Quotes from Ed Stetzer

If the disease is sin, the remedy is found at the Cross.

Too often we attempt to teach people to swim in a classroom." If you have ever taken swimming lessons, you immediately get the importance of getting in the water and practicing under the watchful eye of a swimming rabbi. Jesus invited the original twelve to go swimming with Him.

The church stands no hope of engaging the age of outrage unless we root out the lie that the solution to sin lies anywhere outside of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He is "the true God and eternal life" (1 John 5:20). Salvation is not coming on Air Force One. And Jesus will not come riding on a donkey or an elephant. Those who fail to see such things have been lost to the idolatry of the moment.

Christians need to grasp the hypocrisy of engaging online in a way that would be wholly intolerable if we were face-to-face with others.

God does not use extraordinary striving. He uses extraordinary availability to reach the world with the message of his Kingdom.

We celebrate those comebacks because they inspire us to believe that seemingly impossible things really are possible.

You cannot "save" a church without focusing on the important things that make it a church—scriptural authority, biblical leadership, teaching and preaching, ordinances, covenant community, and mission.

The passion of the church and every follower of Christ should be that all peoples have an opportunity to hear, understand, and respond to the gospel.

Community is essential when it comes to successfully living out the Christian walk in a day-to-day context. So the math is simple: More community = More disciples Understanding the nature of groups helps you.

When Jesus said, "As the Father has sent Me, I also send you" (John 20:21), the mandate was not for a select group of cross-cultural missionaries. It was a commission to you, to me, and to our churches. We have a sender (Jesus), a message (the gospel), and a people to whom we are sent (those in our culture). It is worth the effort to go beyond personal preferences and attractional methods to proclaim the gospel in our church services and outside the walls.

This leads us to an important spiritual principle for growth: comeback leaders know that our Lord considers commitment to Him and His desires an indispensable ingredient to growing spiritually and numerically.

Rooting out bad habits is not enough. If we merely attack what is wrong, we create a vacuum that will inevitably be filled by some new behavior or addiction that does not shape our worldview according to the gospel. The solution, I believe, is discipleship, the process of becoming more like Christ.