J.D. Greear Quotes & Sayings

We may not be worthy to be forgiven, but He is worthy to forgive us. — J.D. Greear

Surveys show that more than 50 percent of people in the U.S. have prayed the sinner's prayer and think they're going to heaven because of it even though there is no detectable difference in their lifestyles from those outside of the church. On this issue- the most important issue on earth- we have to be absolutely clear. We need to preach salvation by repentance before God and faith in the finished work of Christ. — J.D. Greear

At your church, the week is more important than the weekend. Empower people and send them out for the week. — J.D. Greear

The Christian life is a call to risk. You either live with risk or waste your life. — J.D. Greear

Conversion is not completing a ritual, it is commencing a relationship. The assurance of ritual is based on accurate words and memory. The assurance of relationship is based on a present posture of repentance and belief. — J.D. Greear

There is One who remains faithful even when we doubt; One who is a firm foundation when our steps falter; One who holds on even when we let go. Keep your eyes on Him. He is faithful. He said, "It is finished. — J.D. Greear

The goal of the gospel is to produce a type of people consumed with passion for God an love for others. — J.D. Greear

The Holy Spirit did not go into such detail about the Pharisees in the New Testament just so we could understand a group unique to the first century. Pharisaism is a poisonous weed that grows in every garden of orthodox religion. Pharisaism is every bit the threat to the orthodox today that it was then. — J.D. Greear

Worry springs from not being convinced of a sovereign God's absolute love for you. Worry disappears when you realize that God loves you unfailingly and will let nothing interrupt His plans for your good. — J.D. Greear

Our feelings can quickly deceive us - a weakness our Enemy loves to exploit. He loves to approach us in the midst of a temptation, or in a time of spiritual defeat or depression, and tell us that if we really belonged to Jesus we would not feel this way. He tries to use our feelings to get us to doubt our faith. "Feelings," however, are the fruit of faith. They should never be its source. Around our church we say, "Don't feel your way into your beliefs; believe your way into your feelings. — J.D. Greear

should only obey God when we feel like it; only that preaching Christianity primarily as a set of new behaviors will create people who act right without ever loving the right.1 This creates hypocrites, weary and resentful of God. What Is "Real" Spiritual Growth? — J.D. Greear

The author offers Paul Tripp's analogy that most of the strategies for growth in the Christian life amounts to stapling live roses on a dead bush. — J.D. Greear

The gospel produces not just obedience, you see, but a new kind of obedience3 - an obedience that is powered by desire. An obedience that is both pleasing to God and delightful to you. — J.D. Greear

True religion is when you serve God to get nothing else but more of God. — J.D. Greear

Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart:
How to Know for Sure You Are Saved — J.D. Greear

My identity and my security are not in my spiritual progress. My identity and my security are in God's acceptance of me given as a gift in Christ. — J.D. Greear

It's not that I didn't understand or believe the gospel before. I did. But the truth of the gospel hadn't moved from my mind to my heart. There was a huge gap between my intellect and my emotions. The Puritan Jonathan Edwards likened his reawakening to the gospel to a man who had known, in his head, that honey was sweet, but for the first time had that sweetness burst alive in his mouth. — J.D. Greear

The deader your gospel, the flashier your package. Smoke and subwoofers can never do what one glimpse of Christ crucified can do. — J.D. Greear

That has to be one of the dumbest phrases Christians use: "finding God's will." We don't have to "find" God's will, because it's not lost. "The Lord ... is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9 NKJV). His will is that we be involved in that mission. — J.D. Greear

Wanting to repent is the sign God hasn't abandoned you. It is God, after all, who puts in us the desire to come to Him. — J.D. Greear

A Christianity that does not have as its primary focus the deepening of passions for God is a false Christianity, no matter how zealously it seeks conversions or how forcefully it advocates righteous behavior. — J.D. Greear

One "God idea" in ministry is better than a thousand good ideas. — J.D. Greear

To send effectively, we must love the glory of God and the lost more than we love anything else. — J.D. Greear

Salvation is not a prayer you pray in a one-time ceremony and then move on from; salvation is a posture of repentance and faith that you begin in a moment and maintain for the rest of your life. — J.D. Greear

Abiding in Jesus means understanding that His acceptance of us is the same regardless of the amount of spiritual fruit we have produced. — J.D. Greear

In a post-Christian, skeptical age, love on display is the most convincing apologetic. — J.D. Greear

Every great risk in God's name begins with confidence in the goodness and trustworthiness of God. — J.D. Greear

When we realize how great a debt we owe to God, we become willing servants, eager to be poured out for God and His Kingdom. — J.D. Greear

Gospel change is the Spirit of God using the story of God to make the beauty of God come alive in our hearts — J.D. Greear

Focusing on what we ought to do for God creates only frustration and exhaustion; focusing on what Jesus has done for us produces abundant fruit. Resting in what Jesus has done for us releases the revolutionary power of the gospel. — J.D. Greear

When something becomes so important to you that it drives your behavior and commands your emotions, you are worshipping it. — J.D. Greear

God sometimes answers our prayers by giving us what we would have asked for had we known what He knows. — J.D. Greear

If repentance were perfection, none of those people repented. Repentance, however, means recognizing Jesus' authority and submitting to it, even though you know your heart is weak, divided, and pulled in conflicting directions. Repentance includes a plea for God to change your inconsistent divided heart. (Psalm 86:11; Mark 9:24) — J.D. Greear

Carl F. H. Henry was reputed to say, The gospel is only good news if it gets there in time. — J.D. Greear

God's call to radical generosity begins with the good news that he doesn't need us! — J.D. Greear

It is one thing to understand the gospel but is quite another to experience the gospel in such a way that it fundamentally changes us and becomes the source of our identity and security. — J.D. Greear

The Gospel Prayer
In Christ, there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, and nothing I have done that makes You love me less.
Your presence and approval are all I need for everlasting joy.
As You have been to me, so I will be to others.
As I pray, I'll measure Your compassion by the cross and Your power by the resurrection. — J.D. Greear

When you meet God in the story of Jesus. You get swept up into a story of such cosmic drama and beauty that you are forever changed. — J.D. Greear

The gospel is life giving, because it generates changes that are received only by grace through faith. This foundational truth, however, gets bypassed, obscured, and forgotten, because, as Martin Luther noted, religion forms the default mode of the human heart. — J.D. Greear

Many Christians, you see, function as deists. They act as if God rules from the heavens and has spoken in his Word, but does not act on earth or move in their souls - at least in any way that they can sense those movements. — J.D. Greear

Without the mission, a church is not a church; it's just a group of disobedient Christians hanging out. — J.D. Greear

Being converted to Jesus is learning to so adore God that we would gladly renounce everything we have to follow Him. — J.D. Greear

The gospel has done its work in us when we crave God more than we crave everything else in life and when seeing His kingdom advance in the lives of others gives us more joy than anything we could own. When we see Jesus as greater than anything the world can offer, we'll gladly let everything else go to possess Him. — J.D. Greear

When I was in high school, a popular bumper sticker boasted, "Jesus is my Copilot." I suppose that meant Jesus was there to help them when they got into a jam. How backwards. If Jesus is your copilot, somebody is in the wrong seat. It's His car, and we stole it. — J.D. Greear

The apostles understood the church to be a movement birthed by the mighty, rushing wind of the Spirit of God. Is that how you see your church? Most people today see the church as an institution, a place to go to, or something to sit through. How did that happen? — J.D. Greear

Without love even the most radical devotion to God is of no value to Him. Let me make sure that sinks in ... You can gain all the spiritual gifts in the world. You can take the most radical steps of obedience. You can share every meal with the homeless in your city. You can memorize the book of Leviticus. You can pray each morning for four hours like Martin Luther. But if what you do does not flow out of a heart of love - a heart that does those things because it genuinely desires to do them - it is ultimately worthless to God. — J.D. Greear

The gospel is the announcement that God has reconciled us to Himself by sending His Son Jesus to die as a substitute for our sins, and that all who repent and believe have eternal life in Him. — J.D. Greear

Things like radical generosity and audacious faith are not produced when we focus on them, but when we focus on the gospel. — J.D. Greear

Repentance is belief in action. — J.D. Greear

biblical knowledge apart from the Spirit is impotent. — J.D. Greear

This means that when someone claims to be filled with the Spirit and yet spends most of his time talking about his own experiences with the Spirit, you have reason to doubt whether he really is filled with the Spirit. When the Holy Spirit speaks through someone, you tend to forget about the person speaking. You don't even really think about the Holy Spirit. You find yourself thinking about Jesus. — J.D. Greear

The same Spirit who moved in Nineveh and in the Great Awakening still fills the church today. The same power that brought Jesus back from the dead still animates our preaching. People are not "more spiritually dead" today than they were in the days of Jonah or the days of the Great Awakening. There are no degrees of deadness, or any such thing as "mostly dead" (apologies to The Princess Bride). Every conversion to Christ requires the same, glorious miracle of resurrection, and God has not lost his ability to raise the dead. We've simply lost confidence that he will do it on a large scale. — J.D. Greear

If we're in a season where the harvest simply is not coming, the last thing we should do is abandon the only thing that can produce faith. — J.D. Greear

Satan's primary temptation strategy is to try and make us forget what God has said about us and to evaluate our standing before God by some other criteria — J.D. Greear

As we see the beauty of God and feel His weightiness in our hearts, our hearts begin to desire Him more than we desire sin. Before the Bible says, "Stop sinning," it says, "Behold your God. — J.D. Greear

Getting doctrine right is a matter of life and death, but holding that doctrine in the right spirit is essential too. A great deal of damage is done by those who hold the truth of Christ with the spirit of Satan. — J.D. Greear

Where the gospel is not cherished, the Spirit will not be experienced. And, on the flip side, where the Spirit is not sought, there will be no deep, experiential knowledge of the gospel. The two always go hand in hand. Jesus said, "The words I have spoken to you - they are full of the Spirit and life" (John 6:63, emphasis mine). Spirit and Word, inseparably united. — J.D. Greear

He actually became my sin so that I could literally become His righteousness. — J.D. Greear

Being able to articulate the gospel with accuracy is one thing; having its truth captivate your soul is quite another. — J.D. Greear

Maybe the worst failure for a church is success in things that aren't producing reproducing disciples. At — J.D. Greear

Satan's most effective weapon is to take our eyes off of what God has declared over us in the gospel. — J.D. Greear

The biblical summation of a saving response toward Christ is "repentance" and "belief" in the gospel. — J.D. Greear

Awe combined with intimacy is the essence of Christian worship. — J.D. Greear

Whatever you're good at, do it well for the glory of God, and do it somewhere strategic for the mission of God. This — J.D. Greear

In Christ, there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, and nothing I have done that makes You love me less. — J.D. Greear

Often the strongest evidence of my growth in grace is my growth in the knowledge of my need for grace. — J.D. Greear

God calls us first ... not to a platform, but to an altar! — J.D. Greear

Repentance is not subsequent to belief; it is part of belief. It is belief in action-choice that flow out of conviction. Repentance literally means "a change of mind" (in Greek, metanoia; meta-"new", noia="mind") about Jesus. Repentance is not merely changing your action; it is changing your actions because you have changed your attitude about Jesus' authority and glory. — J.D. Greear

The gospel points us upward to a God who gave himself for us, backward to the price he paid for our sin, and forward to what he's making us into. — J.D. Greear

We are changed not by being told what we need to do for God, but by hearing the news about what God has done for us. — J.D. Greear

Peter Drucker says that the worst kind of failure in business is success in the things that don't matter. — J.D. Greear

Everybody loves their preferred worship expression, and they can't understand people who don't like what they like. We — J.D. Greear

Likewise, we continue to follow Jesus as we struggle with sin. Repentance ushers us into a life of greater struggle, not out of one. — J.D. Greear

Christianity has roughly 20 percent of its followers in Africa, 20 percent in Asia, 20 percent in Europe, 20 percent in North America, and 20 percent in South America. Every other major religion has at least 80 percent of its followers concentrated on one continent. — J.D. Greear

True worship is obedience to God for no other reason than that you delight in God. — J.D. Greear

Faith is not the absence of doubt; it is continuing to follow Jesus in the midst of doubt. — J.D. Greear