Quotes from Leonard Sweet

But because we don't trust Jesus to do what He says He will do, or believe that He is who He says He is, or have not caught a glimpse of His infinite glory, we sit at drawing boards and draw up programs and methods and draft strategies that we hope might bring people to Christ. But Jesus could not have been clearer: the only begotten Son of God4 is the draw.

We are what we do with our attention."64

Charles Spurgeon underscored this point, saying, "For every text in Scripture, there is a road to the metropolis of the Scriptures, that is Christ. And my dear brother, your business is, when you get to a text, to say, 'Now what is the road to Christ?' . . . I have never yet found a text that had not got a road to Christ in it."51

The strength of the church is not the strength of its institutions but the authenticity of its witness.

When Jesus got to the point when most people today are thinking of retirement, he goes - 'time to save the world!'

The time to save God's Dream is now. The people to save God's Dream are you.

Hirsch and Ford believe that we've 'demonstrated' enough. It's now time for 'doing.' This book shows how to be missional 'Right Here, Right Now.'

The essence of leadership is relationship; influencing people to achieve things together that can't be achieved alone.

When a Japanese manufacturer was asked by his North American counterpart, What is the best language in which to do business?" the man responded: "My customer's language

God did His most magnificent work while Adam was asleep. This episode contains and important insight: When man rests, God works.

What is the difference between a living thing and a dead thing? In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don't change, you die. It's that simple. It's that scary.

Can you imagine doing ministry the last five hundred years and getting away with 'Sorry, I don't do books'? Can you imagine doing ministry in the next five years and getting away with 'Sorry, I don't do Facebook'?

The greater the amount of knowledge you accumulate, the bigger your island gets, but the greater the shoreline of the unknown becomes. In short, the more you know, the more you know you don't know.

We bless others naturally through our strengths. But we bless others supernaturally through our weaknesses.

God does not ask if we are able. God asks if we are available." And the weakness we offer him, he turns into a strength.

Reading seeks for the sweetness of a blessed life, meditation perceives it, prayer asks for it, contemplation tastes it.

At the table, where food and stories are passed from one person to another and one generation to another, is where each of us learns who we are, where we come from, what we can be, to whom we belong, and to what we are called.

Authentic evangelism is lifting up the veil of what God is up to and manifesting the image of God in the world we are in.

We don't preach the Scriptures; we let the Scriptures preach through us as they point to Christ.

The end product of biblical Christianity is a person—not a book, not a building, not a set of principles or a system of ethics—but one person in two natures (divine/human) with four ministries (prophet/priest/king/sage) and four biographies (the Gospels). But those four biographies don't tell the whole story. Every bit of Scripture is part of the same great story of that one person and that one story's plotline of creation, revelation, redemption, and consummation.

The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is sovereign. At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving. Martin Luther was right. Theology is table talk.[38] Jesus didn't sell the food of his Father. He issued invitations to the table. In fact, Jesus' favorite image for the kingdom of God is a banquet where everyone is sitting around a table.

Jesus Christ is the rest of God. He is, as N. T. Wright has put it, "the fulfillment of the sabbath."114 By taking Christ as our rest, we cease from our labors just as God did from His.115 Christianity, therefore, begins not with a do, but with a done—"It is finished!"116 We enter into God's rest, and we labor from there.

If you aren't smelling awful smells sometimes, then you're not where Jesus is.

Disciples of Jesus do not mimic Jesus; we manifest him. We are personators of Christ, not impersonators. Christ's presence in our lives is more "thereness" than "likeness," more "withness" than "whatness." Jesus made our creation in the imago Dei more "spit" than "image" (as in "spit 'n' image").