Top 50 Leonard Sweet Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.”

— Leonard Sweet

2. “Stagnation is death. If you don’t change, you die. It’s that simple. It’s that scary.”

— Leonard Sweet

3. “The essence of leadership is relationship; influencing people to achieve things together that can’t be achieved alone.”

— Leonard Sweet

4. “Your life is not your own: it belongs to God. To “be yourself” is to be and do what God wants you to be and do, knowing that God created you for a mission and knows you and your mission better than you do.”

— Leonard Sweet

5. “What you do is your history. What you set in motion is your legacy.”

— Leonard Sweet

6. “The greater the amount of knowledge you accumulate, the bigger your island gets, but the greater the shoreline of the unknown becomes. In short, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.”

— Leonard Sweet

7. “What is the difference between a living thing and a dead thing? In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don’t change, you die. It’s that simple. It’s that scary.”

— Leonard Sweet

8. “If your identity is found in Christ, then it matters less and less what people think of you.”

— Leonard Sweet

9. “One can be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ without denying the flickers of the sacred in followers of Yahweh, or Kali, or Krishna.”

— Leonard Sweet

10. “The true leader makes each team member twice the person they were before.”

— Leonard Sweet

11. “If we were to make the table the most sacred object of furniture in every home, in every church, in every community, our faith would quickly regain its power, and our world would quickly become a better place. The table is the place where identity is born – the place where the story of our lives is retold, re-minded, and relived.”

— Leonard Sweet

12. “You are what you pay attention to. No attention, no life. Everything comes to life when you pay attention to.”

— Leonard Sweet

13. “Jesus Christ is the rest of God. He is, as N. T. Wright has put it, “the fulfillment of the sabbath.”114 By taking Christ as our rest, we cease from our labors just as God did from His.115 Christianity, therefore, begins not with a do, but with a done – “It is finished!”116 We enter into God’s rest, and we labor from there.”

— Leonard Sweet

14. “Leadership is the art of the future.”

— Leonard Sweet

15. “The teachings of Jesus begin in story and end in symbol – they begin in parable and end in us. These are not Bible stories that we learn; these are our stories.”

— Leonard Sweet

16. “Jesus called his disciples to “follow me,” but he didn’t tell them where they were going.”

— Leonard Sweet

17. “Jesus invested everything he had in a team. The Bible knows nothing about solo ministry, only team ministry.”

— Leonard Sweet

18. “The strength of the church is not the strength of its institutions but the authenticity of its witness.”

— Leonard Sweet

19. “When I was learned, knowledge was everything. Now that I’m a learner, kindness is everything.”

— Leonard Sweet

20. “God did His most magnificent work while Adam was asleep. This episode contains and important insight: When man rests, God works.”

— Leonard Sweet

21. “When Jesus got to the point when most people today are thinking of retirement, he goes – ‘time to save the world!’”

— Leonard Sweet

22. “God does not ask if we are able. God asks if we are available.” And the weakness we offer him, he turns into a strength.”

— Leonard Sweet

23. “Too many Christians want to change the world not because they love the world but because they hate the world.”

— Leonard Sweet

24. “The church must provide postmoderns with an alternity of rituals by which they can turn and tune to one another and feel connected to the cosmos.”

— Leonard Sweet

25. “To come to the table is to learn to be our real selves – not some construct conceived by someone else, but who God made us to be.”

— Leonard Sweet

26. “The Chains of conformity click in tiresomely monotonous unison.”

— Leonard Sweet

27. “To imagine things other than they are is the essence of hope. It is also the stuff of revolution.”

— Leonard Sweet

28. “Have your breakfasts all alone. Share lunch with your best friends. Invite your enemy to dinner. Nelson Mandela.”

— Leonard Sweet

29. “The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is sovereign. At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving.”

— Leonard Sweet

30. “At the table, where food and stories are passed from one person to another and one generation to another, is where each of us learns who we are, where we come from, what we can be, to whom we belong, and to what we are called.”

— Leonard Sweet

31. “Someone once challenged me: “I bet I can tell you the whole Old Testament and New Testament in six sentences – three for each.” “You’re on!” I said. He started with the Old Testament: “‘They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!’” My friend went on. “Now here’s the New Testament in three sentences: ‘I love you! I forgive you! Let’s eat!’” Jean Leclerc offers the best definition of the gospel you’ll ever hear: “Jesus ate good food with bad people.”

— Leonard Sweet

32. “We all need the pendulum swing of snatching spaces of solitude and serving tables of sociability. In fact, the more plugged in and connected we are, the more we need to unplug and disconnect. A world of presence needs a time of absence.”

— Leonard Sweet

33. “Some preachers need a travel agent to handle all the guilt trips they put on God’s people. But there is a big difference between putting a guilt trip on Christians and unveiling Christ to them. When Christ is presented in power, the Spirit of God will undoubtedly convict those who are walking in contradiction to their new nature.”

— Leonard Sweet

34. “Twenty-first-century people hear and learn differently than most churches communicate.”

— Leonard Sweet

35. “One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.”

— Leonard Sweet

36. “Followers of Jesus don’t so much see different things from anyone else as they see the same things differently.”

— Leonard Sweet

37. “Authentic evangelism is lifting up the veil of what God is up to and manifesting the image of God in the world we are in.”

— Leonard Sweet

38. “Two opposing gospels are fighting one another for the soul of our nation and, increasingly, the world: the gospel of consumption and the gospel of peace.”

— Leonard Sweet

39. “The “hole in the moral ozone” is really what’s behind the hole in the ozone.”

— Leonard Sweet

40. “If you aren’t smelling awful smells sometimes, then you’re not where Jesus is.”

— Leonard Sweet

41. “Anyone who doesn’t need company is either greater than a man, and is a God, or lesser than a man, and is a beast.17 – Aristotle, as quoted by Saint Thomas Aquinas.”

— Leonard Sweet

42. “For Jesus the home is not what defines the table; the table is what defines the home.”

— Leonard Sweet

43. “Hirsch and Ford believe that we’ve ‘demonstrated’ enough. It’s now time for ‘doing.’ This book shows how to be missional ‘Right Here, Right Now.’”

— Leonard Sweet

44. “If you’ve never bled, you have no material for preaching. If when you’re finished preaching you’re not finished, spent, wiped out – if you haven’t “given blood” – you haven’t really preached.9.”

— Leonard Sweet

45. “As a cosmion incarnating the cells of a new body, New Lights will function as transitional vessels through which transforming energy can renew the divine image in the world, moving postmoderns from one state of embodiment to another.”

— Leonard Sweet

46. “Reading seeks for the sweetness of a blessed life, meditation perceives it, prayer asks for it, contemplation tastes it.”

— Leonard Sweet

47. “The essential element of Christian truth is that the risen Christ is not something you mimic but someone you manifest.”

— Leonard Sweet

48. “The time to save God’s Dream is now. The people to save God’s Dream are you.”

— Leonard Sweet

49. “We bless others naturally through our strengths. But we bless others supernaturally through our weaknesses.”

— Leonard Sweet

50. “People who minister worldwide to protect and conserve the environment are of no lower status than those who minister to plant churches.”

— Leonard Sweet