David F. Wells famous quotes

03-28-2025

What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?
-- David F. Wells

#Reaching #Reach Out
Humility has nothing to do with depreciating ourselves and our gifts in ways we know to be untrue. Even "humble" attitudes can be masks of pride. Humility is that freedom from our self which enables us to be in positions in which we have neither recognition nor importance, neither power nor visibility, and even experience deprivation, and yet have joy and delight. It is the freedom of knowing that we are not in the center of the universe, not even in the center of our own private universe.
-- David F. Wells

#Attitude #Humility #Humble
The disappearance of theology from the life of the Church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today, but oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world--in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift form God to the self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, in its reveling in the irrational.
-- David F. Wells

#Thinking #Erosion #Self
Godâ€™s holiness, then, is not only the opposite of evil; it is the measure by which we know evil to be evil.
-- David F. Wells

#Opposites #Evil #Holiness
In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.
-- David F. Wells

#Character #Personality #Culture
What we see at the cross is the white-hot revelation of the character of God, of his love providing the price that holiness requires. The cross was his means of redeeming lost sinners and reconciling them to himself, but it was also a profound disclosure of his mercy. It is, in Paulâ€™s words, an â€˜inexpressible giftâ€™ that leads us to wonder and worship, to praise and adore the God who has given himself to us in this way.
-- David F. Wells

#Character #Mean #White
God's love is his holiness reaching out to sinners; grace is but the price that his love pays to his holiness; the cross is but its victory over sin and death; and faith is but the way in which we bring our worship to him who is holy.
-- David F. Wells

#Love Is #Grace #Victory
Evil by its very nature opposes the purposes of God, but God, in his sovereignty, can make even this evil serve his purposes.
-- David F. Wells

#Evil #Purpose #Sovereignty
Many of those whose task it is to broker the truth of God to the people of God in the churches have now redefined the pastoral task such that theology has become an embarrassing encumbrance or a matter of which they have little knowledge; and many in the Church have now turned in upon themselves and substituted for the knowledge of God a search for the knowledge of self.
-- David F. Wells

#Past #Self #People
The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, His grace is too ordinary, His judgment is too benign, His gospel is too easy, and His Christ is too common.
-- David F. Wells

#Grace #Church #Ordinary
What has to be forgiven is not just what we do but who we are, not just our sinning but our sinfulness, not just our choices but what we have chosen in place of God.
-- David F. Wells

#Choices #Who We Are #Sinfulness
There is a breeze blowing. I see it in the deep discontent that is being voiced with the threadbare state of the evangelical world, with its empty worship, its market-driven superficiality, and its trivial thought. It is a breeze blowing toward better, deeper, more honest things. I suspect that it is the Holy Spirit who is blowing, that this is his breeze, and that these leaves that are shaking are the signs of better things to come within an evangelical faith that is thus being reformed. Let us all pray that it isÂ so!
-- David F. Wells

#World #Spirit #Honest
We are called to see that the Church does not adapt its thinking to the horizons that modernity prescribes for it but rather that it brings to those horizons the powerful antidote of God's truth. It is not the Word of God but rather modernity that stands in need of being demythologised.
-- David F. Wells

#Powerful #Thinking #Church

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