89 Quotes by Judah Smith

When you look in the eyes of grace, when you meet grace, when you embrace grace, when you see the nail prints in grace’s hands and the fire in his eyes, when you feel his relentless love for you – it will not motivate you to sin. It will motivate you to righteousness.

Rules are not bad, but they can’t save anyone.

Don’t you know you are the only Jesus many people will ever see? In compromising your lifestyle, you forfeit your capacity to accurately reflect God’s image and endanger an entire generation’s understanding of Jesus.

Jesus was different. He didn’t wink at sin, but he didn’t write sinners off either. He offered faith, hope, and love. That’s why time after time in the Bible we find hardcore sinners seated around a table with Jesus, just chilling. They would spend hours listening, asking questions, laughing, crying. They were captivated by his compassion and riveted by his practical explanations of how to do life. Jesus let them belong long before they believed or behaved.

The more we live from heaven to earth – that is, the more we orient and adjust our lives to take eternity into account – the healthier and happier our souls will be.

Christianity is not about not swearing. It’s not about not having impure thoughts. Really, it’s not about not at all. Christianity is about Jesus.

It’s far too easy to make life all about the outside me, the external me, the physical me. We fall into the trap that if we can be healthy, wealthy, popular, productive, and influential, then life will be good. So we throw ourselves into the chase, thinking that internal happiness will come from external success. If we just try hard enough, if we just wait long enough, if we just reach the next level, we will feel at peace.

Are you struggling with sin? You don’t need more will power. You need more of Jesus.

When we make up rules because we are afraid people will sin, we end up doing an end run around faith. It’s not fear that saves us – it’s faith. Fear of failure has a sneaky way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. We focus so much on what we don’t want to do that we are drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Or like a mosquito to a bug zapper, since we’re in the twenty-first century now.