Quotes from James MacDonald

We must not think of God as highest in an ascending order of beings starting with the single cell, then the fish, then the bird, then the animal, then man and angels and cherubs and God.… This would be to grant God eminence or even preeminence but that is not enough. We must grant God transcendence in the fullest meaning of that word. He's wholly other. He breaks all the categories of being and knowing.24

Only God is perfect! None of us comes within a country, not a country mile, but a whole country, in proximity to perfection.

All church activities that dilute, diminish, or detract from worship destroy Verticality, deny the priority of doxology, and forfeit what Vertical Church is all about—glory.

If our counseling is truly Christ-centered, then the topic of forgiveness will inevitably come up in the journey toward growth and change.

Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.

If God is not changing you, you have to honestly ask, "Have I ever really converted?" To put it another way, "If your faith isn't changing you, it hasn't saved you." The people who really have the new birth—the people who really have that conversion experience—are changing.

Vertical Church teaches its people to judge every circumstance and opportunity in terms of its potential to reveal "the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."21 That is the goal for every person in our church

people who have been saved by grace grow to love giving grace to others.

Criticism plugs the flow of God's blessing.

When will we see that the depravity of the human heart is not most clearly on display in the gay pride parade or at the abortion clinic? The greatest failures in human experience are not seen in the activist atheist rallying unbelief or the scorning skeptic ridiculing Jesus Christ, or the senseless wars, or baffling famines. The greatest failure in human existence is the failure of Christ-followers to "love one another earnestly from a pure heart

Prayer is the easiest thing to assume in church and the hardest thing to maintain.

We preach so that people will be better worshippers, so that the nature and story of God proclaimed will result in an amplification of what provokes glory to come down. A church's ministry extends, of course, beyond the weekend worship service, but if we fail there, nothing else can succeed. That single service in a Vertical Church is like the wood-burning furnace in a factory or warehouse.

One of the consequences of covetousness is that it destroys the capacity to discern sufficiency. It distorts our thinking to the point where: Enough is never enough.

Transcendence is a healthy dose of insignificance to a race whose root sin is pride. Transcendence cuts us all down to our proper proportion before an awesome God. That you and I are not significant is a wonderful, freeing discovery, and that's what church is for.

God can and will wipe all that shame and sadness away if you will only repent.

A continual diet of the Word satisfies, and it builds an appetite for more.

Men were made for war; designed to struggle and strive to protect and provide.

We need to stop shuffling service parts randomly and set our sights on a goal, something we are moving toward in every service element.

Reality is God-centered and all human beings are worshipers, whether or not they are conscious of this reality and its implications.

Your highest loyalty after the Lord is to your family. Your first priority after God is your wife then your kids.

You would think that the more a man knows and loves God, the deeper he gets into understanding His Word, and the further he progresses in personal holiness, the better he would be at being a watchful man, but that is sadly not the case.

Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half as persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way

When we see the faults of others, we are to forgive and forbear in humility.

A real encounter with the living God changes everything. First, it magnifies the Lord, and then it puts me and my ego and my sin and my burdens all in their rightful place.