “arguments” as fighting but as substantive reasoning and the careful articulation of truth.”
― Adam Mabry, Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage