Top 50 Jefferson Bethke Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “In the Scriptures, Jesus isn’t safe. No one knew what to do with him. The liberals called him too conservative, and the conservatives called him too liberal.”

— Jefferson Bethke

2. “Thankfulness is the quickest path to joy.”

— Jefferson Bethke

3. “Many Christians don’t really care about God; they just want to use him to get what they truly want – status, a nice job, a car, forgiveness – you name it.”

— Jefferson Bethke

4. “Love others so radically they wonder why.”

— Jefferson Bethke

5. “We have branded Jesus beyond recognition. Church has become a business. Jesus is our marketing scheme. We create bookstores, T-shirts, bracelets, bumper stickers, and board games all in the name of Jesus.”

— Jefferson Bethke

6. “God doesn’t hide sin. In fact, he put it on display two thousand years ago in a splintered T-shaped piece of wood. Jesus came down to earth, lived the perfect life we never could have, and died the death we should have. And every drop of blood that poured from him was another drop of love falling on us.”

— Jefferson Bethke

7. “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep lowing concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

— Jefferson Bethke

8. “I think too many times as Christians, we confuse benefits with essence. We pursue the benefits of a relationship rather than the essence of that relationship.”

— Jefferson Bethke

9. “The goal of following Jesus isn’t to do a bunch of things. It’s to become a type of person.”

— Jefferson Bethke

10. “The more I read, the more I felt the Bible looked a lot more like the movie 300 than the movie Pleasantville.”

— Jefferson Bethke

11. “The author Brennan Manning famously said, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their mouths and walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle.”

— Jefferson Bethke

12. “Solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born.”8.”

— Jefferson Bethke

13. “Only when we truly know rest and celebration can we know how to work and enjoy it. We work from rest, not to get rest.”

— Jefferson Bethke

14. “We’ve lost the real Jesus – or at least exchanged him for a newer, safer, sanitized, ineffectual one. We’ve created a Christian subculture that comes with its own set of customs, rules, rituals, paradigms, and products that are nowhere near the rugged, revolutionary faith of biblical Christianity. In our subculture Jesus would have never been crucified – he’s too nice.”

— Jefferson Bethke

15. “To follow Jesus we need to not just follow his teaching, but also follow his way. His process. His cadence. His demeanor. His spirit. His very essence.”

— Jefferson Bethke

16. “We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phone, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence, because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are.”

— Jefferson Bethke

17. “When we expose ourselves and are completely vulnerable, we lose control but gain joy and freedom. No matter what your sin is, nothing is outside of grace. No sin is too powerful for God to forgive.”

— Jefferson Bethke

18. “God uniquely highlights marriage as one of the main ways we know who he is and how he relates to us.”

— Jefferson Bethke

19. “God’s grace is so much more powerful of a motivator than fear. Love is the deepest motivator. Only love can produce not only willing obedience but also lasting obedience. If you are being motivated by fear, rules, anger, or some other emotion, it usually only lasts while that emotion is there. Love, being a state of the heart, lasts even past the initial emotion.”

— Jefferson Bethke

20. “When I was trying to earn Jesus by being good, I missed the real Jesus who wants us to love him and serve him not for what he gives but for who he is – dangerous, unpredictable, radical, and amazing.”

— Jefferson Bethke

21. “Grace always wins.”

— Jefferson Bethke

22. “Work jumped from being a means of “material production” to being much more about “identity production.”3 In other words, work used to be about making things. Then all of a sudden, work was about making us.”

— Jefferson Bethke

23. “Our current hustle culture is no different; it’s all about exceeding limits. It’s about striving for that false freedom to do this. Eat that. Work this way. Just. Work. Harder. Network more. Just buy my masterclass and you, too, can be a millionaire by age nineteen.”

— Jefferson Bethke

24. “True freedom is being able to give up all your rights for another out of love. Just ask Jesus. He willingly came to earth. Willingly lived life for thirty-three years. Willingly let himself be beaten, scourged, and crucified. All for others. All for us.”

— Jefferson Bethke

25. “Heaven isn’t a place for people who are scared of hell; it’s for people who love Jesus.”

— Jefferson Bethke

26. “God gets glory for everything, and everyone eventually will glorify God, be it his grace or his justice.”

— Jefferson Bethke

27. “Because the truth is, no matter how ugly or how deep the scars, there is always hope.”

— Jefferson Bethke

28. “I think thanksgiving is the secret to a healthy Christian life.”

— Jefferson Bethke

29. “When I think of whisper, I think of tenderness, gentleness, beauty. And that was God’s voice. The hard part with whispers, though, is we have to be listening for them. They are just loud enough that only the people listening will hear and those who are distracted won’t.”

— Jefferson Bethke

30. “God is faithful.”

— Jefferson Bethke

31. “And so the beautiful truth is that since we were created by a community, we were created for community. If we are made in God’s image and God is a community, then that means we are rejecting our humanness when we live isolated and alone. That’s fundamental to what it means to be human. That is intimacy.”

— Jefferson Bethke

32. “Without the rain there is no beauty in the summer. Rain gives depth, it gives beauty, and it gives roots. If a plant is only exposed to sun and no rain, it becomes dry, flimsy, and dead. Too many times we curse the rain in our lives-suffering, trials, hardships-but the truth is without rain nothing grows.”

— Jefferson Bethke

33. “While we might not all be able to take a year off work, the question that haunts me is, do I trust God enough to do it? Do I think he’d actually take care of me if I did it? Isn’t that what most of our activity and busyness is about anyway? Trying to hedge our bets, saying we are Christians with our lips, but living as spiritual orphans who need to claw and grasp for every last crumb of provision. Do we actually believe God will provide? That he can be trusted?”

— Jefferson Bethke

34. “The big difference between chaos and shalom is rhythm. Chaos is unpredictable and unrhythmic. It has no set cadence. But shalom is more like a dance that depends on the rhythm in music.”

— Jefferson Bethke

35. “The problem with wearing masks is even when we receive love, it’s really the mask that is receiving the love, not us. Whatever gets thrown at us will always hit the mask and can’t penetrate our souls. So it is with God’s grace. Every second of every day he pursues us and offers grace, but until we take off our masks, we will never be able to accept it.”

— Jefferson Bethke

36. “I’d thought that when I started to follow Jesus, things were supposed to get better. If that was true, why was it getting worse? Why did it hurt more instead of less? Maybe it’s because when we’re dead, we can’t feel anything. But once we’re alive, that means our senses are too. Can a dead person feel chaos?”

— Jefferson Bethke

37. “The Bible rarely tells me to fight against someone who doesn’t believe what I believe, but it frequently tells me to fight against my sin and the disease in me that’s drawing me away from Jesus.”

— Jefferson Bethke

38. “Don’t buy the lie that a full schedule means productivity or holiness or achievement.”

— Jefferson Bethke

39. “My “Christianity” was once again just the American religion of work hard, do good, feel good, and maybe God will say, “We good.”

— Jefferson Bethke

40. “Grace just flows. It’s a one-way type of love that runs the conduit directly from God’s heart to ours.”

— Jefferson Bethke

41. “His face, and his face alone, needs to be the driving force of our lives. If it’s not, we are worshiping something else, and sooner or later that idol will be taken from us by a trial, circumstance, or death.”

— Jefferson Bethke

42. “The bottom line is, we can’t research or think ourselves to a better version of ourselves.”

— Jefferson Bethke

43. “The biggest difference between religious people and gospel-loving people is that religious people see certain people as the enemies, when Jesus-followers see sin as the enemy.”

— Jefferson Bethke

44. “I’ll even say it a little more plainly for those in the back: we as humans are the summation of our repeated practices and rituals. Humans aren’t made. We are formed.”

— Jefferson Bethke

45. “Even though there are few to no credible passages – properly interpreted – in Scripture that call things such as alcohol and tattoos utterly sinful, some fundamentalists insist they are.”

— Jefferson Bethke

46. “A grace economy is backward to most of us – those who think they qualify, don’t; and those who admit they don’t qualify, do.”

— Jefferson Bethke

47. “What if we are attempting to exchange wisdom for shortcuts? One requires years of life experiences, while the other simply requires a Google search. Today, we face a huge gap between who we are and who we want to be simply because we can actually see that gap better than ever before. By just opening Instagram or reading Facebook posts, we see a different, perhaps ideal, self we wish we were.”

— Jefferson Bethke

48. “Our job as Christians is to stick so close to Jesus that when people are around us, they sense him.”

— Jefferson Bethke

49. “In a postmodern world where all religious activity is seen as what we do for God, we need to proclaim Christianity is about what God has done for us.”

— Jefferson Bethke

50. “Be honest about your weakness, be honest that you’re scared, and be honest about the fact that it’s Jesus who defeats the sins that trip you up, not you. God cast us as Israel, not the hero.”

— Jefferson Bethke