Ray Ortlund and Sam Allberry’s new book You’re Not Crazy: Gospel Sanity for Weary Churches (Crossway/TGC, 2023) insightfully explores how gospel doctrine should lead to gospel culture. Here are 20 quotes that struck me.
Church should be the place we sprint to when things are at their worst, not the place we avoid until we’ve got our Instagram-worthy Christianity back in place. (2)
Justification by our own righteousness is not a Galatian problem only, or a Catholic problem only; it is a human problem universally. It’s a Christian problem. . . . You and I are always, at best, an inch away from its dark powers. Indeed, it is possible to preach and defend the doctrine of justification by grace alone but out of motives of self-justification. (6–7)
The church isn’t just meant to be a new community (there are plenty of those constantly springing up). It’s meant to be a new kind of community. (25)
The gospel, it turns out, is divine hospitality. . . . The finished work of Christ on the cross is not God’s way of saying to us, “You’re free to go now” but “You’re free to come now.” He’s not sending us off but inviting us in. (25)
Paul didn’t write, “Welcome one another as people at the fitness club down the road welcome each other.” We’re not meant to be conveying our welcome but Christ’s welcome. It is not about exchanging a cultural pleasantry but declaring a heavenly reality. We’re meant to be inviting brokenhearted sinners to collapse into the open arms of Jesus. (30)
The welcome on a Sunday morning is where we pastors deconstruct the posing of non-gospel culture and reconstruct in its place the beauty of gospel culture. The opening moments of our services are when we can establish new gospel ground rules for why and how we gather as Christians. We’re not here to do God a favor, to give him some company for an hour or so, to make him feel better. We’re not here to pay a weekly religion tax so that he gets off our back for the next six days. We’re not here to get our respectability card stamped for another week. We’re here for just one reason: Christ has welcomed us. We need to wrap our brains around that good news. We need to hit refresh on that surprising reality every single Sunday. (31–32)
Nothing is more beautiful than a church walking together in the light. Have you ever seen a church with too much tenderness, humility, and willingness to own up? No! So why doesn’t every church embrace a culture of gospel honesty? (44)
Jesus did not come to tell us how wonderful we are. But he did come to tell us how beautiful God is. . . . The deepest reason for all our personal problems, and all the evils of history, is that we don’t know how beautiful God is. (47)
If your view of God is true to original, Jesus-given Christianity, here’s one way you’ll know: not by taking a true-false exam on paper but by noticing your relationships with other Christians. (49)
Gospel culture isn’t a glaze of superficial smiley niceness on the surface of deep and robust Christianity. No, gospel culture is itself deep and robust Christianity. Anything less is shallow, including theologically serious but relationally oblivious Christianity. (49)
Why does John say [God is in the light]? He wants to emphasize that God isn’t hiding from us. He isn’t playing “Catch me if you can.” God stands right out in the obvious place of truth, honesty, and reality, right where we can find him and be helped by him. So, what on earth are we doing anywhere else? “Church” can be an ideal place to hide from God. But when a church turns toward gospel culture, it’s also the best place to find God. (51–52)
Pastors who have no one to whom they confess their sins are on their way to trouble. (57)
In today’s predatory world, people cut each other down to size every day. Some of us have never known anything else, even in our homes growing up. But how different is a healthy church! There we lift each other up, not with empty flattery but with real honor because real glory is beginning to appear. Let’s notice it! Let’s celebrate it! The eschaton is becoming visible right now in the saints around us. How could we keep quiet about that? (62)
Grace is not like a runway, the thing that launches us off. Grace is the plane itself. We get nowhere apart from God’s grace. If a believer isn’t turning from sin, he doesn’t need more tasering from the preacher; he needs more exposure to the grace of God. It’s grace that changes us. (86)
Preaching is a personal invitation. It’s not “Come and learn about Jesus.” It’s Jesus himself, through the preacher, saying, “Come to me.” (94)
Greatness is not to be measured by prowess but service. (98)
Inasmuch as we’re to put others “in their place,” it should be to put them above us, not beneath us. . . . Greatness, in Jesus’s eyes, is not measured by how many people are under us but by how many people we regard as being above us. (103, 106)
[Jesus] promised an abundance of family to those who bear the heaviest relational cost of following him. If we don’t attend to living as that family, we risk making Jesus look like a liar. The relational health of the local church is not incidental. It must not be an afterthought, because his reputation is on the line. (122–23)
What will most clearly show the presence of heaven on earth—that God is alive and well and right here—is our love for one another. Our shared love is not an afterthought, as though what really mattered were these other things and our love for one another was added as a bonus. No, the quality of our relational life in our churches is to be an apologetic for the world around us. As Francis Schaeffer once wrote, “Jesus is giving the world permission to judge whether we are true Christian disciples on the basis of whether we love one another.” (124–25)
Jesus’s presence in our lives is the death of indifference, the death of aloofness—concealed under nice words and impressive deeds. His gospel brings us alive to a new reality. We’re bound together now. We’re family. Jesus gets us thinking, “You’re not just in my contacts, or on our church’s membership list, but in my very heart. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.” . . . It should be a relief to turn up each Sunday. (134)
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