Top 40 Scott Sauls Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A shrinking net worth can be one of God’s greatest hidden blessings. True freedom is found in the realization that “everything minus Jesus equals nothing” and “Jesus plus nothing equals everything.” But sometimes, especially for those of us who have been given much, it takes having less material wealth to realize that the true wealth is found in Jesus.”

— Scott Sauls

2. “When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer. – BRENNAN MANNING.”

— Scott Sauls

3. “Our loyalty to Jesus and his Kingdom must always exceed our loyalty to an earthly agenda, whether political or otherwise. We should feel “at home” with people who share our faith but not our politics even more than we do with people who share our politics but not our faith. If this is not our experience, then we very well may be rendering to Caesar what belongs to God.”

— Scott Sauls

4. “Success can work like an addiction – the more successes we have, the more successes we feel we must accumulate in order to keep feeling valuable.”

— Scott Sauls

5. “Perhaps there is no greater way for Jesus to uphold the dignity of the poor than by choosing to be poor himself.”

— Scott Sauls

6. “We must never presume to understand what it is like to walk in shoes we will never wear.”

— Scott Sauls

8. “Sometimes it takes having differences, not understanding one another, and even being a little bit irritated by and bored with one another, to remind us that the church is a family and not a club. At its best, this family dynamic of the local church functions as God’s fertile soil for growing us beyond mere tolerance toward true expressions of love and unity.”

— Scott Sauls

9. “What matters more to us – that we successfully put others in their place, or that we are known to love well? That we win culture wars with carefully constructed arguments and political power plays, or that we win hearts with humility, truth, and love? God have mercy on us if we do not love well because all that matters to us is being right and winning arguments.”

— Scott Sauls

10. “As Dostoyevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov, love in practice is a dreadful thing compared to the love in dreams. In real life, disagreeing about sensitive subjects can reveal pain, sorrow, and complexity.”

— Scott Sauls

11. “What does it look like for Christians to live out Jesus’ Kingdom vision in our daily lives? It looks like taking care of widows and orphans, advocating for the poor, improving economies, paying taxes, honoring those in authority, loving our neighbors, pursuing excellence at work, and blessing those who persecute us.”

— Scott Sauls

12. “The hard and necessary work of reconciliation, peacemaking, relational perseverance, and loving the unlovely is not something we generally gravitate to on our own or when we are creating a personal, custom-made spiritual experience. We need the inconvenient and costly demands of congregational living to shape that kind of love.”

— Scott Sauls

13. “I am eager for more of us to respond as G. K. Chesterton once did when asked by the London Times, “What’s wrong with the world today?” He said simply, “Dear Sir, I am.”

— Scott Sauls

14. “The world thirsts for a different kind of neighbor – not the kind who deny their fellow man, take up their comforts, and follow their dreams – but the kind who deny themselves, take up their crosses, and follow Jesus in his mission of loving a weary world to life.”

— Scott Sauls

15. “As strange as it may sound, it is the hypocrisy of Christians in the Bible that sometimes encourages me more than anything else. It reminds me that God’s relentless grip on me, not my relentless grip on God, keeps me in his love.”

— Scott Sauls

16. “Christianity always flourishes most as a life-giving minority, not as a powerful majority. It is through subversive, countercultural acts of love, justice, and service for the common good that Christianity has always gained the most ground.”

— Scott Sauls

17. “When suffering invades the human experience, people usually respond in one of three ways. Some assume a “pie in the sky” perspective, clinging to superficial “Bible Band-Aids.” They affirm, rightly, that “God is good all the time; all the time God is good,” but they fail to acknowledge the feelings of being betrayed by God, which are expressed in the Bible as well.”

— Scott Sauls

18. “Even when the local church has become less than it should be, the biblical vision is to reform the church, not to abandon it.”

— Scott Sauls

19. “There is something incredibly attractive and inviting about people who stop pointing fingers and posing and pretending to be totally good and totally right, and instead start taking themselves less seriously and openly and freely admit that they are not yet what they should be.”

— Scott Sauls

20. “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. – ANNE LAMOTT.”

— Scott Sauls

21. “Tim Keller writes, “Tolerance isn’t about not having beliefs. It’s about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.”

— Scott Sauls

22. “Faithful are the wounds of friends who show me a mirror, who praised the good in me but who also point out what’s hurtful, because such wounds are surgical, not punitive. Such wounds are restorative, not insulting.”

— Scott Sauls

23. “We are not only to love those who are like us. We are even – no, especially – to love those who are not like us.”

— Scott Sauls

24. “Maybe another reason why Jesus says the giver is more blessed is because the giving experience puts the giver in contact with the receiver.”

— Scott Sauls

25. “The good news is that anyone who fears God will never have any reason to be afraid of God.”

— Scott Sauls

26. “Better to be lumped in with gluttons and drunks than with image-conscious Pharisees.”

— Scott Sauls

27. “In some ways, I think it is fair to say I am worse than I was before I became a Christian. At least, it often feels that way.”

— Scott Sauls

28. “Loveliness, or holiness, or the fruit of the Spirit, or whatever we are going to call it, will not grow in us when we seek it directly. It is not fruit we should be seeking; it is Jesus.”

— Scott Sauls

29. “We should feel “at home” with people who share our faith but not our politics even more than we do with people who share our politics but not our faith.”

— Scott Sauls

30. “We must preoccupy ourselves less with trying to be like Him and more with simply being with Him.”

— Scott Sauls

31. “Children provide us with a necessary gut check. They challenge the distorted value systems that inhibit us from loving well. They are God-given reminders of life as it’s meant to be. Don’t hinder the little children. Let them come to me. Jesus sweeping children up into his embrace is also an invitation – no, a command – to welcome them into ours as well. The children will be the better for it. And so will we.”

— Scott Sauls

32. “For us preachers, Tim said, the longer it takes people to figure out where we stand on politics, in all likelihood the more faithfully we are preaching Jesus.”

— Scott Sauls

33. “In our current cultural moment, outrage has become more expected than surprising, more normative than odd, more encouraged than discouraged, more rewarded than rejected.”

— Scott Sauls

34. “While true faith is filled with holy fire, it is a fire that is meant for refining and healing, as opposed to dividing and destroying. If our faith ignites hurt rather than healing upon the bodies, hearts, and souls of other people – even those who treat us unkindly – then something has gone terribly wrong with our faith.”

— Scott Sauls

35. “Jesus’ gentle answer was bold and costly. His gentle answer included pouring out his lifeblood and dying on the cross. Our gentle answer will be costly as well. We must die to ourselves, to our self-righteousness, to our indignation, and to our outrage.”

— Scott Sauls

36. “Christians are a light to the world only to the degree that they stand out as different from the world. The world does not thirst for a religious imitation of its often-outraged self.”

— Scott Sauls

37. “Whether conservative or progressive, whether religious or nonreligious, we must be careful, in our passionate zeal against the spirit of the unloving Pharisee, that we do not become unloving Pharisees ourselves – a hate group who is harsh, manipulative, and condemning with anyone who disagrees with us. This truth applies not only along ideological and doctrinal lines but also along economic and cultural and moral ones.”

— Scott Sauls

38. “Being awakened by God’s pain-megaphone redirects our focus to essential things worth preserving and nurturing: relationship with family and friends, rhythms and practices leading to health, humble service toward our work, our churches, and our neighbors, and above all, anchoring our roots in the character, promises, and future of God.”

— Scott Sauls

39. “The name of Jesus is sufficient to name us. The story of Jesus is sufficient to be our story. His name liberates us from preoccupation with self.”

— Scott Sauls

40. “Outrage sells. For our generation, hate has been commodified. It has been turned into an asset.”

— Scott Sauls