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Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

God's vision is a call to move forward into the future in the full operation of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, with a fearlessness that could only come from him. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

For instance, some evangelicals have turned Proverbs 31 into a woman's job description instead of what it actually is: the blessing and affirmation of valor for the lives of women, memorized by Jewish husbands for the purpose of honoring their wives at the family table. It is meant as a celebration for the everyday moments of valor for everyday women, not as an impossible exhausting standard. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

We reject the lies of inequality, we affirm the Spirit, we forgive radically, we advocate for love and demonstrate it by folding laundry, and we live these Kingdom ways of shalom prophetically in the world. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Living loved, we relax our expectations, our efforts, our strivings, our rules, our spine, our breath, our plans, our job descriptions and checklists; we step off the treadmill of the world and the treadmill of religious performance. We are not the authors of our redemption. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Our big and good God is at work in the world, and we have been invited to participate fully - however God has gifted and equipped and called each of us. One needn't identify as a feminist to participate in the redemptive movement of God for women in the world. The gospel is more than enough. Of course it is! But as long as I know how important maternal health is to Haiti's future, and as long as I know that women are being abused and raped, as long as I know girls are being denied life itself through selective abortion, abandonment, and abuse, as long as brave little girls in Afghanistan are attacked with acid for the crime of going to school, and until being a Christian is synonymous with doing something about these things, you can also call me a feminist.23 — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

It's the treasure in the empty field; it's worth selling everything to own
your entertainment, your 401(k) or your registered retirement savings plan, your home, your comfort, the sand where you stick your head, your last word, your right answers, your safe and predictable nice little life centered on avoiding heartbreak or inconvenience to your schedule. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

As we follow Christ in the counsel of the Holy Spirit, resting in the love of our Abba, we no longer fear
for there is no fear in love. We do not fear slippery slopes, we do not fear each other, we do not fear change, and we do not fear our own selves or what other people can do to us. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Nothing changes in a true, God-lasting way when we use people or push agendas or make finger-pointing arguments or accusations of heresy. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

When I tried to meet some impossible standard for motherhood, tried to earn my way to a weird sort of Proverbs 31 Woman Club, I collapsed in exhaustion and simmering anger, sadness, and failure. This was not life in the Vine, this exhausting job description; this was not the Kingdom of God, let alone a redeemed woman living full. This was the shell of someone trying to measure up, trying to earn through her mothering what God had already freely given. This was someone feeling the weight of unmet expectations from the Church and her own self and the world all at once. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

When Jesus finished teaching in a synagogue one day, a woman called out from the audience, 'God bless your mother
the womb from which you came, and the breasts that nursed you!' Yet Jesus replied to this common blessing with 'But even more blessed are all who hear the word of God and put it into practice.' Women aren't simply or only blessed by giving birth to greatness; no, we are all blessed when we hear the Word of God
Jesus
and put it into practice. We don't rely on secondhand blessings in Jesus. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Set out, pilgrim. Set out into the freedom and the wandering. Find your people. God is much bigger, wilder, more generous, and more wonderful than you imagined. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

People have tried to tell us that women aren't as visual as men. To which, I respond: Um, have you heard of Pinterest? Because YES WE ARE. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

We indulge in semantics and slippery-slope rhetoric to excuse injustice. We read a few verse about women in a vacuum of literalism and prideful laziness. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

mission is what "God is doing in the world through the church, and even without the church, to bring his creation to its consummation: unity and fullness in Jesus Christ. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

But I do want to take my life's work right now, today
whether it's a book I'm writing or a phone call I'm making or a meal I'm cooking
and I want to hold it all in my open hand with a Spirit-breathed prayer and intention. I want to be filled with the knowing that we are all a fragile universe needing love in this moment before I lay my gift on the altar and ask for holy fire to descend. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Sometimes miracles look like instant healing; and other times, miracles look like medication and patience and discipline. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

When our hearts, minds, and souls are deep within the reality of living loved, we discover that most of those "rules" from Sunday school are simply our new characteristics and our family traits. They are the fruit born of a meaningful, life-changing relationship - they are the flowers of life in the Vine. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

You learn how to love by being loved. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Blessed are the wonderers with the courage to live into the questions. Seems to me that sooner or later, whether we like the outcome or not, theirs is the answer. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I see hope creeping in, destabilizing old power structures. I feel it in the ground under my feet. I hear it in the stories of the people of God living right now. We're whispering to each other, eyes alight, "Aslan is on the move." Can't you feel that? The kingdom is breathing among us already. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

It's a scary thing, a life-changing, paradigm-shifting thing, to honestly ask yourself this question: Am I moving with God to rescue, restore, and redeem humanity? Or am I clinging fast, eyeteeth clenched, to an imperfect world's habits and cultural customs, in full knowledge of injustice or imperfections, living at odds with God's dream for his daughters and sons? — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

One needn't identify as a feminist to participate in the redemptive movement of God for women in the world, The gospel is more than enough. Of course it is! But as long as I know how important maternal health is to Haiti's future, and as long as I know that women are being abused and raped, as long as I know girls are being denied life itself through selective abortion, abandonment, and abuse, as long as brave little girls in Afghanistan are attacked with acid for the crime of going to school, and until being a Christian is synonymous with doing something about these things, you can also call me a feminist. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

In a time when women were almost silent or invisible in literature, Scripture affirms and celebrates women. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I saw how Jesus didn't treat women any differently than men, and I liked that. We weren't too precious for words, dainty like fine china. We received no free pass or delicate worries about our ability to understand or contribute or work. Women were not too sweet or weak for the conviction of the Holy Spirit, or too manipulative and prone to jealousy, insecurity, and deception to push back the kingdom of darkness. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

We'll stand before the piles of stones that used to be weapons, and we'll build an altar. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I'm pretty sure my purpose here on earth isn't to win arguments or perform hermeneutical gymnastics to impress the wealthiest 2 percent of the world. I don't think God is glorified by tightly crafted arguments wielded as weaponry. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Christian feminists can celebrate any sort of feminism that brings more justice and human flourishing to the world, no matter who is bringing it, since we recognize the hand of God in all that is good. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

We're finding each other out here, and it's beautiful and crazy and churchy and holy. We are simply getting on with it, with the work of justice and mercy, the glorious labor of reconciliation and redemption, the mess of friendship and community, the guts of walking on the water, and the big-sky dreaming of the Kingdom of God. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Throughout the records of the Gospels, I saw how Jesus didn't treat women any differently than men, and I liked that. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

The curse that was laid upon Eve
her desire would be for her husband, and her pain in childbirth would be greatly multiplied
even shows us how patriarchy, subordination, and pain are part of the Fall. They were never God's original intent; they are a consequence of sin. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

But I had to learn that taking the Bible seriously doesn't mean taking everything literally. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

There is no more hateful person than a Christian who thinks you've got your theology wrong. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man - there never has been another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!"; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature. Dorothy Day, Catholic social activist and journalist — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

So here I am, my father's daughter, as the light breaks through the forest, writing down the names of my children and my husband, my friends and even the world at large - like our brothers and sisters in Iraq or Haiti or Burundi - and beside these scrawled names, I am writing out the words of Scripture. Not like promises or talismans, not like magic spells, no. But to give language to what I yearn for, what I believe, and even what I hope. It's my way of walking in the counsel of the Holy Spirit, may our hearts be fixed and established on Jesus. I — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Here is something I've learned about miracles: Miracles sometimes look like a kapow! lightning-strike revelation; and sometimes miracles look like showing up for your counseling appointments. Sometimes miracles look like medication and patience and discipline. Sometimes it's the daily unsexy work of loving people and choosing justice, even if no one ever notices. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

this: I lost Jesus in there. It seemed one could be a Christian without being a disciple of Jesus. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I want to practice faithfulness and kindness; I am learning to fill my ears with the repetitions of wide eyes and open hands and innocent fun, holy laughter. I want to practice with intention, joy. I want to tell the truth, but first, I want to live the Truth.
I won't desecrate beauty with cynicism anymore. I won't confuse critical thinking with a critical spirit, and I will practice, painfully, over and over, patience and peace until my gentle answers turn away even my own wrath. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Anyone who gets to the end of their life with the exact same beliefs and opinions as they had at the beginning is doing it wrong. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

God has a global dream for his daughters and his sons, and it is bigger than our narrow interpretations or small box constructions of "biblical manhood and womanhood" or feminism; — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

It's dangerous to cherry-pick a few stand-alone verses, particularly when they are used as a weapon to silence and intimidate, effectively benching half the church5 in the midst of holy harvest season when the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Even if we change practices or behaviors, we are seeking transformed hearts. We must know in our bones God's heart for equality and wholeness in the Body of Christ then live our lives out of that truth, with invitation and joy, as living prophets of God's way of life. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I still don't know how to live my life except on my haunches at the feet of Jesus, eyes fixed on his face. Nothing else "works." No formula, no method makes me feel so fully human and alive as the radical act of living loved. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Here is, very simply, what I learned about Jesus and the ladies: he loves us. He loves us. On our own terms. He treats us as equals to the men around him; he listens; he does not belittle; he honors us; he challenges us; he teaches us; he includes us.. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

One of my friends has a saying: "If it's not true in Darfur, it's not true here." He means if we can't preach it in every context, for every person, it's not really for everyone, and so then we should probably ask whether or not what we are preaching is actually the gospel. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

The Chinese proverb says, when sleeping women wake, mountains move. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as Deborah, instead of silenced as Jezebel. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

The Kingdom of God works into us like yeast, and it grows like a seed in good soil. It enters quietly, holistically, radically, joyfully subversive, right into the core of our humanity, unfurling, renewing, and giving work to our hands. It shows up when we live loved and where we love each other well. And the Kingdom of God lasts. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

But again, this is not a list of rules; we are not reading an impossible standard - no. This describes our Jesus. This! This is our Abba. This is our Holy Spirit. He never gives up, and he takes pleasure in the flowering of truth. And when we are following in the ways of Jesus, when we are abiding in the Vine, these become our characteristics, and we become signposts, tastes, movements of the Kingdom to the North, a glimpse of true Love. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

In Christ, and because of Christ, we are invited to participate in the Kingdom of God through redemptive movement - for both men and women - toward equality and freedom. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I think you have a great women's ministry when the women of your community fall wildly in love with Jesus. Church ladies like this are the overflow of women who are empowered to lead, to challenge, to seek justice and love mercy, to follow Jesus to the ends of the earth like our church mothers and fathers of the past.
You have a great women's ministry when there is room for everyone. You have a great women's ministry when you have detoxed from the world's views and unattainable standards for women and begun to celebrate the everyday women of valor, sitting next to you, and when you encourage, affirm, and welcome the diversity of women
their lives, their voices, their experiences
to the community.
You have a great women's ministry when your women are ministering
to the world, to the church, to one another
pouring out freely the grace they have received, however God has gifted them, including cooking and crafts, strategy and leadership. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Sometimes, by celebrating the evangelical heroes of the faith, we have inadvertently communicated something false: if it's not big and audacious and officially sanctioned, it's not good enough for God. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

In the Kingdom of God, we join with God in co-creation, in the work of the new earth. We love and we follow Jesus. We shape our lives into His life, to live here on earth as He would live among us. We weren't called to follow political parties or ideology, nationalism, consumerism, or power. Instead, we were called to apprentice ourselves to Jesus' way of life. We were called to be part of establishing the Kingdom of God here and now in our walking-around lives. Partnering with God to see the Kingdom come. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Stop waiting for someone else to say that you count, that you matter, that you have worth, that you have a voice, a place, that you are called. Don't you know, darling? The One who knit you together in your mother's womb is the one singing these words over you, you are chosen. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Whether we admit it or not, as people of faith, we sift our theology through Scripture, Church history and tradition, our reason, and our own experience. Most Christians, even the most committed of the sola scriptura crowd, use these four pillars
at varying degrees of importance and strength
to figure out the ways of God in our world and what it means here and now for our walking-around lives. And taking this a bit further into postmodern territory, we can also admit that we are relying on our own imperfect and subjective interpretations of those pillars, too. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Perhaps, just perhaps, we can't read singular verses or chapters in a vacuum; perhaps we can't read letters written to specific people with specific situations in mind in a specific context and then apply them, broad-brush, to the whole of humanity or the church or even our own small selves. Perhaps we need wisdom, insight. We need the Holy Spirit. Perhaps we need Jesus as our best and clearest lens; we need all of Scripture, too. After all, Jesus is the Word of God incarnate. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I won't desecrate beauty with cynicism anymore. I won't confuse critical thinking with a critical spirit, and I will practice, painfully, over and over, patience and peace until my gentle answers turn away even my own wrath. I will breathe fresh air while I learn, all over again, grace freely given and wisdom honored; and when my fingers fumble, whenI sound flat or sharp, I will simply try again. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I'm a Christian. And until the day when the world automatically understands that to mean that I believe in the full humanity and personhood of both men and women, you can also call me a feminist. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I want you to wrestle with the Bible. Do it. Wrestle until, Jacob-like, you walk with a limp ever after, and you receive the blessing of the Lord. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

We can choose to move with God, further into justice and wholeness, or we can choose to prop up the world's dead systems, baptizing injustice and power in sacred language. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Let's sit here in hard truth and easy beauty, in the tensions of the Now and the Not Yet of the Kingdom of God, and let us discover how we can disagree beautifully. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

So may there be grace and kindness, gentleness and love in our hearts, especially for the ones who we believe are profoundly wrong. The Good News is proclaimed when we love each other. I pray for unity beyond conformity, because loving-kindness preaches the gospel more beautifully and truthfully than any satirical blog post or point-by-point dismantling of another disciple's reputation and teaching. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Really, theology is simply what we think about God and then living that truth out in our right-now life. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Patriarchy is not God's dream for humanity. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I want to be outside with the misfits, with the rebels, the dreamers, second-chance givers, the radical grace lavishers, the ones with arms wide open, the courageously vulnerable, and among even - or maybe especially - the ones rejected by the Table as not worthy enough or right enough. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I was reading voraciously about global issues such as clean water, community development, war, human trafficking, economics, disaster relief, the AIDS crisis, unjust systemic evil. Meanwhile, church budgets made room for a brand-new light show and a kickin' sound system or a trip to Disneyland or a video venue in a saturated upscale neighborhood - all in an effort to practice creative-experience marketing. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Jesus is building his Church, not only by constitutions and codes, but by shaping hearts and minds to his way of life. We are a family, not a firm, scattered and yet gathered. Biblical equality is not the endgame; it is one of the means to God's big ending: all things redeemed, all things restored. Jesus feminism is only one thread in God's beautiful woven story of redemption. Begin here: right at the feet of Jesus. Look to Love, and yes, our Jesus - he will guide you in your steps, one after another, in these small ways until you come at last to love the whole world. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

And so of course we won't define 'biblical womanhood' well using a list of chores or a job description, a schedule or income level. After all, healthy God-glorifying homes look as different as the image bearers that entered into the covenant, biblical doesn't mean a baptized version of any culture, ancient or modern.
No, I am a biblical woman because I live and move and have my being in the daily reality of being a follower of Jesus, living in the reality of being loved, in full trust of my Abba. I am a biblical woman because I follow in the footsteps of all the biblical women who cam before me.
Biblical womanhood isn't so different from biblical personhood. Biblical personhood becomes a dead list of rules when it becomes a law to keep. If we have a long list of rules - Put others first! Be generous! Give money! Believe this! Do that! - it's a dead religion from a glorified rule book. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I learned the difference between critical thinking and being just plain critical. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

The line between sacred and secular is man-made. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

The freedom of living loved extends into every aspect of parenting because I can release my death-grip of control. It enables me to extend to my tinies the gifts of freedom (age appropriate, of course) and grace, second chances and then more grace. It means that I don't really care what people think of them or me, I can look only to God, living counter to our culture in every way of truth, love, faith, mercy and justice. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

People want black-and-white answers, but Scripture is rainbow arch across a stormy sky. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Jesus doesn't belong to church people. But church people belong to Him, in Him, and through Him. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

And this is where I learned that sometimes our most holy mountain-moving faith looks more like spending our whole lives making that mountain move, rock by rock, pebble by pebble, unsexy day after daily day, casting the mountain to the sea stone by stone rather than watching a mountain suddenly rise up and cast itself. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

When women are restricted from the service of God in any capacity, the Church is mistakenly allowing an imperfect male-dominated ancient culture to drive our understanding and practice of Christ's redeeming work, instead of Jesus Christ and the whole of the Scriptures. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I pray for bravery and guts, for honesty and discernment. I know you have a lot to lose - we all do when we lay down our certainties and our black-and-white thinking. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I loosened my grip on my opinions. I entered recovery for being such a know-it-all. I stopped expecting everyone to experience God or church or life like I thought it should be done. In fact, I stopped using the word should about God altogether, I sought God, and he was faithful to answer me. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

I don't want to be swallowed by the darkness. Nor do I want to be blinded by the beautiful facade. No, I want to be part of a people who see the darkness, know it's real, and then, then, then, light a candle anyway. And hold that candle up against the wind and pass along our light wherever it's needed from our own homes to the halls of legislation to the church pulpit to the kitchens of the world. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Theologian and scholar Walter Brueggemann writes beautifully in 'The Prophetic Imagination' that real hope comes only after despair. Only if we have tasted despair, only if we have known the deep sadness of unfulfilled dreams and promises, only if we can dare to look reality in the face and name it for what it is, can we dare to begin to imagine a better way.
Hope is subversive precisely because it dares to admit that all is not as it should be.
And so we are holding out for, working for, creating, prophesying, and living into something better
for the kingdom to come, for oaks of righteousness to tower, for leaves to blossom for the healing of the nations, for swords to be beaten into plowshares, for joy to come in the morning, and for redemption and justice. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Speak, breathe, prophesy, get behind a pulpit and preach, mark exam papers, run a company or a nonprofit, clean your kitchen, put paint on a canvas, organize, rabble-rouse, find transcendence in the laundry pile while you pray in obscurity, deliver babies for Haitian mothers in the midwifery clinic - work the Love out and in and around you however God has made you and placed you to do it. Just do it. Don't let the lies fence you in or hold you back. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

If we minimize our gifts, hush our voice, and stay small in a misguided attempt to fit a weak and culturally conditioned standard of femininity, we cannot give our brothers the partner they require in God's mission for the world. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

He loves us. On our own terms. He treats us as equals to the men around him; he listens; he does not belittle; he honors us; he challenges us; he teaches us; he includes us - calls us all beloved. Gloriously, this flies in the face of the cultural expectations of his time - and even our own time. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Hurry wounds a questioning soul. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

And here, at the last, as we sit here among the questions still unanswered and the path you must walk ahead, I pray for your journey as it unfolds into the unknown.
I know you feel a bit out of sorts. We all do sometimes. It's okay. Don't be afraid.
You are so very loved. I pray you would remember it, know it, live it, breathe it, rest in it: beloved.
In the mighty and powerful name of Jesus, Amen. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Live counterculturally when the culture, baptized or secular, does not affirm truth, love, faith, mercy, and justice. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Life in Christ is not meant to mirror life in a Greco-Roman culture. An ancient Middle Eastern culture is not our standard. We are not meant to adopt the world of Luther's Reformation or the culture of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening or even 1950s America as our standard for righteousness. The culture, past or present, isn't the point: Jesus and his Kingdom come, his will done, right now - that is the point. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Many of the seminal social issues of our time - poverty, lack of education, human trafficking, war and torture, domestic abuse - can track their way to our theology of, or beliefs about, women, which has its roots in what we believe about the nature, purposes, and character of God. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

We first take our everyday, ordinary life - our sleeping, eating, going-to-work life - and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for us is the best thing we can do for him. When we fix our attention on God, we'll be changed from the inside out. We'll readily recognize what he wants from us and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around us, always dragging us down to its level of immaturity, God brings out the best in us, develops well-formed maturity."3 — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

For the sake of the gospel, women must speak - and teach and minister and prophesy, too. For the sake of the gospel, a woman must be free to walk in her God-breathed self as the ezer kenegdo in whatever vocation and season and place of her life. And she does all of this alongside her brothers, as the ezer warrior of Creation's intent, to see God's Kingdom come and his expressed will done. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

He called her'daughter of Abraham,' which likely sent a shock wave through the room; it was the first time the phrase had ever been spoken. People had only ever heard 'sons of Abraham'
never daughters. But at the sound of Jesus' words daughter of Abraham, he gave her a place to stand alongside the sons, especially the ones snarling with their sense of ownership and exclusivity over it all, watching. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Rest in your God-breathed worth. Stop holding your breath, hiding your gifts, ducking your head, dulling your roar, distracting your soul, stilling your hands, quieting your voice, and satiating your hunger with the lesser things of this world. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

The lack of women among the twelve disciples isn't prescriptive or a precedent for exclusion of women any more than the choice of twelve Jewish men excludes Gentile men from leadership. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

At the core, feminism simply consists of the radical notion that women are people, too. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

And now for me, faith is less of a brick edifice of belief and doctrine and right answers than it is a wide-open sky ringed with pine trees black against a cold sunset, an altar, a welcome, bread and wine, an unfathomably ferocious love, and a profound sense of my belovedness. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Often when a woman exhibits leadership, she's accused of having that Jezebel spirit. I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as a Deborah, instead of silenced as a Jezebel. I — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Miracles sometimes look like a kapow! lightning-strike revelation; and sometimes miracles look like showing up for your counseling appointments. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Can't you see? It's all an act of protest, a snatching back from the darkness, a proclamation of freedom, a revolution of love. And isn't that a miracle? — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

You'll love the song of the stars in your hair more than you loved the contents of your life, more than you loved tidy sealed boxes and certainty. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

My prayer is that the Holy Spirit would sweep into our lives with holy disruption, upending our assumptions and privileges, our greed and selfishness, our pride and our stupor. To empower our work and our witness. Like Zechariah 4:6 tells us, not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord. — Sarah Bessey

Bessey Quotes By Sarah Bessey

Women have more to offer the church than mad decorating skills or craft nights. I look around: I see women who can offer strategic leadership, wisdom, counsel, and teaching. — Sarah Bessey