The Storytelling God Quotes

“The frightening thing is that, to enter hell, all one has to do is nothing.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God

“We are no more secure in Christ with a strong faith than with a small faith, so long as that small faith is true faith.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God

“The way some people read the parables reminds me of Aesop's Fables. And the way others read them reminds me of the way some discern clue after perplexing clue in their Beatle albums as evidence for a cover-up of Paul's having died in a car accident.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God

“He is no fool who believes the man who knows everything.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God

“The beauty of Christ and his gospel continues to captivate millions of believers all over the world and drive them to passionate worship while it simultaneously disgusts, angers, or bores millions of others.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“When we really see Christ as our saving security, the loss of all else seems a worthy risk.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“Therefore, a biblical understanding of the nature of the kingdom of God keeps in tension the reality that the kingdom is both “already” and “not yet.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“Dallas Willard explains: The world has succeeded in opposing intelligence to goodness. . . . And today any attempt to combine spirituality or moral purity with great intelligence causes widespread pangs of “cognitive dissonance.” [As with Jesus,] Mother Teresa . . . is thought of as . . . nice, of course, but not really smart. “Smart” means good at managing how life “really” is.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“Christian social justice gives witness to the right-side-upness of God’s kingdom.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“It’s possible to do “Jesusy” stuff without knowing Jesus. It’s possible to do good as part of some religious self-salvation project and not out of the joy of being saved.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“The reality is that Jesus knows exactly how things really are, and in fact he knows how things really are better than anyone else. We may look over the ethos of the Sermon on the Mount and find the whole thing utterly impractical toward getting ahead in the world, but one of the underlying points of the Sermon is that getting ahead in the world is a losing gambit to begin with. We come to Jesus’s teaching looking for tips on playing checkers, when all along he is playing”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“Or as my friend Ray Ortlund has been known to say, “In Acts, they preached and awe came down. You can’t put that in your worship order. 10 a.m.: awe comes down.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“If you have to explain your illustration—to decode it, as it were—it’s not a very good illustration.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“The gospel of Jesus Christ solves the innate problem we have of “glory greed.” We are, every one of us from birth, incompetent thieves of the glory that belongs only to God. We know in our insidest insides that we fall short of his glory, and so we are constantly clawing and scratching to make up that difference in some way. This is how all sin is fundamentally idolatry and how all accumulations of worldly treasures—be they material goods or religious merit—are fundamentally acts of self-worship. Then in the gospel of Christ, God forgives our petty theft, sets us free from the bondage of our idols, and unites us Spiritually, irrevocably, and satisfyingly to himself. Now the glory we tried to steal is shared with us freely, and it is real glory this time, not these pathetic knockoffs we think will do the trick.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“The kingdom is the manifest presence of God’s reign.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“We forget that the kingdom does not come through political plotting but through the proclamation of the gospel. We stretch our branches to the wrong king.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

“Once upon a time, a king came to earth to tell stories, and the stories contained the mystery of eternal life.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God

“Only God can write a story that resonates not just in the power of the imagination or the heart or the mind, but in the very soul; only God can write a story that brings dead things to life.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Storytelling God