Quotes by Jim Elliff
Jim Elliff (b. 1947) — Pastor, Evangelist und christlicher Autor · evangelikal / reformatorisch-baptistisch · USA
Jim Elliff (* 1947) ist ein US-amerikanischer Pastor, Evangelist und Autor aus dem reformatorisch-baptistischen Spektrum sowie Gründer des Dienstes Christian Communicators Worldwide. Er tritt mit Nachdruck für biblische Erweckung, verbindliche Gemeindezugehörigkeit und echte Bekehrung ein und wendet sich gegen einen oberflächlichen Entscheidungsglauben. Bibellesern begegnet er heute vor allem durch pointierte Impulse zu geistlicher Wachsamkeit, praktischer Nachfolge und reformatorischem Schriftverständnis.
Era: Today
Recurring topics: Guilt & Forgiveness, Grace & Redemption, Faith & Trust, Discipleship, Witness & Mission, The Bible & the Word of God, Growth & Character, Humility & Pride
Quotes by Jim Elliff
Here’s what we should learn: If we want our children to hear the gospel from us, they must see the gospel’s impact upon us. How we live before them powerfully preaches the gospel and its implications for our lives.
Jim Elliff
God is faithful and just to forgive every sin and cleanse from all unrighteousness because of Christ’s atonement alone. In other words, the believer does not confess in order to get something. What he seeks he already has.
Jim Elliff
If a man turns from sin without turning to God, he will find his sin has only changed its name and is hidden behind his pride.
Jim Elliff
The intimidation that we feel in relating Christ to a non-Christian world has to do with our comparing ourselves to the man or woman, rather than comparing God to the man or woman.
Jim Elliff
There are many who have fought hard for the inerrancy of Scripture who don’t sufficiently break open the Bible they fought for.
Jim Elliff
You cannot save your child yourself no matter how hard you try. You are in a position of trust alone. This is good because it is the only way to please God (Heb. 11:6). Your rest in God, while simultaneously praying to the God who answers prayer, will be an encouragement to others in the same situation It will also help you respond to your child more positively, and will make your life far more joyful than your anxiety ever could.
Jim Elliff
We can be thankful that God does not remove all evil right now. If he did, would he not remove you? Suppose he said, “Ok, I will do just as you request. I will take away all evil right this minute!” Do you think that you would be spared?
Jim Elliff
One is taken aback by the emphasis upon the Cross in Revelation. Heaven does not “get over” the cross, as if there are better things to think about, heaven is not only Christ-centered, but cross-centered, and quite blaring about it.
Jim Elliff
It is one thing to love sin and to force ourselves to quit it; it is another thing to hate sin because love for God is so gripping that the sin no longer appeals. The latter is repentance; the former is reform. It is repentance that God requires. Repentance is “a change of mind.” To love and yet quit it is not the same as hating it and quitting it. Your supposed victory over a sin may be simple displacement. You may love one sin so much (such as your pride) that you will curtail another more embarrassing sin which you also love. This may look spiritual, but there is nothing of God in it. Natural men do it every day.
Jim Elliff
Future worry is overwhelming. There’s a reason. We don’t have grace today for tomorrow. One of Satan’s simplest tricks and most effective devices is to draw our attention to things we can do nothing about. There’s nothing worse than a crisis that can’t be fixed. If our hours are spent with thoughts of tomorrow’s problems, which are not accessible today and which we know we cannot touch with today’s resources, we are doomed to worry. And worry wears us out… [Yet] our calling is today. It’s not that we don’t think of tomorrow, but it must consistently be filed under “future grace.” The tide of confidence in God’s sufficiency must wash out worry. In fact, it’s a command. “Do not be anxious for tomorrow.” To go there is to disobey a directive from the One who holds every moment in His hand.
Jim Elliff
To put a wall between you and others is to build a wall between you and God.
Jim Elliff
Our salvation is a miraculous intervention of God. Evangelism is all about miracles. We pray asking God to change the human will, or to override and arrange the natural course of things in certain ways, or to defy all odds.
Jim Elliff
By meditating on Scripture you are transformed into the person God intends you to be. Meditation is a blend of your words to God and His Word to you; it is loving conversation between you and God through the pages of His Word. It is absorption of His words into your mind by prayerful contemplation and concentration.
Jim Elliff
Wisdom is a process of cognition, not a bombshell out of the sky. In our non-thinking day it is quite popular to short-cut the painful process of reasoning for a blank waiting on some inner voice. It seems highly spiritual to do so and carries with it a magical authority. (“I got this from God at four o’clock in the morning!”) In this way the most spiritually unkempt believer or the novice has equal voice with the wisest Christian veteran.
Jim Elliff
Holiness or sanctification is not just about purity or discipline. It is about displaying your radical difference, showing the marks of God’s ownership, and illustrating through your behavior the unusualness of your new life in Christ.
Jim Elliff
It is the Holy Spirit who gives assurance of life in Christ, not the evangelist (Rom. 8:16). We are to relate the basis of assurance but leave the actual assuring to the Spirit.
Jim Elliff
Repentance is a change of mind regarding sin and God, an inward turning from sin to God, which is known by its fruit – obedience (Mt. 3:8; Acts 26:20; Lk. 13:5-9). It is hating what you once loved and loving what you once hated, exchanging irresistible sin for an irresistible Christ.
Jim Elliff
What may be good and beautiful under the authority of God, becomes a damning god if you love it more than Christ.
Jim Elliff
One man may appear to be righteous before another man, but before God there is no one truly righteous. The only righteousness that God accepts is His own. To stand before God in our own righteousness is certain rejection.
Jim Elliff
What right do we have to make God out to be Someone other than He really is in order to make people like Him more? Honor God by declaring the truth about Him.
Jim Elliff
The word foreknowledge is actually better understood as “thought of endearingly beforehand,” or “foreloved,” or “foreordained with forethought.”
Jim Elliff
Confession means to agree with God on His assessment of our actions and thoughts, and to name our sin to God.
Jim Elliff
Consider the implications of adding the work of confession for ongoing forgiveness… If something more is required for forgiveness and cleansing from all unrighteousness (a state required for heaven), then the believer is in a dilemma. What if he fails to confess some sins? What if he fails to confess one sin? Is he unforgiven and not cleansed from all unrighteousness? This is not what propitiation and the continual immediate cleansing from sin by the blood assert. Must we add to what God has so completely accomplished? Isn’t Christ’s death and the application of His blood enough? Doesn’t this additional requirement diminish the cross by making my naming of a sin, each sin, a prerequisite to forgiveness?
Jim Elliff
A seeker becomes a true Christian because God does something, creating desire for Him and distaste for sin. If God is at work, you cannot help rejecting your independence and coming to Him. You will place your trust in Him because there is nothing else left to trust. You will love Him because He is irresistible to you.
Jim Elliff
God decreed from eternity past that you would be like Christ (Rom. 8:29-30); He put His Holy Spirit in you to make sure that it would happen (Phil. 2:12-13); Christ prayed for you to be sanctified, and His prayers are always answered (Jn. 17:17); He even promises you that He will lovingly discipline you in order to return you to holiness whenever you stray (Heb. 12:5-10). How could we ever doubt that God means what He says, “Without holiness no one will see the Lord” (Heb 12:14)?
Jim Elliff
Don’t delay. The thought you had just this morning will soon blow off the table of your mind!
Jim Elliff
If reason is unaided (by the Word of God), if it is mere reason by itself, it will do little good. Reason standing alone might lead us to some sort of workable resolution, but it carries the liability of doing so without pleasing God. That circumstance is as unsatisfying to us as it is unsatisfactory to God.
Jim Elliff
Obviously self-esteem is not the point. It may be all that can be used for folks in a secular society that will not esteem God, but it is hardly God’s great purpose to make you feel like you’re something special.
Jim Elliff
We are to be biblically rational, though not rationalists. This is not a subtle raising of reason above God. Rather, it is a recognition that normally God works through reason.
Jim Elliff
We have the mistaken notion that evangelism is a choreographed set of ideas well laid out, perfectly transitioned and flawlessly presented. Forget it. It’s not this way. Many of us have tried this with frustration. It is much better to think of evangelism the way the Bible does – “sowing the seed” in any way you can. Any of us can do that. Ever seen a weed grow in an otherwise barren parking lot? Somehow the seed got there and flourished. The simple word in the right place, or the tract well-placed might be the means God uses. Well-oiled presentations frustrate because there is no room for serious questions and discussion on the one hand, and it rules out the less verbal among us, on the other. Rejoice over even the smallest of advances! You are sowing the seed.
Jim Elliff
We should not aggressively hunt for offenses or opportunities to enact discipline (Matthew 13:28-30), but we must be vigilant, ready to address sinful behavior when it becomes known.
Jim Elliff
What God is after is not our naming our sins, but our turning from our sins in obedience. He requires repentance from specific sins. He already knows what you do… Naming all our sins may be therapeutic, certainly, but it can never be said to be required… We may name our sins on the way to repentance, but we do not do so in order to be forgiven or cleansed. We trust Christ’s work for that, alone.
Jim Elliff
When buying books remember the following: 1. Buy only the best books since you will only read a few hundred in your lifetime. When possible seek a recommendation first. 2. Don’t excessively fret over the price, since the cost of a book is always small if it impacts your life for good. 3. Buy to preserve the truth for your family or some deserving friends or institution in the future, for they will inherit your library when you die. 4. Never let the reading of books replace the reading of the Bible. Instead of one or the other, do both. 5. Let a good book humble you and not make you proud, by seeking God in what you read.
Jim Elliff
Experience-driven revival is more like a flash flood than a mighty river. Heightened experience certainly leaves its mark, some of which may be good wherever it meets orthodoxy, but a reformational revival is a life-giving river which has continuing positive effects. When reformation takes place, the conviction is not just over our behavioral sinfulness but over wrong doctrine.
Jim Elliff
Though some situations which invite temptation cannot be changed, most can. A man who will not flee the setting of his temptation when he is able still loves his sin.
Jim Elliff
Though miracles of all types did speak of Christ’s divine origin and were instrumental in authenticating His and His apostles’ message (see Jn. 3:2; 10:38; Heb. 2:1-4), Christ surprisingly did not appreciate those who sought for a sign. Herod was among them (Luke 23:8). In fact, Jesus said, “An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign” (Matt. 12:39).
Jim Elliff
We are not called to live the Christian life apart from the protection of the church. The fellowship of a group of committed believers is vital to our spiritual health and to our endurance in the faith. The church, in the midst of this “crooked and perverse generation,” is just as important for our survival as the ark was to Noah and his family; they simply would not have survived without it.
Jim Elliff
[Christians] look away from themselves to Christ. They believe that God has loved them from eternity past. They believe that the payment of Christ on the cross for sins was for them. They find Christ irresistible, and following Him the greatest privilege of all. They have faith in Christ and what He has done for them. They trust Christ, looking outside of themselves to Him alone.
Jim Elliff
If my car was inoperative and I went to the mechanic for help, I would have to hand over the keys. That is my action of trust in the mechanic. It is fides vive – living faith. Without doing that, all my talk about the competency of the mechanic results in nothing. And so, without our giving the keys of life over to Christ, we have never really trusted. This is Bible belief simply stated.
Jim Elliff
Is it love for the lost that will perpetuate practices producing such damning deception in so many – or is it merely love for success?
Jim Elliff
84 quotes in total — browse the collection.
Sources: bulletininserts.org, ccwtoday.org, familylife.com, counselingoneanother.com
All quotes · lumen.bible