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

52. “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

53. “The night that our friend’s wife died, my brokenhearted husband called his mother: “What do I say?“... There is nothing to say. Stop thinking there is something to say to make it go away. It won’t go away. Abandon your answers. Avoid your cliches. Don’t blame God and don’t blame him. Learn to sit in the sadness.”

— Sarah Bessey

54. “Jesus remains. He is worth it all. He is under the steeples and in the wilderness. He is in the megachurch and in the spiritual conversation at the bar. He inhabits our certainty and also our doubt. He is every good thing that ever was or will be, and He is still in the business of saving our lives. Really, that’s the thing. It is our hope and salvation, and everything else is just details.”

— Sarah Bessey

55. “We’ll stand before the piles of stones that used to be weapons, and we’ll build an altar.”

— Sarah Bessey

56. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

58. “I’m pretty sure that there aren’t actually any big things for God. There are only small things being done over and over with great love, as Mother Teresa said.”

— Sarah Bessey

59. “If a woman is held back, minimized, pushed down, or downplayed, she is not walking in the fullness God intended for her as his image bearer, as his ezer warrior. 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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “Feminism only means we champion the dignity, rights, responsibilities, and glories of women as equal in importance – not greater than, but certainly not less than – to those of men, and we refuse discrimination against women.”

— Sarah Bessey

68. “We don’t have cobblestones and ancient buildings perhaps, but what we do have is the created world, still there, still breathing around us like a friend we haven’t lost touch with just yet. We may not have cathedrals and forums, but we have the cathedrals of the pines and the forums of wildflowers, and we have our own myths.”

— Sarah Bessey

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

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

— Sarah Bessey

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

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

— Sarah Bessey

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

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

— Sarah Bessey

96. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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