Top 35 Frank Viola Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sin and love are exact opposites. Love is benefiting others at the expense of yourself. Sin is benefiting yourself at the expense of others. Sin is selfishness; love is selflessness.”

— Frank Viola

2. “The church, therefore, should not be confused with an organization, a denomination, a movement, or a leadership structure. The church is the people of God, the very bride of Jesus Christ.”

— Frank Viola

3. “God’s idea of ministry training is a broken vessel. His idea of spiritual preparation is suffering, which includes rejection.”

— Frank Viola

4. “Jesus Christ is God’s rule. And Jesus Christ is God’s presence. Wherever Christ is, there is the kingdom.”

— Frank Viola

5. “Within the triune God we discover mutual love, mutual fellowship, mutual dependence, mutual honor, mutual submission, mutual dwelling, and authentic community. In the Godhead there exists an eternal, complementary, and reciprocal interchange of divine life, divine love, and divine fellowship.”

— Frank Viola

6. “Organic church life, however, is a wedding of glory and gore.”

— Frank Viola

7. “Today, youth pastors are part of the professional clergy. Their position is built on the contemporary church’s misguided choice to honor a division that was born in secular culture less than a century ago – namely, the division between teenager and everyone else.”

— Frank Viola

8. “You cannot be around Jesus Christ for very long without changing. His presence transforms.”

— Frank Viola

9. “Sometimes the Lord wants us to wait and rest in Him. Other times, however, He wants us to press into His kingdom and receive what is rightfully ours in Christ.”

— Frank Viola

10. “Every year that we grow in the Lord, Jesus Christ looms larger and greater in our eyes.”

— Frank Viola

11. “In short, extensive Bible knowledge, a high-powered intellect, and razor-sharp reasoning skills do not automatically produce spiritual men and women who know Jesus Christ profoundly and who can impart a life-giving revelation of Him to others.”

— Frank Viola

12. “The Lord has a unique way of preparing His servants for His work. It’s one that involves transformation. And transformation always involves emptying, suffering, and loss. Humanity’s way is to hand you a method. Divinity’s way is to hand you a cross.”

— Frank Viola

13. “It doesn’t matter how great your sins are; God’s grace is big enough to forgive and cleanse them.”

— Frank Viola

14. “Note that there is a monumental difference between well-motivated humans working for God in their own strength, wisdom, and power versus God working through humans.”

— Frank Viola

15. “Jesus desires friends, not servants. He desires love, not servitude. In the cold temple of Jerusalem, God was merely served. But in the warmth of the Bethany home, He was befriended and cherished.”

— Frank Viola

16. “In the minds of the early Christians, the people – not the architecture – constituted a sacred space.”

— Frank Viola

17. “When the Greeks got the gospel, they turned it into a philosophy; when the Romans got it, they turned it into a government; when the Europeans got it, they turned it into a culture; and when the Americans got it, they turned it into a business.”

— Frank Viola

18. “The moment He set me free is the moment He captured me.”

— Frank Viola

19. “As Thomas Moore once put it, “Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.” Jesus is heaven personified.”

— Frank Viola

20. “Winston Churchill wisely said, “First we shape our buildings. Thereafter, they shape us.” Exegete the architecture of a typical church building and you’ll quickly discover that it effectively teaches the church to be passive.”

— Frank Viola

21. “The pew is perhaps the greatest inhibitor of face-to-face fellowship. It is a symbol of lethargy and passivity in the contemporary church and has made corporate worship a spectator sport.”

— Frank Viola

22. “To put a finer point on it, the church building is based on the benighted idea that worship is removed from everyday life.”

— Frank Viola

23. “The triune God stands at the beginning and at the end of the Christian pilgrimage and, therefore, at the center of Christian faith.”

— Frank Viola

24. “It is the depravity of institutions and movements that given in the beginning to express life, they often end in throttling that very life. Therefore, they need constant review, perpetual criticism and continuous bringing back to the original purposes and spirit.”

— Frank Viola

25. “This disjunction between secular and spiritual is highlighted by the fact that the typical church building requires you to “process” in by walking up stairs or moving through a narthex. This adds to the sense that you are moving from everyday life to another life. Thus a transition is required. All of this flunks the Monday test. No matter how good Sunday was, Monday morning still comes to test our worship.229.”

— Frank Viola

26. “You will never understand Jesus by looking at the God of the Old Testament. You must first look at Jesus and then you will understand the God of the Old Testament.”

— Frank Viola

27. “Someone once said that you don’t hold a grudge. It holds you. Holding a grudge is self-inflicted pain. Consequently, bitterness doesn’t imprison those who hurt you. It imprisons you.”

— Frank Viola

28. “People are more important to Him than human traditions.”

— Frank Viola

29. “Thus the pagan notion of a trained professional speaker who delivers orations for a fee moved straight into the Christian bloodstream. Note that the concept of the “paid teaching specialist” came from Greece, not Judaism. It was the custom of Jewish rabbis to take up a trade so as to not charge a fee for their teaching.”

— Frank Viola

30. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or how bad you’ve failed, Jesus Christ is bigger than all your foul-ups, and His mercy and grace loom larger than any sin you’ve ever committed.”

— Frank Viola

31. “Custom without truth is error grown old.” – Tertullian, third-century theologian.”

— Frank Viola

32. “An exhortation from one beggar to another: keep sacrificing. Keep losing. Keep laying your life down. Keep loving your enemies. Keep blessing those who despise you. Keep refusing to return fire upon those who bad-mouth you. Keep pouring your life into others, even if those people never acknowledge it and even if others never notice. Keep faithfully serving your Lord without looking back. Why? Because there is One who is watching. And only His opinion matters.”

— Frank Viola

33. “A great deal more failure is the result of an excess of caution than of bold experimentation with new ideas. The frontiers of the kingdom of God were never advanced by men and women of caution. – J. Oswald Sanders.”

— Frank Viola

34. “When Christianity was born, it was the only religion on the planet that had no sacred objects, no sacred persons, and no sacred spaces.’8 Although surrounded by Jewish synagogues and pagan temples, the early Christians were the only religious people on earth who did not erect sacred buildings for their worship.19 The Christian faith was born in homes, out in courtyards, and along roadsides.20.”

— Frank Viola

35. “Organic churches, like those in the New Testament, are different. They are not trains, but groups of people out for a walk. These groups move much more slowly than trains – only several miles per hour at the fastest. But they can turn at a moment’s notice. More importantly, they can be genuinely attentive to their world, to their Lord, and to each other.”

— Frank Viola

36. “The first-century churches were locatable, identifiable, visitable communities that met regularly in a particular locale.”

— Frank Viola