35 Quotes by Frank Viola

Sin and love are exact opposites. Love is benefiting others at the expense of yourself. Sin is benefiting yourself at the expense of others. Sin is selfishness; love is selflessness.

Within the triune God we discover mutual love, mutual fellowship, mutual dependence, mutual honor, mutual submission, mutual dwelling, and authentic community. In the Godhead there exists an eternal, complementary, and reciprocal interchange of divine life, divine love, and divine fellowship.

When the Greeks got the gospel, they turned it into a philosophy; when the Romans got it, they turned it into a government; when the Europeans got it, they turned it into a culture; and when the Americans got it, they turned it into a business.

This disjunction between secular and spiritual is highlighted by the fact that the typical church building requires you to “process” in by walking up stairs or moving through a narthex. This adds to the sense that you are moving from everyday life to another life. Thus a transition is required. All of this flunks the Monday test. No matter how good Sunday was, Monday morning still comes to test our worship.229.

Organic church life, however, is a wedding of glory and gore.

It is the depravity of institutions and movements that given in the beginning to express life, they often end in throttling that very life. Therefore, they need constant review, perpetual criticism and continuous bringing back to the original purposes and spirit.

Sometimes the Lord wants us to wait and rest in Him. Other times, however, He wants us to press into His kingdom and receive what is rightfully ours in Christ.

The pew is perhaps the greatest inhibitor of face-to-face fellowship. It is a symbol of lethargy and passivity in the contemporary church and has made corporate worship a spectator sport.

Thus the pagan notion of a trained professional speaker who delivers orations for a fee moved straight into the Christian bloodstream. Note that the concept of the “paid teaching specialist” came from Greece, not Judaism. It was the custom of Jewish rabbis to take up a trade so as to not charge a fee for their teaching.