Top 100 Sarah Bessey Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Hey, we don’t have all the time in the world here to play safe little church club for ladies; we have a lot of loving to do right now, so let’s get on that.” It.”

— Sarah Bessey

55. “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

56. “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

57. “I still hold my understandings loosely. Faith isn’t certainty, I know that by now. If I were certain, I wouldn’t need faith.”

— Sarah Bessey

58. “Jesus doesn’t belong to church people. But church people belong to Him, in Him, and through Him.”

— Sarah Bessey

59. “Me? I want to move with my not-safe-but-good God.”

— Sarah Bessey

60. “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

61. “I think it’s misguided, and probably profane, to look at a diverse collection of books written over thousands of years – history, poetry, law, Gospel accounts, proverbs, correspondence, and other writings – as absolute literal instructions without context, as we understand them, in all cases.”

— Sarah Bessey

62. “I remember hearing a preacher once claim the miracle of a good parking spot. As in, she taught a church full of people how to pray for a good parking spot, how to claim it, and how to rejoice when it came. My side eye at this cannot be overestimated. If your greatest notion of suffering is having to walk a few more rows to the Target, then I think we can safely say you’ve lost the plot.”

— Sarah Bessey

63. “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

64. “I will practice, painfully, over and over, patience and peace until my gentle answers turn away even my own wrath.”

— Sarah Bessey

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “Live counterculturally when the culture, baptized or secular, does not affirm truth, love, faith, mercy, and justice.”

— Sarah Bessey

72. “I believe our most sacred moments are often our most human moments.”

— Sarah Bessey

73. “You cannot be full to the brim with Christ’s love and peace without spilling over into the lives of others. You learn how to love by being loved. You yearn to heal once you are healed. We receive goodness and bread, and then, of course, of course, we want to point every other hungry beggar on the road to the source.”

— Sarah Bessey

74. “If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love. – Julian of Norwich.”

— Sarah Bessey

75. “Like most of us, when I walked through my own valleys of darkness and suffering and loss, God was often revealed to me in the darkness rather than in the light. The valleys were where I became intimate with God, far more than the mountaintops.”

— Sarah Bessey

76. “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

77. “Even if we change practices or behaviors, we are seeking transformed hearts.”

— Sarah Bessey

78. “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

79. “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

80. “Throughout the records of the Gospels, I saw how Jesus didn’t treat women any differently than men, and I liked that.”

— Sarah Bessey

81. “But I had to learn that taking the Bible seriously doesn’t mean taking everything literally.”

— Sarah Bessey

82. “I know now that the Spirit is trying to birth something in my life when I find myself craving silence and darkness, when I find myself editing my circle down to just the trusted few whom I know will midwife me through this birth. It’s nothing to fear; it’s the time of transition.”

— Sarah Bessey

83. “Sometimes our most holy calling is to listen, to bear witness.”

— Sarah Bessey

84. “In a time when women were almost silent or invisible in literature, Scripture affirms and celebrates women.”

— Sarah Bessey

85. “Sometimes, yes, we do speak to a mountain and it will lift up and be cast into the sea. But I’ve also learned over my lifetime that it is just as holy and just as ridiculous and just as miraculous for the people of God to pick up their own small shovels and get to work, a million small stones at a time.”

— Sarah Bessey

86. “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

87. “Really, theology is simply what we think about God and then living that truth out in our right-now life.”

— Sarah Bessey

88. “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

89. “Hurry wounds a questioning soul.”

— Sarah Bessey

90. “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

91. “I believe with my whole heart that the number one place where women should be flourishing is in the body of Christ. So I preached about what it might look like when ordinary women like us rise up in faith, at our full strength, instead of silencing or numbing or dumbing down or retreating in response to cultural pressure. It’s dangerous. Women who are awake are dangerous to the powers and principalities around us.”

— Sarah Bessey

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “God may call you to lead the charge, or he may call you to a quiet life of profound consequence.”

— Sarah Bessey

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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