Quotes from Tim Chester

The Christian community demonstrates the effectiveness of the gospel. We are the living proof that the gospel is not an empty word but a powerful word that takes men and women who are lovers of self and transforms them by grace through the Spirit into people who love God and others. We are the living proof that the death of Jesus was not just a vain expression of God's love but an effective death that achieved the salvation of a people who now love one another sincerely from a pure

I may wonder what kind of mission God has for me, when I should be asking what kind of me God wants for his mission.

Tell someone to stop sinning and at best they may do so reluctantly and partially. But give them a vision of knowing God and his glory, and they'll gladly root out all that gets in the way of their relationship with God (Hebrews 12:1–3).

That's the scandal of grace. It means that if you've been working hard to be right with God, then you've been wasting your time because God welcomes everyone—righteous and unrighteous alike.

As far as the Pharisees were concerned, if you gave a dish to the poor it became unclean, because the poor were the great unwashed who didn't fulfill ceremonial washing. But Jesus says the dish becomes clean because it expresses love.

We are God's representatives on earth. We are God's glory, displaying his likeness. After each day of creation God declares what he has made to be 'good'. But only after the 6th day God's verdict on a world that now includes humanity is 'very good'. God's work wasn't finished until there was something in the world to reflect his glory in the world. We often excuse our actions by saying, 'I'm only human.' There is nothing 'only' about being human: we're truly human as we reflect God's glory.

Grace is so simple to understand and yet so hard to grasp.

When Peter says, "Baptism . . . now saves you," he's saying something similar to what we affirm when we say, "The gospel saves you." The gospel is God's promise. It's the promise that the death and resurrection of Jesus have dealt with the problem of sin and judgment—if we put our faith in Jesus. Baptism is that promise in physical form.

We need to shift our focus from putting on attractional events to creating attractional communities.

Jesus is handing out God's party invitations. They read: "You're invited to my party in the new creation. Come as you are.

This means if you want to receive God's blessing, you do not need to go looking for some dramatic new experience. The place to be is your local church, where the word is proclaimed and the sacraments are administered. You simply need to read your Bible, listen to expository preaching week by week, and participate in the Lord's Supper. This is where God's grace to us in Christ is found.

Look to Jesus to be enough for you, and there will never, ever come a day when he is not enough.

American Christians spend more on dieting than on world missions.5 We spend more curing our overconsumption than we do feeding the physically and spiritually hungry of the world.

The task is to become church for them, among them and with them, and under Spirit of God to lead them to become church in their own culture.

The main thing that prevents us from understanding the Bible aright is not a lack of hermeneutical skills but our sin.

May heaven be in my eyes that sin might have less power upon my heart.

relationship with God and find joy in him, the more our evangelism will be enthusiastic and infectious. It will stop being an awkward exercise imposed on conversation as an act of duty. Instead, as an overflow of full hearts, we will speak enthusiastically of the One we love. Instead of being like nearly empty toothpaste tubes, we'll become champagne bottles, waiting to explode, fizzing and bubbling over.

There is a third way to understand the church, which combines what is true in both false images, and which recognizes that we have a responsibility both to worship God and to serve the world. This is the double identity of the church (or incarnational Christianity). By its "double identity" I mean that the church is a people who have been both called out of the world to worship God and sent back into the world to witness and serve.

God offers Moses everything without God, but Moses doesn't want everything. He wants God. And so he declines the offer. The blessings of the promised land are secondary to the true blessing which is God himself.

Professionalism is always the enemy of authentic gospel leadership. Leaders

We were not made to look inward for self-realization, but to look outwards in love. I

All too often we think of holiness as giving up the pleasures of sin for some worthy but drab life. But holiness means recognizing that the pleasures of sin are empty and temporary, while God is inviting us to magnificent, true, full, and rich pleasures that last forever.

Wright talks about how, in his role as chaplain, he would talk with students about their beliefs. Many would defiantly announce to him that they did not believe in God. So he would ask them to describe the "God" they did not believe in. Usually, they described a remote, deistic "God". "I don't believe in that 'God' either," he would reply. And then he would begin to talk about Jesus Christ.

We don't do good works so we can be saved; we are saved so we can do good works.