Kevin DeYoung Quotes & Sayings

First, the way in which the woman was created indicates that she is the man's divinely designed complement. — Kevin DeYoung

Stressing the necessity of personal holiness should not undermine in any way our confidence in justification by faith alone. The best theologians and the best theological statements have always emphasized the scandalous nature of gospel grace and the indispensable need for personal holiness. Faith and good works are both necessary. But one is the root and the other the fruit. God declares us just solely on account of the righteousness of Christ credited (imputed) to us (2 Cor. 5:21). Our innocence in God's sight is in no way grounded in works of love or acts of charity. Whereas a Catholic might answer the question "What must I do to be saved?" by saying, "Repent, believe, and live in charity,"7 the apostle Paul answers the same exact question with, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household" (Acts 16:31). Getting right with God is entirely and only dependent upon faith.8 — Kevin DeYoung

The richest treasure God has for you are the people in your life. Give thanks and don't take them for granted. — Kevin DeYoung

If you find yourself mistreated, misunderstood, and mocked as a Christian, take heart, for so they did to the Christ. — Kevin DeYoung

There is a gap between our love for the gospel and our love for godliness. This must change. It's not pietism, legalism, or fundamentalism to take holiness seriously. It's the way of all those who have been called to a holy calling by a holy God. — Kevin DeYoung

Submission to the Scriptures is submission to God. Rebellion against the Scriptures is rebellion against God — Kevin DeYoung

There is an eternal difference between regret and repentance. Regret feels bad about past sins. Repentance turns away from past sins. Regret looks to our own circumstances. Repentance looks to God. Most of us are content with regret. We just want to feel bad for awhile, have a good cry, enjoy the cathartic experience, bewail our sin, and talk about how sorry we are. But we don't want to change. We don't want to deal with God. — Kevin DeYoung

The differences in these statements are striking. For Kreeft, church tradition is a final authority, on par with Scripture. For Dorrien, Scripture must align with reason and experience. But for Westminster, the word of God stands outside and over and above the church and all human opinion. Whatever else we may disagree on as Catholics, liberals, and evangelicals, we should at least agree that it is our view of Scripture and authority that divides us. — Kevin DeYoung

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. — Kevin DeYoung

Live for God. Obey the Scriptures. Think of others before yourself. Be holy. Love Jesus. And as you do these things, do whatever else you like, with whomever you like, wherever you like, and you'll be walking in the will of God. — Kevin DeYoung

Your love should be so far reaching, earnest, biblical, Christ-centered, pure, and self-sacrificing that the world may hate you for it. — Kevin DeYoung

The best-looking Christian is the one growing by the Spirit into the likeness of Christ. — Kevin DeYoung

When it comes to sanctification, it's more important where you're going than where you are. — Kevin DeYoung

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. — Kevin DeYoung

God's timing is rarely our timing. — Kevin DeYoung

When you share the gospel, you're not calling people to a better way of life, you're proclaiming to them eternal life. — Kevin DeYoung

The Spirit is like God's engagement ring saying to us, "This promise is only the beginning. You have no idea how much I will bless you. There is a wedding feast coming to you that you wouldn't believe. But I've given you my Spirit so you will believe that it is coming. — Kevin DeYoung

The biggest deception of our digital age may be the lie that says we can be omni-competent, omni-informed, and omni-present. We cannot be any of these things. We must choose our absence, our inability, and our ignorance - and choose wisely. — Kevin DeYoung

You will never see the preciousness of a Savior, if you do not see the reality of your sin. — Kevin DeYoung

Why should we think that we wouldn't have a cross to carry? Are we somehow more deserving than our Lord? — Kevin DeYoung

One of the signs that you are walking in the light is that you are honest about having walked in the darkness. — Kevin DeYoung

God knows everything. So why not run to him and tell him all the things that he already knows? — Kevin DeYoung

Much of the impotence of American churches is tied to a profound ignorance and apathy about justification. Our people live in a fog of guilt. Or just as bad, they think being a better person is all God requires. — Kevin DeYoung

The New Testament calls upon us to take action; it does not tell us that the work of sanctification is going to be done for us. . . . We are in the 'good fight of faith', and we have to do the fighting. But, thank God, we are enabled to do it; for the moment we believe, and are justified by faith, and are born again of the Spirit of God, we have the ability. So the New Testament method of sanctification is to remind us of that; and having reminded us of it, it says, 'Now then, go and do it'. — Kevin DeYoung

But we all live somewhere and must swim in the water around us. I can't help but deal with the realities of life as I experience them in the United States. — Kevin DeYoung

If you think God has promised this world will be a five-star hotel, you will be miserable as you live through the normal struggles of life. But if you remember that God promised we would be pilgrims and this world may feel more like a desert or even a prison, you might find your life surprisingly happy. — Kevin DeYoung

Don't try so hard to be hip. When the Church finds out what is cool, it is not cool anymore. — Kevin DeYoung

There is no way to work your way to God. There is no way to climb up to heaven. There is only one way, and that is through Christ. — Kevin DeYoung

Jesus knew the difference between urgent and important. He understood that all the good things he could do were not necessarily the things he ought to do. — Kevin DeYoung

God gets glory when his strength shines in our weakness. — Kevin DeYoung

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. — Kevin DeYoung

Grab them with passion. Win them with love. Hold them with holiness. Challenge them with truth. Amaze them with God. — Kevin DeYoung

You will not find what you want in the world, only in the Father. — Kevin DeYoung

Sanctification is at base a tenacious grip on the robe of Christ, a wrestling with the Lord to bless us, a sojourn in the valley of death in pursuit of a city we cannot see. — Kevin DeYoung

Anxiety is simply living out the future before it gets here. — Kevin DeYoung

Fifth, the redemptive-historical significance of marriage as a divine symbol in the Bible only works if the marital couple is a complementary pair. — Kevin DeYoung

Some Christians make the mistake of pitting love against law, as if the two were mutually exclusive. You either have a religion of love or a religion of law. But such an equation is profoundly unbiblical. — Kevin DeYoung

Opportunities have often felt like obligations to me. — Kevin DeYoung

The Christian's comfort: I am not my own. I do not make my own rules or create my own identity. There is one who made me and can save me. — Kevin DeYoung

God tells me that I need to provide for my family, discipline and teach my children, and love my wife as Christ loves the church. If I don't do that, I'm being unfaithful and sinful. — Kevin DeYoung

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? — Kevin DeYoung

Related to this first reason is the fear that a passion for holiness makes you some kind of weird holdover from a bygone era. As soon as you share your concern about swearing or about avoiding certain movies or about modesty or sexual purity or self-control or just plain godliness, people look at you like you have a moralistic dab of cream cheese on your face from the 1950s. Believers get nervous that their friends will call them legalistic, prudish, narrow-minded, old fashioned, holier-than-thou - or worst of all, a fundamentalist. — Kevin DeYoung

Scripture warns us against pursuing sexual practice inconsistent with being in Christ. When we tolerate the doctrine which affirms homosexual behavior, we are tolerating a doctrine which leads people further from God. — Kevin DeYoung

The "all truth" they would receive was not the truth about every bit of knowledge in the universe, from supernovas to DNA. The "truth" refers to the whole truth about everything bound up in Jesus Christ, the way, the truth, and the life. The Spirit will illuminate the things that are to come (John 16:13), not in a predictive sense, but in so far as he will unpack the significance of the events yet to come, namely Jesus' death, resurrection, and exaltation. The Spirit, speaking for the Father and the Son, will help the apostles remember what Jesus said and understand the true meaning of who Jesus is and what he accomplished (John 14:26). — Kevin DeYoung

The whole of the Christian life, from election to justification to sanctification to final glorification, is made possible by and is an expression of our union with Christ. — Kevin DeYoung

Just very practically, pastors need to be careful that while they have a right to call people to absolute allegiance to the Word of God, we don't have the right to call people to absolute allegiance to our programs or every ministry we have at the church. — Kevin DeYoung

There is no righteousness that makes us right with God except for the righteousness of Christ. But for those who have been made right with God by grace alone through faith alone and therefore have been adopted into God's family, many of our righteous deeds are not only not filthy in God's eyes, they are exceedingly sweet, precious, and pleasing to him. — Kevin DeYoung

You will fear something or someone. The Bible says the wisest way to go about your life is to fear God. — Kevin DeYoung

We may have the best of intentions in trying to discern God's will, but we should really stop putting ourselves through the misery of overspiritualizing every decision. Our misdirected piety makes following God more mysterious than it was meant to be — Kevin DeYoung

The Bible can no more fail, falter, or err, than God himself can fail, falter, or err. — Kevin DeYoung

But when interpreted correctly - paying attention to the original context, considering the literary genre, thinking through authorial intent - the Bible is never wrong in what it affirms and must never be marginalized as anything less than the last word on everything it teaches. — Kevin DeYoung

Perhaps your free spirit needs less freedom and more faithfulness. — Kevin DeYoung

Busyness must start with the one sin that begets so many of our other sins: pride. — Kevin DeYoung

The Bible talks about bestiality even less than it talks about homosexuality, but that doesn't make bestiality an insignificant issue - or incest or child abuse or fifty other sins the Bible barely addresses. — Kevin DeYoung

Justification is God's declaration that we, though guilty sinners, are righteous in God's eyes. — Kevin DeYoung

The next time someone tells you, "The Church is full of a bunch of hypocrites." You can respond, "You don't even know the half of it." — Kevin DeYoung

Legalism is a problem in the church, but so is anti-nomianism. Granted, I don't hear anyone saying, 'Let's continue in sin that grace may abound'. That's the worse form of antinomianism. But strictly speaking, antinomianism simply means no-law, and some Christians have very little place for the law in their pursuit of holiness. — Kevin DeYoung

They've willingly embraced Christian freedom but without an equal pursuit of Christian virtue. Among — Kevin DeYoung

So go marry someone, provided you're equally yoked and you actually like being with each other. Go get a job, provided it's not wicked. Go live somewhere in something with somebody or nobody. But put aside the passivity and the quest for complete fulfillment and the perfectionism and the preoccupation with the future, and for God's sake start making some decisions in your life. Don't wait for the liver-shiver. If you are seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, you will be in God's will, so just go out and do something. — Kevin DeYoung

To run hard after holiness is another way of running hard after God. — Kevin DeYoung

Christian spirituality does not rest on mysticism; it rests in a Mediator. — Kevin DeYoung

The biblical teaching is consistent and unambiguous: homosexual activity is not God's will for his people. Silence in the face of such clarity is not prudence, and hesitation in light of such frequency is not patience. The Bible says more than enough about homosexual practice for us to say something too. — Kevin DeYoung

This, then, can be the only acceptable answer to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter about Jesus's doctrine of Scripture: it is impossible to revere the Scriptures more deeply or affirm them more completely than Jesus did. Jesus submitted his will to the Scriptures, committed his brain to studying the Scriptures, and humbled his heart to obey the Scriptures. — Kevin DeYoung

On the last day, God will not acquit us because our good works were good enough, but he will look for evidence that our good confession was not phony. It's in this sense that we must be holy. — Kevin DeYoung

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

There is nothing gray about whether a follower of Christ should see 50 Shades of Grey. This is a black and white issue. Don't go. Don't watch it. Don't read it. Don't rent it. — Kevin DeYoung

We walk into the future in God-glorifying confidence, not because the future is known to us but because it is known to God. And that's all we need to know. Worry about the future is not simply a character tic, it is the sin of unbelief, an indication that our hearts are not resting in the promises of God. — Kevin DeYoung

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. — Kevin DeYoung

There is no sin so prevalent, so insidious, and so deep as the sin of fearing people more than we fear God. — Kevin DeYoung

God did not send a concept, an idea, or a virtue. He sent his Son. Follow the God of love, not love as your god. — Kevin DeYoung

Leviticus 18 doesn't tell us everything we need to know about sex, but it gives us the basic rules: incest is bad (vv. 6-27); taking a rival wife is bad (v 18) ... adultery is bad (v 20); killing our children is bad (v 21); homosexuality activity is bad (v 22); and bestiality is bad (v 23). — Kevin DeYoung

Don't just ask God for what we want. Let him teach us what we should want. — Kevin DeYoung

God's wrath was not just withdrawn. It was spent. Full atonement can it be? Hallelujah, what a Savior! — Kevin DeYoung

We are busy because we try to do too many things. We do too many things because we say yes to too many people. We say yes to all these people because we want them to like us and we fear their disapproval. — Kevin DeYoung

My life often feels like a whirling dervish of kids, writing, speaking, and pastoral ministry. — Kevin DeYoung

The only chains God wants us to wear are the chains of righteousness
not the chains of hopeless subjectivism, not the shackles of risk-free living, not the fetters of horoscope decision making
just the chains befitting a bond servant of Christ Jesus. Die to self. Live for Christ. And then do what you want, and go where you want, for God's glory. — Kevin DeYoung

Some Christians need encouragement to think before they act. Others need encouragement to act after they think. — Kevin DeYoung

One of the most resilient and cherished myths of parenting is that parenting creates the child. — Kevin DeYoung

Just about the worst thing a leader can nurture in his heart is self-pity. And just about the worst thing a leader can do in front of his people is murmur and complain. — Kevin DeYoung

The person who never sets priorities is the person who does not believe in his own finitude. — Kevin DeYoung

We will have to work hard to rest. — Kevin DeYoung

You can't make sense of the Bible without understanding that God is holy and that this holy God is intent on making a holy people to live with him forever in a holy heaven. — Kevin DeYoung

If you want to know God as your Father, you need to know Jesus Christ as your Savior. — Kevin DeYoung

Any gospel which says only what you must do and never announces what Christ has done is no gospel at all. — Kevin DeYoung

We usually think of law leading us to gospel. And this is true- we see God's standards, see our sin, and then see our need for a Savior. But it's just as true that gospel leads to law ... the good news of the gospel leads to gracious instructions for obeying God. — Kevin DeYoung

I tell my congregation at times, "You don't have to feel conviction for every sermon. Some of you are actually obedient and faithful in this area." Not perfectly, of course, but truly and sincerely. — Kevin DeYoung

That is to say, if we think the big takeaway from this Big Book is the rightness or wrongness of homosexual activity, then we've managed to take a sublime narrative and pound it into a single talking point. — Kevin DeYoung

Perhaps out inactivity is not so much waiting on God as it is an expression of the fear of man, the love of the praise of man, and disbelief in God's providence. — Kevin DeYoung

God is still here, God is still real, and God has not gone anywhere, even if you have. — Kevin DeYoung

But before we get up close to the trees, we should step back and make sure we are gazing upon the same forest. As is so often the case with controversial matters, we will never agree on the smaller subplots if it turns out we aren't even telling the same story. The Bible says something about homosexuality. I hope everyone can agree on at least that much. And I hope everyone can agree that the Bible is manifestly not a book about homosexuality. — Kevin DeYoung

We have been stuffed full of praise for mediocrity and had our foibles diagnosed away with hyphenated jargon and pop psychology. — Kevin DeYoung

He calls us to run hard after Him, His commands, and His glory. The decision to be in God's will is not the choice between Memphis or Fargo or engineering or art; it's the daily decision we face to seek God's kingdom or ours, submit to His lordship or not, live according to His rules or our own. — Kevin DeYoung

We can stop pleading with God to show us the future, and start living and obeying like we are confident that He holds the future. — Kevin DeYoung

I read an anecdote once about a woman from another culture who came to the United States and began to introduce herself as "Busy." It was, after all, the first thing she heard when meeting any American. Hello, I'm Busy - she figured it was part of our traditional greeting, — Kevin DeYoung

If we are busy in a hundred good things - even great things, gospel things, glorious things - but don't sit at the feet of Jesus, we are busy in the wrong ways. — Kevin DeYoung

Homosexual practice is an example on a horizontal plane of our vertical rebellion against God. — Kevin DeYoung

When busyness goes after joy, it goes after everyone's joy. — Kevin DeYoung

No doubt, some people are quantitatively less busy than others and some much more so, but that doesn't change the shared experience: most everyone I know feels frazzled and overwhelmed most of the time. — Kevin DeYoung

Any gospel which purports to save people without also transforming them is inviting easy-believism. If you think being a Christian is nothing more than saying a prayer or joining a church, then you've confused real grace with cheap grace. Those who are justified will be sanctified. — Kevin DeYoung

Here's the problem: when every sin is seen as the same, we are less likely to fight any sins at all. Why should I stop sleeping with my girlfriend when there will still be lust in my heart? Why pursue holiness when even one sin in my life means I'm Osama bin Hitler in God's eyes? Again, it seems humble to act as if no sin is worse than another, but we lose the impetus for striving and the ability to hold each other accountable when we tumble down the slip-n-slide of moral equivalence. All of a sudden the elder who battles the temptation to take a second look at the racy section of the Lands End catalog shouldn't dare exercise church discipline ont he young man fornicating with reckless abandon. When we can no longer see the different gradations among sins and sinners and sinful nations, we have not succeeded in respecting our own badness; we've cheapened God's goodness. — Kevin DeYoung