Kevin DeYoung Quotes

I can turn every "is" into "ought ".

I used to have six theories and no kids. Now I have six kids and no theories.

The Luddite impulse is strong among Christians, and our first reaction is to rage against the machine.

The one indispensable requirement for producing godly, mature Christians is godly, mature Christians.

The irony is that if we make every imperative into a command to believe the gospel more fully, we turn the gospel into one more thing we have to get right, and faith becomes the one thing we need to be better at.

Real life applications get tricky when we think about them.

If the gospel is old news to you, it will be dull news to everyone else.

The world needs to see Christians burning, not with self-righteous fury at the sliding morals in our country, but with passion for God.

I think most Christians hear these urgent calls to do more (or feel them internally already) and learn to live with a low-level guilt that comes from not doing enough. We know we can always pray more and give more and evangelize more, so we get used to living in a state of mild disappointment with ourselves.

We get used to living in a state of mild disappointment with ourselves.

You can exaggerate your authority in handling the Scriptures, but you cannot exaggerate the Scriptures' authority to handle you. You can use the word of God to come to wrong conclusions, but you cannot find any wrong conclusions in the word of God.

Justice in a fallen world is not equality of outcome but equal treatment under a fair law.

I think the church is often a culprit in the busyness, especially in the evangelical church. Again, it's part of being Americans. Part of being evangelicals too is that we're highly activist. We are always diving in, willing to solve problems, and again there's a lot good there. But we also need the theological balance that the Kingdom is not ours to bring or ours to create.

Nothing in the Bible encourages us to give sex the exalted status it has in our culture, as if finding our purpose, our identity, and our fulfillment all rest with what we can or cannot do with our private parts.

And we need Christians who don’t make others feel guilty (and don’t feel guilty themselves) when one of us follows a different passion than another. I read and write a lot. That’s what I do well. But that doesn’t mean anyone should feel guilty for not reading and writing as much as I do. You have your own gifts and calling. We have to be okay with other Christians doing certain good things better and more often than we do.

Effective love is rarely efficient.

Think of (the Kingdom) like the sun. As it peeks through on a cloudy day, we do not say the sun has grown. We say, 'The sun has broken through.' Our view of the sun has changed, or obstacles to the sun have been removed, but we have not changed the sun.

The man who attempts Christianity without the church shoots himself in the foot, shoots his children in the leg, and shoots his grandchildren in the heart.

I sometimes find, especially among my peers, that authenticity is not a…means of growing in holiness, but a convenient cover for endless introspection, doubt, uncertainty, anger, and worldliness. So that if other Christians seem pure, assured, and happy we despise them for being inauthentic.Granted, the church shouldn’t be happy-clappy naive about life’s struggles. Plenty of psalms show us godly ways to be real with our negative emotions. But the church should not apologize for preaching a confident Christ and exhorting us to trust Him in all things. Church is not meant to foster an existential crisis of faith every week

Battling busyness is a community response.

We will have to work hard to rest.

The more my brain was fed, the hungrier it became.

My fear is that of all the choices people face today, the one they rarely consider is, "How can I serve most effectively and fruitfully in the local church?" I wonder if the abundance of opportunities to explore today is doing less to help make well-rounded disciples of Christ and more to help Christians avoid long term responsibility and have less long-term impact.

One reason we never tame the busy this beast is that we are unwilling to kill anything.

If I keep pushing myself, I’ll finally be somebody. I’ll finally matter. I’ll finally arrive.” Nonsense. You won’t be satisfied. The only thing worse than failing to realize any of your dreams, is seeing them all come true. You were meant for something more. Even if you could be known the world over, what does it matter if you have no time to be known by God?

Most moms and dads think they are either the best or the worst parents in the world. Both are wrong.

The people on this planet who end up doing nothing are those who never realize they can't do everything.

The Church acts as a sort of embassy for the government of the King. It is an outpost of the Kingdom of God surrounded by the kingdom of darkness. Just as an embassy is meant to showcase the life of a nation to the surrounding people, so the Church is meant to manifest the life of the Kingdom of God to the people around it.

If the good news is an invitation to a Jesus way of life and not information about somebody who accomplished something on my behalf, I’m sunk. This is law and no gospel.