If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk Quotes

“Christianity as modeled by Jesus was never meant to hold power.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“People deserve a God who so loves the world, not a God who chooses America First;”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“loveless, Jesus-less Christianity is going to leave us fractured in ways we’ve never been before.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“The less dependent we are on a building for an hour on Sunday to replicate the transcendent encounter we have as we live through this life, the more we are able to understand the world as sacred, to embrace the truth that the place where we stand is always holy ground—that we are forever in the thin places if we pay attention. When you begin to unbox God, you may find yourself uncomfortable in church or religion because these places begin to feel restrictive to your soul. The prayers might no longer ring as true, the creeds may seem unwieldy, and the sermons start to sound alarms of hypocrisy.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“For as long as human beings have been declaring devotion to a God of love, they have been gloriously screwing it up by being hateful in the process.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“I still ask for people to pray and I still pray, but I try to reorient my prayers these days. I no longer believe in a supernatural Santa Claus who dispenses life and death based on the conduct or the heart of the recipients and their friends. I don’t believe in a God who withholds miraculous healing or compassionate care until sufficiently begged by us to do so. I believe prayer works by unlocking our empathy for others, that it knits us together in deeper relationship. I believe it to be a beautiful expression of love for and solidarity with people who are suffering; that it connects us personally to one another and to God in ways that cannot be quantified. I believe it is a sacred act of kindness we extend to other human beings to declare oneness with them. But I don’t believe prayer can change God’s mind about healing people we love—nor do I want it to.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“I’m perfectly comfortable hovering somewhere between orthodoxy and heresy.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“they worship a deity made in their own image: white, American, Republican, male—and perpetually terrified of Muslims, immigrants, science, gay children, special counsel reports, mandalas, Harry Potter, Starbucks holiday cups, yoga, wind turbines—everything.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“Yes, God loves us unquestionably and effusively (we are told), but there are caveats and conditions under which we earn and keep that love: prerequisites for belonging among God and God’s people, the moral scores that need to be settled in order to be fully welcomed. It may be helpful to leave behind those scary stories of our childhoods because they make for terrified adults, and terrified adults historically do not love very well.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“I knew that I was loved completely, as long as I didn’t screw it up in the infinite number of ways it seemed possible to do so: stealing, lying, masturbating, listening to Ozzy Osbourne, or one day voting Democrat.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“they worship a deity made in their own image: white, American, Republican, male—and perpetually terrified of Muslims, immigrants, science, gay children, special counsel reports, mandalas, Harry Potter, Starbucks holiday cups, yoga, wind turbines—everything. While they declare this God’s staggering might at every opportunity, their defensive posture belies this confidence. They seem to feel the need to be armed to the teeth and to build impenetrable walls for protection, certain that others mean them harm and want to take what is theirs. They want to change gay couples and transgender teenagers themselves, because they don’t trust God to work within people as God desires. They seem burdened to hoard wealth, health insurance, and opportunity—because they subconsciously suspect the God they claim turned water into wine and fed thousands with a few fish and some leftover bread might not make enough for everyone.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“The Good Book makes a really lousy hammer.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“A God our brains and buildings can fully hold just isn’t big enough to be truly God. The moment we imagine a rigid box adequately
capable of containing the who, what, how, and why of everything that is or ever was or ever might be is the moment we’ve shrunken all the answers to the elemental questions
down into something that is no longer God-sized. If we can fully fathom it, it ceases to be worthy of our reverence.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“As a pastor, sometimes I wanted the people in my care to leave a church service feeling comforted, of course, but just as often I wanted them to be burdened to run from it and into the places where pain is commonplace in order to make them less painful.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“You are in the emotional growing pains of adult spirituality. Reexamining your entire image of God is going to be a bit of an interruption, something you can’t numb with a streaming binge or a couple hours of mindless slot-machine scrolling through your newsfeed. When your previous understanding of whatever you imagine set life into motion and holds it all together and directs your movements faces disturbance, there are going to be consequences and costs and collateral damage. Many people don’t want to do that invasive, uncomfortable work, which is why they’re satisfied allowing someone else to tell them what to believe. I’m glad that, for whatever reason, you’re not satisfied with that. Our world, starved for love, is glad too.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“People deserve a God who is neither white nor male nor cisgender, nor heterosexual nor Republican—because any other God isn’t big enough to bear the title or merit any reverence. Ever”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“coincides with their own desires.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“For so many of us, the need to be right slowly indoctrinates us into a cozy cult of confirmation bias that reinforces what we already believe instead of daring us to believe something that might be more challenging yet more fully true.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“Here’s the best guess I can make based on the available information—though I very well may be wrong.” (I’d love more Sunday sermons like that, and I think most church people would too.) That’s”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans