Quotes from Ed Welch

We spend too much time concealing our neediness. We need to stop hiding. Being needy is our basic condition. There is no shame in it—it's just the way it is. Understanding this, accepting it, and practicing it will make you a better helper.

Who we love above all else is who we worship, and who we worship controls us.

To establish a Scriptural counseling relationship, the speaker says we must know the person to the level that they feel like they are known and to the level that we are moved by the hardness of their experience.

Friends are the best helpers. They come prepackaged with compassion and love. All they need is wisdom, and that is available to everyone.

Your neediness qualifies you to help others. Your neediness, offered well to someone else, can even be one of the great gifts you give to your church. You will inspire others to ask for help.

Confession is always a good place to start when we feel lost.

The basic idea is that those who help best are the ones who both need help and give help. A healthy community is dependent on all of us being both.

Speaker says psychology has commandeered everything hard and partitioned it from Scripture with the assumption that its causes are biological

Speaker calls the Christian counselor to look at each person as soul embodied with unique challenges that move us. This is not, he says, the first step before we get on to important business but vital in and of itself.

A child dies two days after birth. Her parents cried out for help, and hundreds of friends cried out too. Might there still have been deliverance? Consider that the parents had been delivered from death and the Evil One and that the child belonged to God and would be with him. Those deliverances might not lessen the parents' and friends' grief, but they do mean that the community can grieve with hope.

Our task is simple: ask for prayer and then let those who have prayed for us know what God has done. It is simple, but it is also a powerful intrusion of the Spirit in the everyday life of the church.

If God used only experts and people of renown, some could boast in their own wisdom, but God's way of doing things is not the same as our way. We ordinary people have been given power and wisdom through the Holy Spirit and are called to love others (John 13:34).

When you wake up to kingdom realities, you find that you are tracing the steps of both the Israelites and Jesus himself into the wilderness. . . . The wilderness is the place where God meets his people, Satan attacks, and kingdom allegiances are revealed. [Ed Welch, Running Scared, 118]

On this side of the cross misery persists, but the scales are tipped in favor of joy.

What is most important to us? What do we love? What is most dear to us?2 We shouldn't be surprised that these questions get to the core of our being. They also point to where we are headed. All roads eventually lead to our relationship with God. Do we love what he loves? Is he most dear to us?

Why would anyone entertain Satan's questions about God's goodness when everything is good? But a few bumps in the road, and our knowledge of God seems fragile, and that's what Satan is counting on.

Sanctification is more about the direction than the distance we have traveled.

Sin is guerrilla warfare that is deadly. Just when you think you are in control, it seeks to devour you.

If we think we are usually good, then God is usually irrelevant.

Sometimes is [God loves me more than I think] still allows us and our need to be at the center of the world, and God becomes our psychic errand boy given the task of inflating our self esteem.

From Genesis on, nakedness, or the shame of being exposed to others, became one of the great curses in Hebrew culture. It was a profound curse because it symbolized the deeper, spiritual nakedness and shame that needed covering. It symbolized that apart from God's covering, we stand naked before him.

That's the paradox of self-esteem: Low self-esteem usually means that I think too highly of myself....When you are in the grips of low self-esteem, it's painful, and it certainly doesn't feel like pride. But I believe that this is the dark, quieter side of pride-thwarted pride.

For Peter, it was as if he was the first Adam. He felt the gaze of the holy and couldn't have felt more naked.

Emotional suffering needs spiritual encouragement.