Top 100 Sarah Bessey Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

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. “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

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. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

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

— Sarah Bessey

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

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

— Sarah Bessey

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

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

— Sarah Bessey

89. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “Hurry wounds a questioning soul.”

— Sarah Bessey

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

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

— Sarah Bessey