Quotes by Jonathan Leeman
Jonathan Leeman (b. 1973) — Theologe, Buchautor, Präsident von 9Marks und Ältester · Reformatorisch-evangelikal / Baptist (Southern Baptist Convention) · USA
Jonathan Leeman (* 1973) ist ein US-amerikanischer Theologe, Buchautor und Präsident des evangelikalen Netzwerks 9Marks. Bekannt ist er für seine Arbeiten zur Ekklesiologie, in denen er verbindliche Gemeindemitgliedschaft, biblische Ältestenschaft und eine differenzierte politische Theologie vertritt. Für Bibelleser bieten seine Veröffentlichungen theologische Anstöße zum Verständnis der lokalen Kirchengemeinde und zum verantwortungsvollen Umgang mit Autorität.
Era: Today
Recurring topics: Church & Congregation, Discipleship, Grace & Redemption, Witness & Mission, Ethical Questions, Love, The Bible & the Word of God, Guilt & Forgiveness
Quotes by Jonathan Leeman
Baptism does not save a person, but Jesus means for His saved individuals to publicly identify with Him and His people. It’s one piece of how His citizens become official. It’s how they wave the flag.
Jonathan Leeman
It’s not a person’s moral perfection that qualifies him or her for church membership. It’s just the opposite. It’s his or her recognition of a lack of moral perfection coupled with a hunger for it. It’s not the people who never sin; it’s the people who fight against sin. A church’s judicial work is to affirm not the righteous but the unrighteous who thirst for righteousness – the righteousness only God in Christ can give.
Jonathan Leeman
The local church enables the world to look upon the canvas of God’s people and see an authentic painting of Christ’s love and holiness, not a forgery.
Jonathan Leeman
How do we flee greed? We flee, for starters, by recognizing that the idolatry of greed is rooted in a diminished view of God. That’s why we love and worship the idols of gold instead… We flee greed by looking to the liberally giving God of the Gospel. We have received all we need in Christ! To the extent then that we find our joy and rest in this God of the Gospel we are able to give liberally with love (see 1 Cor. 13:3). Just as greed defines pagans, increasing measures of liberality defines Christians (see Matt. 25:31-46).
Jonathan Leeman
When Christians preach, every command, every exhortation, every “how to” must be grounded in the gospel…any and all challenges must be placed within the context of announcing what God has done or promises to do. It’s the very opposite of self-help teaching.
Jonathan Leeman
Once you choose Christ, you must choose His people, too. It’s a package deal. Choose the Father and the Son and you have to choose the whole family – which you do through a local church.
Jonathan Leeman
Yet I dare say that, for Americans, greed is to sin what North Dakota is to U.S. states – it’s easy to forget that it exists. We confess lust, anger, maybe pride, maybe self-righteousness. But greed? It’s whitewashed. It’s camouflaged. We use words like “lifestyle” or “ambition” or “the American dream.”
Jonathan Leeman
[In the Bible] to be a Christian is to belong to a church. No one gets saved and then wanders around by him or herself, thinking about whether to join a church. People repent and then are baptized into the fellowship of a church. Looking to Christ as Lord means being united to Christ’s people.
Jonathan Leeman
Churches should practice discipline for love’s sake: love for the sinner, love for weaker sheep who can be led astray, love for non-Christian neighbors who need to see a holy Christian witness, and love for Christ and His reputation.
Jonathan Leeman
Greed is idolatry. Greed is worshiping, trusting, loving, and obeying worldly treasures rather than God. Greed is breaking the first two commandments. Greed is placing your faith in money rather than in Jesus (Matt. 6:24).
Jonathan Leeman
If a church truly loves God and the fame of His name, it is jealous for more and more people to know and praise Him. Every conversion means one more mouth is praising God, and every church planted is a chorus of mouths. Our love for the world is born out of our love for God. The greater our love for God, the greater our desire for others to display God’s glory by enjoying Him.
Jonathan Leeman
What is the local church? It’s the institution which Jesus created and authorized to pronounce the gospel of the kingdom, to affirm gospel professors, to oversee their discipleship, and to expose impostors.
Jonathan Leeman
If you want to identify yourself with Christ’s people and expect them to identify with you, you need to first identify yourself with Christ, which is the purpose of baptism.
Jonathan Leeman
It’s essential, moreover, to get the doctrine of God right before moving on. Either God will be the center of one’s doctrinal solar system or something else will. What we believe about God determines what we believe about everything.
Jonathan Leeman
It’s true that a Christian must choose to join a church, but that does not make it a voluntary organization. We are, in fact, obligated to choose a local church just as we are obligated to choose Christ. Having chosen Christ, a Christian has no choice but to choose a church to join.
Jonathan Leeman
You can measure a person’s opinion of God by his or her opinion of God’s Word. That’s why a person who loves God loves His Word, and the person who hates God rejects what God has spoken. God’s Word is an extension of Himself – His identity, purposes, affections, and power.
Jonathan Leeman
Are deeds “necessary” for raising the dead and freeing the enslaved? From the standpoint of the Spirit’s work, no. From the standpoint of Christianity’s public credibility, generally yes. The Spirit’s work will produce evidence in our deeds. And every good deed becomes one more witness who testifies on behalf of the gospel’s truth and power.
Jonathan Leeman
Removing a person from church membership is what a church must do when the reverberating of God’s Word appears to have grown utterly silent in someone’s heart. Given a choice between obedience to God’s Word and a particular sin, the individual chooses the sin. And he shows no sign of wanting to do otherwise. It’s not any sin, of course. It’s an unrepentant sin. It’s a serious sin. And it’s a sin that can be seen with the eyes or heard with the ears. The Lord has not given us the ability to judge the heart, so a church should not discipline for suspected sins of the heart, like pride or greed. We can only assess by external fruit (Matt. 3:8; 7:17-20). But based on that external fruit, discipline must happen when a person’s profession of faith in God’s gospel Word no longer appears credible.
Jonathan Leeman
Strangely, church leaders get caught up in all kinds of power for building their churches… But does any power in the universe match God’s power to breathe out worlds or dismiss death simply with words? “Let there be light!” and “Lazarus, come forth!”? No there is nothing like it. Yet this same power is available to the preacher through God’s Word.
Jonathan Leeman
A local church is a group of Christians who regularly gather in Christ’s name to officially affirm and oversee one another’s membership in Jesus Christ and his kingdom through gospel preaching and gospel ordinances.
Jonathan Leeman
Church membership is a formal relationship between a local church and a Christian characterized by the church’s affirmation and oversight of a Christian’s discipleship and the Christian’s submission to living out his or her discipleship in the care of the church.
Jonathan Leeman
We’re strangers and aliens. Christians must look forward to their homeland… But hold on. There is a place on earth where citizens of heaven can, at this moment, find official recognition and asylum: the local church. Churches represent Christ’s rule now. They affirm and protect his citizens now. They proclaim his laws now. They bow before him as King now and call all peoples to do the same.
Jonathan Leeman
How do you recognize abusive leadership? Abusive churches and Christian leaders characteristically: Make dogmatic prescriptions in places where Scripture is silent. Rely on intelligence, humor, charm, guilt, emotions, or threats rather than on God’s Word and prayer (see Acts 6:4). Play favorites. Punish those who disagree. Employ extreme forms of communication (tempers, silent treatment). Recommend courses of action which always, somehow, improves the leader’s own situation, even at the expense of others. Seldom do good deeds in secret. Seldom encourage. Seldom give the benefit of the doubt. Emphasize outward conformity, rather than repentance of heart. Preach, counsel, disciple, and oversee the church with lips that fail to ground everything in what Christ has done in the gospel and to give glory to God.
Jonathan Leeman
Formal church discipline from the entire congregation is reserved for sins of such significance that the church no longer feels able to affirm a person’s profession of faith. The person continues to call himself or herself a Christian and a Jesus representative, but his or her words are no longer believable because of the nature of the sin… I believe we can say that formal church discipline is required in cases of outward, serious, and unrepentant sin.
Jonathan Leeman
We should chose clothing that does not draw attention to ourselves and shows respect for others. We should not choose clothes in order to impress.
Jonathan Leeman
One thing is definitive for an expositional sermon: It lays out the meaning and purpose of a biblical text clearly. It says, “Here is the point of this text, and it’s relevant to you, no matter who you are, where you are from, or what’s happening in your life right now.” The preacher concentrates all his powers on reproducing the burden of the Bible in the hearts and minds of the people, and he avoids letting anything in his person get in the way of that goal. He’d rather risk boring or offending his congregation than depriving them of the opportunity to hear what God says… He knows that he gives his hearers a chance at true life only insofar as he succeeds in faithfully reproducing what God has already said.
Jonathan Leeman
Here’s the [Gospel] message in four parts: 1. God, who is perfectly holy, just, and good, created us to display His glorious character and rule. 2. We rebelled, choosing to display our own glory and follow our own rule, earning God’s just wrath against such sin. 3. God sent His Son to reestablish God’s rule by living the perfect God-imaging life, dying on the cross to pay the penalty for God’s wrath against sin, and rising in victory over sin and death. 4. We are now called to repent of our sinful self-rule, confess Jesus as Lord, put our trust wholly in His finished work on the cross, and live the obedient and free life He means for us to live.
Jonathan Leeman
The American brand of cultural Christianity results from well-intending adults handing out the candy of cheap grace to five-year-olds and twenty-five-year-olds alike. You ask them if they want to be with mommy and daddy in heaven or pressure them into walking an aisle. The point is, you play on their fears, emotions, or appetites to get quick, unconsidered professions of faith. Then you immediately affirm those professions.
Jonathan Leeman
The underlying purpose in every act of discipline, of course, must be love: love for the individual, love for the church, love for the watching world, love for Christ. God, after all, “disciplines the one He loves”; and “He chastens everyone He accepts as His son” (Heb. 12:6). By abstaining from discipline, we claim that we love better than God.
Jonathan Leeman
A Christian’s new DNA, which he’s received from the Word and Spirit, knows that it now belongs to something larger. And he’s not content to wait for that heavenly and end-time assembly. His new being longs to be gathered to other believers now – on earth. Like his new appetite to “put on” Christ’s righteousness, so there’s a new appetite to put on Christ’s unity with God’s people in a real assembly on earth.
Jonathan Leeman
What is a church membership?… It’s a declaration of citizenship in Christ’s kingdom. It’s a passport. It’s an announcement made in the pressroom of Christ’s kingdom. It’s the declaration that a professing individual is an official, licensed, card-carrying, bona fide Jesus representative.
Jonathan Leeman
Sources: 9marks.org, reddit.com, pastorandrewsmith.com, patheos.com
All quotes · lumen.bible