J.D. Greear Quotes

#1. should only obey God when we feel like it; only that preaching Christianity primarily as a set of new behaviors will create people who act right without ever loving the right.1 This creates hypocrites, weary and resentful of God. What Is "Real" Spiritual Growth?

J.D. Greear

#2. Getting doctrine right is a matter of life and death, but holding that doctrine in the right spirit is essential too. A great deal of damage is done by those who hold the truth of Christ with the spirit of Satan.

J.D. Greear

#3. The goal of the gospel is to produce a type of people consumed with passion for God an love for others.

J.D. Greear

#4. The gospel is life giving, because it generates changes that are received only by grace through faith. This foundational truth, however, gets bypassed, obscured, and forgotten, because, as Martin Luther noted, religion forms the default mode of the human heart.

J.D. Greear

#5. When I was in high school, a popular bumper sticker boasted, "Jesus is my Copilot." I suppose that meant Jesus was there to help them when they got into a jam. How backwards. If Jesus is your copilot, somebody is in the wrong seat. It's His car, and we stole it.

J.D. Greear

#6. Everybody loves their preferred worship expression, and they can't understand people who don't like what they like. We

J.D. Greear

#7. God calls us first ... not to a platform, but to an altar!

J.D. Greear

#8. It is one thing to understand the gospel but is quite another to experience the gospel in such a way that it fundamentally changes us and becomes the source of our identity and security.

J.D. Greear

#9. Christianity has roughly 20 percent of its followers in Africa, 20 percent in Asia, 20 percent in Europe, 20 percent in North America, and 20 percent in South America. Every other major religion has at least 80 percent of its followers concentrated on one continent.

J.D. Greear

#10. The gospel is the announcement that God has reconciled us to Himself by sending His Son Jesus to die as a substitute for our sins, and that all who repent and believe have eternal life in Him.

J.D. Greear

#11. Carl F. H. Henry was reputed to say, The gospel is only good news if it gets there in time.

J.D. Greear

#12. Repentance is belief in action.

J.D. Greear

#13. Abiding in Jesus means understanding that His acceptance of us is the same regardless of the amount of spiritual fruit we have produced.

J.D. Greear

#14. The apostles understood the church to be a movement birthed by the mighty, rushing wind of the Spirit of God. Is that how you see your church? Most people today see the church as an institution, a place to go to, or something to sit through. How did that happen?

J.D. Greear

#15. Satan's primary temptation strategy is to try and make us forget what God has said about us and to evaluate our standing before God by some other criteria

J.D. Greear

#16. Without the mission, a church is not a church; it's just a group of disobedient Christians hanging out.

J.D. Greear

#17. Faith is not the absence of doubt; it is continuing to follow Jesus in the midst of doubt.

J.D. Greear

#18. biblical knowledge apart from the Spirit is impotent.

J.D. Greear

#19. My identity and my security are not in my spiritual progress. My identity and my security are in God's acceptance of me given as a gift in Christ.

J.D. Greear

#20. Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart:
How to Know for Sure You Are Saved

J.D. Greear

#21. Peter Drucker says that the worst kind of failure in business is success in the things that don't matter.

J.D. Greear

#22. Whatever you're good at, do it well for the glory of God, and do it somewhere strategic for the mission of God. This

J.D. Greear

#23. Often the strongest evidence of my growth in grace is my growth in the knowledge of my need for grace.

J.D. Greear

#24. The Christian life is a call to risk. You either live with risk or waste your life.

J.D. Greear

#25. God sometimes answers our prayers by giving us what we would have asked for had we known what He knows.

J.D. Greear

#26. The gospel points us upward to a God who gave himself for us, backward to the price he paid for our sin, and forward to what he's making us into.

J.D. Greear

#27. True religion is when you serve God to get nothing else but more of God.

J.D. Greear

#28. Wanting to repent is the sign God hasn't abandoned you. It is God, after all, who puts in us the desire to come to Him.

J.D. Greear

#29. Maybe the worst failure for a church is success in things that aren't producing reproducing disciples. At

J.D. Greear

#30. Being able to articulate the gospel with accuracy is one thing; having its truth captivate your soul is quite another.

J.D. Greear

#31. Many Christians, you see, function as deists. They act as if God rules from the heavens and has spoken in his Word, but does not act on earth or move in their souls - at least in any way that they can sense those movements.

J.D. Greear

#32. God's call to radical generosity begins with the good news that he doesn't need us!

J.D. Greear

#33. We are changed not by being told what we need to do for God, but by hearing the news about what God has done for us.

J.D. Greear

#34. If we're in a season where the harvest simply is not coming, the last thing we should do is abandon the only thing that can produce faith.

J.D. Greear

#35. Worry springs from not being convinced of a sovereign God's absolute love for you. Worry disappears when you realize that God loves you unfailingly and will let nothing interrupt His plans for your good.

J.D. Greear

#36. Awe combined with intimacy is the essence of Christian worship.

J.D. Greear

#37. When you meet God in the story of Jesus. You get swept up into a story of such cosmic drama and beauty that you are forever changed.

J.D. Greear

#38. Gospel change is the Spirit of God using the story of God to make the beauty of God come alive in our hearts

J.D. Greear

#39. As we see the beauty of God and feel His weightiness in our hearts, our hearts begin to desire Him more than we desire sin. Before the Bible says, "Stop sinning," it says, "Behold your God.

J.D. Greear

#40. One "God idea" in ministry is better than a thousand good ideas.

J.D. Greear

#41. At your church, the week is more important than the weekend. Empower people and send them out for the week.

J.D. Greear

#42. Satan's most effective weapon is to take our eyes off of what God has declared over us in the gospel.

J.D. Greear

#43. The biblical summation of a saving response toward Christ is "repentance" and "belief" in the gospel.

J.D. Greear

#44. The gospel produces not just obedience, you see, but a new kind of obedience3 - an obedience that is powered by desire. An obedience that is both pleasing to God and delightful to you.

J.D. Greear

#45. Things like radical generosity and audacious faith are not produced when we focus on them, but when we focus on the gospel.

J.D. Greear

#46. Every great risk in God's name begins with confidence in the goodness and trustworthiness of God.

J.D. Greear

#47. Conversion is not completing a ritual, it is commencing a relationship. The assurance of ritual is based on accurate words and memory. The assurance of relationship is based on a present posture of repentance and belief.

J.D. Greear

#48. Being converted to Jesus is learning to so adore God that we would gladly renounce everything we have to follow Him.

J.D. Greear

#49. A Christianity that does not have as its primary focus the deepening of passions for God is a false Christianity, no matter how zealously it seeks conversions or how forcefully it advocates righteous behavior.

J.D. Greear

#50. That has to be one of the dumbest phrases Christians use: "finding God's will." We don't have to "find" God's will, because it's not lost. "The Lord ... is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9 NKJV). His will is that we be involved in that mission.

J.D. Greear

#51. When something becomes so important to you that it drives your behavior and commands your emotions, you are worshipping it.

J.D. Greear

#52. He actually became my sin so that I could literally become His righteousness.

J.D. Greear

#53. The deader your gospel, the flashier your package. Smoke and subwoofers can never do what one glimpse of Christ crucified can do.

J.D. Greear

#54. Likewise, we continue to follow Jesus as we struggle with sin. Repentance ushers us into a life of greater struggle, not out of one.

J.D. Greear

#55. To send effectively, we must love the glory of God and the lost more than we love anything else.

J.D. Greear

#56. Salvation is not a prayer you pray in a one-time ceremony and then move on from; salvation is a posture of repentance and faith that you begin in a moment and maintain for the rest of your life.

J.D. Greear

#57. In a post-Christian, skeptical age, love on display is the most convincing apologetic.

J.D. Greear

#58. When we realize how great a debt we owe to God, we become willing servants, eager to be poured out for God and His Kingdom.

J.D. Greear

#59. In Christ, there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, and nothing I have done that makes You love me less.

J.D. Greear

#60. The author offers Paul Tripp's analogy that most of the strategies for growth in the Christian life amounts to stapling live roses on a dead bush.

J.D. Greear

#61. Focusing on what we ought to do for God creates only frustration and exhaustion; focusing on what Jesus has done for us produces abundant fruit. Resting in what Jesus has done for us releases the revolutionary power of the gospel.

J.D. Greear

#62. True worship is obedience to God for no other reason than that you delight in God.

J.D. Greear

#63. We may not be worthy to be forgiven, but He is worthy to forgive us.

J.D. Greear

#64. There is One who remains faithful even when we doubt; One who is a firm foundation when our steps falter; One who holds on even when we let go. Keep your eyes on Him. He is faithful. He said, "It is finished.

J.D. Greear