Top 100 Sarah Bessey Quotes (2026 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. “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

53. “We first take our everyday, ordinary life – our sleeping, eating, going-to-work life – and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for us is the best thing we can do for him. When we fix our attention on God, we’ll be changed from the inside out. We’ll readily recognize what he wants from us and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around us, always dragging us down to its level of immaturity, God brings out the best in us, develops well-formed maturity.”3.”

— Sarah Bessey

54. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

56. “I was reading voraciously about global issues such as clean water, community development, war, human trafficking, economics, disaster relief, the AIDS crisis, unjust systemic evil. Meanwhile, church budgets made room for a brand-new light show and a kickin’ sound system or a trip to Disneyland or a video venue in a saturated upscale neighborhood – all in an effort to practice creative-experience marketing.”

— Sarah Bessey

57. “And now for me, faith is less of a brick edifice of belief and doctrine and right answers than it is a wide-open sky ringed with pine trees black against a cold sunset, an altar, a welcome, bread and wine, an unfathomably ferocious love, and a profound sense of my belovedness.”

— Sarah Bessey

58. “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

59. “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

60. “It’s dangerous to cherry-pick a few stand-alone verses, particularly when they are used as a weapon to silence and intimidate, effectively benching half the church5 in the midst of holy harvest season when the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few.”

— Sarah Bessey

61. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

63. “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

64. “Justice is often born in the quiet and ordinary moments long before it’s seen by anyone else. Sometimes it’s as simple and as difficult as listening, as learning, as laying down our excuses or justifications or disguises, as forgiveness, as choosing the hard daily work of restoration, as staying resolutely alive when everyone else is numbing themselves against it.”

— Sarah Bessey

65. “We have to be committed to unlearning the unhelpful, broken, unredemptive, false, or incomplete God if we want to have space to relearn the goodness, the wholeness, the joy of a loving God.”

— Sarah Bessey

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

73. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

86. “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

87. “Hurry wounds a questioning soul.”

— Sarah Bessey

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

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

— Sarah Bessey

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey