Matt Chandler Quotes

Find the things that stir your affections for Christ and saturate your life in them. Find the things that rob you of that affection and walk away from them. That's the Christian life as easy as I can explain it for you.

My sin in the past: forgiven. My current struggles: covered. My future failures: paid in full all by the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace found in the atoning work of the cross of Jesus Christ.

God is awesome; he doesn’t need you to be awesome. He wants you to be obedient.

Love says: I've seen the ugly parts of you, and I'm staying. Our culture doesn't love love; It loves the idea of love. It wants the emotion without the sacrifice.

When you blow it, God still celebrates His Son in you. The litmus test of whether or not you understand the gospel is what you do when you fail. Do you run from Him and go clean yourself up a little bit before you come back into the throne room? Or do you approach the throne of grace with confidence? If you don't approach the throne of grace with confidence, you don't understand the gospel.

If you’re a church person and not a Jesus person, my heart hurts for you. It’s like being engaged and never getting married. It’s miserable.

Prayer does two things. It shows the complete sufficiency of God and the complete helplessness of man. It shows that God is not lacking, that He is in need of no thing, that He is infinitely and gloriously wealthy, that He can give to, He can bless and He can answer without the need of help from anyone or anything else. And it also shows that we are in desperate need of that kind of sufficiency.

I've discovered most Christians don't know what to do with difficult situations because they have bought into the lie that God owes us (for our good behaviour). The reality of life is that if you live long enough you are going to bleed, cry and hurt. AND God is still God IN that.

The more you make this world about you, the more miserable you will be.

God is not in love with some future version of you. It’s not you tomorrow that He loves and delights in. It’s not you when you get your act together....If you believe that Christ’s love for you is a future love for you, then you dismiss the cross of Christ.

Comfort is the god of our generation, so suffering is seen as a problem to be solved, and not a providence from God.

No change of job, no increased income, no new home, no new electronic device, or no new spouse is going to make things better inside of you.

God is at work in the mess. That's the message of the Bible. That's why the Bible is not pretty. That's why it's grimy, because God is working in the mess. He's working in the tears.

Faith doesn’t mean an absence of fear. It means facing fear and trusting that God’s goodness is greater.

God does not regret saving you. There is no sin which you commit which is beyond the cross of Christ.

Without a heart transformed by the grace of Christ, we just continue to manage external and internal darkness.

Jesus doesn't avoid those who mess up. Jesus runs to those who mess up.

The universe shudders in horror that we have this infinitely valuable, infinitely deep, infinitely rich, infinitely wise, infinitely loving God, and instead of pursuing him with steadfast passion and enthralled fury — instead of loving him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; instead of attributing to him glory and honor and praise and power and wisdom and strength — we just try to take his toys and run. It is still idolatry to want God for his benefits but not for himself.

If you're not confident in the authority of the Scriptures, you will be a slave to what sounds right.

Everybody knows something's broken in the world. But illogically, foolishly, we are looking for fixes from broken people with broken ideas in broken places.

So relational evangelism? Go for it, as long as it turns into real evangelism. You hanging out having a beer with your buddy so he can see that Christians are cool is not what we’re called to do. You’re eventually going to have to open up your mouth and share the gospel. When the pure gospel is shared, people respond.

Love says: I’ve seen the ugly parts of you, and I’m staying.

So what does it look like to live a life worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ? It looks like walking with, loving with, and doing life with those who are different from you. What binds you together is Christ. It looks like striving together to make Christ known. What motivates you is Christ. And it looks like standing with courage against all oppressors, natural or supernatural. What secures you is Christ.

The reality is that all God has to do is reveal himself to you,and you'll gladly join the mission in service to his kingdom. He doesn't force the issue; he just has to reveal himself as is: mighty,wondrous, gracious, loving, and radically saving. No man goes back to saltine crackers when he's had fillet mignon.

This avoidance of the difficult things of Scripture — of sinfulness and hell and God’s notable severity — is idolatrous and cowardly. If a man or a woman who teaches the Scriptures is afraid to explain to you the severity of God, they have betrayed you, and they love their ego more than they love you.

Lots of neat Christian boys, not a lot of Godly men. And we are working our tails off for you to try to develop some into that. But do not settle, because it's better that you be lonely now than you be married and lonely later. Are you tracking me? It is better that you be lonely now than for you to get married to a man that will teach your kids everything but the way of Jesus.

Trying to make the Gospel relevant is like trying to make water wet.

The single most loving act we can do is share the good news of Jesus Christ, that God saves sinners.

Your approval before God is woven into the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, not what other men and women think about you.

No matter what our job is, we view it not as our purpose in life but rather as where God has sovereignly placed us for the purpose of making Christ known and his name great. If you are a teacher, if you are a politician, if you are a businessman, if you are in agriculture, if you are in construction, if you are in technology, if you are in the arts, then you should not be saying, ‘I need to find my life’s purpose in this work,’ but rather, ‘I need to bring God’s purpose to this work.’

It's OK to not be OK - just don't stay there.

While the good news of the gospel may not appeal to everyone, the bad news of the gospel still applies to everyone.

You're exhausted in the faith because you're looking at you. The more you look at yourself and the less you look at God, the more you get frustrated at yourself.

Choosing one thing over another doesn't necessarily mean we love the thing we choose. If given the choice to eat spinach or broccoli, you may choose broccoli. It may only mean you don't want to eat spinach. Heaven is not for people who just want to skip Hell. Heaven is reserved for those who love Jesus, who have been rescued by Him and who long to praise Him. If someone doesn't have much use for praising Him now, it's foolish to think they're ready for Heaven.

Some people are so moral they feel like they have no need for Jesus. True worshippers know they are in deep need of Jesus Christ and are transformed morally by "beholding Jesus" and seeing their lives transformed by the Spirit's power from the inside out rather than conformed to a pattern of religion from the outside in.

The marker of those who understand the gospel of Jesus Christ is that, when they stumble and fall, when they screw up, they run to God and not from him, because they clearly understand that their acceptance before God is not predicated upon their behavior but on the righteous life of Jesus Christ and his sacrificial death.

God ultimately raises up leaders for one primary reason: His glory. He shows His power in our weakness. He demonstrates His wisdom in our folly. We are all like a turtle on a fence post. If you walk by a fence post and see a turtle on top of it, then you know someone came by and put it there. In the same way, God gives leadership according to His good pleasure.

If you want to grow in true wisdom, grow in a knowledge of the God of the Bible.

Could it not be, that God loves me too deeply, by having people challenge me so that I know I'm not perfect.

Heaven is not a place for those who are afraid of hell; it’s a place for those who love God. You can scare people into coming to your church, you can scare people into trying to be good, you can scare people into giving money, you can even scare them into walking down an aisle and praying a certain prayer, but you cannot scare people into loving God. You just can’t do it.

Thanksgiving is worry's kryptonite.

As you consider selecting songs for your worship services, consider them in light of the truth of the gospel. Imagine the songs as teachers--because they are! If your people could understand your doctrine only through the music you sing, what would they know about God and His pursuit of us? If your people could understand your church's beliefs only through the music, what would they know?

He created the flavors! He created the colors. He created it all, and he did it all out of the overflow of his perfections. It’s not like he was thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got some fajita flavoring over here. I know: let’s put it on the cow and the chicken.’ He created the avocado to have a certain flavor; he created the skirt steak, the fillet, and the tenderloin to have certain flavors. That was God’s doing. So every aspect of creation, from the largest galaxy to the tiniest burst of flavor in food or drink or seasoning, radiates the goodness of God.

A Church worshipping as a Creature of the Word doesn't show up to perform or be entertained; she comes desperate and needy, thirsty for grace, receiving from The Lord and the body of Christ, and then gratefully receiving what she needs as she offers her praise- the only proper response to the God who saves us.

When God saves you, he doesn’t do it because you gave him permission. He did it because he’s God.

The idolatry the exists in a man's heart always wants to lead him away from his Savior and back to self-reliance no matter how pitiful that self-reliance is or how many times it has betrayed him.

Men of God are those who walk in the fear of the Lord.

Why do we try so hard to make Jesus cool?! He doesn’t need a makeover.

While we lament the apparent injustice of pain and suffering, how often do we forget that every good thing in a fallen world is wholly a gift of God's mercy and grace.

If you are in Christ, you are fully and completely forgiven for all your sin-past, present and future.